Being with Myself

It was my former husband who suggested this blog. (Thank you)

He did something really sweet last week.

He sent me one of my favorite songs, Queen’s Fat Bottom Girls, on a voice mail. He was right in line with something that was bothering me last week (my own fat bottom), and I emailed him that sometimes I wonder why I divorced him. The truth is that we both know the reasons, they had nothing to do with that, and a marriage between us still would not work. It doesn’t stop us from loving each other, though.

Here’s what I said:

Sometimes I wonder why I divorced you.  (And the answer partly is because I had created so much stress in my own mind about being with you… but it was being with me that needed some investigation.)

He queried:

“Being with me or being with you?”

Being with me, of course.

I can only ever have trouble being with someone else to the extent that I am not loving the part of myself they are reflecting. “But only always,” as Katie says.

I’m really going to have to do the School for the Work. I’d love to. I understand they do give some scholarships for it. I’d have to get there, too, which usually means flying to California. You know, I’d almost rather do that than go home for Christmas or my birthday. (So, I went and looked. The next one is in April 2007. If I can make it to Ireland, I can “probably” make it to California.)

Most of us have heard the New Age truism, “The world is my mirror.”

Most of us even say we believe it.

If that is true, then can you please explain to me why on Earth we would ever get mad at another person?

How could we?

Answer: We can’t!

This is an obvious, logical and true conclusion that stems from that fact. Now, I’ll admit that I understood to some degree that the world was my mirror even back in 1989 when I got married and all the way through 1995 when I got divorced and was in many ways still blaming my husband for things that were not working.

At least I made the decision from clarity. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

In fact, my current understanding is why a recent lover was able to say to me, “Thank you for not escalating when I told you I needed to be alone last night.”

Why would I? It didn’t mean anything about me.

Yes, he’s the same one who is having trouble with my fat bottom. So what? That doesn’t mean he is the cause of my upset about that. Not in the slightest. How could he be?

What? He’s supposed to ignore his preference for slimmer women?

Why? I don’t ignore mine for slim men.

Every single man I’ve ever dated, slept with or dreamed of is what the personal ads call HWP: height and weight proportional. Every one of them, bar none. So who am I kidding if I think a man doesn’t have the right to want that? Only myself, only myself.

If I have trouble being with someone who is fat, then I must first look to the plank in my own eye, as Jesus said, before trying to remove the mote from my brother’s eye. Well, yeah!

Katie’s most recent newsletter (www.thework.org) talks about a visit to a friend in the hospital who has cancer. She says something about her friend loving her cancer. I just tried to find that one and didn’t, but I found a blog on “Whose business are you in when you think that thought?” which is just as pertinent.

http://www.byronkatie.com/2006/09/whose_business_are_you_minding.htm

It’s short and sweet.

I spent 10 years in weekly therapy, groups and 12 Step programs over my internal thoughts and feelings about incest, how and whether it had affected me, what I thought of everybody else, especially my husband (yes, the one I was talking with above), and my father.

And do you know what I came up with?

*laughter*

Truly. I laugh. It’s funny to think that “they” did anything to me. That is one of the most absurd thoughts in the Universe. And we all think it all the time. I do, too.

When I am over there in your business, and you are in your business, who is here in my business?

And I wonder why sometimes my life doesn’t seem to be working?!

No one is minding the store.

Now.

Being with myself is simple and yet I forget, over and over and over.

For example, ask me how many other web pages and emails I have looked at in the course of writing just this blog, nevermind the whole book of Ann’s Tale?

How many do you think?

I don’t exactly know. I wasn’t in my business at the time and I wasn’t counting, but I’m thinking it has been in the range of more than a dozen.

Why?

Well, because I think if I think about how I could have been with myself… could I? Can we ever do, be or think anything other than what we did or were or thought? No. If you think we could have, please prove it to me. Go back and do it.

Right.

Now, when I lie to myself and think that I could have loved Marvin any more or been more forgiving or less angry or in less pain or less judgmental or any of those things, is that true?

Obviously not.

I could only do what I did. It’s very real to notice that. I did what I did. He did what he did. Hmph. Even that might not be true. I cannot go back and prove I was ever married to him. Oh sure, we can find a piece of paper in a courthouse somewhere that says I was Mrs. So-and-So, but that’s not proof.

Right now, in this moment, I seem to be sitting at my laptop telling you and me some stories about some thing that I imagine happened in some past that never really happened the way we think it did. How many versions of that past do you think I could find?

Answer: It depends on how many people I ask and how many versions each one of them has.

Well, we’re in the dozens and dozens right there.

See? There I go again!

Now whose business am I in? 

The business of dozens of dozens of imaginary people who have imaginary stories about a past that I imagine.

Well, maybe it will make for good fiction. And that seems to be what I am writing.

It’s kind of funny. NaNoWriMo has it right. Participants seem to want to know what they count as fiction. Their FAQ says, “If you think it’s fiction, so do we.” Good thing.

It’s all fiction.

Being with myself makes it so much easier to notice that.

I’ve been having a fabulous time writing these little fictions to you, my imaginary audience. For all I know, no one has ever read my blogs and no one ever will.

Just as well, you know. It’s fiction.

Love, Ann