On Relating

When you are 31 years old and in the midst of an identity crisis that has left you unemployed, directionless, and depressed, your younger brother joins the leagues of people you know getting hitched. You take a break from your job hunt to attend his wedding with your girlfriend of a year and a half. While your girlfriend helps you and the rest of your family decorate the church and prepare the food, you think about the fact that your brother and his partner were together for seven years before he proposed. In that time, you've been in three serious relationships and a smattering of shorter ones.

You care about your girlfriend, but you don't know if you'll marry her. Watching your brother and his fiancé stride confidently up the aisle, hand in hand, you wish you had even a step's worth of their certainty--about love, your career, or anything.

A month after your brother's wedding, you begin taking shamanic classes in the hopes of finding your way. You light candles and beat a drum in the dark. You look for signs, talk to friends, send out your resume over and over again. You shuffle through old pictures from college and graduate school, study your smile, wonder what you knew then that you seem to have forgotten. How were you so happy when you had no idea where you were going? How do you get back there?

Finally, a few months into your shamanic training, thanks to a friend's recommendation, your frustrating search for full time work culminates in a job. You take on the title of Intensive Community-based Treatment Services skills trainer. You will go out into the community to homes and schools to help kids struggling with severe, often life-threatening mental/emotional crises develop coping mechanisms. You like the idea of helping people, especially children, and are genuinely glad to have something to do and a steady income.

During orientation, you learn the company's policies and the fundamentals of the charting software. The first week, you meet your coworkers and shadow a few of them, ask questions, study therapeutic techniques, and schedule appointments with the kids on your case load. You are nervous, but you are always nervous at the start of any new job. You think it's going to be okay.

Your first day on the job alone, you cry so hard on the drive home, your tears soak the collar of your shirt. You thought the horrors of your childhood would protect you from the horrors of the job--that your immunity to the emotional, sexual, and physical violence perpetrated against you would make you immune to that violence in your young clients' lives. It doesn't take more than a few weeks for you to know better. You cannot protect the children from their parents' dysfunction or from their own trauma, from the injustice of poverty, from a culture of disconnection, from the indignities of adolescence, or even (and especially) from the thought that death is preferable to life. The job you'd hoped would help you climb out of your depression only leads you deeper into the darkness.

You don't quit right away. The learning curve is steep. You are hard on yourself. Overwhelmed by anxiety, you lose your appetite; you don't eat more than a handful of calories the first two weeks. You wake up on the wrong side of the bed every day, your heart full of dread. You have frequent nightmares about work. You feel like you can't do anything right. For the first time in your life, you doubt your belief in the power of your mind to pull you through any problem. You worry you're a phony.

You grow increasingly distant in your relationship and, disconcertingly, aren't certain the job or even your depression is to blame. You want to apologize to your partner but don't because you suspect if you admit there's something wrong, you'll have to do something about it. You don't know how to fix it. You don't know what "it" is. You try to ignore it. It does not go away.

Shortly before your 32nd birthday, three months into the job that is draining the light from your life, a friend encourages you to apply for an administrative position at her company. You hesitate, still burned out on the last round of cover letters and interviews, worried about being weak and disloyal, concerned you may leave one job only to fail at the next, too. But your friend is persistent, sending you encouraging text messages, and her coworker friend, whom you had recently met at a social gathering, writes you a compelling email of sixteen reasons you should consider working there. "We laugh a lot" is on the list three times, so you submit your resume.

You are immediately offered an interview, which you schedule for the following Monday morning. You feel guilty for even thinking of leaving the skills training position, but in the days leading up to your interview, you receive clear messages that you are on the right path. First, you have a dream.

In the dream, you can't get your car started to go to work. When it does start, it carries you in fits and starts. You look up local mechanics on Yelp and find one nearby that has five stars and reviews by folks who say the mechanic is honest and will "cut you a deal if you can't afford the expense." When you pull into his shop, you fully expect you'll have to wait, but he comes right towards you, and he looks like a young, white, Iowan version of Jesus. Blue eyes, corn-blond hair, brilliant smile. He pops the hood and immediately diagnoses a dying battery as the problem. You believe him, but you say, "That's impossible. I just had the battery changed a few months ago." He tells you someone has been stealing your power. "What, like at night?" You imagine kids in the neighborhood popping your hood in the dark and draining the battery with a device. The mechanic looks right at you and says, "No, during the day." When you wake up, you know the battery is a metaphor for your energy, and that your job is draining you in such a way that you will not be able to keep going. Still, you aren't entirely convinced until you have a second divine intervention in the form of a shamanic journey.

You journey to your higher self to inquire about your job situation. Your higher self, dressed in a robe of sparkly blue, teal, silver, and gold, tells you to "go where you'll laugh a lot and where your heart is light." She tells you the work you currently do has you daily journeying into the dark to share your light, but that very little light is reflected back, and this is hard on your system. "You are not built for it," she says, but she also conveys the understanding that this is nothing to be ashamed of, that you cannot help how you are designed. She presses a ball of light into your forehead, and you feel it migrate down to your heart, filling you with a reminder of how you feel when your battery is full.

