ABSOLUTELY right, Amber:
the loneliness might be connected to how quickly you emotionally connect and start fantasizing the most ideally romantic relationship even when you're involved with guys - that you've only known a very short time. Speedy fantasy/bonding isn't romantic, it's dysfunctional. (M taught me a lot, inadvertently.)
Part of it's loneliness (since childhood when it was deepest) and part romantic brainwashing from culture that I absorbed way too deeply. Novels were my whole life for many years as "real life" was too painful. My brain works better now and I am finally able to over-ride my own trance states (such as imagining a future with M, "seeing" kindness when it really wasn't there). It is effortful and significant when I do wake up, even better when I shake myself out of a waking dream in the first place. I think that's why I was "celebrating" having felt faint doubts and following them to a sad revelation about new Mr. Kindness. I saw I'd already begun fantasizing as a loud warning about where the gaps in my heart-coverage sag open if I'm not more mindful. This time, I think I was more mindful, and have saved myself future pain.
I couldn't agree more that it's important to meet one's own emotional needs as much as possible. I'm someone, however, who does NEED intimacy. But I find bits of it here and there in good friendships, in community, in volunteering, and in therapy. It's a patchwork of connection and may be all it ever is. I don't think I'll ever be alone on an Arctic voyage. It's my nature to suffer in too much isolation, and my vulnerability, and this year has been that for me. For a lot of folks, really.
Poet and I just swapped stories, and she'd once met (and dated) a similar man in the church community. Very kind, funny, etc. Once jailed for seducing his music student who was 14. She realized he wasn't for her, but later than I happened to this time. Oddly, maybe it's a poet problem. We're attracted to the unreality of romance and its myths because we are attracted to intensity on every level of life. Otherwise, I'd not have much of substance to write about. To write poetry, I drill as deep as I can, mining emotion and life for the subtlest surprises, which to me are as valuable as gold. Imagination is everything. But a poet can imagine too much in real life, where one needs insight to balance imagination. That radar that helps me see unexpected connections, even powerful ones, between ideas and sounds and images in the world that I can transform into poetry...can bleed over into imagining people-connections where they'd be unreal in daylight. Unreal or even destructive.
Poet friend's work is a lot more ethereal, abstract and delicate than mine. Mine is driving, punchy, and emotionally potent. There's a big thing for me in rhythm and sound, over idea. Mine kind of mounts to a climactic metaphor or revelation; hers floats and twirls in soft air currents and is highly spiritual. Each style suits who we each are, and it's fascinating to be supporting each other's art and life-learning.
She shared this morning that she's still haunted by her childhood abuse in Africa, and said her memories are full of gaps before age 18. She just knows she was terrified, and another memory had surfaced of being chased. I think the whole pack of village children would chase her. Her parents were so involved in their field work that they just abandoned her to the company of all the village children. She was very young and not ready for it and it all went worse wrong when an adult abused her in a latrine or outhouse. That horrible thing at age 4 has hung over her whole life. No wonder she spend several years with a husband who beat her.
Even at this later age, it's a joy to be healing alongside a friend who's also diving so deep. Like most on this board are. I'm really grateful for these friendships. SO grateful.
Thanks for your thinking, Amber. I value it so much because your self-sufficiency, though out of my reach to that degree, inspires me nonetheless. I'm learning not to shame myself for the baby steps, which in comparison look like crawling while you're on a tractor reshaping a mountain. Well, that's pretty accurate. But I'm infusing some of my little steps with more mountain spirit because of you.
hugs
Hops
