The River Wild

Today's Triumph: I muted Toni's posts on Instagram. They haven't been posting much, but when they do it messes with my head, so I think it's best that I not see it.

There is a small waterfall around the corner from my job. Most days the water flows clear and gentle from the calm river above, and on these days it's easy to think the water is clean and untroubled, but the truth is revealed after a storm. The morning after, the same waterfall is stirred and overrun with sediment that the rain had rendered it too full to contain. Then the water tumbles chaotically in ugly, muddy streaks.

I think that even I saw myself like a waterfall on the easy days. I knew a few boulders beneath the surface could stand to be pulled out, but I never really considered my sediment. Then the last year brought a series of storms that churned it up and sent it swirling through every ounce of me, and I can't control how it flows. For a while I tried to hide it and not talk about it, but since I started therapy and this blog, I've realized two things: the surface of the water appearing calm doesn't mean it is, and storms are sometimes the only way to make the muck visible so you can deal with it. So for the time being, I may sometimes overrun and tumble chaotically, but as I dig through the muck I've been hiding, the ugly streaks are necessary, and there's clarity when they pass.

I have also realized that I have a problem with personal narrative. There's a line from a Fiona Apple song (Slow Like Honey) that sums it up:

"And I stand there waiting, try to attain the end to satisfy the story."

I give too much weight and value to the beginnings of things, seeing a beautiful plot progression that to me seems all but inevitable, because I can't conceive that so much promise could end with no payoff. The irony is that I love a book or movie with an untidy, but natural ending, but in my life I can't handle it when a storyline hits a wall. In situations like those with Blake and Toni, where in my mind everything adds up to a perfect origin story, it doesn't occur to me at first that they may not only be on a different page, but they could be in an entirely different book. Maybe that's part of why it hurts so much when it doesn't work. It's bad storytelling.

My parents have an amazing story that I love to tell. My dad fell in love instantly and had proposed within minutes of meeting my mom. She of course thought he was crazy and ran away, but she came back, and the rest is history. Actually the rest is comedies and tragedies, but there is an really incredible love story along the way. This makes me believe in love at first sight and relationships defying the odds. It makes me persevere where others might not. It makes me look down a long, patchwork road and see where everything could have fallen apart, but it didn't. It makes me believe in possibility, so when I meet someone like Toni and everything seems so perfect from the start, I can't help believing life has more. When it doesn't, especially this time, I am left with questions that I can't answer. I am left without a satisfying end.

Then there's that whole matter of "perfect" beginnings, when you find out all the incredible things you have in common, and I don't know why I continue to let that blow my mind. My parents actually didn't have that much in common. They were nothing alike. They developed common ground as they got to know each other, but they didn't start out that way. Most of the people I know who are in successful relationships are not that similar. I wrote about this myself fifteen years ago, in a piece called "Mirrors Have No Faces." Bear with the context:

I have a problem. I think I'm in love with a younger guy. Not a lot younger, but... okay, he's so naive, he just seems a lot younger. And he's a farmer! Probably wants nothing more out of life than cornfields and Sunday dinner. Not at all the kind of guy I ever envisioned myself with, but maybe that's the real problem. I've met the exciting, dangerous guy... the thrills don't last that long, believe me. I've also met "the perfect guy," - you know the one - the guy who wants all the same things out of life, who knows you instantly because you're practically the female version of himself. At first, everything you say is a delightful surprise to him, because it's exactly what he thinks himself.

Which is exactly the problem. There's a point at which such symmetry kills any hope for true love. What's the point of loving somebody because they're exactly like you? Isn't that just one body away from total self-involvement? How do you grow from that? How do you challenge each other? How do you really know who you are beyond yourself, if your partner in life is like a reflection of you?

When two mirrors face each other, each shows what the other shows, because that's all there is. I've found mirrors. I once thought I'd found the man I was supposed to be with for the rest of my life, because he was my match in every detail. What I didn't yet understand is that relationships don't work because two people match. A key won't turn in a lock if the lock is cut identically to the key - it must be its complement. There must be peaks and valleys that fit together - that’s how lives are knit to last.

If we both have the same high points and the same low points, then we collide at the highs and remain empty at the lows, and can therefore never fuse together. Never really join. Similarity to such a degree breeds superficiality, not intimacy. It's easy to fall for somebody who likes and wants and believes all of the same things that you do. It's also easy to put the soft side of two strips of Velcro together. The problem is, that both the relationship and the Velcro strips are just as easy to pull apart.

If the person I fall in love with requires no effort to love, no personal assessments to make when I think of myself spending my life with him, then neither of us has earned eternity together. Love is a commitment. A commitment is something that takes up time or energy - an obligation, requiring devotion, dedication - both of which are actions, and both take work. Someday, I want to be able to look at my husband and know that neither of us is who we were when we met. Sound weird? Sure. People are always talking about retaining their individuality, maintaining a sense of self. Whatever.

That works if we're clones of one another in the first place, but if we never had to put any work into seeing eye-to-eye, I think we'd stay stagnant. We'd never really grow up. We might grow old together, but we would have spent our years trying to keep our teeth sharp while gnawing on bananas. We'd need a little abrasiveness to stay vital. We'd need to take turns being the whetstone. We'd need differences. I hope to look back over my life and the man I spent it with and be able to say that we both had rough spots and that we smoothed each other out. That we became better people for having been together.

Velcro has the right idea. Hooks and loops. Empty spaces that need filling, and tenacious hooks that need some place to fill. Roughness and softness. Opposites. But at the core, they're made from the same thing, both rooted in the same tape. They just balance each other out, and because of that, they stick together.

Similarity to a degree is necessary for a base of attraction, but a mirror image is not what keeps a union strong. The only relevant application of mirrors in the idea of relationships is in the way human biology mirrors the necessity of complements. Man and woman - the most basic illustration of how complements fit together, and a pure allegory of the importance of it. Reproduction - two cells, one made to fit inside the other, each carrying only half of the program required to create a new life. That's how the progression of life is designed. At every stage, a life needs its complement.

And I think mine is Clark Kent.

Okay, setting aside the narrow way in which I wrote about male-female connection fifteen years ago, and the fact that this is an introspective I wrote from the POV of Lois Lane when she made her first appearance on Smallville (yes, I wrote Smallville fanfiction, and yes, it is still out there), it was something I thought a lot about when I was interested in men, and yet I can't apply it to my interest in people of other genders. I don't know why finding a plethora of similarities with someone makes me believe it has to go somewhere.

This leads me to an observation I made during therapy a couple of weeks ago. I talked about how Toni and I had an instant and powerful connection, but I am trying to learn that powerful doesn't mean permanent, and I need to stop mistaking those for synonyms. Even though I haven't been religious for a long time, I still struggle on some levels with the idea of predestiny, and I am easily guided by a feeling that something was meant to be, when in a more rational mindset I would confidently say that human connections mostly happen arbitrarily, based on time and place and circumstance. I wrestle back and forth between those perspectives, between heart and mind. I want to believe in an inevitable person, but so far I have been wrong. I may always be wrong. There may never be one. In case that's true, I need to get back to the place where I used to be, where I can be happy on my own. I didn't hurt so much when I didn't want so much. That's not to say I'm going to close up; I just need to stop making a relationship a goal. There are other ways to have a fulfilling life, and other ways to be validated, and as long as I am measuring my worth by how much or how little another person wants me, I am devaluing myself. That's no way to live.

So here I am, after the storms, testing the waters as they flow throw me. Even if my muddy streaks never run clear, it's good to stir up the sediment and see what it's made of.

#mentalhealth #relationships #love #smallville #blogging