When Monday comes around, you know what's at stake. The interview goes well, and you are told you'll know whether the job is yours by the end of the week. As the week progresses, you begin to emotionally move on from your current job so that by Thursday morning, you realize with a sense of awe, excitement, and dread, that if you don't get it, you will still have to quit your soul-sucking job. You pray earnestly, and then, that Friday, around 6 p.m. on the literal eve of your 32nd birthday, your phone rings with the offer.

You give your current workplace three weeks' notice to allow them time to find a replacement, to give your clients time to adjust to your leaving, and to try to make yourself feel better about quitting. In the remaining weeks, despite the continued difficulty of the job, you begin to feel better. You laugh more, you feel lighter. So it is a surprise to you and probably your partner too when things at home don't lighten up.

You continue staying up long after your girlfriend has gone to bed, savoring the time alone. In the morning, when she heads toward the shower and asks if you want to join, you tell her to go on without you. You eat breakfast while she's in there. During the day, you hardly text like you used to. No more heart emojis. No more funny stories. After work, you come home and instead of making dinner for two or waiting for her so you can cook together, you eat alone. When she gets home and wants to exchange stories about the day, you feel inexplicably put upon.

One night, after another day of nearly no talking, your partner asks if you need more space. You suspect she wants to ask a different question and are relieved she doesn't. You won't have to tell her that lately you've been questioning everything, including the belief that you want to be in a long-term, committed relationship with her--or anyone at all. You are a mess. You don't want to be reckless with her heart, or your own. You need time alone to cope with the shock of the possibility that you don't want to get married, a thought so antithetical to your lifelong beliefs about relationships and about yourself as to be taboo. Before you say anything, you tell yourself you have to know what you are running from and why. You wonder: Are you running from her? From relationships in general? From yourself?

You ask a friend to do a tarot reading for you. "Am I happy in my relationship?" you ask, because at this point you don't know your ass from your elbow. She says you're running away. You immediately fear you'll sabotage a good relationship because of an unconscious belief that you don't deserve nice things. But to your surprise, your friend says running could be an asset. You think about that while driving home from your depressing job one night. Why do you think running is a bad thing? When have you run in the past?

You tried to leave home when you were six years old. You don't remember specifically what set you off. You remember feeling as if you didn't matter. You remember how your mom laughed as you marched sullenly through the front door, how she watched from the doorway, how easily she let you go. Her laughter followed you down the driveway, onto the sidewalk, and behind the tree in your neighbor's front yard, where you sat and cried and thought about how you had nowhere to go, how you would have to go back, back to a house where your father touched you too much and your mother rarely touched you at all, back to your inexplicable feelings, alone.

You cut ties with your stepfather after he proved he could not be honest with you. You've ended friendships and partnerships that felt incongruent or were destructive. You've muted relationships with extended family members who told you they loved you, "the sinner," but hated your "sin." (You wonder how they would have felt if you'd used that phrase, only ever used on LGBTQ people, to show them your love.) You can't remember running from anything that wasn't wrong for you, but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen.

Hoping to find answers to the question of relationships, you ask the couples you know why they like being together. They talk about built-in community, security, friendship. You argue that these benefits can be gained from friends and family, without the hassles of coupledom--of domesticity, of serious compromise and negotiation. They talk vaguely about the rewards of relationship. Something about growth. They talk about the future, about growing old together. You remind them there are less irritating ways to grow, that you can get rewards when you sign up for a new credit card, and that old age doesn't actually last nearly as long as the present moment. The couples winkingly remind you that couples have sex, and you remind them that most couples fail to continue having sex--even boring sex--after a little while. Everyone laughs uncomfortably. The problem is, despite mounting evidence against relationships, you sense there is something to them, that there is something that your interview subjects know in their hearts to be true but cannot convey.

You search for answers in the past. You think about the two years you've spent with your partner. You review key moments--the first time you had a real conversation, the night you talked on the couch until the sun was nearly up, the first time you kissed, the day you got hit by a car while you were on foot in a crosswalk not even a month into your relationship and she left work to go to urgent care with you, the first time you exchanged I love you's. You think about falling asleep in her arms, the comfort of her closeness.

You spend a lot of time reflecting on the day she fell off her bike while the two of you were biking to a coffee shop, seven months into your relationship. You'd just moved in together the week before, and the stress of the move combined with the fact of your five part-time jobs was already a lot for you to bear. When your partner fell off her bike, breaking her left wrist and right kneecap, and she, understandably, wanted you to be more available to support her at home, you told her that you could not take care of her--that you, in fact, would not take time off from your five jobs--that it would be more work to take time off than it would be to go to work and that you would not be paid for the lost time. You reminded her you didn't even have enough time for yourself; how could she expect you to take care of her?

