What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life? via Kottke
“We’re the cake.”
It’s no secret that I’ve long struggled with relationships, romantic and otherwise. Though I have two older half-brothers, I grew up an ostensible only child without anyone but my parents in the home. If you had asked me at the time, I would have said the predominant feeling of my childhood was loneliness. Geographically, socio-economically, socially, intellectually… I was isolated. I had the tremendous fortune to be born to two loving, kind, thoughtful people, and as I age I’ve learned that this alone set me apart from most everyone else. To say nothing of our economic status: well-off in a town that, well, wasn’t.
And I was gay. In a conservative town. That fucking sucked. I wasn’t able to be myself throughout most of my childhood, always learning to avert my eyes or change my voice, always afraid that someone would uncover my secret and beat the shit out of me. (As it turned out, this eventually happened long after I came out and if I’m honest, it wasn’t as bad as I had imagined it might be. They didn’t kill me, after all, but no child should have to internalize a fear of death at such a young age.) Cruelly, my sexual orientation in that place-and-time pushed me to self-isolate, never sure of who I could trust, compounding my loneliness.
In my isolation, I honed my sense of observation. I spent much of my time attempting to understand people, which is why I’ve come to feel at home in nature. Though I concede that humans are themselves part of nature, the latter makes sense to me. Humans still don’t.
Though I suppose that’s not quite right. What continues to confound is trauma. How much trauma exists in the world, how much suffering people endure (and therefore inflict). People aren’t complicated, really. We merely internalize our insecurities, then project them onto the people and world around us. They animate our actions the way a puppet master pulls the strings of her puppet. Only in giving them name — only by speaking them aloud — do our insecurities lose their power.
But the sheer magnitude of this very simple, very obvious thing is stunning. Look around. Capitalism. Religion. Marriage. Parenthood. Childhood. All are social constructions upon which most people foist their insecurities, rather than do the work of acknowledging their pain, their hurt, the ache they feel, their fear.
Yet it remains the only way: to go through the fear, not avoid it.
I’ve long said that “I prefer the company of animals to humans.” It’s one of those utterances I tend to liberally throw out in conversation, particularly when making small talk. But each time I say it, I wince. I don’t really mean it, or more specifically, I don’t want to. I don’t want to prefer the company of animals to humans, if only because it means that I’ve given up on humanity in a profound way.
I’m already tending in this direction. I spend much of my time in the woods with my dogs. (Just as I did as a kid, funnily enough.) Just last night, my dog and I were up in the foothills at sunset when a female elk came within 100 feet of us. She stood there, barking and coughing, curious about these two new animals in her clearing. My dog and I sat there for 20 minutes, just watching, neither of us moving a muscle. Eventually, I stood up to pee. The elk stood straight up, stomped her front hooves twice, and disappeared into the canyon below. Those moments of communion with animals are some of my most precious, as I remember I am part of a larger world, one far more interesting and mysterious than I can imagine.
But my love of nature need not come at the expense of my love of humans.
Or does it? Humans, after all, seem to be destroying much of nature. We clear cut, we mine, we burn, we raze, we graze, we build, we pave, we reap and sow.
I am not immune to this. I am complicit.
How do I circle this square? To love is to accept as-is. To love humanity is to accept us as-is, to look around at the world and accept that we are destroying so much of our own home.
Why?
Because we’re insecure. We’re afraid. We want to be loved. And we’re afraid we won’t be.
This is all to say that relationships have never been easy. I struggle to accept people as they are, both individually and collectively. The ghosts of Kant and the first formulation of his categorical imperative haunt me, and becomes harder with age to not attempt to universalize every decision made by myself and, most cruelly, others.
I know where I need to go, though I doubt I’ll ever arrive: acceptance. Only then will I be forgiving and tolerant and accepting and loving in a way I myself want to be loved. But I first must accept that humans are the engines of our own destruction, that we would rather destroy our own home than deal with our pain. Hurt people hurt people, and perhaps we’ve reached a critical mass of hurt people.
I have to accept that we as humans have not learned our lessons, and very likely won’t. Only then can I honestly love others.
How the fuck do I do that?