The Inconvenience of Love

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On my drive back to Nashville after Thanksgiving, I followed a hazy smoke on the horizon for miles in the flatlands of Arkansas until I finally passed by a smoldering field, the smoke blotting out the blue autumn sky. Apparently these burns are called “prescribed burns”—the farmer burning away the old crop to make way for the new. That’s a lot of what the last couple of years have felt like for me: a prescribed burning away of all my false ideas about life—like my prideful assertion that I don't need people—to make way for the new.

Disclaimer: I’ve never been one to appreciate people. My self-defensive armor growing up was sarcasm and a black-and-white, right-or-wrong view of the world. I followed the rules and made the grades and went to church because I was supposed to, but pride and the need to be right was my motivation behind this rigid rule-following. And while college was a gradual melting of this judgmental view of people and life, it wasn’t until after college that the real work began. Time to scorch the earth to make way for new things, better things.

Maybe my realization of needing people isn’t some enormous epiphany to you because you have always known this, but to me—the girl who joked with her friends growing up that “stupid people suck” (Lord have MERCY on my 15-year-old soulless soul)—the realization that I actually needed people was like waking up to a world I’d only known faintly. It’s a world that requires love, and love is exceedingly inconvenient and requires a lot of motivation on my part, because I’m someone who likes grudges and the easy way out. And often, love hurts.

And I really hate getting hurt—from someone flipping me off on the road to not getting an invite to being told, “Sorry, I just don’t feel that way.” I relate on all levels to my bae C.S. Lewis: “I am a safety-first creature. Of all arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as, ‘Careful! This might lead you to suffering.’” Love requires vulnerability and vulnerability can hurt as all get out; but without vulnerability, we go through life like one of those spooky pond bugs skimming the water’s surface.

But even with this risk of hurt, I need people, and this becomes apparent when, despite the fact that I thrive within my solo time, you give me one too many nights alone in my apartment and I become a weepy mess over New Girl episodes while taking selfies with my cat. Yet needing people requires reaching out and reaching out requires vulnerability, and we’ve established that vulnerability opens you up to being hurt and disappointed and seriously, who wants that?!

But I’ve been to enough counseling (10/10, would recommend) to know that, as Brené Brown says, “Numb the dark and you numb the light.” In order to know the fullness of joy, you have to know the fullness of pain.

Now, if I were God, I would’ve given humans the emotional capacity of a pond bug—do you think pond bugs fret about the future or mourn the past or grieve over broken relationships?! However, I’m not God (probably for the best), and so we have an emotional spectrum as wide as my overweight cat (read: very wide) and doing relationship with other people requires accepting the emotions—the comfortable and uncomfortable ones—that come along with all relationships. This is supremely difficult for me to do. If I were given the choice of going through life experiencing no pain like a pond bug or living a full life with love and hurt, I’d be seriously tempted to go with the pond bug.

Case in point: the other day I sat bundled under a blanket on my couch in the throes of the Winter Wallows, arguing to my roommate Chelsey that perhaps the secret of a happy life was to forbid yourself to develop any expectations at all for how you’d like the future to be. And then she argued, hello, we’re human, that’s impossible. And I said “TRY ME” and then the next morning while praying God was all, “You naive girl, go read that C.S. Lewis passage again.”

So obediently I turned to the chapter on Charity in The Four Loves:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

I realized that my argument against expectation was really an attempt to wall myself off from heartbreak of any kind, whether that’s from broken dreams or broken relationships or broken expectations. And so I did as one does when truth shoves them to the ground—I cried a bunch over my skinned knees and admitted that God and C.S. and Chelsey know what they’re talking about, and I’m just weakly trying to protect my own happiness, which, I’ve learned, is not at all the point of life.

So that requires “throwing away all defensive armor” and staying open to love (all of it), which assuredly means that there will be hurt—over and over and over again—in silly ways that pinch and monumental ways that knock the wind out of you and leave you doubled over.

