Thoughts About Love

"The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along."   
    — Rumi (The Illuminated Rumi)

I've been thinking lately a lot about love.  Truth be told, I've always thought about love.  I remember as a child that I thought love was Maureen O'hara being dipped and passionately kissed by John Wayne.  It always made me blush.  And then when I was a teenager, I thought love was something that happened at a football game; the quarterback eyeing the water-girl as she tends to his injury, and she is clueless all the while of his feelings for her.  And then they marry after graduation and have babies.  When that didn't happen, I started considering that maybe love was scientific and mathematical, and that was pretty depressing as I've never been good at arithmetic.  And then, in my early twenties, it occurred to me that love was a whirlwind.  It happened faster than you could determine the time of day.  And then the whirlwind ended and love was over and replaced with something quite different.  At first it felt like hate, but in time I learned to recognize it as hurt.

Now, I don't know what love is or how it is found.  I'm 28 years old.  I've lived a lot of life and I've learned from living.  Outside of my own dating mishaps, you wouldn't believe how many times I've had conversations with other women my age where love just eludes.  Or conversations with women my age where they truly thought they had love and everything was so great and then one day, it was no more... it was just gone.  It's all very disappointing.  And then there is my job.  I see divorce every day.  Not just divorce.  I see bitter and hateful divorce every single day where people who once loved each other deeply, only want to hurt each other.  And I wonder, how does that happen?  It's crazy.

I used to think that I was incapable of love.  Seriously.  I used to think that love eluded me because I didn't know how to love.  And I used to think maybe it was a good idea that love has eluded me for so long because then if I can't find it, then I can't lose it.  But, never once have I stopped looking for it.  It's strange.

And I'm not done looking for it, because I know more now than I did when I was 5, 17, and even 25 years old.  What I do know is that I am very capable of loving.  My mission in this world is to love loyally and passionately.  Everyone.  Family, loyal friends, children, and my future love.  I advocate for children.  I don't just stand up for them, but I advocate for them when they have no voice.  And I advocate fearlessly and fervently for them.  I spent 2.5 years in a relationship that I fought for tirelessly, just to learn that it was a lie.  It's taken a lot out of me but I also know that the next one is going to be pleasant and not filled with fighting from the beginning, and I look forward to that.  I also know that to fight that long and that hard for something I believed in, a future with this person, was both foolish and also proved the level of my devotion.  I am not void of love.  I am love.  I just need to find that person that it's worth devoting my love to.  Find.  As if to say, that the person I will "find" is hidden away from me, or lost.  I don't believe they are either.  

Maybe love is about recognizing something of yourself in another person.  And, also recognizing what you lack and desire in a person who has the qualities you can learn from most.  Maybe love isn't about wanting more or any less, either.  Maybe love is about acceptance.  I think that for love to happen, that there needs to be a degree of transparency.  To allow one deserving person to know the hurts of the other so that they know the vulnerability that grows the strength that they love.  Does that make sense?  The hitch to it is knowing who deserves to know your vulnerability in order to understand your strength.  Cause there are a lot of jokers out there, people who pray on the most sacred parts of people and then use those parts against a person to hurt them.  And it seems that there are more jokers than there are princes. And maybe that's the problem.  It's not a matter of what love is in comparison to what it is not.  And it's not about whether love is lost to someone, or they don't know how to love.  Maybe it's that love is used as a weapon in the hands of those who have no desire to love.  

I don't know.  I just know that I'm ready for love.  No more pondering it, but ready to actually find it and experience it on my terms.  The real deal.

It's Been A While

It's been nearly 3 months since I last posted.  The major things to catch everyone up on is that Spring semester is over by a month now and I'm glad for it!  That was a long semester.  I ended up passing my math class which means I never have to take another math class again (YAY!)  I actually passed it with a whole grade better than I thought I would, so that's cool.  I did what I set out to do when I signed up for my first math class; I made it through every single one of my math classes without having to take any of them again, which is not the standard at UVU, so that's an achievement of it's own.

My Rhetoric and Grammar classes went well.  What I know is that I don't like rhetoric and grammar can go to you-know-where, which is pretty much where it's going now days, anyway.  Seriously, college grammar is an unpleasant way to torture oneself.  Truly unnecessary in my opinion.  If you can't tell, I'm really glad this last semester is over.  The classes were difficult, my work schedule was not pleasant, and I came out of something in December that truly messed with my mind and there was no time to "work through it" before Spring semester started and so I was working through the residual emotional stuff the entire semester.

All in all, I'm in a great place right now.  Truly.  I:'m going to Iceland in November with my best friend and I can't wait.  My cat has survived her boosters and being spayed, so she's a strong one and I'm glad for it because you all know I haven't had the best luck with kittens.  I live alone which is so nice, and my best friend lives right next door and we have lots of fun all the time.  