Though she was upset, she seemed to understand. She suggested that in the future you lighten your load, presumably so you could take better care of yourself and be a better partner. You could see the sense in her idea. It wasn't like you hadn't pondered the ludicrousness of having so many jobs. But you wondered when you would muster the energy and courage to make those changes. You reminded her that you couldn't do anything about your situation at the moment. So instead of leaning on you for support, she called her parents, and her mom moved into the spare bedroom to assist in the early stages of her recovery.

You think about those post-accident weeks, during which you continued doggedly running from job to job as your partner underwent wrist surgery that would prevent her from doing her job as an acupuncturist for weeks and essentially guarantee early-onset arthritis, as she shuffled around on modified crutches in a knee brace,  as she slept fitfully (with the aid of pain medication), as she endured the disappointment of the sponge baths she took in lieu of showers, and as she massaged her aching body after dutifully attending physical therapy.

You remember how awful you were, your frustration upon coming home to counters cluttered with the day's dishes, boxes still unpacked from the move and littering the living room--how claustrophobic you felt in an apartment filled with your partner's family and their belongings after you had worked with hundreds of people all day. Though you sincerely appreciated your partner's parents' help, you deeply wished to have the apartment to yourself.

You remember feeling like a bad person for viewing your partner's injury from a self-centered place, seeing it as a horrible inconvenience in your life rather than a devastating disruption in hers. Yet, you also remember angrily thinking that if you had been in her place, you never would have expected her to drop her life for you. But then you also remember that when your girlfriend in college had a knee surgery that left her trapped in a brace and hobbling around on crutches for months, you leaped at the chance to help her. You remember how much love you felt for her as you carried her tray for her at lunch, helped her balance to sit on a shower stool, massaged her aching body. You had felt honored that she had trusted you to care for her. You had sincerely enjoyed experiencing, and showing her, your devotion. Helping her had not been a sacrifice, but a gift.

You know you have failed your partner. It takes a while for you to realize and to admit to yourself the deeper truth: if you'd only had one job when your partner had her accident, and if you'd had the means to take time off to care for her, you still would have turned your back on her.

The thought is terrible. You do not tell her. You know it has little to do with her. You do not want to hurt her. But, worse, even more than that, you do not want her to know how awful you are. You want her to think you are a good person, that you are compassionate. Of course, you know she knows you aren't perfect, but you're pretty sure she doesn't think you're awful either, and you want to keep it that way.

You want to want a relationship. Deep down, you think you do want one, even though the desire doesn't make any sense to you. Deeper still, you worry you are only telling yourself you don't want a relationship as a way to protect yourself from a darker, more worrisome possibility: you aren't capable of having a relationship; you aren't capable of loving someone else that much. You fear you've permanently tripped a fuse, burned out wiring that can't be repaired.

But you remember the fireworks in your chest the first time you fell in love with someone. You remember how you felt when she said your name--in fact, every time she said your name. When she looked at you. When she held your hand or wrapped you in a hug. The feeling is so visceral, your chest heats up; tears fill your eyes. You are shocked by this first memory of love. When was the last time you felt that way? You flip through your mental rolodex of relationships, pausing at each to test the fire in your heart. You realize that with every subsequent relationship, you have felt less and less.

It dawns on you that your current relationship might be entirely viable if you were able to feel more. Worried you'll run from a love you can't recognize or wind up in a relationship you can't commit to, and concerned you've lost something vital, you continue hiding your confusion and fears from your partner. You cry silently on your side of the bed at night. You remember the day your dog got hit by a car, how she tried to hide her ruined leg from you. You didn't understand her then, but you understand now.

You turn to a shaman for help. The shaman closes her eyes to see you better. She tells you there is a feeling in your heart, a feeling of self-deprecation, self-hatred. She tells you that fear arises when you're in a relationship and start feeling loved because you've had difficulty expressing love for yourself. She says that as you learn to cultivate a love for yourself, much of your fear will subside, and you will be able to be present in a relationship and deal with things as they come up. She says you need to dive down deep into your emotions and face some things you haven't wanted to look at. You think she's talking about your shadow. You have denied the whole of yourself for so long. You have told yourself that you must accept--and even like--that which does not make your heart sing--on so many levels, for as long as you can remember. Your quest is to invite the hidden parts of yourself out of the shadows, to get to know them, to accept and honor them. All the answers you seek are inside, in the shadows.

After months of chaste interactions and superficial conversations, your partner suggests you talk. You don't want to talk. You literally don't know what to say. You still don't have the answers you want; you can't reconcile your thoughts and feelings. Your partner is a good person. She feels safe, and you know she would never intentionally hurt you. But when you think of marriage, a house, and children with her, you feel yourself sliding down into the darkness, into a strange, melancholic, sedated panic.

You pray for guidance. You are not given answers to your questions, but you are given honest words. You tell your partner you aren't willing to make the sacrifices and compromises the relationship requires. You know this might be the biggest mistake of your life. You tell her you're sorry. You are sorry.

You run away and hope that someday, you won't need to run anymore.