Love

My whole life I’ve been plagued a compulsion to try – to try to please, to try to be liked, to try to be wanted, to try, try, try. I never understood what compelled me to keep trying even in the face of knowing that it wasn’t getting me anywhere. It always left me frustrated and unhappy. Always.

One of my grade school memories was of a friend overcome with seething anger over something I’d done and yelling, “You’re always thinking of other people!” Up until a few days ago, I didn’t understand why she was so angry, or why thinking of others was such a bad thing. Now I think she was angry because she wanted more of me in the moment and less trying to please others. It’s true, I am always thinking of other people; always trying to figure out what they want so that they’ll stick around. But somehow they always leave.

I keep thinking of the Bible quote that says: those who have no need will get more, and those who want will have it taken away. I’ve always wanted to be wanted. So if the Bible is right, the very act of wanting this was what drove people away from me. It’s this very want, this trying that pushed everything and everyone out of my life. The easy thing is to just say, “Okay, I don’t want any of this anymore. I give up.” Easier said than done. How do I get from a lifetime of trying to genuine surrendering? This is what all the spiritual books talk about, but they never truly tell you how to do it.

I’ve realized that they only way to get to a genuine surrender is to dig deep within to see what’s really motivating me and start from there. That’s a lot of digging and removing of things that are blocking my view. I’ve dug and dug and come to accept that I wasn’t made for relationships. By the time I could walk, my parents were leaving me alone, locked up in the house by myself when they went to work. No siblings or friends to play with, no toys, no one. Just me and the darkness. My parents would go to work in the morning and I think my mother came home for lunch and then it was just me again until night time. This is how it pretty much was my whole childhood. Me alone in the house. I spent more time by myself than with people. Now it makes perfect sense why my relationships haven’t worked out. But for the majority of my life I couldn’t figure it out. And this confusion just made me try harder. I read self-help books, and watched Oprah religiously – constantly trying to work it out. All my energy was on fixing this problem. Now I see that there’s nothing to figure out. I wasn’t meant for love, relationships, friendships, family, or kids. If God had wanted me to have they things He would have made it possible for me to have them, instead, it’s as if every possible avenue for these things to happen was closed off.

When I realized this an ocean of tears flowed out of me. The one thing that I was striving for was never going to happen, never meant to happen. That was a five days ago. Now I’m beginning to accept. It still saddens me and probably will for some time. This is also the beginning of surrender. I can feel myself letting go. There’s freedom in knowing the truth, even if it’s a truth that I don’t want to see. Now I can go on with my life and not feel the compulsion to try to make relationships work. I can stop focusing on the external and start to look inward.

Right now, I want to create the best relationship I can with myself. I’m going to give myself all the things that I’ve been searching for in other people: love, protection, acceptance, fun, happiness, compassion, support and understanding. I’m going to do the same with my relationship with money because my connection with it use to be external too. I only wanted wealth to prove to others that I was worthy and successful. It was another form of trying to please others. I want to change this way of relating so that it’s a way to take care of myself and to make me happy. The same goes for learning; I want to learn to enrich myself, not to prove anything to other people.

It really comes down to feeling worthy within. I never felt like I was enough, so I went outside to find my worth and never found it, and was forever disappointed. Now I’m going within. Interestingly, after all the sadness and tears, I’m starting to feel lighter and more comfortable with myself. The pressure to please is gone and I can simply enjoy my own company.

I’m enough. I love myself and I don’t care what I do.

Why am I so fucking sensitive to noise? But not always. Only at home, when I’m trying to read, sleep, eat, listen to music, write. I hate to hear other people. My neighbours exist despite myself. They exist when they shouldn’t. They make noises that come unbidden into my life. I hate this. Perhaps it’s the loss of control; that something foreign has entered into my safety. Every screech from a sliding chair, every click of a heel sends me into white rage. I can’t stand it. I’m getting better at controlling it. There’s no longer any door banging nor are there anymore brooms to the ceiling. This is a major improvement to how I handled my last loud neighbours. Now, I talk back to them. I scream, I rage. Sometimes they hear. Other time I feel like a lunatic. Maybe I am a lunatic for being this sensitive to noise. Why? I will always have neighbours. Unless I move to a bubble in the sky, I will always have to deal with the noise. Even the highest mountain peak has to abide by the sounds of nature. The loud family that just moved in down the hall, who seems to hold constant moratoriums in the hallway, is target number one. Then there is the new neighbour upstairs whom I hear constantly. There is no getting away from him. It’s the sound of his thumping heal tramping across the ceiling, his tinkling of things on the floor, and all the other noises coming from him. The rage. The fucking rage. Then, there is J. from next door who, when she has a particular friend over, talks to loud that it reduces our concrete barrier to Japanese paper.

I’ve tried meditating on my feelings about the noise. I’ve tried to let the rage flow through me while this is happening by being present to it. All this has dulled my anger to a degree but I’m still enraged. Why? Could it be that it reminds me of the life around me that I am not participating in? Perhaps it links me back to those lonely moments when friends at school were in deep connection and feeling excluded from all of that because I wasn’t invited and I didn’t know how to initiate myself to the group. As I wrote this I felt the truth connecting to me. There were constant moments in my childhood and adult life where I felt purposely excluded. Where I felt that for some esoteric reason I was not being invited into the group, because for some reason I was not wanted. I felt humiliated and defenceless against it. I didn’t know how to be open and allow others in. When these moments of exclusion happened, I felt myself retreating into my armour. I braced myself against the cold, and comforted myself with self-righteousness; telling myself that I am better than them, that I am better off. It was also a feeling of persecution. That I was being singled out, when all I wanted was to be acknowledged and seen.

With the noise I feel that I’m not being seen. I feel that they are intruding into my life without an invitation nor my consent and just doing it anyway as if I don’t matter. This is what the noise stands for me. It’s not being able to control my environment and others having little regard for me. All of this serves to alienate others from me – my lunatic rants and anger.

Another perspective: People are living their lives just as I am. I scrape my chair on the floor, too. I talk too loud sometimes. My music can be heard in the hallway. I drop things on the floor. None of these things speak to my regard or disregard for my neighbours – I’m simply existing. I can feel some of my anger dissipating as I write this. When I make a noise I’m not thinking of how I can invade another’s space without their permission, I’m not thinking of my neighbours at all. It’s nothing personal if I make a loud noise, which I’m sure that I do often. Okay, I get this.

I have a severe attraction to people who refuse or don’t have it in themselves to see me. They remind me of my parents and it’s my way of trying to work through what I couldn’t with my parents. I’ve consistently been attracted to those who don’t care for me. It’s comforting to be around these people and it’s completely familiar. It makes me feel like I’m at home, and it’s another chance to validate my being. It’s a chance to work it through, because if I can make these people see me then it means that I matter, that I’m not worthless. This is why I try so hard.

It happened most recently with R. – the designer at my previous job. He was immature, irresponsible and only ever saw life through his eyes and never acknowledged another’s. I was bound to him with such pain that I’ve rarely ever felt before. I saved his job numerous times because I would justify that his irresponsible behaviours just showed greenness on his part and that he had talent. In truth, there are acres of talented designers out there who are easy to work with. R. admittedly enjoyed making my job harder by not finishing on time, by not giving me what I wanted, and many times I had to do his work for him by giving him ideas about images and creative direction. Sometimes I was doing all but the manual design work. For this I never got a thanks or an acknowledgement but I kept at it, even though inside I was torn over the pain and the frustration. I just couldn’t understand in the moment why I was so tied to this incompetent person.