I've spent so much time thinking about what I've wanted to write about, and true to form, the thing that is inside of me that I need to "write out" of me is difficult to say simply.  So, I'm just going to write and hope it is cohesive.  

This last winter lasted forever and it really took it's toll on me emotionally.  The thing I "got out of" in December and that followed me all through this last semester was another really deep betrayal and it's really messed with me.  I've been angry.  I'm sure you've noticed it in the timbre of my writing.  And I will never understand why this person did what they did to me, let alone the man I spent a good amount of time loving and how he betrayed me as well.  The thing that happened to me has no rational explanation and in trying to rationally understand it, well that's the thing, how does a rational person learn to understand an irrational thing?  It's a mind-trick, over and over again.  And I've spent a lot of time obsessing about it.  And I'm done obsessing.  

Yesterday I came home from work and I started thawing out some ground turkey and I got an onion out and a cutting board.  I was dicing the onion when I cut a portion of it unevenly, so I went to correct the cut and I put my entire hand underneath the onion and sliced down and cut very deeply into my finger.  My neighbor-friend was talking to me when it happened and she saw the whole thing and she covered her mouth and screamed.  I immediately pulled my hand back and looked at my finger which hadn't started to bleed yet and I told my friend, "It's okay, I just nicked it."  And then blood just started pouring profusely from my finger.  I put my hand under cold running water and the water ran red, at which point I calmly said, "that's not good."  My friend was pacing and asking if she should take me to the hospital.  I told her that wasn't necessary, because it was just a little cut.  She told me she would get me a towel and I thanked her for that.  I pulled my hand out from under the faucet thinking the bleeding would stop.  I watched my hand as blood ran down my wrist and forearm and elbow.  It wasn't stopping.  My friend got back and we decided that maybe I should have it looked at.  We ended up at the hospital and in true form when I am afraid or nervous, I was cracking jokes right and left with the staff and we were all laughing as I was holding my hand up clasped with a towel. Long story, short (too late), the emergency room doctor ended up poking and prodding and causing all sorts of discomfort before he determined that my fingertip could just be glued and stitches weren't necessary.

What does any of that have to do with winter and obsession, or even the color pink?  When I got home from the hospital last night and I was laying in bed thinking back on the day, the shock wore off and it occurred to me how bad the situation could have been.  Had I cut a little deeper, the situation could have been so much worse, I could have chopped the tip of my finger clean off.  And that's when it occurred to me that everything I'd been obsessing over up until that moment was really quite unnecessary.  Since I got out of this "thing"/situation in December that I was in, I've felt like the betrayal I experienced took a piece of me.  And that piece, I didn't think I would ever reclaim.  And that is what had been making me so mad.  What I realized is that in the case of what I escaped from in December, I can reclaim that part of me.  I can take it back.  But, the incident that happened last night, that could have literally resulted in a piece of me being separated from the rest of myself and that would have sucked big time and would have been instantaneously more painful than the entire betrayal leading up to December and the residual anger that's occurred since then.  Good Heavens, I hope this is making sense.  

Betrayal is cold like winter.  Betrayal blocks out light and peace and happiness and it can last as long as the night for a child who is scared of the dark.  And in that dark lies obsession, a drive to understand what we will never understand because we aren't meant to understand it.  That obsession can blot out the morning when clarity does come because we don't see the blessing before our face because we want to understand the betrayal, so we are blinded to the joy.  That's where I've been.  My pink has been muted and made dingy and it no longer radiated light.  But, I saw the red last night for all that it was and it was cleansing.  I didn't lose my fingertip and I'm really happy about that.  And while the pain of accidentally cutting into my finger was blocked until I had a doctor poking and prodding at it, once I felt it, while it hurt, I was glad to feel it because I could feel.  How is that for a metaphor?  The physical injury to my finger last night acted as a ginormous metaphor for the last 2.5 years of my life.  And while I've been more open to feeling this year, with pink being my theme, I was only dabbling.  

For the first time in a very long time, I'm back.  It's been growing delicately, but I've got a new drive and a new passion.  This is my year to radiate love and life and I haven't done that for years.  It's scary, but it's good too.

Change Begins with the Individual

Shane Koyczan is a Canadian Spoken Work Poet.  I came across him on the TED awards for being chosen to be awarded the TED prize which is given to a person who boldly and creatively inspires and actively seeks global change.  Shane Koyczan speaks out about school bullying.

I've been in this funk for a little while now.  And I've wanted to write about it, but I haven't known how to write about.  Watching Shane Koyczan speak and perform his poem "To This Day" and the way he effortlessly mingled it directly into his speech so that you didn't know where his speech ended and his poem began... was truly impactful to me.  His poem spoke to me.  It's like he looked into my mind and wrote down what he saw, and that ability to connect your words to people you've never met and most likely never will meet, is truly a profound gift.

