And it wasn’t when we broke up. Not the first time or even the fifth time. It wasn’t when I learned he had a new girlfriend or when the bastard actually asked my best friend of 31 years if he could crash at her place with the new girlfriend when they were visiting his friends on the East Coast (can you believe the balls on that motherf*cker?). It wasn’t even when the egomaniacal f*ck texted me to ask me (whilst in relationship with said new girlfriend) if I still looked at the picture he had taken for me (during happier times) of his naked, erect penis (classy, right?).
Nope, it wasn’t then. (Although, admittedly, those were all pretty good clues.) It was some time just before all that. Er, well, between all that, I guess. Some time before all the new girlfriend stuff, but after the actual breaking up (what can I say? I loved the guy and held out hope for far longer than any sane person should).
Anyhoo, it was an email he sent me after a particularly gruesome (and public) fight, in which he leveled an accusation so patently, absurdly, outrageously off-base that I actually laughed when I read it. Y’know, when I wasn’t weeping. On the surface, the allegation -- tucked in between some other more obviously harsh (if equally unfair) ones -- seemed almost inconsequential, banal even. But it pierced me through with the sharpness and coldness of an icicle through my heart.
Lemme explain.
See, I have this couch in my living room. It’s a striped couch. I’ve had it for years. Prolly getting time to replace it. Whatever. The important thing is that it’s striped. And, to me, those stripes look like they’re kind of a sage-y green. But maybe if you saw it, you might think the stripes look more like a shade of blue.
Ok, so, we disagree about the color. (Just go with it for a minute.) In fact, maybe we even argue about it -- me absolutely convinced of its green-ness and you 100 percent sure of its blue. And maybe the argument gets heated and maybe we make value judgments about each other because of this inability to see the stripes the same way (Me: “Why are you so unwilling to even consider the stripes might be green? You don’t respect me or my point of view. You don’t really love me.” You: “Stop projecting. You’re being irrational. And anyway, I’m right and you’re wrong. The stripes are obviously blue”).
Or maybe we don’t fight at all. Maybe we’re the type of people who decide it’s just not worth it. So one of us throws up our hands in defeat and concedes that, fine, fine, the color is as the other person sees it. Depending on how much we value being right about color, that concession either sits perfectly well with us … or sparks the first nascent bloom of resentment.
Or maybe, just maybe, we’re a wholly different type of people -- the type of people who can respectfully agree to disagree and find a way to celebrate the opportunity to share a life with someone who helps us to see blue when all we think we can see is green.
So maybe, just maybe (if we’re the wholly different type of people), when I look at the couch on certain days and could swear the stripes still look green, I’ll turn on a lamp or cock my head just so and see the particular way a finger of the amber afternoon sun hits a cushion, and I’ll say, “Y’know, I can sort of see a hint of blue in there...”
And maybe, just maybe, you’ll walk up behind me, slip your hand around my waist and say, “It’s funny, but … I actually kinda sorta see what you mean about the green.”
And then maybe we’ll look at each other sort of sheepishly, and wonder why the color mattered so much in the first place, and we’ll just be glad for a couch on which to rest our weary heads -- and consummate our love (rowr!).
But what if it’s not the color we dispute?
What if I look at my couch and tell you I see green stripes … and you look at my couch and tell me you see polka dots -- or, say, a bicycle -- and I’m as convinced of the stripes as you are of the polka dots (or the bicycle)? That is a different sort of disagreement altogether.
See, color is a matter of perspective; shape is a matter of fact (at least in this analogy). When we're arguing facts, how do we find middle ground? How can we agree to disagree? And if we can’t find middle ground, or agree to disagree, what option is there but for one of us to simply … concede? What would that cost us? And is it fair to ask either one of us to pay that price?
I’m not talking about a couch, obviously. I am talking about the distinction between recognizing a difference in our perspectives versus a difference in our realities. I mean, if we both agree that we are looking at a striped couch, well, we can figure out how to address the difference in our perceptions of the color of the stripes. Ultimately, we may discover that color is far too important a thing for us disagree about, and thereby go our separate ways. Or we may discover that color matters just enough for disagreements about it to needle us but not divide us. Or we may discover that color really doesn’t matter at all -- not when we consider everything else we share, everything else we value -- so agreeing or disagreeing about it is a non-issue.
But if we can’t even accept the premise that the couch we’re looking at is striped (and not polka-dotted or, y’know, a bicycle), then arguing about color is pointless -- whether we want to argue about it or not, whether we love each other or not, whether we’ve hurt each other a million times and apologized a million times and forgiven each other a million times … or not. Because asking me to agree that something I know to be true isn’t actually true is like asking me to agree that the world is flat -- it changes the whole model of my solar system.
It changes where my center is.
And when I figured that out, that’s when I knew it was over. No more arguments, no more “I’m sorries,” no more working it out. Just … over. Because I realized we weren’t disagreeing about whether the stripes were blue or green, but whether the couch was striped at all.
Don’t get me wrong, I rehearsed a thousand speeches and drafted a thousand email replies (even sent one -- or possibly twenty) with the hope that we might both see stripes again (I say "again" like we ever both saw stripes. ha!). Because I wished, with all my heart -- my whole huge, broken, bleeding f*cking heart -- that we would. On some level, I needed us to both see stripes, because it would mean that my reality would be validated. It would mean (or so I thought) that I hadn't completely lost my mind.
