I find it absolutely fascinating that Chi's and my Davison specifically states that we each came into the other's life with a lesson for that person.
And, seriously. THE WEEK after I had finally completed that learning...here he is. He told me he had wanted to contact me again for a long time, but he was afraid to. He was afraid he would open old wounds.
Really, I don't know how I ever would have closed those wounds without him. I was reeling over being rejected, and felt horrible that I may have tarnished something that would otherwise become beautiful.
Oh, and there was the obvious evidence that I was nuts. Yeah, that.
The learning I was meant to complete was quite the riddle. My transits for this and next year told me that completing it was a major make-or-break issue, but neglected to mention WHAT this specific task actually was. I had to go on a hunt for that, through our Davison and through all of our transits over the next twenty years.
And it was a damn good thing I did, because I had never, ever suspected that the way I was around this issue contained anything unhealthy at all! I thought it was simply the way I was. I thought it was the way all people were!
Imagine, if you will, a five year old getting separated from his parents in a huge department store, or maybe one of those colossal theme parks. Suddenly the child looks up, having been absorbed in some toy. Mom and Dad, brother and sister, are gone! How will that child get home? Who will feed him, who will take care of him? Where will he sleep? Will he ever see his family again?
Just study the reaction of a tiny baby when Mom and Dad head out the door for a date night. The panic. The despair.
I was a kid rejected at home and rejected at school from birth until the age of twelve. I always believed there was something deeply wrong with me, else everyone around me would not have rejected me. I was in touch with the sense of terrible inferiority I always felt. When I finally started to make real friends, in college and as a young adult, I was ecstatic. I could fit in with people after all! And when I married Simon. Finally, I had a happy family! I was good enough, after all! (And, I had WORKED HARD ENOUGH to know how to make a marriage relationship work.)
What I was NOT in touch with was that feeling that overtook me after Simon was gone, went away when Chi arrived, and plunged me below sea level when he left. This horrible, abiding, aching sense of sadness that felt unhealable. That felt like it would never go away. And the fear that went with it. I'd be out jogging and it would get dark outside, and I'd think: I could be raped or mugged out here and not a soul would know. Or the horrible time I had norovirus and the flu alone in a hotel room miles out of town. I threw up and had so much diarrhea, and felt so horrible, I truly was scared. What if I got seriously dehydrated? No one knew or cared where I was.
Now I understand that feeling that way all the time is NOT the way life is or the way normal people are. And if I feel that way all the time, I would grab onto Chi long before he was ready, wrenching him out of a family he just wasn't ready to leave. I suppose I would have learned eventually anyway...but who knows what horrible things would have had to happen to me and my relationships over the rest of my life as I discovered it the hard way? Since finding this in my chart and reallllly thinking it over, I could apply myself to addressing it now.
If I didn't do this, the consequences could be disastrous.
As you know, I worked. I worked hard on this.
And I thought I had it. I really did.
Until...The Incident With Richard.
In my frantic search for friendship after Chi left my life, I ended up taking over a writer's group that had been left orphaned after the organizer quit. Somebody had to take over, so I did.
Writers, I am discovering, have a lot of emotional problems as a group. My group is now down to two members, thanks to the childish behavior of two other members.
I had thought things were smoothing out with Richard. Although he brought in writing that was atrociously spelled and had a lot of newbie plotting and structural problems that would bore the reader to tears left as they were, his story was so weird and so inspired (and, well, so gross), that I could see it finding an audience. The problem was that his reader deserved his best work, and since it was a critique group, I told him so.
He would sit there turning red in the face and then explode in anger at me. Others in the group stopped sharing their honest reactions, fearing to start a temper geyser that would have people at neighboring tables staring at all of us.
Not me. He brought the book in for our opinions. I knew what it needed, and I told him. We thought he would never make it all the way through to "The End."
But finally, he did make it. He had grown calmer, and even told me once that he'd made some of the changes I suggested. We marveled together at some of the outlandish behavior of a couple of other people who acted even worse. Finally, it was down to just us three: Me, Richard, and Judy.
I was so proud of him for finishing. He came to his last meeting fuming about his illustrator, who was clearly a few cards short of a full deck, and we commiserated about that. Then I started on his last ten pages. I actually did like them, except that he had included as an epilogue something that there was no way for the reader to recognize as connected in any way to the story he had just finished telling, and he'd left dangling loose ends that really needed to be the actual epilogue.
I was so happy that morning, as Richard sat there telling us stories about this illustrator that would curl your hair. And I thought, " See? You're going to find real friends again. Look at this. It's going to be me, Rich, and Judy together at this table for a long time to come." And I felt that coziness...the safety and security of having other people in your life you can call real friends.
I hadn't even finished discussing the pages he brought before Richard erupted. And I mean ERUPTED. Although any reasonable person could see that I had valid points, I didn't even get to the part about the loose threads needing to be the epilogue instead. Richard got red in the face, screamed at me for "eviscerating" his book, called me a C You Next Tuesday right there in the restaurant, threw papers at me, and stormed out. Judy, who is in her seventies, sat there trembling and told me he had scared her to death.
It was as if I had slipped back into that needy mindset one more time, and the Universe used Richard to bitch-slap me right back out of it. Immediately.
And I felt this little click inside my head. All my life I had felt like other people were great and I wasn't, and everybody needed people, and the world was just this warm and fuzzy place I was locked out of.
I realized suddenly that I hadn't met but one or two sane people since Chi left me. And I understood finally, It's not such a good world out there. People are crazy. People are goddamned crazy.
And that I had better get the FUCK out of the mindset of just marking time until I had people again, because there aren't very many good ones out there, and with crazies like the ones I'd been meeting, what I needed to do was toughen up so I wouldn't need any of these bozos.
When you are too needy for companionship, and all you can find is this, you are going to find yourself in one bad place. When you are too needy for companionship, and all you can find is this, you could accept behavior you should never, never accept.
There was simply no need to miss people. People are crazy sons of bitches, and I am wayyy better off by myself.
I went walking downtown after that alone, to an Ethiopian restaurant I love, and for the first time I went about by myself without this funny feeling that it wasn't right that I was alone, that I needed company and I would never, could never, feel happy or safe without it.
I had turned the very last corner. And I knew it. I had finally gotten the last lesson Chi came to teach me about feelings from childhood I really needed to change.
For the first time in my entire life, I could be alone, quite possibly forever, and feel perfectly okay by myself.
***
And the very next week, Chi came back.
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