We don’t need to bathe in grief or anoint ourselves with holy misery. There is, after all, a mastubatory element to counting our flaws, calculating our sins and enumerating the wrongs done to us. It is indulgent. It solidifies our already resilient excuses. It is…icky.
But oh, how grim circumstances plant the seeds of a good story. Often, when I’m the midst of existential despair (every six weeks or so) or have been wronged egregiously, I comfort myself with the knowledge that this will make a great story some day.
Set me up at a cocktail party (or a blog!) and I’m good hours of storytelling entertainment. But even an endless stream of pretty stories has a dark side. Sometimes we build personal narratives the way we do prisons: to keep the bad things in.
And when we disparage ourselves, luxuriate in our flaws, and spin intricate histories woven through generations of Why We are the Way We Are, we cast ourselves as the inmates.
So…this is not an engraved invitation to a pity party. This is not a Be Miserable! manifesto or an incitement to the inaction of complaint.
This is simple truth talking.
While we probably don’t need to stroke ourselves with tales of incapacitating woe, we do need to acknowledge that all of those things – sickness, misery, death, loss, divorce, random unkindness, broke, discrimination, frustration, heartbreak, loneliness, soul-deep disappointment – are real, inevitable and mostly (mercifully!) transitory.
Transitory, not simply “temporary”. As Alexander Graham Bell – and I think we can trace “social media” back to the party-line phone – said, “When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.”
So misery – or even joy – is transitory. You walk through it and land somewhere else. You walk through it and your life is transformed. You walk through it and you are transformed.
Grief is mourning that which has passed. A time, a togetherness has been lost. A new time is at hand. Periods of intense emotion – or even being insulated from any emotion – herald the end of one experience and the birth of another. A new life is upon you.
But in the squall of grief, in the hardened eye of despair, this is small comfort. What is even less comforting is denying and fighting the fact that pain and suffering exist.
Why are we compelled to deny our realities and the full spectrum of our feelings?
Within ourselves are entire orchestras of emotion and possibility. High notes, low notes, sour notes, dissonance, heart-rending harmony. We are not one note in a symphony. When we confine ourselves to one sound, one note, one colour, one mood, one tweet, one endlessly repeated facebook status update, we abbreviate all that we are.
And that’s a lyrical and mmm-hmmm easy-to-accept truth. But the more urgent and pressing truth is this:
- when we squelch our grief, we deny ourselves the breadth of experience. We deny ourselves the richness of life. There is a divinity in pain. There are truths in heartache. There is a reckoning in slammed doors. None of this is to be courted for the sake of experience – though artists often paint and write and create and dance in the fire of a self-destructive struggle with exactly that gas and those matches – but it is to be endured. It is to be acknowledged, even savoured, in the moment. Once when I was heartbroken and valiantly fighting the fissures with “It’s all my fault; I shouldn’t be this upset; I need to buck up…”, Dave told me: Be sad. Cry. Feel it all and let it pass. And that is essential advice.
- to be relentlessly chipper we must ignore the sometimes disheartening demands of daily life.
- when we wave the “everything is awesome” flag, all the time, we inadvertently shame and silence people in the midst of very real suffering.
- and…it is a lie. When we only glaze our faces with pasted smiles and only adorn our profiles with cut-and-pasted positivity, we lie. We seek to impress others with outwards signs of happiness. We hope to impress ourselves too or else we content ourselves with appearing happy and well. We lie. We lie to ourselves, we lie to others, we build lives and relationships on sand and salt and lies, and then we wonder why it all tastes fake, like tears and mud. We wonder where our true friends are – the ones who’ll be with us through the grit we hesitate to admit.
There’s pleasure and pain in knowledge, truth, life. Reality is a fucking mess and yet in that morass we dig in and we grow. We grow and we grow and we glow.
And buried therein are the tangled roots of juicy fear and fearsome joy.
You need to get over your addiction to falling in love – Dave Doolin
Eros is in the mundane – Dave Doolin
Allow me to assemble a straw man.
Hallmark, Harlequin Romance et al, the Valentine’s Day cartel, Disney, most mainstream women’s magazines, almost all dating advice aimed at women, chick flicks, and the wedding industrial complex (this list is not exhaustive) conflate the blush and the rush of New Relationship Energy with the entire experience of romantic love.
Even so, infatuation does not get its due.
In fact, infatuation gets a bad rap.
My friend Ricardo – a deep, passionate, romantic Pisces – once told me he doesn’t “do” infatuation because infatuation is not real. When I’m in a new relationship, my friend Z despairs of me. I’ll say “do you want to hear what ____ did? Can I tell you about _____? And he’ll sigh and say “If you must”. And then he’ll make disparaging remarks, mock every sweet thing the new man might have said and conclude that my new dude is full of shit or a pussy (which I don’t actually find offensive because I think vaginas are MAGIC and a man should be so lucky as to be compared with one). Once, I got frustrated with him and heatedly asked him,
Why do you ALWAYS have to do that? Why can’t you let me enjoy the sweet and fleeting moment? Why can’t you be happy that someone is making me happy?
His answer?
- Because we’re in a sex haze and we’re out of our damn minds.
- Because we’ll wake up in four days, four weeks, four months or four years and wonder what the hell happened.
