Woe, #25: Respect your big feelings, and expect others to respect them too
tl;dr: if you have big feelings, respect your big feelings, and don't hang around with people who don't, because it'll ruin you
I'm sitting up in bed crying with the laptop tilted off the edge of the bed at a 45 degree angle, twisting my body and using my hands both to type and to keep the laptop from falling entirely off the bed onto the floor.
The reason I'm doing that is because Lucy, the gray cat, is sitting on my lap without leaving any room for the laptop, and I was just away for 10 days and think I should give Lucy priority, although of course in reality I always give Lucy priority, because she bites me if I type too loudly too close to her twitching translucent gray ears, and also because she is a cat and she will not be with me for nearly as long as I would like her to be.
I'm crying because it's December and I'm feeling a little lost and because I just read a column Heather Havrilesky wrote about grief and because I'm feeling a lot of grief myself, which is to be honest my usual state, but it still hurts.
I once wrote a poem about a time I went to a reiki practitioner and she said, as she was working on me, "you may find some grief" and I answered her with a wry laugh (as I do) "I always find grief," which is true.
Much of my grief seems to belong to nothing and no one; it's elemental. I imagine myself with a live wire directly into the destructive forces at the center of the universe, which is grandiose, but it's what has allowed me to tolerate and to appreciate my grief: seeing it as capacity, as gift, rather than merely burden.
Also at the center of the universe is, of course, a creative force, and sometimes I touch that too, or the edges of it, because the edges are blurry there at the center of the universe, and grief and joy and creation and destruction are all mixed together.
Some of the grief is what Joanna Macy or Cindy Milstein or other activists would call social or planetary grief: empathetic grief, not abstract grief or elemental grief but still large: grief over what is happening in Israel and Palestine right now, and grief for Ukraine and Congo and the Weelawnee forest and the ancient tree that was cut down in Great Britain not long ago and for dead whales and dying ecosystems and laid-off workers and dead children and murdered transfolk, the list goes on.
That grief is both large and specific; I can't name everything and everyone I grieve for because I am not a god and I do not know the names of every sparrow, but I know the names of some and I know that the others do have names, that everything and everyone can be named, and grieved.
And some of the grief is personal. I sit here and remember sitting at my uncle's bedside holding his hand while he died. I remember our cat George, holding him by the fireside in 2022 while we said goodbye. I remember my friend Jay, who killed himself while I was texting him. I remember all my dead.
I grieve for the not-dead too; the people I loved who are no longer in my life, who I still love, even if they no longer want me in their life or I no longer want them in my life, or both, even if they were bad to me and I was bad to them, or we were bad for each other, I still love, I still wish things could have been different. I still grieve for those losses. I grieve for the losses my friends have suffered. I grieve for the losses that people who are no longer my friends have suffered. I grieve for the friends I lost, maybe more than once, maybe through my own fault, or their fault, or both, or neither.
Another thing I tell myself about my grief, and I think it might be true but I also know that it is useful: I say that my grief is so large because my love is large.
My grief is so frequently unmanageable, so existentially overwhelming so much of the time, because grief is the other side of love as destruction is the other side of creation as sadness is the other side of joy and fear the other side of wonder.
I have big feelings. I have always had big feelings. Anyone who knows me even a little bit knows I have big feelings, and the people who love me, whether or not they can always tolerate or be with my big feelings, accept them as a part of me; not something I can manage away. They respect my big feelings, whether or not they are something they feel themselves. They understand why I might say the things I do about having a live wire to the center of the universe, whether or not they themselves think of the world in that way.
They want to be close to me so they too can experience the world with big feelings, or because they already do and they want to be close to someone who gets that. They want me to feel things with them or for them, they want me to help them find their own big feelings. Sometimes they might just want to appreciate me in my feels, because sometimes my feels are so large that I vibrate with them, I mean literally vibrate, and being around someone who is vibrating with feelings can be scary, but it can also be wonderful.
Sometimes people want to abuse my big feelings, however. They snort up my big feelings for their own reasons; my big feelings are a cool party drug, they make them feel so alive, but the moment they get uncomfortable, the moment my feelings are too real, they are annoyed. Manage your feelings, they say. They mean "only present your feelings as a line to be snorted when I want to snort a line." They like the excitement of my feelings, but they don't want to have to be bothered by them at other times.
