independence (a meditation)

Friends often tell me that the reason I’m still single is that I’m too picky; and I always argue because I think I’m not. I know a number of guys who fit what I’m looking for, and I actually think I have a pretty reasonable list of hopes for someone I’m with. (Picture traits such as warmth, passion, optimism, a love of learning, playfulness, a fondness for having time alone and time with others, and confidence/inner strength.) Underlying my desire for a number of those characteristics is my utter belief in independence—a quality of my own that I both cherish and think may be the real culprit in my unlucky relationship with love.

I’ve been alone for just over three weeks now, and I’m only mildly surprised to find that I’m not feeling at all lonely (whereas I had been feeling lonely at home prior to this trip). Throughout this sabbatical I’ve realized just how keenly I needed time off—and time to myself. I am someone who fundamentally believes that I can’t connect with others until I feel whole and well all by myself. Over the past three years, with this crazy job that leaves me totally worn out, I’ve tended to make fewer social plans because I honestly haven’t had a lot to say. I haven’t had enough going on in my own life to feel I could contribute much to anyone else. Now I’m getting to refill myself—with things to say, to think, to love. I’m following the rule I set for myself when I decided to move to California: “Don’t just live a little, live a lot.” My three years in San Francisco were full of rich living—but my three years since grad school were not. Now that I’m back on task, I’m writing, I’m devouring books and articles I’ve been meaning to read, I’m seeing gorgeous landscapes and listening to new music and just indulging my brain and my senses with a flood of inputs. I have an incredible inquisitiveness that thrives on seeing new places and ways of life and considering ideas and gaining insights. And I have an independence that can make those things, done alone, feel like enough.

I drove to Abiquiu (AB-ih-cue), New Mexico earlier this week to see the landscape that Georgia O’Keeffe loved so dearly when she lived and painted there. You should have seen the scenery; I found myself smiling repeatedly on the drive. It reminded me of one of the pivotal scenes in this work of fiction I’m trying to figure out; the character has just visited Chaco Canyon (a remote and stunning canyon whose floors and low walls are lined with Ancestral Puebloan (formerly known as Anasazi) great houses) and leaves like this: “In the evening, Sarah made her way back slowly. She wanted to hold on to the quietness she had felt in the canyon. She loved the feeling of smiling with no one there to watch it. Of gasping in awe with no one there to second it. She liked taking in so much of her surroundings and having the space in which to process it all. Sometimes she needed a day to herself, with no human interaction, to hear her own heart beat; to sort out her thoughts. Sometimes she needed to take a journey to find out where she had already been.” I wrote that a long time ago, but right now, I’m living it myself. On my drive to Abiquiu, I said aloud things like “this is life at its finest” and just plain “holy shit.” (The colors in that area’s landscape are vibrant, varied—astonishing to look at.) And saying them made my smile widen; I feel whole and well again. I feel I’ve come back to life.

I’ve taken this trip on my own because of a vow I made twenty years ago. I made it to myself. I was fifteen years old, starting my sophomore year and also keeping an eye on my mom. Having just gotten divorced, she was depressed and also terrified. My parents had waited longer than they should have—years longer—to get a divorce because, quite simply, having two households would have cost too much. My dad was a professor; he didn’t make a lot to start with, and what he did have he spent on the cost of tuition for my brother and me at an elite private school (worth the struggle, in my parents’ minds, given the very low caliber of the Atlanta Public Schools). After spending my childhood working as a potter, by my early teens my mom was solidly getting work in the field of public education reform—but on a consulting basis, which meant her income wasn’t assured. Within a year she would get a permanent position and the money worries would diminish; but in the meantime, as I watched her feel anxious and distressed, and I saw both parents sink into depression at being alone, I made a promise to myself that I hope to always keep.

Always be able to support yourself and make yourself happy. That’s what I said. That’s what I committed to at age fifteen—despite growing up in a time and place where other mothers looked down on mine for both working and getting divorced.

At that age, I had already been given a lot of independence, so I knew something about finding your own happiness. Starting in fourth grade, I came home from school alone. My brother would be at football practice until six and my parents would be at work until then, too. The house usually filled back up with people by seven; until then, it was left to me and my cats—and the puppy I was given at age 10 to keep me company. Until I started playing sports in sixth grade, I would get home at 3, watch the soap opera Santa Barbara (to which I was turned on by my up-the-street neighbor and former after-school babysitter), and then still have three hours to myself. During that time I always walked my dog around the neighborhood—which took 15 to 45 minutes, depending on my route. The rest of the time I spent reading novels and, come junior high, poetry; writing stories and poems of my own; playing cards (I could beat anyone at double solitaire at that age); talking to friends on the phone; writing letters (to which I was very dedicated, writing weekly to my cousin and an adored friend in the town where my grandparents live); and doing homework, though often I saved some of it until my mom was home and did it in the kitchen while she cooked dinner.

