Luftmensch

I am trying out Internet dating right now.  I have always had trouble with relationships.  Possessing at age-three, a preternatural sense that I would one day be described as a “chore of a woman”, I began to calculate my assets alongside my liabilities.  Now I am repeating this process on-line. 

Do I have the perfect, yet imperfect smile? Do I present myself as natural and unpretentious, without letting myself go? And worst of all, am I too twisted and incomprehensible to be in a real relationship with any sane human being? This has always been my biggest fear.  I grew up believing that I was a twisted and hideous freak.   In fact, a classmate of mine inadvertently validated my own anxiety on this subject in fourth grade.   We were sitting across from each other, and she picked up a piece of tape.  With the coldness and confidence of the receptionist at an inner-city AIDS clinic, she  said, “This is my life, smooth and perfect.”  She unblinkingly stared at me, and without pause wrinkled up the tape and continued, “This is your life,  a mess.” I wasn’t sure why she was saying this to me.  It never occurred to me that any ten-year-old, who seethed with such intensity, might not be so together herself.  At the time it seemed very meaningful that she was speaking to me and me alone.

I now know the meaning of self-love.  I grew up in my family feeling smart, charming, and attractive, and never feeling that I was enough.  I was trapped in an unbearable paradox.  While I did not feel worthy, I perceived myself as projecting  outward luminescence that would magically make others love me.  Because I felt unlovable, I thought I was therefore more deserving of affection.  In my sadness, I vied for sympathy.  If only, I thought, I can make someone recognize my loneliness.  After all, it is those who suffer most that are most deserving of love.  Wrong.  We are all deserving of love.   

Now I have learned the truth.  How did I stumble across this truth?  I can’t really say.  It as if I woke up one evening and the insanity and hatred that I had been feeling for years just stopped.  It just got cut off mid-stream.  And then something else tooks its place.  I learned: Love is not the same as brilliance, and so I stopped trying to be brilliant. Love is not the same as sweetness, and so I stopped trying to be sweet.  In fact ”love” is not the same thing as love.  Sometimes love is merely the absence of hatred, the point were we stop ourselves and really breathe.