People are the color and texture to the canvases of life, they include spouses, friends, children, family, random souls assigned to us by drill sergeants, university housing committees, or prison screws.
In a sense, they are all roommates, to one extent or another, who have taught us about the various degrees of empathy through love for the purpose of evolution and understanding the individual canons or ourselves.
Who better to help us accomplish said feat than the very people with whom we have made these unlikely, disparate connections, these tenuous bridges formed across geographical, political, and metaphysical divides? Some of the most profound truths are those taught to us by those who have rested their heads near ours.
We share universal experiences like loneliness, isolation, uncertainty, and joy, but, it’s not exactly clear what the observations and realizations of said experiences mean when plugged into the puzzles and conundrums of life.
For the experiences to lead to understanding, and the understanding to lead to the evolution of self requires that we learn to see and know ourselves through the eyes and experiences of others. That is perhaps the key for any of us to evolve into our own heroes, the men and women who are emotionally intelligent, situationally aware, patient, and above all, uninhibited by fear, prejudice, or destructive attachment.
Our lives can often seem like anthologies made up of random passages from books. They include trips without destinations, careers or jobs without passion or purpose, marriages without love, and vice versa, not to mention all the banter and jokes without an actual audience. It can often seem like we’re paddling a boat with a spoon, looking for the land on the horizon, but all we can see are the clouds.
If any of this seems at all like your life, then be thankful that your floating life isn’t also taking place in a bathroom with an assigned roommate rowing against you. But let’s not explore this book from the back to the front, let us start at the beginning. I have not always lived in a twelve foot by six foot bathroom with another man.
There was the fetus-womb, gestation arrangement that I lived through, so I’m told, followed by the tortures and triumphs of childhood, which again, I’m not entirely lucid on. Which brought me to my first relationship and roommate arrangement. Her name was B (discretion, names will be limited to letters). B was the first woman to ever hear I Love You from my mouth.
She was also the first woman I ever showered with, shared regular sex with, took a trip with, or, for that matter, shared a bed, bedroom, and life with. I was only sixteen. It is a strange circumstance to have just passed puberty and to suddenly have this other human being in your arms.
She tells me that she loves me, wants me—needs me. I repeat what she says, because I don’t know what else to do. What class or course on life was meant to prepare me for the proper motions and etiquettes of a heteronormative relationship with a woman? B was that something firm and certain for me to hold tightly to throughout the general flux of adolescence.
She was an orphan and I wanted to know what it felt like to be loved. Together we shared my mom, grandma, cousins, and aunts and uncles. With her at my side life was more vivid, expressive, textured, knotted, and, to be perfectly honest, more confined and limited.
Then there was the issue that my family—if one could call the misconfigured gypsies of my blood line, a family—actually liked her more than me. Maybe it was because they all knew something that even I didn’t know.
That I was inevitably going to be profoundly antagonistic to any semblance of domestic life. Was it possible that they knew me better than I knew myself ? Or was it just an estimation or best guess they were making, based on the clear observation that I had nothing to go off of, for what made up a good husband or life partner?
Maybe it’s a disease I have, domestic or commitment-itus, and they were all privy to the diagnosis that nobody bothered to give me. The symptoms were the restlessness, the moods and the ego-centricity to the overall makeup and messiness of me finding me. And since nobody shared this diagnosis with me I never sought out the cure.
Before we were eighteen we had already plotted a singular course for our life, not lives, but “life,” in the singular. In many ways we were like two protagonists from a Dickens novel who did everything together, she being one of the few members of my intentional family. Everyone outwardly assumed that we would get married, have a brood of children; her the non-profit lawyer and mom, and me the businessman, soccer coach and dad.
To this day I still remember the ring I saved all summer to buy, in secret, and the stuttered proposal that I stumbled through just prior to graduation. Which brings me to another symptom: I was terrified of being alone. I wanted to belong and B made me feel like where I belonged was with her.
The problem, as would later prove to be the case with almost all my relationships, was that B wanted to make me happy. For those of you who have ever tried to be happy at the bequest, or, due to the effort of someone, then you know what I am referring to.
There is simply too much expectation. It’s like trying to deliver the perfect punchline to a joke, in public, without a rehearsal. Or, an example from my world, like someone looking at their watch waiting for you to hurry and give a urine sample. Talk about pressure!
What we both failed to comprehend is that happiness is not something that anyone can give to another. Love, patience, empathy, forgiveness, these are some of the things we can give, and happiness is not on the list.