- Because I’ll get lured in by soft words and hard lovin’, suspend my disbelief and my romantic judgement, and get fucked over. Again. And then in addition to this mushy bullshit he’ll have to hear about the heartbreak, too.
- Because what I’m feeling is not real. Infatuation is not real.
Infatuation is chemistry, chemicals, biochemicals.
Doesn’t that make it more real?
Scientists tell us infatuation is oxytocin and dopamine and therefore simulated, stimulated, induced and ruthlessly temporary, as though “temporary” is a synonym for “illusion” or “delusion”.
(A note on induced experiences: saying that because infatuation is chemically induced, it isn’t real is like saying induced labour and birth isn’t real, either. Trust me. Induced labour is agonizingly real.)
Still, the needle amongst this stack ‘o hay is this: the effect of infatuation inevitably wears off. And if we think that infatuation is the entire experience of love, then when (no if, it is absolutely a when) we lose it, we feel – nay, know – that we’ve fallen out of love. And we want love. Lots of love. We’re jonesing for it. So, like good addicts, we’ll be driven to abandon our families and our lives to go out and chase that high.
The function, then, of anti-infatuation arguments is to convince us to stay the course. To convince us that infatuation isn’t the prize, the stuff that comes after it is. To convince us to be patient. (And, arguably, not a lot of us are being taught or teaching patience. I’m short of it and need schooling and I’m convinced most of the modern world does, too.)
Denigrating infatuation doesn’t do that, though. Telling me infatuation isn’t real – when I know, viscerally, in my blood, that I’m feeling something – is futile. My body knows the truth.
Instead, giving infatuation its due might be the solution.
There’s research that says the way we tell our love stories tells us the state of our relationship today and the future of our relationship tomorrow.
When my friend Heather told me about how she and her husband started out – long distance, e-mails, endless phone calls – she felt the butterflies. She re- read their e-mails and was feeling sweet on her man. She was remembering the halcyon days, and it helped her handle some of the daily irritants – and yes, that is love. Dave’s right: eros is in the mundane.
And infatuation is the bonding agent that gets us there. The evanescent thrill of infatuations is insurance against boring. And boring is thankfully inevitable.
Because interesting relationships, like interesting times, are exhausting.
Back to our straw man. Let’s not forget that all along, with every step on the yellow brick road, the seemingly empty-headed scarecrow did have a brain.
And infatuation has an intelligence, too. It’s brief, it’s primal, it’s butterflies, it’s bliss. It’s lizard-brain logic and it’s useful because the memory of your shared bliss gives you and your lover the wings you need to soar on through boring and interesting times.
Clever men place the world into cages, but the wise woman ducks under the moon and throws keys to the rowdy prisoners. – Hafiz
There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? and Who’s in charge?” – Elizabeth Gilbert
On Wednesday I had a hot and sweaty date with five demanding women. Heather and I took our respective progeny (two daughters each) to the beach.
A couple of weeks ago I had discovered – not-so-funny how some of us claim things new to us even when they’re long-known and owned by others, ahh the history of the world – Centennial Beach at Boundary Bay.
It was a spontaneous thing. I’d heard about this beach, we were out for a drive and I found my way there.
And what a beach. What a bay. Long, uninterrupted swaths of white sand bordered by a bird sanctuary on one side and the surprisingly warm Pacific Ocean on the other.
Did I mention the water was warm?
The water was warm. My girls immediately got in – clothes be damned, Sophie wore all of hers and Lola took ‘em all off – and stayed in. When you live north of the 49th and you find water warm enough to swim in, then by the water gods, goddesses, sirens and mermaids (but not Shark Week, damn you Shark Week!), you swim in it. Now. You don’t wait to be equipped with petty luxuries like towels and bathing suits. Skin is a fine swim suit.
And then you brag to your bff that you discovered what would have happened if the Holy Grail mated with a unicorn: a beach in the Pacific Northwest that doesn’t make your pointy bits announce their presence to the world or seek shelter internally.
Naturally, Heather immediately wanted a piece of this hot (ok, warm) swimmable beach action.
So we strapped all the kids into her super-sexy Dodge Caravan with the unspoken and fervent wish that the kids would splash and make sandcastles while we gossiped and all would be right with the kids-being-kids/mamas-being-adults world. You know, fantasy land.
When we arrived the tide was out – waaaaaaay out – and recriminations ensued.
“Why are you getting mad at us?” I asked. “We didn’t make the tide go out. That’s the moon. That’s a higher power than your mothers. You need to take that up with God.”
Heather and I unpacked the towels, blanket, snacks, sunscreen, wipes, extra clothes, and beach toys ferried from car-to-beach by a small fleet of valets, puckishly attired man-servants, donkeys, camels and helpful elves – which is to say “the two of us” – and then encouraged the children to play. With each other.
Heather’s two year old promptly reclined against Heather’s thigh while my four year old set up shop in the small of my back. They snacked. They ignored our pleas to go play in the tidal pool.
(Hey. We suggested a tidal pool, not traffic.)
And this, I told Heather, is the paradox of motherhood.
Our children know that we bring the tide in and out. When they are little, their world is small and we are large. So large that we duck under the moon to order bed times and vegetables and boss the sea. We choreograph their world so why not the natural world, too?
And just when we marvel at our own power and glory and incredible ability to command clouds and caravans and kids, they sit on us. With their casual permission to access our bodies they remind us exactly who’s in charge, after all.
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