Category Archives: personal

I hope this doesn’t sound judgmental

You deserve friends who make you laugh, feel loved, comfort you when you need comforting, accept your limitations and quickly work out any problems with you when they see you are unhappy.   

You deserve friends who always give you the benefit of the doubt, who accept when they’ve hurt you and always do their best to make amends and not let you sit in pain. 

You deserve friends who return your best efforts at kindness and friendship with their own best efforts.   We all deserve that. 

We are lucky when we find real friendship and should remember to be grateful for every day of it.  Friendship should never be taken for granted, it is mortal, just like us.

Complainer

My best advice to you when times are tough for you — and what I’m going to say might seem like very, very tough love — never, ever lose your patience with people who hurt you, no matter what.

Once you lose patience, and the ability to hold pain inside, forever, if necessary, you become the problem and the focus of everyone else’s defensiveness. How can you be worthy of friendship when you make people who hurt you feel so defensive?

Think about it like this, my constantly complaining friend, giving in to frustration is like inconsolably protesting that it’s wrong for the corpse you loved so much in life to keep lying there like it’s dead and not getting up to hug you.

I may not be able to take this advice about endless, limitless patience myself, you understand, but if you don’t, you are going to have big problems. Trust me on that one.

You deserve love

You deserve friends who make you laugh, feel loved, comfort you when you need comforting, accept your limitations and quickly work out any problems with you when they see you are unhappy.   You deserve friends who always give you the benefit of the doubt, who accept when they’ve hurt you and always do their best to make amends and not let you sit in pain.  You deserve friends who return your best efforts at kindness and friendship with their own best efforts.   We all deserve that.  We are lucky when we find real friendship and should remember to be grateful for every day of it.  Friendship should never be taken for granted, it is mortal, just like us.

The hard part of friendship is when you are deeply hurt by a friend who then feels defensive and needs to feel understood themself about why they hurt you, tells you why you shouldn’t have been so hurt, why they couldn’t respond to you any differently, why what you needed by way of honest acknowledgment of what happened was impossible for them for a list of perfectly valid reasons — and, perhaps most importantly, how hurt they were by you saying they hurt you.  Your emotional emergency, they might explain, does not make it their emotional emergency, since they are very busy with many responsibilities and loved ones to take care of.   It can sit, until there’s time, until people are not under stress, until everyone is nice and calm.  That period of silence will give the hurt party time to heal, presumably, and then cooler heads will prevail and everything that is bothering everybody can be left in the past as the simple human mistake that it was.

The hardest part about friendship is the expectation that, no matter what, you need to take our undying love as beyond question or doubt, to understand things we can never explain, acknowledge or stop justifying.  We all have reasons for our actions and inaction, we all believe we are justified in what we do or don’t do, that we are not emotionally volatile assholes who hold in a lifetime of painful feelings and simply lash out in frustration and misplaced anger sometimes.   

“OK, fine, you want to blame us for your pain, your childish need to be the eternal victim?  Yes, we could have behaved better, we could have listened, we could have responded, we could have reached out after you reached out to us, but we didn’t, so just get over it, either accept our understandable human limitations, and our love (which you obviously don’t know how to return) or be on your miserable way.   Our life is good, and full, and fulfilling and we can’t really help you with your immense reservoir of pain, anger and need to blame others for your own problems.” 

If we are filled with infinite love, patience, wisdom and compassion we may be able to understand that position as a somewhat defensive expression of true, deep friendship, in spite of its seemingly harsh nature.  If not, we remain hurt, locked in a childish feeling of being unloved and ready to lash out even when our old friend drives hours after a day of work to prove his friendship by being there, even if unable to offer any actual comfort, to absorb a final, typical, angry outburst or two.  Push an asshole far enough emotionally, et, voila, they revert to their sickeningly aggressive, threatening, childish type.   

“Nobody wants to hear your justifications for why you felt entitled not to continue to hold your pain and frustration in, after way less than a year of simply not being heard.  It’s just sad that you need to weaponize a few months of innocent, perfectly understandable silence.  Friends don’t make you sad, friends help you.”