I am always surprised by this, because to snort up another person's feelings without any regard for the person who is making their feelings available to you to snort is, well, it's disrespectful. It's a fetish for big feelings, not love of the person who has to (is able to) feel them.
One kind of grief I feel is when I find that someone I thought cared about me actually just wanted to snort me up. They snort up my feelings and then act like they didn't know I had the feelings, they treat my feelings as an inconvenience, an imposition.
Last week I was walking around San Jose with a loved one and suddenly I was having some big feelings. "I need to sit down and cry," I said. We found a ledge in the sun and I sat there for a while crying, and he sat there next to me, and he was very patient. He didn't ask me what I had to cry about, or try to cheer me up, or explain that my feelings were getting in the way of his enjoyment of the brief time we had together. He didn't act like he thought he'd done something wrong or I had. I cried for much of that afternoon, lying down, and then eventually we went out somewhere and it passed.
That is what it looks like when you have people who love you and your big feelings, who respect the feelings.
Maybe you have big feelings too. I'm sorry for you if you do, but also glad; that capacity to feel can be a generous offering: to yourself, to others in your orbit, to the world.
If so, I hope you can remember that your big feelings are a gift and that if you share them with others they ought to respect and appreciate that gift, and if they can't, maybe you can't be close to them.
I have tried to be close to people who did not want my big feelings, or who only wanted them when they wanted them, or who liked that I had the big feelings, especially if the big feelings in question made them feel especially loved or especially wanted or especially special, but who didn't like the big feelings when they were inconvenient -- well, trying to be close to such people, the ones with a little bit of a fetish for the crazy women (and by fetish I don't mean merely sexual, I mean fascination, objectification of any kind), trying to be close to such people, in any capacity -- that will ruin me. It HAS ruined me before.
I have tried in the past to constrain my big feelings, control them, hide them, disavow or dissimulate about them for someone else's comfort. In doing so I hoped that someday, eventually, that person would understand and appreciate me in my entirety, accept the gift AND its curse.
It was always a lot of work and all that work ever did was trap me: trap me in my own desperate, obsessive yearning, my efforts to shrink myself enough so that someone I wanted to love me could find me merely acceptable, find me large enough for their needs but no larger.
This has never worked, and it has always left me diminished. These days, when I see this happening, I try to stop sooner. I have many kinds of grief already, and that particular kind of grief, when it keeps going, it's like a death every day, as I attempt to murder my self daily in order to be a person that someone else can merely tolerate. (Cue Taylor Swift here).
These days I try to say no right away, as soon as I hear it, that cacophonous salad of words that mean Not Like That, Not Like You, Not So Much, Not So Messy.
I'm not a violet wand, folks, I'm a goddamn electrical storm. You can't turn me on and off like a toy, and if you try, I might shock you.
If you, too, are a person with big feelings, I hope that you can also learn this lesson, and learn it sooner than I did, maybe.
It's not stupid to want someone to want the whole you. You didn't fuck things up because you were too much too quickly or at the wrong time or with the wrong words or whatever story you're telling yourself about how you should have been less and you would have been loved more.
I have many people who love me very much who do not need me or want me to be less, even if in particular moments they are not able to stand so close to all of my more. "I can't stand so close to your more right now" they say, but they don't expect me to make my more into less. They don't make me feel like my more is a fault.
I'm not for everyone. I'm not for everyone I wish I was for. I'm very sad when I find that someone I thought I was for, I'm not for, after all. But after all, that's just one more kind of grief, and as I said, I always find grief, and that, in the end, is okay.
This isn't a very original tale, and it's not a very original moral. But it's one I've spent a lot of my life avoiding, because it's hard to be rejected on such a fundamental level. Like many people, I want to believe that everyone will love me if I just try hard enough. It isn't true, and it doesn't have to be.
Grief for people I've loved who haven't loved me back. That is their loss, yes, but it's also mine, and like all my losses, I have a right to feel grief over it. For as long as I want, as long as I need to, as long as I live, which so far has turned out to be the length of time all my griefs last.
One last thought: I was talking to a friend about a grief of mine and she said that she didn't want me to have to feel that grief. That is understandable. I don't want my friends to have to feel grief either.
But I choose this life, I said.
I choose it because anything else would be an amputation.
And I stand here whole in my choices, even when they seem to bring me nothing but grief.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you can find some solace in the solstice.