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The realization that ‘falling in love’ is actually a choice of convenience is not something to be ashamed of. There’s shame there because we bought the fairytale. The movie idea of love. The romantic, steamy, everything you ever wanted kind of love. The kind of love that everyone pretends to have and shows off. That love is a dream, an idea. And it sets entire cultures of people up for disappointment. Because real life has nothing to do with these kinds of dreams. And these kinds of dreams can make real life feel like a total let down.

The idea and pressure that someone can fulfill you and love you for the rest of your life is a lie and a very tall order. A lie we tell ourselves to cover up our wounds. Our loneliness. Our mortality. Our fleetingness. Our fears and aches. This is not cynicism. This is an inevitability that comes from being unfulfilled by everything outside of you and from being fed lies.

‘Marriage’ has developed so many strategies (lies) to cover up, outrun, or deny the truth of this. It’s made relationship into a fantasy; an idealistic make-believe story that we are continuously fed through rom-com’s and fairytales. The flip side of that being a very dark underbelly – only discovered once you’re on the other side of the marriage door. That darkness is a pretense of realism (hard-earned “wisdom” from parents and married peers) emphasizing things like compromise, the importance of having kids and of tradition.

There’s nothing wrong with any of these things in and of themselves but when they’re used as strategies to avoid deeper truths – it’s hell in the making. Compromise in that context is not real compromise, it’s not the kind of compromise that keeps your sense of agency and integrity intact. It’s a bargain, a barter; leaving you robbed of your own life, your own sovereignty.

And in our innocence, we are trying to live up to these dreams, these ideals, these fantasies. And failing miserably. Putting an enormity of pressure on our partners and on ourselves and feeling enormously let down. Because we can’t make dreams and ideals into reality. We can’t translate the should’s and could’s and ‘this is what you do when this happens‘ into real time because it’s out of sync. So then we fantasize. We fantasize about the what if’s and what went wrong and how did I end up here. And we project that maybe out there somewhere is the perfect person, the perfect life just waiting for me.

We look upon our lives with contempt and disdain for it hasn’t lived up to the fantasy. And in our limbo, we look upon our partners to find fault and blame. To make it somehow tolerable and to justify our anger and rage at how could this be. Brought face-to-face with our gaping wounds and forsaken dreams. Made to question why and who and what we are and what on earth could make us happy. That’s if we haven’t bolted and moved onto the next thing already.

And so there is something to holding yourself to the limbo and not bolting. Holding yourself to the gaping wounds and to the forsaken dreams. If you can withstand the pain and the constant reflection from the world that your “holding” and not bolting is a thing of madness.

Because when you’re not adhering to the guidelines; not using strategies to cover up your unhappiness. Not having the kids, not bargaining and bartering, not doing the dance of a married couple – you stick out like a sore thumb. And you can start getting back this reflection from the ‘world’ or everyone doing the dance that there’s something seriously wrong with you.

That you’re settling for “less than you deserve”. That your ‘holding’ is living a life of misery. That it may be even an act of cowardice to hold. That ‘brave’ people, “bite the bullet”, end things and end up finding what or who they’re really looking for. That being unhappy is a sign ‘the relationship’ isn’t working. That something needs to be done about this.

But in the holding and not bolting, not doing, you’re actually learning. Learning to trust yourself. To trust that you have it in you to hold and be held. To have everything come to sway and entice you. To make you feel a failure, to shame you, to make you a travesty.

In that holding, you learn to discern. In that holding, you grow in patience. In that holding you go into yourself more and more and more and more. In that holding and in the frustration that inevitably arises and encircles you, you learn to let go of the answer coming from outside of you.

From the one who knows. The teacher, the parents, the culture, those who look like they got their shit together – all of it. You learn by way of being forced to let go. Let go of everyone else, everything else, the whole world and everything in it.

Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.

Rainer Maria Rilke

You are not ” a couple”.

You are two individuals living side by side.

Unearthing archaeological artifacts by virtue of who you are and where you are.

Unraveling, unwinding – being dismantled.

No need to run.

No need to hide.

No need to be “a couple”.

No need to feign attraction.

No need to “uncouple”.

This point of stalemate is inevitable.

Between any two people.

Everyone comes to this point.

Whether they stay or not is a whole different story.

It’s the point of no return.

No options.

All the options feel old.

Not something to run away from.

But to sit in the discomfort of all the uncomfortable truths.

No teacher can know or tell you what to do here.

It often helps to look at your current set of circumstances with the eyes of your former self. Some years ago, you would have wished for the very things you don’t notice anymore. And this is not something to be shamed for or feel guilty about. It’s just amazing. It’s not your fault.