You will rarely get exactly what you need from another person

You can become emotionally paralyzed sometimes, holding out for exactly what you need from another person.  All color and nuance will disappear and you are left in a grim black and white, either/or zero-sum stand off where understanding becomes impossible. Character, integrity, maturity, decency and insight all become matters of heated debate. Issues reduced to enflamed morality rarely end well. Sometimes a few words intended to make all the hurtful things go away is the best you can fairly expect.   

The words may not be the ones you need to hear, they may even annoy the shit out of you with their insistence on some detail or another, but recognizing they are the best a loved one is capable of is the key to ending an emotional stalemate.  If you can’t accept that, you need to keep suffering or cauterize the wound and feel done with it.  The hardest part of accepting an imperfect apology (particularly if held out as proof that you are unforgiving) is remembering that apologizing is hard for many people in our culture. It is also rare to ever get exactly what you need in this life, no matter how clearly you ask for it, no matter how seemingly reasonable what you are asking for appears to be. 

An old friend told me it is humiliating to have to ask a loved one for something that should be given without asking.   Sometimes it is.   The sympathy and care we expect, we provide, have become mutually accustomed to, may not come sometimes.  There will always be a reason the other person is not able to extend sympathy or care, since nobody acts without a reason they believe is a good one.  It may be a good reason or a weak one.  It may be a rationale you don’t agree with, even find ridiculous.  Whatever they say to try to make things right afterwards, even if it still contains the need to defend what they did as the right thing, somehow, you must accept as the best they are capable of.

If the relationship is important to you, you can either accept the best they can do as the best they can do, and good enough, walk away or remain locked in a senseless conflict that can never end well.  In the end of intractable existential conflicts, everyone loses.  

Emotional Maturity, anyone?

I don’t know how the artificial intelligence of YouTube algorithms determined to send me this particular video, (and I shudder to think about the sophistication of the surveillance we are all under using our smart devices) but as I watched it I said “damn!” A pretty smart little film clip with a short, powerful comparison of emotional immaturity and emotional maturity.

The narrator asks what our characteristic reaction is when someone we love hurts us. We can sulk, hoping for a magical solution. We can rage, like the cartoon of a powerful autocrat. We can grow cold and withdraw. Babies and children act this way, why shouldn’t adults?

For one thing, the world would know nothing but war and no interpersonal conflict could ever be solved.

Three characteristics of emotional maturity needed to actually solve musunderstandings and mistakes: The capacity to explain why we are hurt. The capacity to stay calm and extend the benefit of the doubt when hurt. The capacity to be vulnerable.

The narrator asks reasonably and humanely how we can expect to emerge from childhood with emotional maturity if we are raised by people lacking the emotional vocabulary, or emotional maturity, to show us how adults deal with pain? Lacking that, it’s just years of hard goddamn work not to act like a baby when we’re fucking hurt. Here’s a neat six minute primer:

insight?

When I was in my late twenties, visiting the farm of my parents’ best friemd, Arlene, she laid a great truth on me. As we watched the sun set one evening she said:

“You feel like you disappointed your parents, like you’re responsible for their unhappiness. I love your parents to death, as you know, they’re my best friends, but they are both very unhappy people. They just are, they were that way long before you were born. Their unhappiness has nothing to do with you, there is nothing you can do to change it, the burden of it is not something you need to carry through life.”

Though what she said sounds obvious to me now, it was like she’d reached up and pulled a string to turn on a light in the universe.

That understanding was an immense help to me, comparable to my father’s older first cousin Eli, years later, describing how he witnessed his beloved Aunt Chava grab the thick, burlap covered cord for her steam iron, from a drawer behind her seat at the kitchen table, and whip little Irv across the face with it.

“In the face?” I said.

“Yep, over and over,” said Eli.

“Jesus,” I said, “how old was he?”

