Sometimes we hold each other’s possibility. By this, I mean that we show one another what is realizable—experimental ways of orienting to self, to other, and to the world that are attainable, viable, within reach. What I’m trying to say is that we’re all teaching one another, changing one another, related.
I hope that I can convey to you an image that I have been holding in my awareness for a few weeks.
I was out to brunch with a friend and their new partner and it came out of my mouth. It caught me by surprise. Again, it arrived when trying to mend a conflict that had made home feel unfriendly and cold. It appears when I think of the romantic and emotional entanglements that I’ve experienced this past year—the ones that I am continually trying to make sense of.
It is another name for the space of flux between what is mine and what is yours. It is a way of understanding responsibility to self and to other as two sides of the same coin. I can hear the change that jingles in my pocket next to my studio keys as I walk down Victoria, humming quietly under my sunhat, taking a stranger’s smile in bone deep.
In this flash, we all walk around with another’s name on our forehead. A permanent game of heads-up. An endless series of role-reversals, all happening at once. Sometimes there are small oval mirrors in place of names, attached to my forehead and to yours, attached to everyone’s forehead all the time—the man at the grocery store having a meltdown at the cashier, the cashier herself, the bus driver, the guy in his pick-up that stopped too late and cut off the crosswalk, the woman crossing said crosswalk with barely repressed rage pushing a tram, the baby in said tram, the woman from work, the roommate, the lover, the studio-mate, the friend. They make it so that any conversation we have with one another always involves catching our own eye in the mirror.
This is a powerful image. A metaphor for so many things.
For much of my life, I have felt a deep sense of monstrosity, of un-belonging, of alienation.
One of these things is not like the others.
This felt-sense was there for good reasons, private reasons, painful reasons. I’ve been doing work for a long time to make meaning out of my experiences of childhood. I’m not even sure that I plan to keep this portion of this writing here, since I’m thinking a lot about how the process of integration and healing from harm means cultivating internal boundaries.
What do I share and what do I keep just for me?
This is proof-positive of the gift of trust in myself—my own competence and capacity to bear my circumstances with dignity and grace. To bear up under them and to fucking flourish. To move from the crumpling-downward-motion under the weight of it all, to learn slowly to lift with your legs, lock your knees out, engage your core, keep anchored, and push the weight that bears down, up over your head as hard as you can. To make meaning. To live here, amongst us.
Push so you stand up straight, push so your kids can bear up under less, push so that you can die on your feet. Push because it is a human thing to crumple, push so that others can see that it is possible to push. Push up stoically, push up with tears in your eyes, push next to a brother or sister, push beside an old friend. Look around you and recognize that we’re all trying to push, in our own ways—to bear up under the forces that bear down on us.
I’m not talking about brute strength here, but about the quality of the myocardium. And of the spirit. And of the journey. I’m talking about the quality of light that glints from those mirrors we’re all wearing when the sun sets just right, catching your eye and that of the other, the light looking back over its shoulder one last time.
I’ve come to see this vision of us walking around with each others names on all our foreheads often, especially in conflict, and to understand its message more and more.
I don’t think I have a concrete meaning to boil down for you, to present in a neat little package on this tiny newsletter, more a felt sense that whether we realize it or not, were it.
When it comes to existing, we’re all trying to make sense of our experiences with and through one another.
For a brief and blinding second, in the hard light of late July, the face of a stranger on the street looks like the face of grace—a real human angel, and I realize that if I see this in another, it must also be in me.