We can provide circumstances conducive to happiness, yes, but the actual state of happiness requires a choice and a willingness to be happy. And the simple truth is that I was not yet capable of said state.
For that to happen I first needed to become who I wasn’t so as to find and know who I was, and that would prove to be a decades-long project of self-discovery, self-deception, and self-discipline, the latter more properly aligned with the damage that I would inevitably have to inflict on myself and others so as to better understand my purpose for being in this world and life.
Obviously, B could not have known any of this. And it was after our relationship had fizzled to a drip, then dried beneath the scorching summer sun that I was finally able to see myself through her eyes. Selfish. Arrogant. Overbearing. Dishonest. Inconsiderate. There were good qualities, too, but at the end of it all, getting to them was like bobbing for apples in fecal matter, or snorkeling for pearls in the sewer. Not-worth-the-effort!
Naturally, what I would come to learn from seeing myself through the eyes of B wouldn’t be comprehended in its entirety until after M,J,S,A and N. For some reason I was incapable of having casual relationships. Instead, I would cling to woman with a repressive neediness for love, which, in the end, led to a series of parasitic relationships that were anything and everything but symbiotic.
Then there were the male roommates, the fraternity brothers, the collection of testosterone driven homo sapiens who made genocide seem like a viable option to global warming. For me, living in a fraternity house was like Lord of the Flies with constant drinking games, regular visits to the emergency room, and the multiplicity of pillow partners that turned sex into a competitive game of Russian roulette.
And what exactly did I see when seeing myself through their eyes? A nice guy who would always finish last with women for his unwillingness to degrade them. Someone who takes everything, including life, too serious, and, because of which, would inevitably end up married, miserable, and celibate.
A perspective that apparently I took to heart because I checked all the boxes. Somehow I was stuck between the contradiction of loving women so much, while simultaneously being incapable of reconfiguring myself into that rock of stability and adoration that so many of them seemed to need.
I tried, again and again. But the outcome was always the same insanity, the only alterations being to the shades of grey I was using to paint my canvas of justified existence. Did I love any of them, or was it just the idea of them that I loved?
I don’t know.
What I do know is that love is a problematic, complex, venture of inevitable loss that never takes us to where we set out to go. And, it quite possibly might be the only worthwhile pursuit.
Though I will admit that learning to see oneself through the eyes of former loves, so as to complete the picture, can seem like a demented and unbalanced pursuit, right on par with skydiving without a parachute or crossing the Atlantic on an inner tube.
It doesn’t just require courage, it requires a personal conviction aligned with a reality based on the repeated observations of you being you, again and again and again, where it finally becomes clear that there is a version of yourself who you have never met.
And getting to meet this alternative version of ourselves requires of each and every one of us that we push through the first dates, the one-night stands, the unwanted engagements, the resulted marriages that fail, and the inevitable divorces to a plane of acceptance and understanding that the very reasons for why we have suffered so, are the very same reasons for why we suffer still—because we are unwilling to be honest with ourselves about who we are and what we want. Most of us have invested a lifetime trying to convince ourselves and everyone around us that we are the masks that we wear.
We go on first dates with these masks. We take each other’s clothes off, but we leave the masks. We wake up next to one another, masks still tightly affixed. We then decide to form relationships and eventually marriages, and still, the masks stay put. Then come the children, followed by other vicissitudes of life like illnesses, bankruptcies, or lay-offs. Before we know it we are suddenly wearing what amounts to a collection of masks, and it’s getting harder to see through the eye holes.
Suddenly our lives are not at all what we imagined they would be, a realization that carries with it the very resentments that we now harbor for ourselves and others. We try to cover it up with date-nights, a vacation, a new car, a new lover, one vice or another, and still we can’t ignore what has always been so blatantly obvious to others, that we are not happy and it’s unclear whether we even possess the willingness, capacity, or courage to be happy.
Making the change, taking that proverbial first step and actually doing something about the dreadful circumstances in which we find ourselves is when the opportunity presents itself for us to meet and get to know that alternative you, me, and us. But, will we?
If following the heartbreak of B, I would’ve had the courage and willingness to see myself through her eyes, I would have saved myself the torments that followed, as I said, with M,J,S,A, and N.
But I wasn’t yet ready to see myself as she saw me, which meant that I was going to have to push the limits of insanity a little further. The masks stayed put, tightly fastened, and, so, naturally the relationships were doomed.