“However old you are when you can stand on your two feet without falling over,” he said, with limitless sorrow. He saw it many times after that, and he said that over time all she had to do was rattle the drawer where she kept the whipping cord and young Irv would stand at rigid attention, staring at the ground, trembling, waiting for the whipping to start.

how writing helps you clarify things

I was raised by parents who had been physically and psychologically abused as children.  They grew to adulthood with little ability to restrain themselves when frustrated and, quick to anger, took out their unbearable feelings on their children.   My sister and I were blamed for all kinds of things, some of them ridiculous.  I trace my need to express myself to my childhood desperation to untie the knot of the incoherent story I was expected to accept about myself, about my sister.   I started writing fairly young, and before that I drew, constantly.   

“Why are your drawings so scary?” my mother would sometimes ask.   

“Because I can’t write yet,” I might have told her.

I had a girlfriend and her baby visit me in New York decades ago, saved up, sent them plane tickets.  The child, who I loved very much, is now in her thirties, maybe forty (damn!).   I last saw her on her fourth or fifth birthday.   Her mother was beautiful, talented, had a great sense of humor, we got along great, I loved her, but in the end things didn’t work out between us.  During the week they were my guests, the two year-old had a few temper tantrums, as two year-olds do, and her mother tried to press me into moving to California and join the community she lived in with her Indian guru, Baba Hari Dass.  I felt increasingly pressured as the week went on.

After they left I found a drawing I’d done while they were in NY.   It was a shapely woman’s leg, standing firmly on its lovely foot, with a leash tied to the thigh, where a garter would be.   The leash was taut and straining against it was a dog with a human face, and a huge boulder on his back.

“Fuck,” I thought when I saw that drawing afterwards, “that self-portrait says it all…”

I find this unexpected revelation of my deeper feelings with writing sometimes.  I read something I wrote and a phrase jumps out to clarify a complicated quandary for me.  Here’s a paragraph I wrote recently that made me realize something very important about a prolonged estrangement from two of my oldest, dearest friends.

Long, deep talk with old friends recently [different ones — ed.], reminding me of the healing power of being heard and of forcing yourself to hear things you may not like to hear.  These are crucial perspectives you can’t come to on your own when you are impaired by pain. Good friends don’t always have to agree with you, though they often do, but they always treat you with care when you need care. 

Simple test: did my oldest friends always treat me with care when I needed care?

Well, not always, and lately, for the last nine months or so, no care at all.  In fact, the opposite of care. They insisted I was wrong to feel the way I did after one jumped ugly with me, since in their story she was only reacting to my threatening attitude.  They blamed me for ruining a wonderful vacation with a flash of anger the last day, denied there was any tension at all leading up to my outburst, just a simple misunderstanding I blew up over, until seven months later one of them admitted things had been very tense, because she had been micromanaging everything to make sure it was all perfect.  The other one later threatened me that he’d walked away from friendships for less than what I’d done to him.  The first one had a temper tantrum, then was so shocked later that I still needed to talk about it that she went incommunicado for months, then had another temper tantrum when I dared to bring up the troubling pass our long relationship has come to.  

Understanding does not lead to a clean solution to your vexations, but it is better to see the thing clearly than to have it muddily painful in your head, waking you hours too early, like a toothache.  I compare this depressing impasse with my dear, old friends to having a knife stuck in my side by one of them, unintentionally, let’s say.  When I pointed to it, the other pushed it in a little further.   Months later, when I gestured toward the still unhealed knife wound, the first one stuck her finger deep into it and wiggled it around.  I didn’t bleed out, I didn’t lose consciousness, so what am I fucking blubbering about?  That’s a tiny flesh wound, asshole, I’ll give you something to blubber about!

To forgive is divine, truly, and to be slow to anger is praiseworthy.  I managed not to respond to either of them with anger, but their conditional apologies turn out to be hollow, empty, without form or substance, without any change in behavior.   I don’t need apologies anyway, as I explained to them, I need to be heard and understood by loved ones when I’m hurt. You know, empathy, understanding, the benefit of the doubt — basic friendship.  I expect to be treated with the same care I extend to them.  But that turns out to be unreasonable when the only pain the other person can truly relate to is their own.

We are all capable of casting ourselves as the victims when things get ugly, and things are ugly enough for all of us right now on this imperiled little planet, at the doorstep of climate destruction and surging worldwide fascism.  There are also not always two equally compelling sides to every story.  Treating friends with care is the most basic duty of friendship.  Dereliction of that duty, especially if repeated over and over, is an indication that the friendship you are clinging to may already be dead.   

