“All I want is for those who love me to love me no matter what.
And if you can’t love me no matter what, love me from further away.
And if you can’t love me at all, stay away altogether.”
~Shanna, Love Me or Leave Me
I’ve been thinking about our failures in love a lot lately.
I have had people slander me, insult me, turn away from me, decide they don’t want to be my friend anymore or have lost respect for me.
All because I don’t want to put on a mask and cover my face amid the coronavirus chaos.
I have my reasons, which I’ve outlined several times for anyone who asks, but in the end, for some, my reasons are not enough. “Put the mask on, or I will hate you. You will become my enemy.” They say.
This conflict comes at a time when I’m focusing on concepts of unconditional love, both giving and receiving. In the past, when someone insulted me or offended me in some way, I struck back and engaged in a sort of “hate competition.” Who can hurt who the worst? Who can cut deeper?
Me! Me! Me!
I had a conversation with my sister once about our ability to hurt people with our words, to shut people out, close the door to our hearts, and cut cut cut.
It took me years to realize I didn’t want to cut anymore. Hell, it took me years to even see that I had a choice. An alternative.
It took me still a bit longer to understand that just because I didn’t want to cut, didn’t mean I wasn’t going to encounter people still willing and ready to cut me. People act as mirrors for us, after all, and I still have much to learn, and much to teach, about this love/hate dichotomy.
I don’t want to be hateful and hurtful.
And I don’t want to judge anyone who is still feeling hateful and hurtful. That’s just more of the same.
There’s a step in the process of turning to love that I experienced, and I’m watching others in my life experience it now. It is the superiority complex of choosing love.
“See?” We say. “I choose love. You still choose hate and fear.” The implication here is that I am so much better than you because you are stuck in hate.
You Don’t Love Me. You Don’t Deserve Me?
I wrote a piece a long while back, under the influence of some really good whiskey, on the Marilyn Monroe quote pictured above. I was reflected on how broken I was, on my healing process, and how I didn’t want to bleed on everyone around me as I healed. The full quote is as follows:
“I’m selfish, impatient, and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.”
I was sure, so sure on that whiskey soaked night, that what Marilyn is trying to say is that if you want me in your life, you will have to put up with all my bullshit. Sucks for you. You’re lucky to have me.
Now… I’m not so sure.
Now, I’m pretty sure she was saying what I hear my own self saying. “Fuck. I’m so fucked up. Please love me anyway. I’m worth it.”
“I need you to love me more than you love your ego.” I said to my husband this weekend.
We had taken the girls to this magical little creek, and I had been feeling some resistance from him for about a week. A wall had come up between us.
Ego Tells Us to Fear. Fear Tell Us to Shut Down. Love Tells Us to Open All the Way Up.
We both knew going into our move away from the only home we had ever known together in the San Francisco Bay Area, into a little house on a hill in rural Southern Oregon, that the transition for both of us would be hard.
We’re different people at our bases, and we naturally have had different experiences with the move.
To be fair, I moved last September, and I work from home. He just moved in with us in March, and he had to get to work almost right away.
I’ve had time to adjust, to go through all my internal and external pressures, without also having to focus on my marriage.
He is now having to adjust, working full time, going through all his internal and external pressures, and has to answer to a wife who wants (demands?) obviously, expressed, professed unconditional love.
Not easy. I get it.
But still… I want to be loved like that.
No matter what.
“I’m fucked up, and I fuck up, and I’m wrong, and I do the wrong thing, and I fail, and I make mistakes, and I struggle to admit my mistakes, but I’m standing here now in front of you telling you that I love you, that I will do anything for you, that I am committed to you, to us, to our family. I am fully exposed, raw, vulnerable, and actively killing my ego. I’m asking you to do the same.” I’m saying all of this quietly, crying, emotional, while our children are off playing in the distance, picking flowers and falling over tiny slippery river rocks.
In the Name of Love: Kill the Ego
It’s a lot to ask.
Kill your ego.
Kill the thing that has protected you from hurt for all these years.
And I’m not killing my ego for my husband. I kill my ego for myself. He just happens to benefit from it. For, as Meggan Watterson tells us, in Mary Magdalene Revealed, “to love another is to love oneself.”
To kill the ego is not what you think. You can’t actually “kill” your ego. You cannot destroy it anymore than you can destroy your soul. It is a part of your human experience as much as your soul is an infinite part of your being.
What you can do, though, as many modern spiritualists will attest, is integrate your ego fully into your spirit.
Get it out of the way. Get it out of the front seat, the driver’s seat, driving you and everyone else crazy!
Allow it to have it’s little bossy voice in the backseat. Honor the ego for what it is, the part of you that makes you socially aware. The part of you that understands conformity and expectation. Ego is helpful when it comes to deciding when to bow to social norms, to propriety, to engaging in mutual discussion and concession.
Not the Boss
But bear in mind that ego is not the boss. And the ego that has taken the role of the boss must be killed.
Ego that tells you what to do, what to say, what to think, in order to keep some sense of superiority, in order to maintain power, in order to not get hurt, must be killed.
If you are ever to give in to love.
And it is this last part that I struggled with for years, and that I am now watching my husband struggle with.
On our way home that day, as I was leaking silent tears and snot in the passenger seat, and he was battling his ego, he expressed this in so many words.
“It sucks to get sand kicked in your face.” He said. “What if I let my guard down, and I get punched in the face?”
And this is what it all comes down to, right?
Especially for those of us who are survivors of trauma.
I’ve been hurt too bad. I don’t want to be hurt again. So up go the walls. Ego will protect me.
If You Block the Pain, You Block the Joy
But, as author and sociologist Brene Brown tells us, if you block the pain, you block the joy as well.
The only way I could get through to my husband that day was to break myself entirely down. I had to show him that I was willing to destroy my ego in order to help him begin the work of destroying his own.
“You just have to trust that if you get sand kicked in your face, you’ll deal with it. You’ll be okay. I’m here. I will do my best not to hurt you. I am not interested in competing with you, fighting with you, or challenging you. I just want to love, and for you to love me. Let’s really embody this soul mate stuff.”
I’m grateful he let his guard down. It’s a risk, opening up that way. I could feel how risky it was as I was doing it, as I was letting down all my walls, taking apart the last hard parts, letting go completely of silly little things I once found so important: pride, self righteousness, the higher ground.
And I realized as we were working through this stumbling block in our journey together, that it was a perfect analogy for what I’m experiencing in the world at large.
Love Exposed
I’m completely exposed. I have no interest in hiding who I am, how I feel, or what I think. I am not angry about it or self righteous in my decisions. I simply want the freedom to be who I am and to be loved anyway.
And many, many people are struggling with that.
As I watch people hate me, slander me, insult me, and try their very best to shame me, I see that struggle to love. I represent everything they’re afraid of.
And I love back anyway.
I love harder.
I remember when I was in that place, and I understand where it comes from. Fear is a motherfucker, and it will convince you to hate and hurt out of some sense of self preservation.
Ego will convince you that I am going to hurt you, so you have to hurt me first.
And the worst possible thing I can do in response is to resurrect my ego.
The best possible thing I can think to do, the only thing I can imagine doing, in the middle of all this chaos, when you insist on hating me, insist on kicking sand in my face, is to love you anyway.
And so I will.