She had an abortion and had a miscarriage, and still, I stayed the course, eyes clenched closed. N was followed by V, followed by JJ,AA, and G and through it all I continued to resuscitate the belief that I would be happy if I could just meet the right woman. It was either that or face the truth that my life was misaligned from my reality.
The reality being, that I was choosing to relive the repeated tragedy of broken promises and heartache, all because my stated purpose was not even mine. It was a borrowed cause that I had picked up from the Hollywood romantic comedies of the nineties. All of which were absolute nonsense.
Nonsense, not because we are incapable of falling madly in love. The momentary bliss of that is very real. It’s nonsense because we can’t just live the extremes of love from only one side of the coin, because inevitably the coin must flip, as that being the very nature of the coin, just as it is the nature of glass to break.
And when it does comes the heartache and desperation and devastation of realizing that we cannot save a love that never was. It never was because we never were those people.
Allow me to explain.
When two complete strangers meet they are almost never meeting the true inhabitants from beneath the surface of appearances that they perceive. Who are they meeting, then? They are meeting our proxies or our surrogates, the versions of ourselves that we hold up to the world as us.
When you see someone wearing a silk and mohair tailor-made suit, adorned with platinum or gold cufflinks, a Yacht-Master Rolex, Allen-Edmund shoes, and a silk tie, and said person steps out of a six-figure automobile, you are not seeing a person, you are seeing and perceiving a persona, and that persona is one of success.
Your senses are only hearing one thing, irrespective of whether or not it is being said, that here is someone who is powerful and rich and potentially capable of improving your life. That is the message blaring from the bullhorn that is not even present. And it’s also a misperception.
A misperception because whether or not we accept and acknowledge a dealt hand of cards from the life of another depends on our mutual misperceptions of each other.
Maybe we order drinks, share a laugh, dance; maybe we share an adventure, a great conversation, or discover that we enjoy the same authors, podcasts, or directors of a film. If there is a mutual connection or interest maybe we’ll exchange info, which will lead to the potential for more encounters, more masks, and more lies.
We do this, not because we are sociopaths, but because we are human and we want to find acceptance from the people who interest us. It could also be that we’re afraid that if we show too much, too soon, we may scare the other off. So we edit or withhold certain details of our lives with the justification that when the time is right we’ll share everything.
A limiting factor that often doesn't coincide with the other’s expectations. Besides, when is the time ever right, really? Or maybe it was never a question of timing.
Maybe it was just that on the night you met me, you had just found your husband in bed with your best friend, and at that very moment when I approached you were just sick and tired of living your life with your nose pressed up against the glass of other people’s better and more beautiful lives. So rather than tell me that you’re a soon to be single mom, unemployed and slightly neurotic, you decide to break free from your limiting narrative and become someone else.
You present yourself as confident, snarky with the comments, and fluent in world events, with just the right amount of intelligence and sexuality. An experience of you that leaves me starting to mentally reconstruct my future. And, what is it that I might not be telling you?
How about that my success is as stable as a house of cards built on a table of balanced toothpicks. I have a wife who hates me but won’t divorce me, a father-in-law who wants to ruin me, a family who doesn’t acknowledge me, and a business that is mostly run by sociopaths, and, as luck or circumstance would have it, it turns out that the last amazing woman I met, dated, dined with, and later woke up with is also the wife of sociopath number two who I just merged my company with.
And if that weren’t enough, MM won’t stop calling me, demanding more of the same, despite the risks or the lives to be destroyed. Excuse me for not wanting to share all of that with someone I just met. And these are just the immediate problems in the life of me.
It’s not that I don’t want to share myself with someone, but that’s why I pay a therapist, so I don’t have to bother L,H,O, or any of the others with the nightmares that I lived through as a child. Or, at least, that’s part of the justification. The other part is that if I don’t have a reason to trust someone, I don’t.
The masks stay where they are and life proceeds onward. But, the obvious problem with this approach is that there is no connection, no intimacy, and no love. And that is very much a problem.
The more eyes I saw myself through the more disappointed I became. The more disappointed I became the more determined I was to bend the boundaries of social convention and me. That is, I started to harbor feelings and love for the very women that had stepped into my life under the mutual misperceptions of two people both desperately wanting to step outside of themselves.
We tell ourselves that it’s just for a moment, a few hours, a day maybe, but, the more we step outside the more we start to like it out there, and suddenly we find ourselves actually living out there. And, of course, that’s not conducive to a good life.
L and I were madly in love. But one night we were having dinner together at some Caribbean-themed restaurant and it suddenly hit me that maybe our thing, our relationship was doomed because we had met one another on a plane of mutual misperceptions. A very direct question suddenly occurred to me. And I voiced it.