I still have a hope that these two dear friends will have an unexpected change of heart the next time we meet, whenever that might be.   I’m ready to be pleasantly surprised, delighted and relieved, by that change of heart, that deeper understanding.  It’s a slim, wan, simpering hope, I know, but it is a hope and I appreciate it.  Hope is always better than no hope, I believe, until the proof is irrefutable and the hope for something better is crushed by dull, heavy, merciless reality.

Winning, losing, and the urge to create

Some people love creativity for its own sake, for the exhilarating feeling of making something new in a world that has seen, heard and tasted everything.   Most people in our culture understand creativity in the context of success or failure, the urge to invent being a transactional impulse that can move someone to an exalted place if sold, or a depressing place if creativity is left unmonetized.  If you’re really good at a hobby, most people smile blandly, understanding only what the world considers financial/artistic success, that of the professional. Sometimes they may be moved to say “you should do this professionally!” a high compliment.   

I know I have nothing to say to the world on this score, but I can assure you that the first view of creativity is the better view, in every possible way.  Do what you love, as much as you can and feel grateful for that love and the feeling of fulfillment creativity brings.

Now I think of the ultimate transactional American, former president Donald Trump.   To men like him only domination matters.  You are a sucker and a detestable chump if you let anybody beat you, that’s all there is to it.  His father Fred was a psychopath who amassed a vast fortune.  His mother, Mary, a dirt poor immigrant from a godforsaken Scottish island, married the wealthy psychopath and produced several children.  The oldest boy, Fred Jr. had all the tools, intellectual, social, emotional and otherwise, to do anything he set his mind to. 

Fred Jr. was, according to his little brother Donald, loved by everyone.  He was, Donald said, a great athlete, funny, popular, the first person people would call if they were in trouble, he was an amazing person, everyone liked him, everyone wanted to be friends with him.   In Donald’s version this is what killed his older brother, he was too nice, people fucked him and he drank himself to death.  Talk about a lesson learned.

Dad started paying baby Donald $200,000 dollars a year back in 1947.  By the time little Donald was eight, he was a self-made millionaire.  When Fred Jr., managing a Trump property, did a kind thing for tenants without forcing a long court fight, his father flew into a rage and Fred Jr. opted out of the family business and got a commercial pilot’s license.  Little Donald, a distracted student and schoolyard bully, was eventually sent to a reform school for wealthy juvenile delinquents, after buying a case of switchblades. 

After Fred Jr.’s banishment the far less talented Donald was reluctantly groomed to become the heir of Fred Trump senior’s real estate empire.  Starting with every advantage in the world, except the love of his parents,  Donald launched many closely held businesses where he was the boss, made every decision, the buck stopped with him.  He learned young about the power of unscrupulous lawyers, guys like the satanic Roy Cohn, ready to bend and break the laws to prevail, working on a gigantic retainer that was a business expense.  He learned to stiff people who worked for him, get revenge on anyone who tried to take him to court, he declared bankruptcy over and over.  He refused to lose, even though every business he ever launched, outside of his personal brand, failed.  If you lose, you are a loser and deserve your humiliation.

Do you have any doubt that Donald was at the center of the seven tentacled plot to overturn the results of an election that humiliated him?   His only choice, faced with losing again, was to lash out desperately and enlist a group of blindly ambitious toadies to carry out his crazy plans.  They did so.  Is any of it surprising?   I’m looking forward to the rest of the case against him, laid out as clearly as in the opening hearing the other night.  Laying out that case persuasively, in the face of virulent propaganda, is an act of great, other-directed creativity.

terra incognita!!!

Mapmakers used to describe gaps in their knowledge of the world under the phrase terra incognita.  The legend on old maps described uncharted, unimaginable expanses of unknown terrain.  Krakens, dragons and every kind of supremely destructive beast were presumed to inhabit terra incognita.  Prove they didn’t, using the maps of the day, you couldn’t.  Therefore, under the coercive, superstitious logic of the day, these monsters actually lived in the terra incognita, and if you disagreed too conspicuously, you could be bound and publicly set on fire as an instruction to other monster skeptics.

