The Missing Piece

/“Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”/ — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I wrote a piece a couple of years ago called “Pietà”. /Wrote a piece/ is strange wording, however, as its pieces fell together accidentally. What happened was this: I had five or so shorter pieces that I had drafted throughout the year; I liked the drafts just fine but never felt they held enough weight to become something more substantial. Then, it was a few days out from an event I was reading at with my three best friends, and I had nothing to read. I began pasting these pieces together based on an image they all shared: fire. California that year was on fire, constantly, as it always seems to be these days, and I was having a lot of feelings about it. I figured if I put all these pieces together, I might be able to forge some thinly layered meaning from it.

The pieces shared another idea: most of them revolved around the women in my life. My mother. My sister. My grandmother. My ex.

My. My. My. And that’s exactly the kind of thinking I am trying to cut at.

Anyway.

In putting these pieces together, I was reminded of a painting I saw a few months before when I was in Rhode Island with Melanie. It was titled /Pietà/. I asked Melanie about the title, and she explained that any painting that depicts Mary holding Jesus after his death is called Pietà. I was fascinated by the idea — that a scene like this had a name. And I was also fascinated, for the first time — despite being raised Catholic and surrounded by images of Jesus and the Virgin — by the idea of Mary holding her dead adult son, powerless. And I questioned this thought: why was my first instinct after seeing this image related to Mary’s powerlessness to save her son? Why was I so saddened by the fact that she couldn’t? Why did I almost feel judgmental towards her for that?

I looked back at the pieces I was writing and figured out that what I was actually writing about for the last year had less to do with fire and more to do with the role I expected women to play in my life, how I expected these complex humans to play some part in my healing, to play some part in my resurrection. And, when they weren’t able to do so, I belittled their existence, their humanity. In small but consequential ways.

/Mother, did I maybe expect too much of you?/ I eventually wrote.

I tell you this because I’ve done a lot of work to try to process and move forward from all of this. And a lot of that work came to head this year when a former partner and I attempted to fix an old relationship.

A lot of the work I’ve had to do consciously and subconsciously over the last few years has to do with matching my actions to my belief system. I could spout off all I want about my feminist beliefs but so long as I continued to only allow women in my life to exist in context to me rather than in community with me, I was merely saying the right things but not actually living them. I realized that I held a deep grudge against my mother because I attributed my lifelong suffering to her and her parenting. I realized that I expected the women I dated to save me from myself. I realized that the friends I had, prior to my mid-twenties, were merely expendable pieces in a puzzle I formulated in my mind; once someone outgrew their positioning in the puzzle, I discarded them and looked for someone else who fit that piece.

And that was the thing. In my broken mind, growth held a negative connotation. I was scared to death of growth. Mental growth. Social growth. Intellectual growth. I associated growth with abandonment. /If someone, especially a woman, outgrows me, they will leave me/ was my thought. So I did everything I could to avoid that.

I had to move past this way of thinking. Or else I’d never be able to have healthy relationships with the women in my life. I began making more intentional choices about how I interact and relate to my mother. I began to be more critical of what I asked for and expected from the women in my life. I began to lean back a little in those relationships, attempting to take less space. I began to think more consciously about what I was attracted to in people and why.

And it was important that I did this work alone and internally. This could not be work that was the responsibility of others. I could no longer be someone’s suffering son.

And I made progress.

But, as it turns out, it’s possible to over-correct.

When I entered this new-old relationship in the middle of last year, I had, though I didn’t know it at the time, deeply convinced myself that I could apply everything I had learned about myself and my mental health and my relationships to other people to this old relationship. I had grown. I had learned. I could now do better. Right?

I had convinced myself that I could heal something that a former broken version of me could not get right. I could, cliché as it may be, heal the past.

And one of those lessons that I thought I could apply was around how I relate to women.

The problem was, in trying to allow this person to be fully /herself/, I fully erased /myself/. I fully erased my needs as a person. I became, just, /blank/.

