“Do what you can. Want what you have. Be who you are.”
Forrest Church, minister,
All Souls Unitarian Universalist Church, New York City
I got a new pair of glasses a few days ago, and it opened my eyes to how I’ve been seeing the world most of my life.
I notice that my vision was getting pretty clouded and when I'd look into light, there was a constant haze around figures and objects. The glasses were the culprit, with their scratches , outdated prescription and faded protective coating. For over a year, I had considered getting a new pair. But the concern for how I would look in new glasses kept slowing me down. Every time I'd look at new frames, I'd get stumped. Which ones looked best? What was flattering? What was in fashion? I didn't have a clue, so I kept putting it off.
Finally, a month ago, I stopped by the optical department at Costco, tried on two pairs of frames very much like the ones I had been wearing for 10 years and ordered my new prescription. And last week, I picked up the new glasses. When I put them on, I had my revelation. I was so happy to be able to look around and see everything in sharp clarity. I realized that, probably for the first time in my life, I was more interested in what I could see looking out at the world than in what other people could see looking in at me. I had shifted perspective in my life to being the one whose perception I valued most.
In some ways, the possibility of this different perspective had always occurred to me to me as a selfish place to stand. Like many women, I was raised to put other people first. The problem with this way of living for me was that I gradually learned to feel unable to know or say what I wanted. I could only know what I wanted when I would find myself in situations or relationships that I didn’t want. These experiences would push me up against dissatisfaction and pain, pointing my attention in the opposite direction at what I really wanted. That’s when I could speak up. Unfortunately, by then my words tended to take the form of complaint. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but complaining isn’t really the most effective way of getting what you want.
My first experience of what I thought was love was with my college boyfriend. He told me I “was the best he ever had.” I figured this meant I was all he wanted and that he would always see me that way. By the end of freshman year, I believed we were soulmates, and I trusted him implicitly. When I came back after the summer break, however, I discovered that his version of love wasn’t exactly the same as mine when an embarrassing medical problem revealed that he had been with another girl (that’s what we called ourselves then – this was 1971, after all) over the summer. Later, I discovered he he had spent the night with yet another girl, as well.
I was shocked, heartbroken, and I thought this was evidence that I was not enough for him.
If he wanted to be with someone else, my viewpoint told me that the problem was with me. I stayed with him for another year and a half, spending much of the time worried that I wasn’t pretty enough or good enough for him. During my junior year, he asked me to marry him while we were fighting. He told me that I should accept his proposal because I would never find anyone who loved me as much as he did because I had “a lousy body,” and why should I pursue a journalism career since I “would never get a job anywhere other than a mediocre newspaper,” and some other slight that I’ve since forgotten. Somehow, even then, I knew this wasn’t a great basis for a marriage, and I said no. (And by the way, I eventually ended up working for The Washington Post, not a bad newspaper in most people’s opinions. Thank you very much!)
Still, in some troubled part of me, I thought he was right, but the part of me that objected to his stinging words eventually triumphed and I managed to walk away from that relationship.
But I didn’t so easily escape the internal conversation that continued to whisper, “You really aren’t good enough.” That voice haunted me for the next 30 years, and still bedevils me when I forget that it ain’t necessarily so.
It was a conundrum, and it brings to mind stories I have heard from people who have consulted with me for counseling services over the years. One young man -- let's call him Joe, not his real name – says he sometimes is captured by worries that he’s not smart enough or handsome enough. He looks for evidence in other peoples’ reactions to him to try to convince himself that he is good enough. When the worries get the better of him, he finds himself paralyzed and unable to reach out.
But Joe also describes moments when he's been able to outmaneuver the worries. For example, not long ago, he went to a dating event where he knew he would be meeting more than a dozen women. Before the activity started, he sat next to a pretty young woman in the waiting room and struck up a conversation. He forgot about the worries when he wasn't under pressure to act according to expectations, and he was happy to find that he was more interested in the woman than he was in his own image.