The whole world is trained this way. Trained not to notice. Trained to go to the next thing. Trained to veer towards what’s not available. What’s available is boring. Had. Done. What’s not available is a promise. Still to be. A dream.

And we love to dream. Dreaming’s all we got. Otherwise, it’s monotony. Being here. The ordinariness of what’s right in front of you. The lack of fulfillment of it and the discomfort of that.

The dream is so much more alluring than reality. It’s sexy, it’s yet to be, it’s anything you could want and more. The mystery. The fantasy. The yearning of it. It hasn’t solidified. It’s ethereal. And it’s a promise of fulfillment.

Everything in our world is about the dream. We can’t escape monotony fast enough. Monotony kills our illusions. Our fantasies. It kills the dream. The dream of fulfillment. The dream of yet to be.

On the other side of that dream is despair and this is why monotony kills us. Because monotony doesn’t distract from despair. In fact, it highlights it.

Despair . . . is the only cure for illusion. Without despair we cannot transfer our allegiance to reality—it’s a kind of mourning period for our fantasies. Some people do not survive this despair, but no major change within a person can occur without it.

Philip Slater

People will rob you blind of your solitude if you let them. They will make what’s privately yours – theirs. And leave you wondering why you feel swindled. Dispossessed of yourself and of your own riches – not knowing and not being able to even name that dispossession. That disorientation.

Guard your solitude with fierceness. And don’t be surprised if this provokes others into strange behavior. Your solitude may be upsetting to them. Because in guarding your solitude you pull the rug from under their feet.

The rug of bullshit. The rug of convention, appearances, pretense, niceties. The rug of ‘normal’. The rug of suffocating conformity.

Your going “off-script” highlights their “on-script”. Your guarding of your solitude highlights their own desolateness. In their desolateness they are desperate to make you desolate with them.

But you can leave them be. Leave them reaching. Let their grasping arms fall on nothing. In your solitude you can be untouchable. Ungraspable. And in that, giving them back to themselves.

And, to speak again of solitude, it becomes increasingly clear that this is fundamentally not something that we can choose or reject. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about it, and pretend that it is not so. That is all. But how much better it is to realize that we are thus, to start directly from that very point. Then, to be sure, it will come about that we grow dizzy; for all the points upon which our eyes have been accustomed to rest will be taken away from us, there is no longer any nearness, and all distance is infinitely far.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Bring to the light your solitariness, your self without anybody else there to define you. Give it breathing room and respite. For it has been shoved in the dark since the title of ‘relationship’ has come into your world. For in essence, in truth, you don’t know what relationship is, you never have.

You have always taken it to be ‘something’ that is imposed on your freedom. So long as there is a wish to love another solely – which meant become another’s solely – and to share a life together – freedom was moot. For what place has freedom in relationship, in daily living? What place has solitariness?

To long for that part of you that remembers the air of that freedom was to betray the very verbing of that ‘relationship’. And so you could not long in the open, but only in secret and in hiding for your freedom and your love of it.

But what is that longing? Is it a longing for solitariness or is it a longing for freedom? And what is the difference between them, if there is any?

Your idea of ‘freedom’ has become a distant memory, something of the past that you recollect with nostalgia. Thinking that if ‘freedom’ was brought to the surface in the midst of relationship, it could not and would not bear the tight chains of that imprisonment.

The two could not go together and in that, making a choice: freedom or relationship?

The ‘freedom’ of the past was a feeling of being at liberty to be approached by others, by the world. Being a ‘free agent’. No ties, no chains. It meant a sense of autonomy to come and go as you please, it meant possibility – that the world is your oyster so to speak. You could be whoever you wanted to be with anybody you wanted to be with. And that could change from day to day, month to month or even hour to hour.

At large, this ‘freedom’ was an idea, it wasn’t a living truth but an image of what freedom meant from a conditioned rebelliousness and an aversion to responsibility. Not the world’s version of responsibility, but responsibility in the sense of making a choice, committing, loving and what that really means without sugarcoating or denying.

That ‘freedom’ is a a freedom that cannot bear the confines of ‘relationship’. The responsibility of not betraying another’s trust, another’s heart. Of being confined to the monotony of daily living where that ‘responsibility’ becomes a burden. Growing heavier and heavier with time, and with it, the feeling of imprisonment. That ‘freedom’ makes an image of ‘relationship’; a snapshot of requirements moving through time with ‘freedom’ as the price tag.

How can you be in relationship and long for freedom when you don’t know the real meaning of either? All you have are ideas; a narrative of an old world – a world that is being completely dismantled.

Do not hurry to answer these questions for they are important questions to just ask without searching your mind for an answer. But in letting these questions work upon you and in your silence and willingness to explore, not knowing the answer.

The state of collapse doesn’t want to be messed with.

It wants to be held, loved and tended.