This was not intentional. And, though I felt this happening deep in my bones, I could not see in the moment the water I was swimming in. I look back now and recall memories where I felt outside of myself, where I felt nothing at all. We would eat dinner. I would cook. And I would listen. I would offer supportive language, simple rebuttals and responses. But the emotional depth that I know I’m capable of getting to in conversation with the people I love was absent.

I couldn’t get there. I lacked language. I lacked personality. I lacked me.

I had stories inside of me. I had whole universes of thoughts and opinions and critiques of everything I heard, but like a shit you hold for too long that ends up subsiding, I held everything in and then the thoughts melted away. But, really, they were collecting and creating a mucky gunk all in my insides. And it became difficult to grab on to any of them, even in situations with others.

I was spending so much of my time erasing myself for this person that I had unintentionally erased myself for everyone else as well.

And it showed. It clearly showed. One day, after weeks of this, one of my best friends sat me down and said, among other things, /You have to realize that your life affects others now. You have a godson. You have friends that you call family. And your emotional state has an impact on all of those people./

This isn’t something I’m used to. I grew up feeling very much disconnected from my family. Outside. And the thought that not just my conscious choices but the ways of being that aren’t necessarily my choice — like my emotional state — could be consequential to the people around me was completely foreign.

And so when it was clear that I could not continue erasing myself to allow someone else to exist fully in my life, I had to move on. As best I could.

I’ve thought a lot about how this experience is exactly the brand of erasure that society has asked of women in order for men to exist fully. And, in trying to account for that societal misogyny, in trying to be less toxic by leaning far out of the space of my relationship, I was being toxic in other, perhaps smaller ways. I was in so many ways making the same mistakes that I was as a kid. They just took on a different body. What I was trying to get to was a /mutual humanity/, but I was instead shrinking the humanity of this person /and/ myself.

I didn’t trust her ability to exist on an emotional level playing field with me.

I wanted to protect her from my perspective and what can often be the rough edges of two humans existing together. I was afraid that if she felt those rough edges, she would leave.

What I had successfully done with so many of the friends I had made in my adult life I was not able to do with this person.

Love /is/ rough. Existing in communion with others is exhausting and difficult work. And I wake up every day and do that work with the people I love the most. And some days it’s deeply challenging — after an argument or a disagreement or a conversation that goes awry — and I want to trash it all and move to the forest by myself. But the people — their unconditional love and my unconditional love for them — always make persisting the natural choice.

I thought that, since I had built up this network of beautiful, mutually human relationships with people that I love dearly, then I must surely be able to rebuild an old one on the same grounds. But, unfortunately, that just wasn’t possible. I can’t allow others to exist in context to me. But I also can’t exist purely in context to someone else either. There has to be a middle ground — and there is. It’s a middle ground I’ve found with so many people that I have built solid relationships with over the last ten years. Relationships where we all are able to exist fully /with/ each other, not /because/ of each other.

I read Shel Silverstein’s /The Missing Pieces Meets the Big O/ for the first time a couple of months ago at the recommendation of one of my mentors. And it resonated in ways I didn’t anticipate. The gist of the story: a missing piece tries to find where it fits in, looking for other pieces that have a missing side that complements its shape. The missing piece eventually realizes that it itself needs to become whole on its own, through intentional work, only then can it roll confidently alongside the Big O it so admires.

And I guess that’s what I’m getting at. It turns out we are not puzzle pieces in other people’s puzzles. You are not part of my puzzle. I am not part of yours. Mutual love, mutual humanity is not a piece finding its missing part but, instead, multiple parts — perhaps with differing degrees of missing elements — building a tiny universe where they can to do some searching together. Missing pieces helping each other to search under rocks, in forests, in cities. And maybe, in doing this work, they’ll grow those pieces from within themselves, from their own individual efforts.

Or maybe being in community with each other will help nurture and till the soil to grow something new where something was once void.

Or maybe they’ll /never/ be full. Maybe no one is ever actually fully. And instead, what is most healthy is to bask in the idea of our being works in progress. Forever.

And, in this, we might realize that we were always whole, alone and together.