In addition to all that time to myself, in both houses we lived in, I also had open space around me, and I spent a lot of time out in it. At the first house, I usually went exploring with my neighbor or my brother in tow; most of our focus was on the areas around the fast-flowing creek a few hundred yards behind our houses. At the house we moved to when I was seven and that I lived in until I went to college, I would take long walks down the often dry creek bed in the woods behind our house and look at the plants and climb up the hill to the cave dug by teenagers and filled with dating-related graffiti and then sneak through the fence above it and into the baseball park that my brother played games at before heading back home by the road. In the summers, I’d go even farther—heading to the park a mile away to see who was in the swimming pool or to watch a horseback riding class or game of tennis or to hear sound check for a concert in the outdoor amphitheater there. And for a few blessed weeks each summer I’d roam even farther afield yet, flying up to Rhode Island, where I traversed not just the four acres of land on which my grandparents live but the coastline, my bare feet completely at home hugging the flat faces of rocks pelted, at certain hours of day, by sea water and clung to by barnacles, mussels, and seaweed as well as by me. Sometimes during my wanderings I thought; sometimes I just felt; sometimes I found a large stone seat and read a book to the tune of waves crashing. Sometimes I sat by the water for hours. And felt ecstatic. As a teenager, I remember explicitly not getting into drinking or drugs because I knew the high that being in nature could give and thought it too precious to compare anything to.

Back then I had a favorite motto, which I placed on the bumper sticker of my brother’s car as soon as he left for college and it was a year away from becoming mine. The background was a deep cobalt blue, and the writing—interspersed among stars—said in white letters “Follow your bliss.” The day I found it, I was with one of my best friends, who bought one that we thought made a good partner for mine: “Enjoy being.” We gained such wisdoms out in the woods, in both the outdoor program at our high school for which we were both instructors and in the semester we both spent living on a farm in Maine, and by the sea, and by the pool behind her house, and in the car as we drove from place to place talking. When either outdoors or with friends like her I was a happy kid—despite the fact that I was also nursing the broken heart that results from living through too many years of a bad marriage.

I enjoyed a lot of time and space to myself growing up; but I was also gregarious. I was involved in just about everything in high school and had plenty of close friendships from which I derived tremendous joy as well. Back then I don’t think my independence got the best of me—it just made me be at my best. A few years later, I think, the balance changed.

As a teenager and college student I bought into all you see in the media about love—thought I’d be happier yet if I had someone to love and be loved by. I’d never had much luck with dating, having had a lot of guy friends but only a boyfriend (ok, two at once! oh my) in ninth grade. In college I had crush after crush but nothing but friendship came of those interests either. Then I met the guy I thought was going to change it all. For two years, I spent tons of time with him and thought it was leading to forever. But he was in a weird headspace in regard to dating and so we never did get there. The first time I decided our closeness wasn’t good for me, I spent six weeks not talking to him—until his best friend begged me to “take him back,” saying that he was moping and depressed and wouldn’t do anything since I’d “left.” Boy did that relationship-like talk give me hope. So we reunited, and another three years had to pass with no dating but all kinds of closeness before I realized that I was trying to derive way too much of my happiness from him. You see, I’m definitely a romantic—painfully so. I’d let that part of my nature win out over the self-sustainer. For five years I’d let myself believe something that for many other people is true: that being close to a certain person was essential to my happiness. And when it proved instead to be essential to my unhappiness, well, I boarded up the windows of my heart and tucked into the basement to ride out the storm. And there I reminded myself that I had learned this lesson before, through my parents. And from then on, in a mode of serious self-protection, I repeatedly told myself that it was my own responsibility to make myself happy, not anyone else’s. And the combination of a belief in independence and a wound as deep as the one I was trying to heal, it seems clear to me now, led me to a place of finding happiness where I knew I could create it and mitigating risk where I knew the outcomes wouldn’t all be up to me. I managed my own expectations, committing to the idea that I would marry someone only if I found someone I really wanted to marry. But it’s taken all these years for me to realize that when you set a boundary like that on your heart—when, in essence, you turn your focus away from finding “true love” because you stop thinking it’s a priority—and when you couple that with a strength at finding joy on your own, maybe it becomes easy to turn too far away from center. You run your odds down, leaving the only chance for love to develop to serendipity. And while it does happen that way sometimes, most of the time—you see at the end of a year when you were invited to nine weddings, seven of which blossomed from online dating—it results from more concerted effort. And while I’ve joined every online dating site of repute in the past ten years and gone on a lot of dates in the seven years I’ve lived in the Bay Area—showing that I am open to dating and actively trying—I think maybe my heart wasn’t fully available to it. I think my ability to thrive independently much of the time made me forget about the thick walls I put up to heal a wound years ago—and thus let me leave them up too long.

I never meant my promise to suggest that no one else could influence my well being or happiness. I just wanted to have a certain amount of all that in place on my own first. To not rely on external sources of it. Consider them a wonderful bonus, yes; consider them necessary for living, not a chance. I still believe it’s the right approach to provide for one self in many ways. But I’m here in New Mexico right now because I cherish the idea of being happy all around—both on my own and then, because of that, with someone else. I have been watching that joy unfold for years now with others; having never had a model of it at home, I now see it every time I visit my brother or spend time with certain friends. Having never had a model of it at home, it was hard to navigate toward it. I think I steered myself a little off course. But if you could see me with my nieces and nephew, or with the kids I serve at work, or even in certain friendships, you would understand what I now understand, which is that for me to fully thrive I need to be giving outward. I love to love. I know how to take good care of myself; I’ve proven that. Now I want to find another independent and loving soul and take care of him too, and be taken care of by him. (And make babies, but we all already know that I want that!)

I wrote earlier that I came out here to refill myself with things to say, to think, to love. I will come home full to the brim, as a dear friend would say, so if I should come across my potential mate, I will be ready to let down the walls and love away.