I am trying to be wise. In a desire to live deep and to continue to have a positive impact on the human community in which I love/live, I am trying very hard not to re-invent a rigidly defined set of rules by which I make decisions. One of my weak edges is an intolerance for mistakes. I fear failing to live up to so much, I rarely experience the liberating reality of being human. I refuse opportunities to "give up," and "give in;" to be weak, stupid and stubborn enough to simply shrug my shoulders at life's arrows and move forward; and I believe that "past" living, that idea that things in life would be better if they never changed, is FALSE-is, in fact, Life-Denying rather than Life-Affirming.
I tell you this because I first learned control from you. I learned a certain futility and resignation from you that makes me doubt the future. I also learned to fear being myself, lest who I am be something you would despise. I am sharing this because our recent conversation really bugged me. I was sharing my inclinations, my hopes and my relationships with you, and you started focusing on your own idea of where I should be putting my energy. This kind of dialogue still hurts. It depersonalizes me.
Here is what I think:
I am sensitive to certain kinds of disapproval. I hear you tell me that giving of myself to the support of my Beloved's career is wrong, harmful, painful, and unsatisfying. I feel shame that I have chosen a "follow" role in my relationship with my Beloved (specifically where "work" is concerned). Shame feeds guilt. Guilt feeds despair. Despair leads to anxiety. Anxiety leads to fear. Fear strangles life, and I wake up angry, unmotivated, and distrustful of my Beloved.
What I don't say, or perhaps more accurately, don't communicate effectively is that I do not think I am you. I do not think my Beloved is your Beloved, and that, because each of us are individuals, each relationship dynamic is different. What you find stifling, I might find liberating. Where someone in your life may have failed you, someone in my life may have held up. In life's dance, with the right partner, the roles of lead and follow interchange flawlessly. In choosing to follow this lead, I may be setting up the shift of footing for a sudden change of direction.
I do not want to discount your experience, Pneuma. I have no place in your own relationship dynamics, and I do believe that your concern about my current unemployment stems from your love, but my full personhood depends upon my making decisions from myself and bearing the consequences. I cannot become completely human without that.
Some part of me absolutely rejects a life built on decisions to show the world I have as much talent, expertise, professionalism or competence as that superstar over there, even as some part of the child in me feels inadequate.
Yet I know, and this is where the desire for wisdom plays in, achievement of "greatness" doesn't fill in the childish gaps. Achievement works like shampoo: it plumps up and shines dead stuff. I am struggling to let my addiction to status and respect go so that I can nourish the evolution of my true life. I need to stop feeding an image of self so that I can be myself. When you express your worries by suggesting that I am not living up to my potential, I begin to feel that you do not really know or value me, and that you have little faith in who I am trying to become.
I woke up one morning, a few years ago to the realization that my death is something only I own, and if my death gets to be mine alone, so does my life. My choices, my mistakes, my triumphs, and my goals. Since that day, I have not regretted one single choice I have made. I have stood in places of Divine Compulsion, and mind-numbing humility. I have achieved unrecognized greatness, and filled up with joy in the knowledge that whatever I am to this world, it is something that breathes life into people. Pneuma, I love you, but I need you to listen for a while, and let me find my own path through to discernment of how best to bestow my gifts, and how best to love the life I have been given.
Faithfully Yours,
Cobalt Dreams
