Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

—He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, William Butler Yeats

She knows how much I’ve fallen for her.

And by giving her my heart in such a way, she’s sharing the burden. The last thing she wants to do is hurt me, and she thinks herself selfish for wanting to be held just so. But I know what I’m getting into. I know the risks.

There’s no point in denying ourselves the joy of what we have now. To be lying next to each other when we talk into the early hours of the day, bodies pressed against one another while the morning light washes over us, is worth any chance at being hurt. We can deal with the inevitable later.

So she treads softly, on me and my heart.

And rests her head on my chest when I hold her.

I left when the sun was setting. Along the way, the road stretched out infinitely before me, as if to say that I can always get away, and there is always more to go. The tree line danced and waved across the horizon, eventually disappearing with the sun. Then the lines of red and white in each direction guided me all the way to Darren’s house.

In it are little things from the house I grew up in — some candles here, some cabinets there — that my parents didn’t want after the divorce. So strange to see innocuous objects from my childhood in a different setting.

It was the first time we’ve been completely sober together since we were kids. No alcohol, no weed.

I found out a couple things I wouldn’t have known otherwise:

• My dad started dating someone. He is currently single again.
• He has a dance floor at his house and a nice car. This is typical of my dad, who loves his toys.
• My mother is still insecure.
• My parents still see each other, but not alone. The current social rule among the group of parents, is that you can’t invite one to a party without inviting the other.

A weekend of sweet indulgence, late nights, and intimate conversation. No one understands my relationships the way Darren does, because we both share these quixotic ideas about love. It was so comforting to be able to express myself on these things without having to explain my underlying feelings, as if someone could truly understand me, especially important in this current phase of my life.

It made me realize that home isn’t where the parents are, something I used to believe¹. It’s an idea.

A comforting place you can go to get away, where you’re completely accepted for who you are.

1. I’m not sure exactly when I stopped believing this, but it was probably somewhere between the time my parents got divorced and I stopped talking to my mom.

An example from Tai Chi is the posture of the p’eng shape. If you’re too stiff, you can be pushed over easily. If you’re too relaxed, you can be collapsed easily. People make the mistake of thinking that you have to be one or the either — that you’re either resisting a force or letting it move you — without understanding that there exists a “somewhere in between”. It’s difficult to explain how something can be structured and relaxed at the same time.

A Taoist example is the idea of wu wei, or “action without action”. Practically speaking, it’s the concept that you don’t do anything that isn’t necessary, and by remaining reactionary you let nature (or the interaction of Heaven and Earth, as Taoists romantically say) run it’s course. In doing so, “nothing is done yet nothing is left undone”.

Last class, my teacher said “Tai Chi is easy, that’s why so few people do it well.” His words reminded me of verse 70 of the Tao Te Ching.

My teachings are very easy to understand
  and very easy to teach
yet so few in this world understand
  and so few are able to practice

The answers remain elusive and difficult to explain because they must be felt, as in Tai Chi, or experienced, as in Taoism, a characteristic of the paradoxical nature of both the ancient Chinese martial art and philosophy.

It’s a world where every song is a journey, every chord is more dulcet than the last, and I don’t want to, I need to dance.

It’s not a simple feeling. There’s so much to consider — new realizations, unfamiliar territory, questions of fate, unresolved proprieties, inevitable change — that it’s all a mix of emotions unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. But who says that life has to be simple? All I know for sure is that I love her, even if she doesn’t love me the same way.

And for now, I’ll wear this smile like my heart on my sleeve.

The crooked become straight
The empty become full
The worn become new
Have little and gain much
Have much and be confused
So the Sage embraces the One and becomes a model for the world

—Verse 22, Tao Te Ching

Yesterday, I woke up from a nap at four in the afternoon. Usually, when I wake up from a long nap, I feel groggy and uneasy, but this time I was bright and rested.

When I went outside, the rain had stopped. It washed the bird poop off my windshield, it filled the air with the lingering scent of cleanliness. In my car, Becky started singing in the stereo.

And every time she hit me with the words “cavalry of light” in her wavering vibrato, I had to sing at the top of my lungs along with her, my voice cracking, my dignity left behind me.

This morning, I was running late for work. But by the time I got to the car, the sun had been out long enough to warm the breeze. I could roll the windows down and let the air in. The traffic made me even more late, but it let me take my time too. It gave me the chance to enjoy Lenny crooning to me about how true love leaves no traces.

