Bookmarks & Affectations of 2021 (1/?)
This is a summary of all the quotes, articles, stories I have bookmarked and ruminated on over the course of 2021.
Some ideas are larger than others, provoked further by conversation with friends, lovers, strangers.
Romantic love is a disappointing illusion
Alain de Botton first introduced the irony of modern and romantic love to my psyche, and though I've soaked in his material of see your loved one like a baby and you'll find them easier to love and we are in love with those who hurt us in the most familiar ways…it's just hard to kick the habit of seeing romantic love through the lens of Hollywood and Disney.
My expectations for an ultimate experience runs deep. Most of the time, I'm not even aware that I'm projecting illusory aspirations onto my most important relationships. If you ask me to clarify the experience to you, I lack the words for it, for I haven't thought so far.
That's the blind yearning of something illusory and irrational. Essentially, it's a yearning for losing myself into a larger whole, disregarding my attachment history, and disregarding the ability for my body and psyche to even go into that level of surrender or transcendence. Take me, in any shape or form, because I don't want to live by my own two feet ever.
On the other hand, I am acutely aware of how little I know about communicating tenderness. Disappointment rose again and again simply because I don't have the tools to initiate intimacy. Intellectual knowledge and bodily knowledge are different. Some times, I would even tell myself I didn't have a need for it, that I could go back to being the invulnerable teen in the face of loveless parents.
Nicola T's description of her mania tore open my current reality and formed a wormhole straight into the earlier days of my late teens. For a weekend, I relived my teen self and noticed the ambiguity and lack of feeling. I gained a deeper understanding of how I developed my own MPDG narrative.
More leads: Inner marriage , narcissistic romantic love re Jung. You don't love the person, you just love the projection.
Podcast: Inner Marriage by Marion Woodman & Robert Bly
“Though no one notices at the time, in-loveness obliterates the humanity of the beloved. One does a curious kind of insult to another by falling in love with him, for we are really looking at our own projection of God, not at the other person. If two people are in love, they tread on star dust for a time and live happily ever after—that is so long as this experience of divinity has obliterated time for them. Only when they come down to earth do they have to look at each other realistically and only then does the possibility of mature love exist. If one person is in love and the other not, the cooler one is likely to say, "We would have something better between us if you would look at me rather than at your image of me.” ~ Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche
Ambient love is accessible
The last time I sulked about my lack of romantic love, I lost sleep for days. My limbs were tired from single-handedly carrying my tender body, in need of a loving touch, my mental posture was parched and frail. This in sharp contrast with my actual, plump body, swollen and filled with comfort foods and hateful words to remind me of how truly disconnected I felt from both body and reality.
Despite all that, I did come down from my passionate resentment. In its place, a soft wave of ambient love lapped over my being. I felt a generous, innocent, tender and freeing love for the animals around me. And to some extent, the birdsong and the earth that inhabited me.
Ambient love filled me without need for pretences. A pet licking my face with sticky and fishy breath demanded less complaint and resentment than I ever would for a man. The moment romantic love stopped being the peak loving experience, I made room for ambient love to wash over my being, to cleanse me of expectation-disappointment cycles, to teach me how to love without judgement.
A pet's loving devotion and loyalty is inspiring. What have I done to simply enjoy her endless attention and curiosity? Absolutely nothing. Even a painful claw on the arms or thighs are easily forgiven, knowing the pure innocence in her wanting to be petted.
Perhaps a deeper practice of lovingkindness will eventually bring on more benevolent feelings towards fellow bipedal creatures. But I've made a significant leap here, and I'm eternally grateful for allowing myself to open into the arms of ambient love.
Half the road to happiness relies on other people
I'm not talking about the hedonic treadmill kind of happiness, but the underlying goodness and earnestness that can come from genuine friendships and connections with people.
I've gotten pretty far on my own in terms of better quality of life, surrounding myself with a beautiful environment…the rest of the journey has been about connecting with the kind of people that makes me feel understood, that would consider my thoughts and regard me as essentially worthy of love.