Make no mistake, though, boundaries are good. Boundaries keep you from marrying the wrong person or letting a toxic friendship dominate your life. Boundaries are healthy; walls are not. Boundaries allow love over the lines; walls keep all—love included—out.

I write as if I actually know anything about love, as if I practice it daily to friend and foe and stranger on the street. Second disclaimer: I do not do this. I’m at the level of still learning to read—my books are mostly illustrations with maybe three simple words strung together to form a sentence a 5 year-old can read when it comes to learning what love looks like in practice—to give when you’d so much rather keep, to forgive when seriously why should I because they do NOT deserve it, to say, “Hey, what you did hurt me” when you’d rather passive aggressively brood over the wrong, to patiently accept that you aren’t perfect and neither is that maddeningly complicated human sitting across from you at coffee.

Love requires much—requires all, really, and yet a life fully lived (and not barely lived) requires love in all its exasperating, uncomfortable, vulnerable complexities. Most of the time—probably 99% of the time—this seems like a nearly-impossible request, especially when your fear and pride and selfishness and hurt are encouraging your fight (“hit ‘em where it hurts, sister!”) or flight (“go hide in your room listening to sad Bon Iver songs!”) response. Confront a situation head-on to resolve it or let an icy air hang between you and a friend for a week in avoidance of confrontation? I’ll take the latter, and I have, often.

But love calls us to something higher than ourselves—or rather, something deeper within ourselves, something truer, I think, than any of these walls we’ve built in an effort to stay safe. Life is inherently unsafe (spoiler: we die), and so these walls, while keeping us somewhat sheltered from disappointment and hurt, also keep us isolated from fulfilling relationships with one another that go deeper than keeping people at an emotional distance.

I get it wrong nearly all of the time; I choose myself over love just about always. Like I said, I’m still reading picture books over here—the language of love is a challenging one. But I see the tiniest bud—green, hopeful—in the scorched ground, the life that needed to be cleared away for the new. And so I will tend to this truth until maybe life looks more like love and less like self-protecting fear, where relationship becomes my priority rather than me, me, always me.

// READING RECS //

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[Photo by Julie Bloom.]

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Featured

The End of An Era: Saying Goodbye to Windrose

Hi friends,

Announcement (sounds so formal, doesn’t it?):

It's the end of an era.

I’ve decided that, after nearly 8 years of telling stories of navigating life, this season of Windrose is drawing to a close.

Even Here: Words for When You're Wandering

When I was 22 years old, I visited the desert for the first time.

A metaphorical desert, if we’re getting technical.

I was fresh out of college, starry-eyed and eager to begin my post-grad life. I had big ‘ole me-centered dreams: a shiny, brag-worthy PR job in the music industry! An apartment with an exposed brick wall that (somehow) would fit an upright piano! A committed relationship with a kind, goofy man!

I got exactly none of those things.

To summarize an entire year’s worth of emotion: I was devastated.

What is Home?

Late last night, I flew back into town after a week away, the city lights covering the Valley like a blanket of incandescent flowers. I’ve flown into Phoenix at least a dozen times at this point. Usually, I can identify a handful of landmarks, like my antenna-scarred South Mountain or the twinkling lights of the bridges spanning Tempe Town Lake.

Flying into Nashville, however, was always different.

I Don't Live Here Anymore

I recently returned to Nashville for the first time since moving to Phoenix five months ago.

Before my reunion, I often said that the word “home” could apply to both Nashville and Phoenix. Nashville is my home. Phoenix is my home. I could find that home-sweet-home feeling in both cities.

During my 8 days back, I frequented my old haunts. The brickwalled coffee shop still serves the meanest mocha in town. The hillside winery still proves to be a worthwhile spot to sip away a sunny Sunday afternoon. The hip burger joint still offers a lovely evening to dine with friends, new and old. The lime-green Mexican restaurant on the corner of Whitebridge still feels like a queso-soaked refuge.

There were many “stills,” but there were changes, too.

Why did you move?

