As soon as I hit publish on my recent post about dithering, I second-guessed how such a post would be interpreted and/or received. This happens a lot when I have concerns about who might read it or what they might think. It happens when I talk about any subject over which I hold multiple and sometimes contradictory thoughts and feelings. In my experience, the world outside of my head can never quite grasp the nuances inside my head (admittedly, I do an inadequate job of explaining). Because of this, when I begin to think of potential readers, I find myself writing and over-writing for or against them. This makes authenticity a little difficult and brevity nearly impossible.
If I write about feeling depressed or frustrated, I always have in the back of my mind those people who care about me and have seen me struggle. For them, I try to temper what I say. I try to show that my struggles aren’t terribly troubling (they aren’t), or that I’m mostly fine and happy (I usually am), or that I’ve made progress (I usually have). When I write about relationships, I’m acutely aware that people who were (or might yet be) involved with me romantically might read it (people google exes and potential dates all the time). To them, I want to show that moving on or dealing with past baggage, for me, is about keeping things out in the open and revisiting them as often as is necessary. It’s about leaving doors open and allowing myself to be pleasantly surprised by whoever or whatever walks in.
If history is a bunch of photos in a shoe box (or on a phone), putting that box in a trunk and then in a closet and then locking the door doesn’t diminish our knowledge of the box’s existence. Even here, writing that example, I’m reminded of a miscommunication with an ex about her attempt to honor her past and I’m tempted to overwrite and explain my side of that story (just in case she’s reading)…. If trying to be heard is hard, trying to be understood is harder. As I’ve practiced this journaling/blogging thing, I’ve been trying to strip away those asides and minor arguments with my potential readers – my first year of blogging is littered with them. Yet sometimes, especially when I talk about the nature of relationships (past and future) I still find myself with an audience in mind trying to telegraph that I neither hope for, nor fight against future outcomes. I try not to demonize or compare – though the latter is nearly impossible. I try to approach my past with generosity and my future with cautious optimism – which can sometimes look like longing, pining, or being stuck in the past. To flat out deny that longing (or memory) exists would be dishonest. It would be equally dishonest to say that I have some bigger plan or aspiration other than to see where this life takes me.
For me, writing, love, and life are often about developing a balanced mindset. Several years ago I broke off a relationship because I hesitated when I felt the urge to say I love you. After the moment had passed, I focused on what wasn’t said and why. Surely, there must have been something wrong that made me pause – or at least that was the logic in my head. Only in hindsight did I realize that I could have used being on the verge of saying I love you as a reason to continue that relationship. It was an important lesson in the difference between a deficit mindset and an abundance mindset.
The same can be said for progress (a word I’m skeptical of) on any issue. In climbing a mountain, we can look at how far we still have to go, we can celebrate how far we’ve come, or we could do a bit of both. In yesterday’s post, I quoted a survey that said a third of the participants (single Americans on a dating site) would get back with an ex if they could. I think society tends to view that as a bad thing – as though our end goal should be some type of absolutist certainty. What’s the fun if we know all the answers or how the story ends? I think had I been asked the “get back together” question shortly after any of my more significant relationships, I would have been right there in that one-third. Now, I suspect progress away from that grouping lands me somewhere between “probably not” and “I’m not sure.” I doubt I’ll ever land in the “hell no” category. It’s just not how I operate. I’m a man who enjoys soft qualifiers and varying degrees of gray. I prefer words like often and seldom to always and never.
Two years ago on Christmas, I shared the poem “Freight Cars” by Stephen Dobyns. Last year, on Christmas I re-shared some of the lines… which are oddly appropriate for this year as well. I suppose it’s the season that trots out this notion of progress as I reflect on the past and head into another year.
…
out in the country, riding freight car
after freight car, just squeaking by
in pursuit of some private quest.
That’s the problem, isn’t it?
Coming into the world and imagining
some destination for oneself,
some place to make all the rest
all right, as we cast aside those
who love us, as they cast aside others
in their turn, and all of us
wandering, wandering in a direction
which only our vanity claims to be forward,
Vanity gives me pause in my writing. It makes me worry about who might read what I have to say and how they might read it. It sometimes convinces me that progress has only one direction when I know deep down, most of us are just wandering and maybe thankful for the view.