I was bullied as a pre-teen.  My bullying started before my pre-teen years.  I started being bullied as young as 6 years old, and the offender was my first grade teacher who was Baptist and felt it necessary to take out her hate of Mormonism on an innocent child, therefore setting the tone for how other students treated me.  By the time I was in the 5th grade, I was already very cautious on how I interacted with others.  I would imagine that a lot of my fellow classmates would have seen me differently (not cautious), but that's because every day I made an effort... a conscious effort to socialize with others.  And it was hard.  By the end of my 5th grade year, I had consistent bullies.  They were kids older than me and we weren't in the same school, but we lived in the same community, and we rode the same bus.  Riding the bus was a war zone for me.  Every day, if they felt like I looked at them wrong, I would be surrounded and ridiculed ruthlessly.  And they always felt like I looked at them wrong because as they told me, I "looked wrong".  They surrounded me and they called me fat and a heifer (I was neither of these things, I was a healthy 10 year old who was taller for her age than other 10 year olds).  They pulled me hair and shoved me between them, there were 4 of them on a consistent basis, and on occasion  a couple more would join in on the "fun".  They made up a rhyme about me.  It was something to the effect of being so ugly that they would try to remove my mask only to find out that it was my face.  It was at the part of "removing my mask" that they would pull my hair and touch my face roughly... not hitting, not scratching, but completely invading my personal space and grabbing my chin forcefully.  When they wouldn't be able to remove my mask then they would howl out with laughter and tell me that my favorite holiday must be Halloween because then I could walk freely out in the open in my hideousness and not look out of place and not scare others with how ugly I was.  I would get off the bus and I would take my time getting home (1 block away) and I would cry and then wait until the traces of my tears were gone and then I would go home.  The bus driver never stepped in.  By the time I was 13, I was angry and inwardly aggressive.  I became Gothic and stuck out even worse.  My best friend was considered a "problem kid" and had his own reputation.  But, in our friendship, we were safe with each other.  He was the most compassionate person I've ever known.  His bullying never stopped, really.  And when he was 17 years old, he committed suicide because... I don't know why, but I know part of it was that he was never treated "normally" by his peers.  There were other components to his choice to die, but being ostracized by his peers for being different was a very hard thing for him.  I know this, because he would open up to me about it, and I to him.  My bullying never stopped until the end of my Junior year when my bullies graduated high school.  No matter how "normal" I tried to make myself, these emotional terrorists never let up.  And it's impacted me to this day.

This poem hits home.  The feelings of worthlessness and being undeserving because you aren't "normal", or you stick out for some reason that other's don't... they follow you for the rest of your life.  And while the bullies go through their life bullying other's to get what they want, or maybe they grow up and stop bullying, and settle down to have a family and work at their job that pays the bills... they don't think a second about second guessing themselves, because no one ever second guessed them.  But to the one who was bullied, self doubt becomes a way of life.  That doesn't mean self doubt has to be your life, because there is life after bullying, it's something that you have to fight for though.  Becoming an adult is difficult enough already, add into the mix learning to trust yourself and love yourself and respect yourself after a major portion of your life being told you aren't good enough or "enough", period... makes it that much more difficult.

The point of this post is not to be depressing.  I'm choosing to speak out about my experiences being bullied because bullying is not a matter of kids "just being kids", it goes so far beyond that.  The same rationalization could be applied to war and dictators, "Oh, the war on terrorism is just politicians being politicians... politicians can be mean."  Bullying is an emotional war and it takes place every day in every school across the world.  And teachers stand by and watch.  Administrators don't dare get involved because there is so much fear involved in correcting the behavior of a child whom is not your own.  And other children standing by watching don't dare say anything because if they do, then they are next.  Where is the protection?  Kids who are bullied are the most loving and generous of their classmates.  I'm not saying that in honor of myself.  I'm saying that in honor of the people I know who have been bullied.  Their hearts are kind and compassionate and delicate and that should be protected, not betrayed.

If we, as adults, expect change to happen in schools then we need to set the example to those who look to us as an example.  And we need to be actively involved in pursuing a positive change where it's needed.  If you witness something that is "wrong" in your book, you need to react against it, not in an antagonistic way, but you need to respond in a way that will promote and encourage something better.  We need to let people know when we appreciate them, especially teenagers, because they have it freaking rough.  There is so much out there about what is "wrong" with teenagers and what they can do to be "better" or "worthy" of attention, and it's all coming from the media and from authoritative figures in their lives that only see them a mere portion of their lives.  Some teenagers have rough home lives.  They need encouragement.  They need to know that they are "good" and that they are important and respected and appreciated.  The social structure that a child and teenager are submitted to on a daily basis is a huge component on their behavioral "makeup" as an adult.  If we want a "better" tomorrow then we need to start nurturing those that will be leaders of tomorrow.  It sounds hokey in a "glass-perpetually-half-full" kind of way, but whatever you want to call it, it's idealistic, but it is still possible.  Change begins with the individual and leads to those impacted by the individual.  Change is always possible.