A cardstock print sits propped against the lamp on my desk: a taupe watercolor swipe outlining a peakside Saguaro, the sun a tiny ring above. Beneath this minimalist illustration are these words in typeface: “I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”

I happened upon this notecard-sized print on the way out of a shop last weekend, after already having completed another purchase. It was the last print of its kind in the pile. I had to have it. I returned to the cashier: “This one, too.”

You see, this verse has been a thread weaving through my story, simple words spoken by a prophet long dead, a passage of comfort I’ve returned to again and again since my pilgrimage to the desert four years ago, when I inked a cactus on my wrist.

The Good Old Days

Last week was National Margarita Day.

I did not, however, celebrate the holiday. Truthfully, I’ve yet to find THE Mexican place here in Phoenix. You know the one: gaudy decorations, cheap food, even cheaper margaritas.

But there’s a Mexican restaurant at the corner of Charlotte and Whitebridge in Nashville, TN.

You may have heard of it.

Witching Hour (or, Fighting Off Demons at 3 am with a Box Cutter)

Between the hours of 3 - 4 am, I find myself awakened by nothing in particular. The room is silent. There is no sound outside. No loud car horns. No dogs barking.

I’m upset.

I wish it was something other than just me. Then I could stop it. Nothing is to blame. It feels like moments have passed since I closed my eyes. The moments of a long dreamless sleep last about 4 hours.

10 Life Lessons This Cross-Country Move is Attempting to Teach Me

There are a few lessons life has attempted to teach me since my move — all things that I haven’t yet spiced up into a full essay, but deserve to be memorialized by my metaphorical pen nonetheless.

So I present a collection of lessons I’ve learned — and am still learning — in the last 3 months.

What Will Your Life Look Like?

Tomorrow marks 3 months.

Three months here, sharing a zip code with Saguaros.

“So how is Phoenix?” a friend asked me over the phone as I sat on my balcony beneath glowing string lights, a pour of raspberry wine in my hand. The sun was setting, painting the eastern mountains with rosy swipes of redemption.

How has Phoenix been these last three months?

What is it Trying to Tell You, if Only You’d Listen?

I went on a date recently. Two glasses of Riesling, pleasant conversation, and a perfectly amicable guy — it was an altogether fine evening.

However, I wasn’t interested in a second date.

Not because of any run-for-the-hills red flags. Not because I didn’t think he was cute. Not because we didn’t get along. I simply — wasn’t interested.

There’s no better way to explain it. No fear-based avoidance of the potential for a healthy relationship. No disdain for commitment that needs a heavy round of therapy to work through. Nothing deeper than the inner sense that a second date just wasn’t necessary.

But, I said yes to getting dinner again with him.

The Other Side of Yes

I’m a No Girl.

In many ways, this is a good thing. I’m able to confidently decline invitations that disinterest me.

“Want to go whitewater rafting?” No thank you, I’m comfy right here on the bank.

“Want to do a shot?” No thank you, I’ll take my liquor with lime juice and Triple Sec, plz.

“Want to try this carrot cake?” No thank you, Harry, I can’t eat gluten.

“Want to go to Broadway?” No thank you, I’d prefer to go to bed.

In many ways, however, being a No Girl originates less from personal boundaries and more from fear. Fear and I happen to be pretty tight; we talk on the daily. Fear has been the primary consultant for many of my life decisions, in fact.

A Song for Growth

A year ago, a friend of mine got a job at a well known tech company. He had been slogging through the interviews, and he finally got an offer. Obviously he deserved it. He was a hard worker, and his attitude for success and life was admirable to say the least. I knew he was beyond qualified.

But at the time, I was on a career path I couldn’t see myself being happy in. I had made the mistake of staying in the industry mainly for the money. Every month in the industry was a reminder of how much I did not want to stay. It created a nasty cycle of overthinking and career angst. Feelings of inadequacy and existentialism rooted themselves deep inside me. I couldn’t focus on anything and was utterly disconnected from the work I was doing.

I admit I wasn’t happy for him.

Life, RelationshipsAlly WillisDecember 1, 2017FeaturedComment