It’s despair and lethargy all mixed up into one.

A dizzying cocktail it’s no fun

Rising up from the depth without a warning

The mind is plagued, thoughts are swarming

This ancient pain is too much to bear

It’s murky, it’s real – it’s so much fear

Fall into this , the abyss is calling

There’s no other way – enough stalling

You tried pushing, hiding, numbing and biding

Nothing is working, you can’t stop the fighting

Work your way from the outside in

Name where you are and feel your skin

Look around and notice this moment

Your nervous system is not your opponent

Safety is here even if it doesn’t feel real

You haven’t failed there’s just too much on your plate

You’ve been gaslit since time began

Culture, family and all the men

It’s been a wild ride and now you’re digesting

The hurt the confusion your Heart’s been fasting

It’s no small thing to unfurl in this environment

Don’t gaslight yourself in believing you’re arrogant

What you feel is valid and what you see is true

Drop all the spiritual concepts you thought you knew

Trauma is real and your experience is valid

Don’t skip the meal and just eat the salad

Your path is unique and it’s your own

Trust your gut and hone in your bones

Nobody can tell you what it’s like for you

That’s why you’re here and it’s a blessing too

Remember that when doubt takes over

An old habit it comes with an odor

To rob you blind of your own riches

Make you poor and throw you in the ditches

There’s nothing humble about distrusting yourself

In the name of the Unknown you put your power on the shelf

Misguided by trauma spiritual guidance can be tricky

If you’re not careful you’ll find yourself all sticky

Not knowing where you end and where the other begins

If you don’t reign in it in you’ll find the mind spins

Taking on a task it can’t handle

In there you can light yourself a candle

By finding the source of the mind’s spinning

A buzzing a whirring a feeling of sinning

You’ll find it in the body a tsumani of confusion

Unsafety and fear are its illusions

Trusting yourself is the key

Not as a belief but more like the only guarantee.

I am not your ‘daughter’.

I am not a piece of flesh you bought to serve your meager torpid ‘needs’.

You insolent fool.

I am a Queen in my Own Right.

Your touches are revolting.

An insult to my skin.

Stirring a fire of rage inside me that could eat you up.

Get out of my way.

For you’ve tested my patience enough.

You can’t dim me.

If you had the eyes to see, you wouldn’t step foot within my vicinity.

You’d cower like you do behind social convention, patriarchy and false masculinity.

I have denied my rage for far too long.

But I can no longer contain what wants to burst from within me.

To protect your frail ego.

Or to pamper the twisted facade of femininity you wish to see in me.

Like a soft river of glowing Pāhoehoe lava.

Overflowing with billowy grace.

Commanding it’s path with sculpting fervor.

Deceivingly soft but wrathfully ablaze.

Set foot on my path and you’ll be incinerated.

Stop slamming the part of you that wants to look good. Be beautiful. There’s nothing ‘spiritually noble’ in punishing that part of you. This part needs a lot of tenderness. It’s the part that was bombarded with you’re not pretty enough. Well-dressed enough. It was battered with shame for not looking a certain way. Not being ‘presentable’.

It was shamed, ridiculed, ignored, alienated, put down, left out, neglected, forgotten and blamed even for not looking the part. It was the target of a lot of abuse from both within the family and from the outside world.

Of course she wants to look good. Get that nice jacket or those nice shoes. It’s not all “bad”. If that’s the word even to describe it. But your psyche is describing it in that way. It’s not all twisted. But it’s also not all “clean” either. But not in a punishable, falling short kind of way. In a I need love here kind of way. Love and acceptance. Not a trying to wipe out it’s very existence because there’s an idea that spiritual people don’t care about how they look. This is bullshit.

In this culture, in this society, how you look meant survival. This is what you’re dealing with. The desperation of trying to survive. It differentiated on a racial and socio-economic level between those who live in squalor (who don’t get basic human respect) and those who had it all (authority, power, respect, social status aka safety). And this conditioning is so intense here. It’s rabid.

It’s nothing to sneeze at. Nothing to spiritually bypass as superficial ego stuff. No. This was survival stuff. It’s embedded in the psyche as this is how I can survive here. This is how I can get people not to prey on me here. I need to look good. I need to present myself in a certain way so that I am not preyed on. It was a survival mechanism. And in a way it became your research project. It shaped your interests, hobbies and ambitions. Both healthy ones and unhealthy ones.

And even so, you were still a target of abuse within your own family – who saw this as mere vanity not as survival. And they hid behind the veil of religiousness – that was their survival mechanism. And in that mechanism, your inclinations were seen as vain, superficial, egotistical even. You were judged for it. Made wrong for it. Alienated within your own family for it. And outside the family, you were loved for it, liked for it, recognized for it – that contradiction is super confusing.

