The Point of a Lesson is Learning

The past 6 months have been a true rollercoaster for me. I’ve experienced extremely high highs and very low lows and just about everything in between. Some of it happened to me, some of it is stuff I’ve been working with friends on when it comes to their changes. I’m not gonna write about family here for the most part because, while it’s difficult stuff as well, it’s not particularly relevant to the subject I’m writing about today. I’ve struggled a bit with how to write this, because in part some of it left me so flat I had kind of lost the will to write and also because I want to protect and be respectful to the people who I might talk about so I’m gonna do my best on both fronts here. There isn’t gonna be a lot of talk about the story of the relationship and whatnot because this is not an essay about a break up, although that part still exists in the world of this essay. This is not an essay about anger or sadness, although it may touch upon those feelings. It’s an essay about learning about yourself and the world and moving through things in a way that feels beneficial as opposed to unnecessarily hard on yourself. It’s an essay about finding strength and betterment in places that one might not expect. I’m not an expert on this, I’m still learning but this essay is about the process of self realization not about being on the other side of it already because who’s to say when anyone is ever fully on the other side. But I’ve been doing the work and I’ve been lucky enough to have someone who stood by me and helped me learn even as things were straining between us. As things were falling apart, she took the time to make sure I saw the value of being present and not trying to push things down. The whole point of this thing comes from something she told me the other day “The point of a lesson is learning, not how much studying it took.”

In October I had a friendship blossom into what I could best describe as a long distance emotional affair. We had been increasingly close friends for a while, and this felt like a logical progression even though at the time everything felt very chaotic and nothing felt logical, least of all trying to start a relationship in a vacuum. I had been in long distance relationships before but the romantic aspect thereof had always been kickstarted while we were together in person. This felt like it both made the most sense and the least sense of any romance in my adult life (When you’re a kid things always feel like they make sense because you haven’t been burned by the illogical and disjointed partnership between head and heart yet). I’m not gonna talk too much about this here, because it’s not only my story to tell and this isn’t a story about the months in which love bloomed. Things felt great but I always feared the other shoe dropping and I think it at times this either led me to consume things more aggressively than I otherwise might have or to detach and try to steel myself for what was about to come. This would ultimately become part of our undoing, the other part you’re gonna have to stick with me for because while I believe it to be an apt analogy it is a little bit of an odd one.

In the second Jackass movie, there is a vignette (please shoot me in the face for referring to anything the Jackass boys did as a “vignette”) called Roller Disco Truck. In this clip the guys load themselves in the back of a truck and dance while the truck drives around. Everyone is having a good time, slightly off balance at times but mostly enjoying themselves and the surprising freedom with which they can move around an unmoored space. Then the truck hits the brakes, and all of those care-free skaters are hurled to the front, suddenly the uninhibited movement is halted by forces that are at the same time ever present and never really considered. This is the literal representation of what metaphorically happened in our relationship. Things that were able to be ignored while my partner was away could no longer be ignored once the dance of romance at a distance had come to an end. The fragility of how I care for things, which was admittedly at times far too precious, and the unsorted realities my partner was able to leave half sorted due to proximity and time and constant communication between us were now unavoidable. We had hit the front of the truck and we had fallen. Is this the dumbest metaphor for the dissolution of a relationship? Quite possibly. Is it the one that has helped the people I’ve spoken to about this (which is admittedly not a lot of people)

Now we get to the crux of this essay because what felt for a little bit like a death ended up giving me a new approach on life. It was really hard to not have access to a thing that had kept me afloat but eventually you either have a choice when your safety raft has sunk, you can either learn to swim back to shore and begin the work of building a new raft or you give up and drown. If you’ve read my other essays you’ll see that I haven’t let car crashes, cancer scares and severe depression kill me so I for sure wasn’t going to let a stupid broken heart finish me off. Plus, as I said earlier, even though at times it felt very lonely, I have been blessed to have had a partner who didn’t want to completely abandon me. She stuck with me, while also making sure she took care of herself. She offered what consolation she could and acted as equal parts a role model, a guide and a confidant, which is something I am aware is exceedingly rare and something I’m forever grateful for. Did it feel for a week or two like I was dying while at times I tried to snatch victory from the jaws of a soul flattening defeat and other times tried to show off how mature and gracefully I was handling things that felt like splinters in my heart? Of course I did. Did finally taking the step of realizing that what we once had was never going to be that exact same again hurt more than most things in my life? You know it, dude. But ultimately you have got to make peace with the fact that you can’t control the weather, you can only control how you dress for it. So I set about teaching myself and letting the world, and my former partner, teach me how to carry on. Woof that’s a lot of mixed metaphors. The rest of this essay is going to be lessons that I was initially shown by my former partner/still dear friend and how I took her wisdom and internalized it.

