Amidst the joy, it resurfaces. Like the sound of waves lapping the shore, sometimes distant, sometimes closer. I am certain this feeling has accompanied me since childhood. It emerges quickly, suddenly, and eventually. It evolves. It creates a vast and deep well of empty and I have tried, throughout my earth-time, to fill it. But to no avail. There is no mystical elixir, no god in human form, no amount of social contact, nor informational or energetic download that will do the trick. I have repeatedly tried to create a panacea only to repeatedly discover that there isn't one. The void is divine and only surrendering to it will do.
And surrender, like other spiritual virtues as I understand them, is not as peaceful as it sounds. For me it often takes a lot of thrashing about, sleepless nights, countless cigarettes. I flail limbs like a drowning woman until they exhaust. I peer under rocks, I flip pages of my spiritual self-help books and new-life programs manically looking for answers; I search myself, interrogate others, whimper into self-pitying collapse, and especially, especially, now that I no longer have my older stronger more precious vices (which I miss dearly like old friends), I wish my significant other were more like a stuffed animal-- always present, always available, always focused on providing for my needs-- my never-ending impossibly mercurial could not would not should not be met by a partner--needs. It's not that needs are wrong. Slowly and more slowly but surely the needs that actually belong in relationship--whose rightful place is in the space between myself and another--become requests and possibly mutual agreements, but those are not the ones I'm talking about. Although it should be noted that the development of wise discrimination is still murky and in progress and in process and involves a lot of holding each bejeweled need up to the light for a better look. And it also involves a lot of checking in with women older and wiser than I.
The needs I'm speaking to here are the ones that bob afloat the dark waters of the aforementioned oceanic ever present well. The ones that, psychologically speaking, were born when as an infant I cried and wasn't always held, I hungered and wasn't always fed, I felt and expressed emotions that weren't always mirrored and even more disruptive to my development, were sometimes transformed before my young wide eyes into shame. When my deeply curious questions were met with disdain or dismissed, when the persons who peopled my world mistakenly sent me the message that there were "important things" that needed to be tended to, and I, in that moment, could not be one of them.
Katherine Woodward Thomas, author of Calling in the One, recently echoed my therapist, and they both reminded me that my more-than-occasional lapses into insanity int the arena of romance was actually quite normal. Relationships are regressive; they can be little heart-mind-spirit bombs and explode us back in time, triggering all manner of unmet, unhealed, unresolved childhood needs and wounds. Without much conscious thought (no matter how much consciousness-raising mediation yoga recovery and other circuses of self-improvement rings I've stepped into, I'm still a samsaric-making machine of habit), I have repeatedly turned to The Person with an expectation, sometimes subtle as a sigh, sometimes overtly aggressive, but always manipulatively well-intentioned, that said person complete me, make me whole, save me from the abyss that is myself, and the existential well of empty. Like Woodward Thomas describes, I doggedly clung to the "fantasy that someone somewhere [would] come and make it all up to me" (p.142).
Because I am in my late 30s, and as I joked about, I have a keen level of self-awareness and ongoing training in mindfulness and psychospiritual development, I am not just coming to this realization-- it is not my first time at this particular psychological rodeo. But awareness of our unhealed places is a spiral. I don't think our wounds ever go away, I think that over time, if we do the work and have the proper guidance, we gain a kind of distance that allows a different response. Acceptance, self-compassion, friends and therapists who are willing to peer into the darkness with us. New tools for the trade of self-archaeology.
Woodward Thomas says that "until we are healed, it doesn't matter how much someone loves us. The heart will soon be empty again, demanding to be fed with a ferocious hunger that will not be abated" ( p. 141). That is until we take up the task of "re-parenting" ourselves. Of looking closely and clearly at the skills we didn't get taught like self-soothing, unconditional pleasure in our own being-ness, emotional regulation and skillful expression, boundary-setting and honoring the boundaries of others, listening to the voice of the inner child (the One That Whispers)and more concrete life skills like budgeting, cooking, creating and maintaining hospitable internal and external environments,. She writes, "It's time to cut our losses. It's time to begin giving to yourself that which you've been waiting for someone else to give to you." And that is where I am right now. It's like staring over the edge of the cliff knowing you have to leap.