It’s like I’m waiting for something to go wrong, because I’m not used to things going this well. But nothing’s going wrong. Things are be working out. Everything has a reason, no matter how small or trivial.

Taoist theory says that surrender brings perfection. Don’t force anything. Allow things to happen, and they’ll naturally balance out. Perhaps I’m finally believing this, instead of simply understanding it.

When things are going badly, you’re not really behind.

You’re just waiting for the good that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

Her name was Christine. She was thin lipped. Frail limbed. Not the least bit camera shy, as she pulled her shirt up to expose a breast, like she had fallen on the grass this way and the folds in her clothes rearranged themselves on her body.

Here she is on a horse in the night. Here she is, grim-faced, cradling her son. There was a scar on her neck from a suicide attempt years earlier, and through a series of photographs, you could see the scar heal.

For seven years she was married, before she successfully jumped to her death from the 9th floor of an apartment in East Berlin.

This is someone who understood his art, his morbidity, his need to capture her suicide in a frame, then publish the image of her body on the pavement, looking down from the 9th floor, along with insouciant pictures of a teacup, a playground, a tank, three plants.

And as soon as I had found her, she’s gone.

Should I be happy that she existed? Should I be sad that she’s gone? Should I be punished for comparing the women I’ve had to her?

Is this painful, or beautiful, or both?

During my first session, my therapist noted that this was a mutual process. It wasn’t as if he was going to surgically remove an issue with me, it would take the both of us working together, with a progressive effort from me.

That’s what I’m doing now. I’m determined to fix myself.

Dependence

• I have a general feeling of incompetence, which leads to a lack of trust in my own judgments. As a result, I have a very difficult time making decisions because I’m paralyzed by the fact that I may make the wrong one.
  • I can trace this back from my childhood to my early twenties when my parents were overbearing and would never let me make any of my own decisions. In fact, they would make most of my decisions for me, including significant ones, like my program of study in university.
• The result is that I tend to ask people for advice on everything, although I’m dependent on Pat the most. This is because Pat is so smart and experienced, and has never, ever let me down. What I’ve come to realize, however, is that Pat is so smart because he’s already made his mistakes.
• This was linked to my anxiety, where I felt like I couldn’t handle anything on my own.
• I’ve been trying to fix this is to keep in mind that it’s not the end of the world if I make a mistake, and that sometimes, making mistakes is the only way to learn.

Unrelenting Standards revisited

• I realized that I tend to have unrelenting standards when it comes to life in general, but especially in my writing, photography, or art because I feel like this is the only way I will ever distinguish myself and be worth something. I feel like if I’m not the best, then I’m worthless. As a result, it’s difficult for me to enjoy my life, even something as simple as sitting down and watching a movie.
  • The roots of this are more difficult to trace than I initially thought. While my parents were a tremendous influence in terms of making me feel like their love was conditional, I believe a large part of this lifetrap has to do with me making up for my emotional deprivation by filling my deeper emptiness with success.
• Even when I do something that I know I should be proud of and satisfied, I feel like there’s always another thing to do, another level to reach. While this fuels my self-improvement and has gotten me to where I am now, I’ve come to realize that there’s an imbalance between the effort and the payoff. I work too hard for too little enjoyment.
• I may realize this, but it’s a hard habit to break. I have a feeling that I’ll need to fix my emotional deprivation at the same time to do so.

Which is why she tries to cling to me so desperately, even when I try so vehemently to avoid her. It’s the same way that some men or women only love the idea of marriage, instead of their spouses. They’re relationships based on all the wrong reasons.

Realizing this has made me wonder; did I ever actually love my girlfriends, or did I just love the idea of love?

It’s funny that I started going to therapy for my anxiety attacks, but he keeps digging up issues I never knew that I had.

Not that any of it is as debilitating the way the anxiety attacks were, but it’s made me realize that they have affected my quality of life. All of it stems from my parents (as opposed to being teased, some kind of incident, etc.). Once again, I say that I don’t like to blame them, but the glaring fact is that I can now trace every issue back to my childhood.

