Lit-spiration

The rewards of a well-tended life

For a long time, I believed that if I took care of myself, I would necessarily, organically move farther away from others. In the binary logic of individualism, you fortify the self at the expense of the other. But in filling the empty space of me, I have found that actually the complete opposite is true. The more I love myself, the more my heart opens, the more present and sensitive I become, so much so it hurts.

I find I don’t know how to share in the open-ended way that certain others are able to, to take up space with a mumbling, meandering comment about what’s transpired in my week. The few times I do speak up in a meeting, I curate my thoughts carefully beforehand, making sure there’s a narrative arc to what I’m going to say, a few small self-deprecating comments for laughs, a point to make. Even the emotion I submit to a support group must demand little of others.

I still don’t, can’t believe in God, so I just believe in that—that when I show up, some lightning bolt of essential, tailored wisdom is delivered directly to me, piped right into my ears.

I miss being that naïve.

The grief over the end of the relationship is nothing compared with the mourning I must do for the thing I long believed to be love. Breaking up with that love fantasy is what brings me to my knees. I still grieve for the dyad—that desperation, obsession, distraction. I grieve for the belief, nurtured against all odds, that I could save my sister or K. I really did believe I could save K. But a man is not a house. You may be able to carry out small renovations, but you can’t re-pour the foundation.

In the silence and stillness we learn to be alone, we learn to listen to ourselves, and we learn humility. The surge of confidence we felt while thinking we knew what was right for everyone else was actually arrogance, the cheap high of self-righteousness. Also like a drug, it’s surprisingly hard to put down.

“Don’t just do something, sit there.”

Like alcoholism, codependency is, at its core, a form of insincerity, of bullshit. And it feels terrible to be insincere.

“If you’re eating a shit sandwich, it’s probably because you ordered it.”

(how many notebooks and nice pens have we given each other over the years, how many do all girls give to other girls, so that we might facilitate one another’s truth-telling, might imagine we will one day write it all down and find catharsis there?),

The life of a healthy bachelor is so staggeringly easy it is stupefying.

He was a love-is-an-action-verb problem-solver,

It also broke my heart a little, but very little.

You deserve to have some fun! I told myself. But it mostly wasn’t. The work of getting to know someone, even briefly, felt both exhilarating and perfectly pointless.

I feared I emitted some toxic straight-girl desperation: the kind that just wants relief from men, to be put out of my misery.

It all made me cringe with embarrassment. I hated my own tone, too. It felt like it had been a lifetime since I’d been engaged in that kind of casual self-presentation, and I didn’t like squirming under my own microscope, rereading my messages to see how I’d played a particular question, assessing the extent to which I’d mastered affecting a cool-girl air.