It’s fun making fun of myself — like this I can realize when I’m acting out a pattern and losing myself, again. Yesterday I read an article from my old therapist where she talks about the ‘dependent personality type’. In a list of 20 self identifying characteristics one with this personality type might identify with, I saw myself reflected in 16! I highly recommend taking a look at her article if you find identification with this piece — it’s quite informative :)
Earlier today, I was talking to my sponsor about the person I wrote that little poem about (before I wrote that little poem). While I could see the pattern playing out, knowing that my yearning had very little to do with him (he’s literally just some guy) - I couldn’t figure out how to make the cyclical thought patterns stop.
The only way I know how to absolve myself of obsessive longing is to distract myself from it, by throwing myself into other parts of my life. In a way, it can be a good thing — I’ve written the better part of a short story, a new poem, and soon, this article, too. But, because this is a common pattern, I’ve found myself at this weird moment where I realize a lot of the work that I create is made on the grounds of forgetting about something else that I’d rather be doing with someone else who isn’t cooperating with my burning desires. That doesn’t really seem fair — not to myself, not to my work, and not to the person in question, either.
In Roland Barthes’ book, A Lover’s Discourse —(one of my all time favorites! i’ve linked a PDF here. he’s long dead, so I doubt he’d mind ;) — he describes the different symptoms of a person with the affliction of a hopeless romantic/preoccupied lover. One of the chapters is called ‘waiting,’ and it was the chapter that I felt the most called out by when I first read it. Here are some quotes from that section:
I am waiting for an arrival, a return, a promised sign. This can be futile, or immensely pathetic: in Ewartung (Waiting), a woman waits for her lover, at night, in the forest; I am waiting for no more than a telephone call, but the anxiety is the same. Everything is solemn: I have no sense of proportions.
The being I am waiting for is not real. Like the mother's breast for the infant, "I create and re-create it over and over; starting from my capacity to love; starting from my need for it,": the other comes here where I am waiting; here where I have already created him/ her. And if the other does not come, I hallucinate the other: waiting is a delirium.
Am I in love? — Yes, since I am waiting. The other never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn’t wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game: whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.
Oh boy! If Barthes were alive, I’d tell him to just stab me next time — it’d be a much kinder death than this torture of being so seen.
So no, I am not the first person driven mad by a longing for the idea of a person who doesn’t truly exist, nor is this the first person whom I’ve attempted to turn into a deity.
My sponsor wrote to me earlier, “remember yr higher power kinda needs to not be a person and esp not some guy lol”. And yes, again — this is just some guy. So to tie it altogether, in my manic mindmap way, if the thing I am waiting for isn’t real, then what is it that I’m truly attending?
I think, as Barthes wrote, it’s my capacity for love. I am waiting, because in waiting, it allows me the chance to delay my loving nature. The person who is waiting for an important phone call is irritable, nervous, high strung. He thinks he will be kinder when the phone rings, if only the phone would ring, if only this person would call. But that’s not how I want to love. That’s not how I hope to be loved, with terms and conditions.
Earlier, I was meditating on non attachment. I realized that if I held in the same breath for too long, I would suffocate (at the very least, pass out). My survival is dependent on my ability to breathe things in and breathe them out again, too. I don’t want to suffocate the people I love, no more than I wish to be suffocated by them. I’ve been on both sides of that equation, and neither is pretty.
The more weight I put onto the future, the less I enjoy it when it comes, because after all my hours of fixation/hope/obsession, reality’s arrival can do nothing but disappoint me. By trying to control what comes into my life, I lose appreciation for all that does. When I am waiting for someone to text me, every text received from someone aside from them inspires a little disappointment, an eye roll, a tiny, blooming resentment to the not texter and the texter alike.
In my Bhagavad Gita discussion group this week, one of the girls in the group talked about how she’s been thinking about the difference between hope and faith. Hope, as a concept, still implies an attempt to control what comes to us — we hope for an outcome, for a phone call, for a favorable reply. Faith, however, removes our hands from the steering wheel. I say, “hey, whatever happens, I’m sure it’ll work out. There is not market cap on the amount of love I can give and receive in this lifetime. There is no urgency to the life I am living.” And with hope, there is always a chance of disappointment, but from faith, there grows the time and space to relax. I am trying to lean more into my faith right now, and away from hope.
In any case, if I were going to hope for something — I should imagine I could find a better dream than a reply from some guy ;-)
Love you madly,
Jomé