Would you still be with me if there was no money? She stopped in mid-drink of some undoubtably exorbitant priced wine, observed me for a few moments, and then responded with the following. My love, it’s impossible to separate you from the money because the money is an extension of who you are. You are disciplined, determined, and capable.
Success for you is as inevitable as the sun rising tomorrow. And these are just some of the qualities that I love about you. So, if you are trying to imagine a version of yourself who is professionally flaccid or impotent, broke and without prospects, then you’re going to have to die and come back for that one, my love, because that is not at all who you are in this life.
I still remember that her words, they were like a well-crafted sales pitch or pep talk and it was hard to disagree with her. She was quite possibly the first, since B, to see and appreciate me as I had labored so diligently to make myself so, obviously I liked what she saw.
The problem was that I knew enough about the sales pitch to know when one was being made, and she was trying to sell me on me; while at the same time trying to sell me on staying the course, our thing, the eventual marriage, the house, the exotic trips, the great sex—the whole package. So, what was the problem?
The problem was the same as it had been with B, in that none of that was the true me, and I was tired of living outside of myself. Either she was being selective in what she saw, or she was likewise trying to sell herself the same pitch, all the while trying to reconfigure me to her.
In other words L was committing the same mistake as every other woman from my past She believed that she could change me.
When I separated from L, I was at a point where I was comfortable with seeing myself through the eyes of others. I knew that what I was seeing was not the real me, and I knew that I was going to have to make some drastic changes to get there. And in making those changes there was going to be collateral damage, the extent of which I couldn’t possibly have imagined.
Never did I imagine that said damage would lead me to being betrayed by my best friend, where I would be sent to prison for something that I didn’t do. But such is life, at times brutal and dishonest.
And when you are assigned to live in a twelve by six foot bathroom with someone who is likewise living the collateral damage of his choices, you are going to see the very worst parts of yourself in everyone around you. You will also see the best parts. And the choice before you is crystal.
Either you will continue to be who you are not, or you will find the strength within yourself to finally be who you are—the highest aspiration of who you are.
The prison experience is like a dystopian Fantasy Island. Most do not arrive with a willingness to see themselves as they truly are. They come pre-loaded with these elaborate tales about possessions and success. Followed shortly thereafter by some plea for help and money. Fake it till you make it was the slogan of my mentor in the world of finance, and apparently almost everyone sent to this island is guided by the same advice.
We lie in job interviews. In restaurants. In the doctor’s office. To the boss. Teachers. Deans. How about the compassionate lies told to our spouses, our children, our parents, our siblings or our friends? What about the lies told to the police, the insurance adjusters, or the accountant?
We may not all be guilty of all these lies, but we are all most certainly guilty of some of them. And when life brings me someone who tells me that they don’t lie, I don’t even bother challenging them on their lie about the lie. Maybe I’m too cynical to interrupt their delusion, or maybe I’m just sympathetic.
Because at the bottom of their lie is a fear of being revealed and seen for what any and all of us really are: People with messy lives who are trying to figure out what this life process is all about. The lie is the defense mechanism, because maybe we’re too smart for our own good. Or maybe some things are better left unsaid.
Personally I’m of the opinion that the only opinions that matter are our own. Seeing ourselves through the eyes of others is only a stopgap until we are able to look within and see ourselves as we truly are.
It’s not meant to carry us through our entire lives, it’s only meant to lead us to that individualistic point in time, along the trajectory of our lives, where we start living and being as we truly are. I have noticed that when people are terminally ill they become a lot more direct and honest. And maybe being reminded of our mortality should make us more honest, more willing to divulge our secrets.
We see that we have all lived provisionally up to a particular point, and now it’s time to live courageously. It’s time to break the tethers on the life perspectives that were never ours to begin with, so as to find a meaning and direction in life that is personally authentic to each and every one of us.
I haven’t had an actual, living, breathing relationship in seventeen years. Like many of you I’ve only had the parts: the sex part, the intimacy part, the headache part, the part where we both lie part (to each other and to ourselves).
None of this, of course, is the love of us becoming or evolving into our own heroes and heroines: no more destructive attachments, prejudices, or impatience.
We are now as we have always been, emotionally intelligent, situationally aware, and most important of all, uninhibited by fear. This is my best me, and I challenge you to show me your best you.
Thank you for reading today’s publication and supporting MYLIFEplus25. Look out for next week’s publication: Enslavement or Freedom.