Safety First
If you don't feel safe, a small part of you would always be wondering where the (metaphorical) fire escape is. Sometimes all it takes is the faintest whiff of smoke to sound the internal alarms, and send our bodies into a state of vigilance or ambiguity. This is especially true for traumatised bodies, people with attachment disruptions, etc. If even a small part of your attention is dedicated to fight or flight, your opponent can already sense it as soon as you dart your eyes across the room.
I did not realise I had been living in a world of vigilance, stiffness and invulnerability. While I like to think I've said yes to things more than ever, there seems to be a whole plane of reality which I'm not attuned to yet. A reality where I smile back when locking eyes with a stranger. A reality where I'm the one to ask how are you? first. A reality where I can hold out my hand and ask if someone wants to hold it. What could ambient safety and security feel like in my body? In my household?
More leads: Talk to friend Rachel Tan about feng shui and maximise feelings of safety and warmth at home.
So what if I'm broken?
Hannah Gadsby, in her highly praised Nanette, expressed this in a crescendo of vulnerability:
“I have lived a life. The damage done to me is real and debilitating. I will never flourish.”
Toxic positivity speaks lengths about how we're not broken and lacking. To that, Hannah Gadsby says:
“...To yield and not break, that is incredible strength”
To not acknowledge the brokenness is to remain invulnerable, to crawl back into the glass coffin of stiffness, lifelessness. Who scrapes by without a scuff or two? What's so interesting about an unseasoned living, an unexamined wound?
“There is no way anyone would dare… test their strength out on me, because you all know… there is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.”
To yield, to be seasoned…Easily brings me to Hafez's poem (thank you Vivek):
Don’t Surrender Your loneliness so quickly. Let it cut more Deep. Let it ferment and season you As few human Or even divine ingredients can. *
The greatest pains will yield in us the greatest strength. A taste of life's most demanding offerings, an integration of well-deserved wisdom. A fiery courage that keeps us living.
I've spoken about trauma for a whole year, and I am done. I don't want to discuss about the loneliness, the lack of ability, the learned helplessness. I want to advocate my attachment history more coherently, to integrate with it as if with a missing limb. I may not have the sensitivity or the vocabulary to communicate what I need, but I can certainly learn to feel into those parts of myself again.
A body like mine has spent years being unloved, abused, swollen, beaten, and neglected. To think that I can start experiencing the deeper pleasures of seawater wading through me, the kiss of the sun at 10am, the breeze at 7am, the warmth of a hand clutching mine…in due time, I say. I will spend a whole lifetime learning to feel deeply again.
“I saw that I had been trying to reduce the pain by placing expectations on other people and the world, that I wanted someone else to save me from this, to swoop in with the delicious story that the pain was wrong, as if it had been making an incorrect claim or breaking a law. And that’s what I thought, on some level – that there was a perversion of reality, that this pain should not be. And if the pain should not be, then intimacy with others is what should be, and the gap between myself and others became a burden that became both mine and theirs to resolve. Of course I’d never had these thoughts explicitly – but somewhere, deep down, that’s what had been happening.” ~ Aella on The Body of Isolation
Flirtation and the secret menu
Find the things and the people in life that you can flirt with, and do it a lot. Flirting is the infusion of liveliness into your being. Flirting is the kiss of life you offer to another. Flirting is the spark of a flame which will come into burning for longer than you think. It is the life-giver of opportunities and competence. It is also earnestly good doses of oxytocin.
A friend of mine told us a trick in becoming more flirtatious with life – Seeking out for the 'hidden' menu in all situations available to us. To tastefully exploit possibilities, to suck the marrow out of life.
What are the chances your opponent happily reciprocates? Or perhaps silently waiting for you to make the first move?
“I like to live always at the beginnings of life, not at their end. We all lose some of our faith under the oppression of mad leaders, insane history, pathologic cruelties of daily life.” ~ Anaïs Nin
What are the pathological cruelties you can shield yourself from, had you been more flirtatious with your life?
Thank you so much for reading all the way till here! Fortunately, this is not the end. I have plenty to share and review from bookmarks collected this year. And some thoughts that I’ve shared here are so early in its infancy, and so full of depth that it’ll take many revisions over the upcoming years.
I hope to have the next edition for you soon as we wrap up 2021. I hope you’re well.
If you’d like to write in communion, don’t hesitate to reply to this email. We’ll schedule something in.