Maybe the message gets in this time
The ways we protect ourselves from pain isolate us from pleasure and everyone is squishy underneath it all.
Every few years I read a book about love. It pretends to be a book about war, but I know better. It’s a kids’ book, really, which makes all the null gravity space battles and preparations for an alien invasion peanut butter around the medicine: how do we love each other? How do we love our most brutal, monstrous selves?
The closer we get, the harder it is to love well. The closer we get, the more our humanity bubbles up between us and then there we are, a mess of body parts entangled in the passionate embrace we learned to perform when we were promised the power of together, until a distant hissing warns that in the background, behind the scenes, we’re boiling over.
There in the boil is our pain. Scry into the writhing surface and you will see the face of every remembered rejection, insult, misunderstanding, disappointment. What floats to the top are all the ways we have learned to protect ourselves from precisely the connection we crave. Because we tried that, once. Because last time didn’t go very well. Because what we offered another was not returned. Because what was offered to us we could not accept.
A few years ago I found living in New York incredibly difficult. Everywhere I went all I could see was how we were doing it wrong. A million tiny neglects. Rejected on-ramps to an oh-so-close utopia. We stand up for each other on the subway, don’t we? We hold open doors. We give directions and we look around to see who needs what. We rummage in our pockets to see what we might have to share. Don’t we?
Back then I read the Metropolitan Diary every weekend to remind myself that there was still magic here, or at least that there were still humans here who wanted some. The stories made it easier to get through the day because they offered hope that by the end of it we might find a way to connect. Eye contact and a smirk shared with someone who saw what I saw. Stopping someone from getting on a subway headed in the wrong direction.
But I didn’t see anyone looking around. I didn’t see anyone helping. It made me angry, how cold and isolated we all were. Time it right and the bowels of the city are the perfect place to witness just how much we don’t respect each other’s space. How we don’t help each other. How under the guise of self protection, all we do is self isolate.
A few weeks ago I caught myself cursing under my breath at the latest gaggle of girls that was pissing me off without really doing anything wrong. In that moment, I became acutely aware that this was a me problem. There was everything that hurt, boiling over: Don’t you know? I wanted to scream. Don’t you feel what I feel? Aren’t you baffled by living?
They were covered in glitter from head to high-heeled toe and tottering arm in arm to a Halloween party. They were on a subway headed in the wrong direction and I hoped that was the worst problem they would face that night. I thought about how their glitter was armor too, how their Barbie and Clueless and fairy costumes inured them to the world or perhaps inured the world to them.
I am in my 34th year and only now beginning to grasp that just because other people aren’t feeling everything out loud all the time doesn’t mean they’re not feeling anything. I’ve spent many years fantasizing about being one of those Chill People — unperturbed. Able to replicate the outfit of the week, arm in arm with a squad of other Chill People, passing as whatever it means to be normal right now, smiling and laughing easily in every environment as if entirely unaffected by the everyday indignities of existence.
Who will those girls be when they wake up in the morning wigless and bare-faced? What will worry them when they are themselves again?
Now I am beginning to understand that maybe Chill People aren’t doing it less, maybe they’re just not doing it on the outside all the time. I confess this is not the first time I have realized something incredibly obvious incredibly late. (You should have seen when I discovered anti-chafe cream; many of our problems are solvable, friends, and we can often only find the answers if we think to look for them.) Sometimes we need to hear the message over and over and over again until we are the right person arriving in the right moment to really receive it.
I understand also that as long as I am angry with my glitter girls, I am not helping. I’m not looking around to see who needs what or rummaging in my pockets to see if I have it. The machine of my own mind believes it is protecting me from rejection, from judgment, from disappointment, from pain. But self-protection is a detour away from the on-ramp to heaven. Self-protection forces isolation because it is obsessed with its own object — there is no room for anyone else’s humanity when I am desperate to distract you from seeing the truth of my brutal, monstrous self.
I batten down the hatches so nothing can get in and as a result, nothing can get out. So I force myself to relax the muscles in my face instead of rolling my eyes in their general direction and I look for ways to love them under my breath instead of insulting them. I lean against the door at the short end of the subway car devouring books about space because sci-fi doesn’t teach us anything about alienness, it teaches us about humanity. How do I forgive myself enough to allow both my own humanity and yours? How do we love each other? How do we love ourselves?