“Stop second guessing yourself so much. You’re usually right.”

The first lesson was that I second-guess myself too much. This has always been true and been something I tried to work on for a long time, but it took realizing how often I was right about things that weren’t being spoken about. Throughout the quick unraveling things would be met with bouts of silence. All I wanted was to be talked to. I am aware that I can at times be a very sensitive boy and that sometimes that might require some protection but I adamantly didn’t want to be protected for a multitude of reasons. The thing is that for as much of a dummy as I can be I am, in fact, a grown adult and even though things might hurt my feelings, I knew that not knowing things would ultimately do far more damage to my psyche, but because I couldn’t talk to someone I had spoken to about everything, big and little, for a very long time, it felt even more isolating to be left on an island, and lastly because I knew that without information my mind would automatically jump to the things I feared most. What I didn’t anticipate was how often what I would regard as my mind jumping to worst case scenarios actually turned out to be fairly accurate anticipation. The things I had silently feared for weeks or months were being quietly confirmed. So I’ve learned to embrace this instead of hiding from it. What good is the intuition and perceptiveness I’ve worked so long to hone if I ignore it when it comes to myself? Who does that serve, really? Nobody. I think for a while I did it as a safety mechanism, I didn’t want to be right so if I doubted myself I could protect myself from that. However, if you’re not able to use your awareness of your surroundings to help the people you love, whether it be because you’re not given an opportunity to or you’re too timid then at the very least you can utilize it to prove to yourself that you’ve learned enough about the world to be right about its’ machinations sometimes.

“Where do you want to be in the sphere that you feel like you’re not?”

Next came the fact that expecting an immediate and full release from a thing like that is a fool’s errand. You have to do work to protect your heart but still allow you to access it. A thing I was guilty of was not letting myself feel very natural emotions of hurt and upset because I was afraid of them and also because I’ve always tried to be strong for everyone and sometimes that causes you to lose track of your own self. This came into sharp focus the other night when we were watching Encanto and halfway through Luisa’s song I said out loud to nobody “Oh fuck”. I didn’t want to feel those things, at least not anger. Not that I was desperate to try to return to a world before I felt them, which at times I admittedly was, but because I have a small handful of people in my life I truly hate (A former drinking buddy, some folks who led family down wayward paths, a friend’s abusive ex) and I don’t want to add to that list. Meanwhile my friends would try to support me by expressing the anger that they felt I was repressing as a way to access it, and I, in turn, would repress it more because I still treasure people and I didn’t want any hate in my heart and if I could prove to my friends that I wasn’t carrying resentment then maybe they would believe that they shouldn’t either. This did and did not work to varying degrees based on the person we’re talking about but it ultimately did me a disservice when it came to processing because I was, once again, doing heavy lifting for other people when I should be working on processing through my own feelings. So I had to step back a little and stop sharing so much with certain folks because I needed to mend my own foundation before I could do the work of trying to make others understand how I felt. Before I could do that work I had to make sure I understood how I felt. This meant disassembling everything, examining and then trying to figure out how to put myself back together in a way that wasn’t just the same as it was before, but stronger, more resilient and more beautiful. It meant sitting down and realizing that our friendship and love for each other existed well before any romance and as such we weren’t willing to let it be destroyed because that one layer had been peeled back. Trying to convince people you don’t feel the way they think you do is always more work than just doing the labor of cleaning up your pieces and putting them back together so you actually move through feeling these things and working on whatever comes next. The best thing I could do was listen to my own body, my own heart and my own brain and then try to form a cogent strategy to move forward from there that both honored the important and special things we shared while also being respectful and aware that the direction forward might look a little different than I had thought it might a few months earlier.. Things aren’t always going to be easy, and they’re not always gonna be on the same page with what you want, but you have to listen to yourself and the people you hold closest before you can put yourself in a space to listen to the din of others’ opinions about what you want and what you deserve.