The idea of a self-destructive pattern whereby we repeat the pain of our childhoods is called a lifetrap. They’re categorized differently, depending on the school of psychology one prescribes to, but my most significant ones (i.e. rated “very high”) are emotional deprivation, dependence, unrelenting standards, and punitiveness. When I first started, I also had pessimism, but this has mostly gone with my anxiety.

I’ll touch on two of them now:

Emotional Deprivation

• One of the things that sparked the realization that I didn’t have a regular childhood was when I was asked to fill out a diagnostic questionnaire. I was told to rate how strongly I felt about the statement “I have not had someone to nurture me, share him/herself with me, or care deeply about what happens to me”. I thought to myself, “That’s normal? People have that?”.
• This is why I feel alone and detached from the world. It’s not quite as clean-cut as this, as there are a bunch of other issues that factor into the issue, but it’s an overall feeling.
• Until that point, I never considered the idea that such people exist. I assume the parents are supposed to fill this role, and eventually a spouse.
• In many people with emotional deprivation, the lifetrap manifests itself in relationships where they remain emotionally distant. For me, it’s more of a difficulty communicating to my girlfriends about my needs, and then feeling disappointed when my needs aren’t met.
  • This makes me wonder how certain relationships would have worked out if I was a different person and didn’t keep breaking up with my girlfriends
  • Unfortunately, I could write a book on this.

Unrelenting Standards

• I’ve realized that I’m still being too hard on myself. This stems from the expectations put on me as a child, or simply the fact that I think being unsatisfied with stagnancy is healthy because self-improvement makes me a better person. Most likely, a bit of both.
  • Sometimes I have to compare myself to someone like Pat to give myself perspective on this issue. He’s a person who hasn’t “achieved” much when evaluated by my standards, but he’s happy and that’s what matters. It makes me question what I’m trying so hard to achieve. I think of an old Calvin and Hobbes strip, where Calvin says, “It’s hard to argue with someone who looks so happy”
  • I understand that it’s the pursuit of greatness, not greatness itself, that should make life worth living, so when I have this self-destructiveness as a result, it doesn’t quite make sense. I’m working on this. It helps me to keep a quote by Charlotte Cushman in mind: “To try to be better is to be better”.
  • A side effect is that I’m too hard on other people because I project my unrelenting standards on them as well.
  • A lot of people tell me that I wouldn’t have had so much pressure to be the best and perform well if I wasn’t an only child.

1. I don’t say solved because I don’t think one can completely eliminate anxiety

Some time when I was a child, I asked my mother if she loved her nails more than she loved me. She had this kit full of nail tools — clippers, files made of metal and emery, toe separators, fake nails separated in little boxes, even a small hand-held, battery-operated dremel with different attachments used to grind, sand, and polish — that she would carry with her around the house. When I asked her this question, she picked me up in her arms, and vehemently denied it. I didn’t believe her though, not in my heart. She had always paid more attention to her nails than to me.

My dad was no better. One time I googled his name to find his work number, and came across an audio/visual site where he had written a small paragraph as a review on a projector he had. I was crushed. It was more effort than he had ever put into my life, sitting in a couple of short sentences in front of me. It would have been okay if he had been so uninterested in everything, but he wasn’t. He loved his car, he loved his home theatre, he loved his karaoke, but me he had no interest in.

So, before I had become a teenager, I started to look for some kind of approval from other people. At that point, it was Andrew and Alex. They were my best friends in grade 3 and 4, but I changed schools in grade 5. Even after this, I tried to hang out with them but they seemed to be more interested in school, and we lost touch.

Pretty soon, I realized that I wasn’t anyone’s “best friend”. I cried and I cried and I cried. I felt like I needed this to define myself. I needed be a priority to someone because I certainly wasn’t a priority to my parents. Without being someone’s best friend, I was worthless.

As an adult, you may feel insecure about certain aspects of your life. You lack self-confidence in areas where you feel vulnerable — intimate relationships, social situations, or work. Within your vulnerable areas, you feel inferior to other people. You are hypersensitive to criticism or rejection.

I still feel this way now. The problem is that the need isn’t being met. Everyone puts other people first, and the one foundation I believed I had in my life has crumbled. I’m never important enough.

Two things keep me from killing myself.

The thought that one day, I may mean something to someone. Or the thought that one day, I’ll be able to stop defining myself through others, and simply be content with who I am.

Either way, something’s gotta give.