Confessions Of A Fixer

I admit it, I am a fixer. I like things to go smoothly. I don't like it when I perceive someone being unhappy or distressed (of course, it doesn't matter if they really are or not, what's important to me is that I think they are). In all of my relationships I was the one asking with some regularity:

"Are you happy?"
"Is everything OK?"
"Is anything wrong?"
"Can I help?"
"What do you need?"

As I was speaking with a friend very recently, it is amazing how much people love to talk but they don't seem to communicate. That is a problem for me as well. But it isn't quite as simple as just not communicating, my poor self-image confounds matters even more. I don't communicate as I should, but I want the other person to communicate with me at all times. My fears about myself, that they will leave me if I don't make them happy at all times, makes communication even more problematic because I want communication on what I think is happening rather than what really IS happening.

A couple of passages from the book I am currently reading...

"It is axiomatic in communication between intimates that each person owns their own emotions, and that each person is responsible for dealing with those emotions. This means that nobody "makes" you feel anything." (p118)

"What you are not responsible for is your lover's emotions. You can choose to be supportive - we're great believers in the healing power of listening - but it is not your job to fix anything. Once you understand that your lover's emotions are not your job or your fault,you can listen to him and really hear what he as to say, without falling victim to an overwhelming need to figure out whose fault it is or to make the emotion change or go away." (p.119)

Smart words... and honestly at some intellectual level I knew this to be true. But experientially and emotionally I didn't "believe" them and thus didn't live them. The trick is to convert these types of "truths" from axioms into life rules. Sadly, I am learning these basic rules too late to save my relationship, but they are helping create foundations for the next one.

Lessons From Strange Places

One of the books my therapist has mentioned as worth taking a look at goes by the provocative title of The Ethical Slut. It is... interesting. While I don't agree with many of its suppositions I did find something very elementary but quite eye-opening for me. On page 100 I have found what may be the most important bit of advice I have been given in my current journey of self-discovery:

"Your relationship with yourself is what you bring to a relationship with another person: it is what you have to share, your offering, personally, emotionally, and sexually. The sexier you are to yourself, the sexier you will be to your lovers."

This is a huge hurdle for me to get over... though I am finding I don't mind myself as much as I did. I've got a ways to go, but I now seem to have a direction.

Heidegger and Me

Not the greatest of weekends. Friday evening started poorly and went rapidly downhill. So it wound up being me, Romeo, and Martin Heidegger. Not really... I didn't drink THAT much. I simply pulled out my copy of "Being and Time" and started some skipping around, looking at passages I had underlined before, etc. Nothing intense, but for me Heidegger goes with wine and it was wine I was having at the time. So traveling down the paths of analysis of the words "existence" and "dasein" I came to some clarity that had started in my therapy sessions.

Etymologically, existence signifies "to detach from" or "to emerge from". Now for Martin and the later existentialists this was emerging from nothingness. Human existence is not just "being" but "being there" (Da-sein). We have being within time and have an interconnectedness with "reality". And there it was that I made a connection. I, in essence, have never really existed. Oh sure, perhaps I have bodily form and capable of rational thought, but I have always been part of someone else. My individuality had always been subsumed by my partner. I literally became part of them. Now some people might not think this to be such a bad thing but for me it has been. I was never an individual living an "authentic life". I was always part of someone else. So now this is my chance. First impulses are to try to find someone quick and attach myself to them, but such action would not be good for either of us. Nor do I need to create one small circle of people around me because my "self" would simply be part of that small group. No, now is the time for me to learn to be me. Now is the time to try things (and people) out and see what I like, what I want, what I desire. Only once I find out who "me is" can I again consider trying to move my field of being to a point of overlap with another "significant other field".

Summer Reading Book Review #3: The Forever War

I will admit I am not all that much of a science fiction fan (more into fantasy literature) but Joe Haldeman's The Forever War was a wonderful read. Originally a collection of stories in 1972-1973, "The Forever War" was first published in book form in 1974 and has stood well the test of time. While one can see obvious references to the Vietnam War the journey of William Mandella (who explains that his name is even more strange when spell correctly) fits well into our current state of affairs. Young man, reasonably intelligent, is conscripted and serves a tour of duty against an enemy that is not understood (truly alien) returns home to find Earth so changed that he cannot function in "modern" society (which is interesting since a good part of the story covers the current real time year, 2007), returns to service, is injured, tries to retire but is brought back one final time. Each time out he feels more and more removed from his "home" in such a way that the corp becomes the only place he seems to function. Yet this is not a spaceships and blasters kind of book (though there is some of that). First and foremost it is a story about people, in particular one William Mandella, someone who was in the corp at the start of the conflict and survives the 1143 year war. And that provides one of the most interesting twists in the story. As ships travel at near light speeds, time for the crew "flows" differently than for home world, so two months ship travel time can cause years to pass outside the relative field of the ship. Not only does this account for some of the time shift, but allows for situations such as finding the enemy has created much more advanced weapons than they had when the mission started (after all, for a global economy in military mode weapons advance quite rapidly). For me there were three rather emotional pivot points in the novel:

When Mandella is assigned to a different point from the love of his life, Marygay. I almost cried when I read Mendella's feelings of her departure. They were together at the beginning, both returned to earth decades after their mission to find it nearly unbearable. In Mandella's own words, "I wasn't just losing a lover. Marygay and I were each other's only link to real life, the Earth of the 1980s and '90s. Not the perverse grotesquerie we were supposedly fighting to preserve. When her shuttle took off it was like a casket rattling down into the grave."

Finding out the reason for the war (I'll leave that to you to find out).

Mandella's feelings about having survived over a thousand years and being alone, a relic (remember that time for him has flowed differently than for Marygay so her survival at this time is beyond the realm of the fantastic... but read the story).

If you like reading fantastic literature, especially one that lends itself to intelligent discussion, I highly recommend this book to you.