Loving Matters

Loving isn’t about doing or saying the right thing. It’s about letting ourselves be felt and about being able to receive someone else’s feelings without being overwhelmed or defined by them.

This takes a village, this takes calling in something more innocent and loving than we can possibly be. This is the work of our times – of allowing Life itself to say “yes” and “thank you” to us, and through us, simply for having the courage to exist.

Enjoy this 12-minute read, or let me read it to you on your commute, neighborhood walk, or cooking session!

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By “sober dating”, I mean exploring intimacy with someone you’re attracted to without using them for safety, validation, or getting high. It means being aware of, honest about, and taking full responsibility for how our impulses and survival strategies sabotage relationships and hurt ourselves and others. It means seeing someone – and ourselves – as we are and accepting that. It’s being respectful, kind, and honest about what they – and we – can and cannot do.

This takes a village, because it takes tremendous courage, honesty, and tenderness few of us are able to access – let alone sustain – alone.

My experiences have taught me it’s risky to let my guard down. When I was younger – bolder and more energetic – I was unnervingly honest in my opinions about personal and often controversial topics regardless of how well I knew the person I was talking to. I would take on anyone’s religious beliefs, point out activists’ hypocracies, confront strangers about their existential failures, challenge comforting worldviews. Nothing was sacred except my own convictions. I felt alive and empowered, and rode a rollercoaster of emotion that took me and others to exciting, transcendent, and often dismantling, disillusioning places.

I’ve met only a handful of people able to sustain that level of intensely honest living, and they were quite challenged by functioning in consensus reality. I was just feral enough to dance in the shadows, but not unhinged enough to make a home there. My highs always dissolved into often mutual bitterness, betrayal, and heart-break. I see how I’ve annihilated things I later realized where precious, mocked things that were inherently sacred. I see how I’ve destabilized and offended people I respect and care about. Despite my mischievious mind, bent at unraveling and challenging what I view as our faulty reality, I also want to be sane, decided, and consistent. I don’t want to unsettle or disappoint others, because without trust, there is no community. And I don’t want to be a destroyer without planting something of even greater beauty in its place.  

In trying to achieve this, I’ve done a fair amount of worrying: “What if they don’t like this or invite me to do that?” Anxiety gives me the mental vision and emotional momentum I need to plan through anything that might happen so I feel adequately certain of an acceptable outcome. The possibilities are endless, so there’s plenty to do. Worst case scenario, I’m exhausted and overwhelmed. Best case scenario, I’m beautifully scripted – completely appropriate, but inauthentic and inaccessible to a spontaneously unfolding moment – which is the only sort of moment there really is.

I’ve seen what this does to relationships – mine in particular. I can be so good at remaining calm and choosing my words carefully that the person opposite me has trouble relating. In an attempt to avoid hurting them with the force of my feeling, I mask to them the point that my feelings become dry concepts instead of shared humanity. I think I’m creating safety by being clear and collected, but they often feel the shame and inferiority of being less aware and articulate. I think I’m being transparent – that they can see the sweat on my face, the shake in my voice, hear my beating heart – but they can’t. We can be so good at being guarded that we can’t be seen, even when we think there’s a spotlight on our every blemish. And we can be trained out of genuine vulnerability by trying to be overly considerate.

Sharing how someone affects us isn’t about a polished diatribe – it’s about letting ourselves be felt, about letting someone into our experience. And that’s messy. That requires us to shed the safe distance of a neutral observer – the lofty confidence of someone who’s got it figured out – and get some skin in the game. Some of the most productive conversations I had during my marriage were when I let go of all my tools and skills and just got down and dirty. He inevitably said, “Oh, now I understand how you felt. Now I get that you were angry and hurt.” I couldn’t just say it. He had to feel it. And that required me to let myself be taken by something that felt a little feral and out of control. It wasn’t about unraveling them. It was about letting myself be a little undone.

But for this to work, the person we reveal to must be able to witness our experience without being overwhelmed or defined by it. They must have the capacity to hold their shape and their reality when impacted by the force of ours. This is one of reasons I believe inner work is one of the most loving things we can do for the world. When we can validate what’s true for us, when we can tend our own emotions, we gift others the freedom to have their own. We become able to truly relate – to say “here I am” and “there you are” and explore together the space between us.