But here’s the thing: I’ve come to realize that I don’t need him (or you, or anyone, for that matter) to see stripes to know that the stripes are real. I’ve come to realize that the thing that matters is that I know I see stripes; which is to say, the thing that matters is what I know to be true.
Ok, the analogy is getting a little unwieldy now. So I’ll just say this:
There are so many things about myself about which I am completely unsure, so many more things I wish I were but realize I am not (yet!), still more that I recognize but struggle to reconcile: I am kind, wise, fiercely loyal, and strong, but I am also wildly insecure, passive-aggressive, narcissistic, and a perfectionist. I have impossibly high expectations of myself and other people (particularly those I love), and I have a troubling track record of letting those expectations (and whether they are met or unmet) define me. I love big but lose bigger -- I ruminate on the negative and frequently suffer from a persecution complex (some call that “being a victim,” and -- with several exceptions that I will defend to my death -- they wouldn’t be wrong). I understand intellectually that nothing is ever black and white, but in practical terms I only seem able to process information (and respond to it) as if it were. To compensate, I'm obsessively committed to hearing both sides of every story, which I like to think makes me fair-minded but often only makes me seem wishy-washy -- or, to people who want me (or need me or expect me) to be on their side, it feels like I'm abandoning them. I define honesty and virtue so narrowly that there isn’t a soul on planet earth who could hope embody either -- least of all me (despite my dogged pursuit of both).
In a relationship, these qualities can be, at best, huge hurdles to clear; at worst, some can be monumentally destructive. And the damage I have done to people I love and relationships that matter to me literally keeps me up at night. My regrets, I’m afraid to say, are legion.
But for all the mistakes I’ve made, for all my shortcomings -- my insecurities, my impossibly high expectations, my short-sighted insistence that I see green when something is really blue -- for all my uncertainty, here is something I know beyond a shadow of a doubt:
My deepest, most profound, most character-defining, most heartfelt desire is that I want to be known. I hunger to be known. This has been my truth for as long as I can remember. It is the thing that keeps me waking up each morning. And, in true double-edged-sword fashion, it is the thing that often tempts me to the bottle or the blade for an endless sleep as well. In the simplest terms possible, this desire to be known is Who I Am.
A hundred years ago, when I first joined Facebook (oh, Facebook...), I found a quote by Frederick Buechner that expressed this yearning more elegantly and more precisely than I could ever hope to express it myself. So I used it for my “About Me” section. Because what is “about me” if not my deepest yearning?
Here’s what it said:
“We hunger to be known and understood. We hunger to be loved. We hunger to be at peace inside our own skins. We hunger not just to be fed these things but, often without realizing it, we hunger to feed others these things because they too are starving for them. We hunger not just to be loved but to love, not just to be forgiven but to forgive, not just to be known and understood for all the good times and bad times that for better for worse have made us who we are, but to know and understand each other to the same point of seeing that, in the last analysis, we all have the same good times, the same bad times, and that for that very reason there is no such thing in all the world as anyone who is really a stranger.”
-- from Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons
I know this about myself, this desire -- this hunger -- to be known. I know it as sure as I am sitting here, as sure as the shark-tooth-shaped scar on my arm, as sure as the ground beneath my feet.
I know it like I know the couch in my living room is striped.
Which brings me back to the infamous email and the moment I knew it was over: “You want,” he said in the message (although sneered is more what it felt like, there was such arrogance in his certainty), “desperately, I think, to not be known.”
When I read that, I laughed. Guffawed, actually. Prolly even snorted (I do that). Because I knew in that moment that he had never been more riotously, ridiculously, egregiously wrong about me. I knew in that moment, with those nine little words, that most everything he believed about me -- most everything of which HE was completely, totally convinced -- was not even on the same planet as the truth about me, not even in the same UNIVERSE. It was, if you’ll indulge me a biblical metaphor here, as far from the truth as the east is from the west.
And then I wept. A LOT. Big snuffling, blubbering, wailing, grief-of-the-dead sobs. Because I also knew in that moment that it was over -- really, truly, finally, completely over. And I knew that this person that I had loved more fiercely and more deeply and more foolishly and more profoundly than any other living, breathing soul in all my life was lost to me for good. That -- even worse -- he had never been mine to begin with, and that believing for a millisecond that he ever was had been the cruelest lie I could have ever told myself. Because how could a person that disconnected from my truth EVER lay claim to my heart?
“He was the love of my life,” I lamented to a friend a while back. “No,” she said, firmly (although not unkindly). “He couldn’t have been.”
She didn’t elaborate. She didn’t need to. Because I knew what she meant. And I knew she was right.
My regrets, I’ve mentioned, are legion. But I will never regret loving him. I will never regret wanting him. I will never regret fighting for him or believing in him (even when he remained convinced that I didn’t). But he was wrong about me. So so so very wrong. About so so SO many things.
So for all that I DO regret, there is nothing I regret more than the years I wasted believing in HIS version of me. There is nothing I regret more than how much of myself I gave up just so he could be right.
Regret is a funny thing. There are many who suggest that it is useless -- self-indulgent, even. But I disagree. If not for this regret, I would never know how dangerously close I came to losing myself completely. If not for this regret, I would never know the power that comes from discovering my own truth, from laying claim to my own heart.
The honest to god truth is that a broken heart just plain sucks. A broken heart full of regret is a bitter, heavy, black hole of a soul-suck. And if you let it, it can annihilate you.
But there is wisdom in it, too. And when it heals, it can also set you free.