Then there's the young woman (call her Polly) who is exceptionally successful in her work, has many close friendships and attracts romantic partners almost effortlessly. Her problem: she finds herself uninterested in potential partners who seem too eager to be with her, but inordinately interested in men who present a "challenge”; in other words, men who are not readily available to her for one reason or another -- too much self-involvement, too much working, too much partying, other women. This is a familiar dilemma, one which I often hear in my therapy office. It reminds me of the old Woody Allen joke: I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member. It's also a familiar refrain for those of us afflicted with the problem of getting caught up in a belief that our own interests and preferences are not worthy.
My second “true love” was a talented and tormented photographer at the first newspaper where I worked. When he lost his job after trying to organize a union among the photography staff, he asked me to quit my job and go with him to pursue his singing career. My own career was just starting and I wasn’t ready for such an adventure, plus the awakening feminist in me refused to allow me to follow a man. So I said no.
His response was violent. And once again, I became a victim, both of his actions and my own guilt about rejecting him. The “selfish” idea fed the guilt, telling me I was bad for wanting what I wanted and not letting somebody’s else’s agenda come first. I somehow managed to not completely surrender to the notion, however, and I moved on, but I was confused and conflicted.
I muddled through the rest of my 20s, trying to find a passionate purpose and hoping that a relationship would one day be part of my life. I eventually found the purpose I had been looking for in my work as a psychotherapist, but in my personal relationships, I continued to flounder. I married in my 30s, mostly because I wanted a child. The parenting part of that worked out great. My daughter Molly is 32 now, and she has brought deep joy and love to my life. Her father, John, has been very loyal and attentive to her, and he and I have maintained a friendly relationship, which is primarily built on caring for Molly. But our marriage ended after seven years, probably because the foundation was built on my desire to have children.
I married again in my 40s, and we stayed “together” for nine years, but the relationship had soured just six months after the wedding. You see, I had been infatuated with him because he was handsome, talented and clever, and he appeared to have chosen me. What I had seen but chose to overlook was the poisoning effect of chronic criticalness and sarcasm that plagued him. I thought he would learn to shake free of those habits, but I wouldn’t have chosen him if I had known him in a work environment. He is the kind of guy I would have steered clear of, and that’s what happened after we were together for a few years.
I wouldn’t leave the marriage, though, because I was determined to stay and “make it work,” meaning I wanted to find some way to love him even though I really didn’t like him. Lucky for me, he eventually left me. Was I happy when this happened? No. I was devastated. It took about a year for me to realize he had done me a big favor, one which, at the time, I couldn’t see clearly enough to do for myself.
That's why my experience with the new glasses and clear vision captured my attention.
How did I finally get to this simple moment of unfettered and easy self-care? It's been a long road, and even as I've been writing this article, I've slipped back into getting captured by someone else's opinions about what I should be doing and how I should be doing it. What I can see now, though, is that it is only when I lose my grounding that someone else's opinions can hurt me.
The road that I've traveled is like the path of so many others, like many of the people who see me in therapy. It's a road full of potholes and detours and wrong turns, even some collisions and injuries. When we forget that we're in the driver's seat, we can really go down some dangerous dead-end streets.
So how does this happen? The problem for many of us, I believe, is that we learned somewhere early in our lives that somebody else, or something outside of us, is the authority to be honored. Sometimes this happened because the adults in our lives as children tried to steer us too rigidly, maybe to protect us from the dangers they feared in the world, maybe because they thought that was the best way to take care of us, or maybe because they were distracted with problems of guilt or sadness or rage or addiction that were overwhelming them. This confusion about knowing our own preferences and honoring our own experience of life is epidemic in our culture, I believe.
Sometimes it’s the stories that shape our sense of identity in relationship that are in charge. For women, there’s often a strong message that we’re supposed to be nurturing and take care of the needs of others at all costs. For men, the messages are more likely to be about performance and achievement. If we would just stick to these rules, perhaps we would fit together easily. Realistically, though, none of us is a norm, and we suffer when we try to fit ourselves into these too-tight clothes.
This confusion gets called many names: depression, anxiety, panic, worry, fear, loneliness. Perhaps It’s our work in life to wake up from confusion, to remove the old glasses that cloud our vision and to see clearly who we really are, what we really want, and do what we can to bring that into being.
-- Jane Ashley, LPC
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