“Stop Being Haunted”

This is a phrase I repeat to myself fairly regularly, “stop being haunted”. My friend used to say this because I have a habit of taking pictures of spooky or ethereal looking things on walks home and sending them to her. But it’s also just good advice about how to identify lingering feelings and move forward from the ones you’re ready to move on from. Ghosts are not always evil, they’re not always malicious but they’re ghosts because they have some unfinished business on this plain. The only way to get rid of a ghost is to help them finish their journey. Now, I want to be clear that the people in your life are not the ghosts, at least I certainly hope not. If they are then you should probably consult an exorcist of some sort. The ghosts are the unresolved feelings that you let sit with you. There will always be something that sets off a little twinge in your heart. Maybe it’s a song that you shared, or a place you liked going together. Maybe you see someone wearing an outfit that reminds you of a person you miss a little. This is all fine, but you can’t let the larger feeling of grief, emptiness or sadness rule over your life because if you do then you’re haunted. You can’t sit there pining for a thing that isn’t there anymore because if you do then you’ll never be able to open your eyes to the things that are there, in front of you. If you sit around just thinking about all the times you lost, you’ll never see how many things you gained, how many times you won. Most of us are often too deep in the forest to see the trees but take it from someone who grew up in the woods, the trees fucking rule. The goal in moving on is not to get rid of the memories of the people you loved, because those are still treasures to be held tightly and never forgotten, the goal is to stop being haunted and stop living in a house full of ghosts. Help them finish their business however you can and then the ghostly veil drops and you can sit with the spirits. I always liked the idea that spirits and ghosts, while similar, are not the same. A spirit is a benevolent figure that stays with you, a ghost haunts you. That doesn’t mean you can’t still treasure and honor the people who formed those ghosts, you absolutely should, but you should let them live as spirits. It doesn’t mean that you need to leave people in the past because they hurt you once, that’s not a healthy way to move forward with your life. There are very few people who deserve to be banished from your life completely. You’ve learned lessons from folks and they’ve given you things, whether it be crappy gas station meat sticks (god I really shouldn’t have eaten that thing) or lessons in self confidence. It could be a lighter or the strength to keep moving after you’ve been kicked in the gut by life repeatedly. However, it is important that you stop being haunted, because the world is scary enough without floating candelabras or paintings with shifting eyes. You need to release the energies that run counter to what you’re trying to build your life into. Things won’t always be as you want to them to be, sometimes things will fall apart and it will hurt but you have to dust yourself off and move forward with love and strength in your heart. Sometimes you have to bust your own ghosts, sometimes you might have someone to help you see what things are ghostly and what are benevolent. Once again I’m aware that I’m very lucky to have someone who stuck by me when things were rough, to help me sort out the good from the ghoulish. Also I am very aware that she is probably very mad at me for calling myself lucky for having her in my life, but look, kid, not everything is the easiest in the world to shake.

I also want to be clear that I have no intention of telling anyone what should come next because that looks different for everyone. My dissolve came in the middle of a streak of dissolves that rocked some people to their cores and others seemingly just kept swimming unaffected. I tried my best to maintain a loving friendship when others went their separate ways, not willing to so much as be in the same room for months. Some people were completely abandoned by their former partners and others were loudly and enthusiastically supporting each other mere days after things had gone kablooey. Your journey is your own, I’m just sharing the things that I found useful after a few months of sorting through some debris and also airing some appreciation for someone who didn’t owe me anything once things started to dissolve but showed me the compassion and kindness of making sure I was okay.

So there you go, another meandering screed full of mixed metaphors. A way for me to process things by sharing them with the world because that’s the only way I know how to do so effectively. I just want you to know that if you’re not feeling okay, that’s fine, but also know that you can work to make yourself feel whole. The world is full of lessons, some of them harder than others, all of them worth learning. If you’re reading this I hope you’re alright, I hope you know that you’re loved and cared for by more people than you probably even realize, and that no matter how long it takes you to study, the point of a lesson is learning, not focusing on how long it took you to learn it.