Mongols in Middle School
Sometimes I imagine that everyone I’ve ever known, from kindergarten to grad school, is looking at my Instagram page and thinking, Who is this bitch to think she has anything to say about having good relationships?
And listen: I cop to it all.
I’ve been that bad friend. I’ve been a lousy girlfriend, corrosive, toxic, whatever you want to call it. I have neglected relationships, I’ve dropped them when they become hard, I’ve used others for my own needs and then left. I’m pretty sure that I’ve done all the things I would tell my kids not to do, in relationships.
And I know that because whenever I learn something new about having good relationships I feel an … ouch. Defensiveness is bad for relationships: yikes. Attack the problem, not the person: oopsie. There’s a well-known phenomenon whereby medical school students become convinced that they have every condition they learn about in their classes; the same must be true of therapists, where you decide you either must be crazy or an asshole (or a crazy asshole) as you learn about interpersonal health. I want to say I was fairly clueless about being intentional in meaningful relationships before the age of, say, 35, when I met my husband. I simply did not know what I was doing. Mainly because I was raised by wolves, or something close to wolves; or maybe it’s better to say that I was raised by robins when I, in fact, am myself a wolf.
There was so much I didn’t see at home, in terms of negotiating terms with others, and oneself. My parents were of the “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” New England school of being in the world. But we each have our own stuff, don’t we? Some of us have all the tools on the Swiss army knife, some of us, just the bottle opener. Man, there’s a boring tool? A scissor?? Imagine my surprise when I found out that some people were equipped beyond the multi-tool. They had backpacks. TENTS! And little propane stoves! Now, there were some parents who knew how to send their kids out into the wild on their own.
In earliest childhood, I wanted to be nice. Then I got to second grade and wanted to be safe. Safe won out over nice from then on. There’s a great teaching story about a golden Buddha statue that was covered in mud in order to keep it safe from, I don’t know, the invading Mongols. Hundreds of years later a worker accidentally chipped off a part of the hardened stone to reveal the priceless metal inside. The Buddhists use this story to illustrate how we bury our tender, vulnerable and compassionate nature under heavy layers of hard, rough concrete in order to keep ourselves safe. And boy, was I muddy.
So … exterior of clay, and one maybe two functions of the multi-tool. Maybe not one hundred percent my fault, but for sure one hundred percent my responsibility. Tearing off that clay, though – not for the faint of heart. The world is hard to bear, especially without the mud we’ve accumulated – the denial, numbing agents, distractions and postures, the things we tell ourselves about our condition and station in life: “There’s still plenty of time to X”; “I can do Y tomorrow”; “I just need Z to happen and then it’ll all be OK.” What we have to remember, constantly and every day, is that there are no invading Mongol forces; that we are safe, we can go ahead and be shiny again.