I think we’re anxious and scared and longing for reassurance and comfort. But I think at our core, we want authenticity even more. We want something real. We want to know how someone really thinks and feels. We’re tired of politeness and tired of being lied to. We’re tired of being appropriate and responsible. We want to know – really know – who we are and where we stand with the world. We’d rather have true enemies than false friends. We want to know that when someone says they love us, they mean it – they really see, honor, and allow us to be what we are. And that when we’re really being a pain in the ass, they’ll tell us, because they know we don’t want to alienate the people we care for and depend on. But we also want to hear that truth in a way that honors our inherent goodness and agency – that softens what isn’t really us to reveal the inherent truth in our core. It might hurt a little – it might make us a bit disoriented, dizzy, and nauseous, but it ultimately connects us to something far more real and reliable than we experienced before.

I want to receive that gift. I want to share it with others. But the truth is, I’m scared shitless about getting my shell cracked and there are instinctual forces beyond my conscious control that re-enforce my meager protections all day long. In order to show up for others – and myself – with respect, kindness, and courageous honesty, I have to invite something bigger in, something that’s far clearer and better at loving than I am, something that can hold and guide me, and them, and us. I don’t know what that is, but I know it exists. I’ve felt it. I’ve felt it wrap its arms around me in moments of despair and trembling. I’ve heard it tell me how to love and how much loving matters.

Loving one other person might not seem like much on a planet of billions screaming for social, political, and environmental rebellion and reform, but it’s actually everything. The wounded and guarded world is in desperate need of tenderness and vulnerability, and if we can reach out and pull just a strand of that through into our moments of defensiveness and blame that is healing. That’s seemingly impossible and scary enough for our staunchest inner activist. And our attempts to do it well – with integrity and care – are enough, more than enough. They are everything. This is the work of our time.

If you find yourself wanting to correct wrong and force reform, I invite you to consider that the most effective way of challenging the things that wreck our world, of satisfying the part of you that aches to rage and tear it all down, is to admit to yourself how those very things you define yourself in opposition to actually sustain your way of being. It isn’t until we realize we are essentially unwilling and unable to change within ourselves – to sacrifice our habits and comforts to live sustainably – that we are able to participate in the world cleanly, without faulty conceptions of who we are or what is happening.

If you find yourself wanting to inspire change through righteousness behavior, I invite you to consider how liberating and validating it is to step outside of the pressure of being “good”, of trying to figure out and do the “right thing”. It isn’t until we admit the ways in which our goodness is contrived to gain acceptance, safety, pride, success, brownie points from deities that we can begin to truly love in an innocent, selfless and ultimately hopeless way, completely devoid of attachment to outcome.

Imagine a sense of goodness permeating your body, every cell all the way to your core. Feel it flooding your being with tenderness and innocence, purity, wakefulness and willing readiness. Embodying that feeling – whatever it is or wherever it comes from – is enough, is everything, is an end unto itself. It is an agent of transformation for us in each moment and for everyone we encounter. It is the best – and arguably only – thing we can do in this time of upheaval and disorientation. Our cunningly greedy, self-righteous parts will always try to co-opt it, mimic it, and monetize it, so we keep sacrificing our pride and ambitions to the purity of its presence. This is how we unravel our failures, repair harms done, regenerate our relationships and greet our hardships one breath at a time: “Thank you.” “I’m sorry.” “You are precious.”

I send out a prayer to everyone on the planet right now who is in pain in their relationships, who is negotiating time and space and values with people they care about, and who is displaced from their home and vitality and navigating an uncertain path. I pray that they feel a spot of tenderness for themselves and their struggle, that they feel held in their pain by something larger and more loving than they can possibly be. I pray that the softness that grows in them becomes a greater gentleness with others – not a permissiveness that allows the sacred to be trampled, but a permeability that allows what is to move through without misshaping what we are and know to be true.

If you feel unable to access the force of this love or unworthy to receive it, I pray that you open to the idea that it is generously available to all the billions on this planet and will reveal itself in the way you need it when the time is right. It is deeply personal and totally infinite. It is Life itself saying “yes” and “thank you” to you, and through you, simply for having the courage to exist. Keep coming back to the point at the center of your storm, to the space of silence between words and thoughts, and it will meet you there.

Nancy

A deep bow of gratitude to the anonymous members of SLAA and WA who – in honest receiving and sharing of our struggles and insights – shaped these words that greet you.