The Worry and Work of Love

When life is imagined and then created, there’s no telling or predicting the sojourns that little soul will take throughout its journey. It’s probably this fact alone that cruelly rations sleep to every mother in every corner of the world for each of her remaining nights. It’s the un-knowing. The idea that your body made life possible and in doing so, it made a way for another heart to beat on its own, independent of your vessel, no longer able to draw from you the raw inputs needed for survival.

It was my own mother who probably never imagined the sojourn my soul would take into the land of the un-deserving. She didn’t know it would get stuck there as if the tentacles of this complex had been caught in quicksand, unable to free itself from the harsh perception that I wasn’t a good person. It was much later, after she was bestowed the mixed basket of what she would learn is the mother’s sentient lot, a complicated emotional weave of reeds all representing the feelings that are so deeply ingrained and native in the giving of life, that she would understand her destiny now included the endless agonizing over her brood. But before all that, she had simply lied down with a lustful boy, never thinking that maybe I might come to be. She was just a girl herself, now flush with new life. Predictions and worries didn’t yet occupy the real estate in her mind, she was too full of despair and despair has a different makeup from worry. Despair needs your attention today. Worry steals from your tomorrows. And with this, her fret not easily outgrown, her mouth was too full of questions about the mechanics of how to build a family to worry about how to eventually shield this small, growing spirit from the damaging effects of self-doubt.

I’d end up spending a majority of my life in this place - the land of vast misconceptions. The keystone of this faulty foundation was a version of me that I reticently revealed. I kept her nice and safe, tucked away, so she could proliferate in size and importance deep within me. In fact, I did such a good job of securing her chokehold on my confidence that she had no choice but to succeed me as the more powerful one. It was torture thinking from time to time that maybe I was good only to then bump up against evidence that I thought told a different story. I hated thinking this way, I hated this whole process. A little flicker of a flame inside me would flirt with the idea of outshining the self-assigned strata that had driven so many other things out of my life…but it was damned to limited success. Sure, I had brief departures to places where smiles are abundant and laughs are the RSVP for more of it all. And it was here that I would outwardly project a version of me that said I had no reason not to like me. That I deserved all that good company. All those great friends and all the other wonderful things that came my way despite my deep energetic attempt to stave it all off, setting it aside for someone else who deserved it more.

I’d grow and create life myself. I’d worry and give away my tomorrows to that beast which demanded them. At night, I’d take the winks I could get in order to give myself a break from wondering about what my own sweet little spirits were going to experience on their paths. My first babe was a girl and so I’d agonize, wringing my mind’s hands over how to protect her from hating herself. From loathing herself to depths that should require some level of parental occupation on top of her person so that the hate could be suffocated completely, squeezing out with it every other lackluster thing from her self-image, leaving space only for love to live and grow inside of her. This certainly would’ve been the rock in my formative stream. The way a rock can change the direction of the water flowing around it…I needed that desperately. Growing up, I never thought or threatened to hurt myself but damn if hating yourself isn’t death by a thousand cuts. And I didn’t even want a whisper of this for her…not even a faint calling from the distance, luring her away from herself.

I didn’t even know this was my modus operandi. The well-worn paths in my heart were always paying homage to this other part of me until…..until…..I realized what she was doing to this one life I was given. And you can’t unsee things like this once you’ve seen them. I was visiting the well of self-loathing one day, trying to wash off of me the feelings of inadequacy. Trying, once again, to figure out how to foster a hospitable environment for love to grow. And as these things do for me, a voice in a podcast was borrowed to be the lighthouse in my perennial storm. The woman speaking said “Deep down, I always thought I wasn’t a good person. I had to learn mercy toward myself. I had to embrace an attitude of radical friendliness toward myself.” And there it was. Radical. Another sage I’d been listening to recently was using this word. Radical. And just like that, I knew the stars were aligning to show me the way home to myself.

Because there are no coincidences, I believe. Only signs you either are or aren’t willing to notice. And this one deserved room in the garden I’d just plotted out the space for deep within my heart. It was now the fourth voice in my orbit that was beckoning me to till that soil so that I could grow an abundance of love. These voices were telling me of the seeds I needed to plant, what to do with the seedlings once they sprout, the nurturing ways through which I could provide the optimal growing environment, and ultimately, how to harvest a life that only has space for love. Radical love. Bright, compassionate, radiant love.

I’m listening. I’m right here. Eyes wide open. My heart a tabula rasa.