I’ve been stuck. In another tab, I have a rambling mess of a blog post that I’ve been playing with for an hour or two each day for the past four or five days (very similar to this one). I keep adding and deleting, cutting here, mixing there. It has paragraphs that end mid-way through and snippets of thoughts everywhere. Its parts consist of reflections on where this blog has gone over the last three years, why it started, who I had hoped to reach, and that ever elusive sentiment of attempting to be the person I hope to find (or finding the person I hope to be). Where I felt the post was going, or where I wanted it to go, was towards the conclusion that we need relationships to, among other things, help us measure our progress and ultimately hold us accountable. I found myself trying to answer the question: if I genuinely set out to be the person I had hoped to find, how would I know when or if I’ve succeeded? Mixed in are some thoughts about self-reliance vs. effective dependency… I found myself vacillating between we need others to break down our own self-delusion and we have everything we could possibly need within our self. I even wrote a satirical country love song called “accountable you, accountable me.”
Ever since going to a backyard concert on Saturday night where I was gently reminded of a few people who would have enjoyed the experience (primarily women I dated), I’ve been thinking about the nature of sharing, accountability, and curiosity in relationships. More specifically, I was reminded of how I feel when I’m at my best in a relationship – someone bubbling over with the desire to share everything… to give it all away. This is who and how I am, let me give it to you – and I hope you will meet me with equal force, enthusiasm, and generosity. I’ve felt this sentiment before (at concerts, on hikes, in quiet moments with subtle light) – life is to be shared.
What I’ve been trying to figure out is whether a good relationship (chemistry) is as simple as: we like to do a lot of shit together and also like to sleep with each other? And the more shit we like to do together, the better? Is it as simple as thinking, this is nice, and I don’t think I’d ever get bored of this person? I mean, I have friends I like to do things with, but I don’t think I want to have breakfast with them every day and I don’t pay enough attention to them to notice their quirks, let alone find those quirks endearing. I’ve had relationships of varying levels of intensity… so what made one feel like it had the promise of forever and others feel like this is cool, but maybe not “forever” cool. The more I think about it, the more I come back to these notions of sharing, curiosity, and accountability. Can we meet each other with similar intensities and desires to continuously share and learn? Can we drive each other to better versions of ourselves? It seems that in the best romantic relationships, those things we enjoy with each other (big things and little things) often, if not always, bring us a little closer. Are strong relationships about having enough curiosity about each other to push through the many disappointments? Or is it really about the sleeping with each other?
Coming up on three years of blogging and exploring, I’ve been re-reading old posts and reflecting…. trying to figure out if I’ve made any progress on my journey of self-discovery… or have I just come full-circle. I suspect only people who have known past versions of me would be able to tell. I started this blog with a post about transitions. I was moving. I was still processing and reeling from what felt like an insurmountable loss. I was about to set out to intentionally be alone for a bit – in hopes of figuring out how to “move on” (though towards what I wasn’t sure). In some respects, I felt like I needed to start over from scratch – a rebuild from the ground up. Going to the backyard show last weekend made me feel like I’m the same person I always was, but also very different. I do a lot of the same things I used to do, have a lot of the same interests. Sometimes, I feel like this whole exercise may have been a lot of running in place. I’ve been trying to think back to a time before… before the moving, before the pandemic, before the engagement. I do this because I’m a terrible Buddhist and because I struggle to be in the moment without prior reference points. I do this because I had set out to learn to build or rebuild and I’m realizing I have no way of knowing where the project stands or what the structure looks like.
Over the course of these past four or five days of fairly intense thinking, I feel like I’ve had mini epiphanies… If I’ve been lucky, I’ve been able to get to the computer or my phone to jot something down. Those epiphanies are the scraps that influence the blog post I can’t quite pull together. They are attempts to connect some of the more complex feelings many of us have experienced in various aspects of life.
In one particular epiphany, I was walking the dog and failing to keep the work thoughts at bay. I was thinking about how I have days where I’m simply exhausted from the responsibility. In my work I have to be mildly knowledgeable about IT, finance, the United Way network, the community, issues such as homelessness and early childhood education, marketing, communications, etc. etc. It is a lot of responsibility and I don’t always feel up to the task or sometimes wish I could hand it over from time to time. I think we sometimes feel this way in relationships. I know I sometimes feel this way about the dog. The note I wrote to myself was, “the thought of being indispensable to someone else, being accountable to someone else, was terrifying.” Being in a committed relationship means being responsible for someone else’s happiness and well-being. Not solely responsible, but responsible. This can be a lot of pressure.
In another epiphany, I was thinking about my personal enthusiasms for things like poetry and live music and how in one-sided relationships, those enthusiasms come off as overbearing. I know of at least one person who did almost everything I wanted to do and later complained our time together was all about me. What they hadn’t realized was that I never wanted to do all the lifting – I did it in the absence of them bringing themself to the relationship. I want and hope that whoever I’m with is as fierce about sharing their life and interests with me as I am with them… I want minor competitions in giving it all away.
And that’s where I’ve been stuck. Trying to find ways to articulate how my thinking has evolved, how I have evolved. The problem I’ve had with being the person I want to find is that the initial efforts were in reaction to this person who had left. I wanted to be a better person for them, a better fit for them… and maybe better isn’t the right word and maybe for them isn’t entirely accurate either… which is also where I’ve been stuck. It has been for them, and also for me, and also for whoever else I might encounter: colleagues at work, a stranger on the street, friends, family. I struggle with the selfishness of human existence and I have a mix of distrust and admiration for the self-reliant. I believe that we are here to take care of each other, to enrich each other’s lives, and to make this whole thing a little more enjoyable and a little less scary… and yet I also believe that one of the greatest ways to achieve those goals is through constantly developing this sense of inner peace. I’ve been trying to reflect on three years of reflection and sometimes feel just as lost as when I first started – if I’m lucky, I’m a little better spoken, a little more poetic.