Super challenging to wrangle with both extremes within yourself. And of course you chose to go for the love, for looking good, for the attention – so natural, who wouldn’t? Even if it came at great cost to you because it did. It was no picnic either. Genuine suffering there too. Believing that looking good meant survival, love, attention. The desperation of it. The agony of that struggle, that my life depends on this! So hard. So challenging. So filled with conditioning on each and every level; cultural, sexual, female, racial, socio-economic and probably more you can’t even see. It’s not just a small thing. ‘Shopping’.

Mercy on this part of you. This intelligent, savvy, extreme, self-protective, to-the-death part of you.

There are days just for crying.

Believing that tears mean ‘there’s something wrong with me‘ adds an additional layer of suffering that is unnecessary.

You don’t know why you’re crying.

And you don’t need to know either.

Just cry.

You don’t even need anyone by your side.

Crying alone is in itself what’s needed.

Without someone there to justify or intrude upon the natural flow of tears.

You with yourself crying, mourning, grieving and even more than that.

You’ve been taught by the world that when you cry, that means something is very wrong.

And so crying becomes something you’re trying to hide.

Ashamed of.

Something to keep in. To hold back.

So you can go about business as usual.

But business as usual has gone out the window some time ago.

Business as usual was always a superimposed layer on the tears that want to flow.

Days for crying are beautiful days. Just for you. You by yourself.

Ask those around you to leave you be. To not intrude or impose their relational needs on you. To leave you to cry your heart out. Without trying to come and save you. Or even feel with you. It’s not what you need. It’s a time for you, your tears and your solitude to be honored – bowed down to. Left alone.

Sometimes you just need to cry alone. Totally alone. So you can be honest with your tears. And so that your tears can be honest with you. So that your tears can bless you in your aloneness.

The kind of honesty that comes when you’re by yourself. The kind of let go that comes when there’s no one else around.

Crying days are sacred days that need to be honored.

You can cry your heart out.

You can cry till you can cry no more.

And the mind will try to come up with reasons for why you’re crying.

But it doesn’t matter, does it?

The tears are the fact.

There’s no need to add a layer of understanding on top of it.

What can we understand anyway. Not much.

So be with your tears and honor them. Let them clean you out. Let them take you where you are alone in the solitude of your dark. Without needing to explain or worry or care about anyone else, anything else, anywhere else.

Let your face be an expression of the pain you feel. Don’t try to mold it into an amicable expression to soothe or appease your nearest and dearest. Trying to communicate on some level, “I’m okay, it’s okay, nothing to worry about”.

No, fuck that. You’re not okay. And in your not okay-ness, you’re okay. More than okay. You’re beautiful.

You don’t need to make anyone feel better about themselves by masking your pain. A saccharine smile, or a slight nod or gesture to re-assure them all is well. All is not well. And that’s okay.

Pain is not a mistake. Pain is not a sign that something is wrong. That belief makes an enemy of pain. A shame of pain.

You’re not here to make everyone comfortable. That’s what weighs on you because you believe you need to hide your pain. To take on a role. And you can’t. You don’t have it in you. You no longer have that capacity.

Be in pain. Don’t make an enemy of pain. Let it be on your face. In your eyes. In your relating. The more you try to hide it, the more painful it gets.

And cry. Cry without making the tears wrong. Without holding back. Without putting a time limit on your tears. Without making tomorrow a day for ‘being better’. Because in that, there’s a subtle demand for the tears to come to an end today, sooner rather than later. And in that, a sense of hurry – speed past the tears, rush by the sobbing and the heartbreak. Be a mess today, but business as usual tomorrow.

No. Throw out this old and dusted instructions manual. And be here today crying, sobbing, in pain, in heartbreak, in inconsolable sorrow. Let the pain pierce your bones, your heart, your gut, your skull. Give it permission to totally touch you, unhidden, unashamed, untangled from the belief of wrongness.

Bless you in your pain, in your tears, as it is, as you are without anything needing to change. Amen.

How small that is, with which we wrestle, what wrestles with us, how immense; were we to let ourselves, the way things do, be conquered thus by the great storm,—we would become far-reaching and nameless.What we triumph over is the Small, and the success itself makes us petty. The Eternal and Unexampled will not be bent by us.

Rainer Maria Rilke

There’a a a great undoing at my root. It wrestles me as I wrestle it. Or is it the other way around?

Compassion says, go slow, slower than a snail even. Regress if you must. You don’t really know where you are anyway.

You can’t understand what you can’t understand. You can’t undo what you can’t undo. So what is there to do? What is there to understand?

All you can do is be quiet. And even that you can’t do. You can’t force. You can’t will. You can’t pretend. You can’t hold onto.

So…