Armed with better and better maps intrepid explorers, funded by kings, queens and wealthy early corporations (Dutch East India Company comes to mind) bravely ventured into these uncharted areas and the maps became more and more complete until there was no corner of the earth (except perhaps deep under the sea) that was truly terra incognita.  Today the greatest expanse of terra incognita is inside the minds and hearts of homo sapiens.

A friend used to have a footer on his emails (which I was unable to find in a pile of emails to quote verbatim, dagnabbit):  be kind, remember that everyone you meet is engaged in a hard battle.   True, and good advice.  The invisible battles waged by everyone are truly terra incognita.  We stumble into this land of other people’s unimaginable terrors at our peril.   When your interior battle crosses mine, watch out.  

I spent two years, every day, writing everything I could think of about my father, a perplexing man of unlimited potential and unlimited defensiveness.   My father was chased every moment of his waking life by what he referred to as the demons we all have inside us.   After writing and conducting a long post-mortem discussion with him for two solid years I came to truly understand his motivations, though I didn’t always agree with them, and this understanding allowed me to truly forgive a destructive character who apologized for the first and only time at the very end of his life, hours before he breathed his last. Still, as well as I grasp the tragedy that was my father, the recesses of my heart are still haunted, as all such recesses are.

Do the same thing my father used to do, glare with implacable hostility, maintain an angry defensive silence, defend yourself in lawyerly and inhumane ways, create and insist on an insane counter-narrative to make me the aggressor, you the victim, and I immediately find myself in that familiar, terrifying, incoherent terra incognita.   We can’t map this terrain because we can’t bear to look at it for more than a second or two at a time.  It overpowers us and seems to limit our options to fight or flight.  It is primitive, terrible, maddening business.   We push it down because there is little else to do about it.  Anyone seemingly not engaged in a hard battle is very good at acting, until you touch a nerve that sets off their fight or flight response.

We live in a culture where our collective terra incognita has been set on fire. Along with actual record wildfires on various continents, and the rage and violence we see and hear in many of our citizens, a fire rages in the hearts of tens of millions of us.   This fire is fed regularly, and much of its most potent food is incoherent poison, things a healthy body would never put into its mouth.  No matter.  Down the hatch it goes, and instead of digestion, fire belches forth, to singe the eyebrows of anyone who dares to ask “Jesus, are you OK?” 

When you breathe fire, of course, you are not OK, not fucking OK at all!  How infuriating is that stupid question when the burning inside you is actually flaming out of your mouth and singeing the face of your interlocutor?   Jesus, am I fucking OK?  Yes, I’m fine, you’re the one who is about to die, asshole… 

The first casualty of a frayed relationship

When a relationship is strained, lines are drawn, sides taken and moral stances struck.  The first casualty in such standoffs is often honesty, which is a shame, since it’s also the only way back to health.   But since feelings are strained, hackles are easily raised and things are at a breaking point, you must be very careful about what you say, how you say it, what you leave out, what is safe terrain and what is a minefield that will blow everybody up if you set a toe on to it.   

Though this limited honesty may feel to you like a kind of death, if you are used to an honest back and forth, it is nothing like death.  It is an attempt to save the life of a frayed relationship in the only way possible, by putting things on a respirator in hopes of an eventual return to health and good cheer.

Only time will tell if your efforts towards repair succeed.   A primal wound feels the same every time someone pokes a finger into it.  The loss of a long, close friendship, in spite of your best efforts, always hurts exactly the same way, is identical to the grief of death in its inexorable finality.  I will say, from my experience, a friendship that ends with someone screaming at you or bullying you is much easier to walk away from than one where your friend expresses only hurt, confusion and exasperation.  It is as if the anger of the friend you are trying to reach cauterizes the wound, since you feel immediately relieved to be away from someone who can’t stop hissing and snarling.  Good riddance to the raging bastard.

It is a tricky business, to be a human, as anyone who has tried it will tell you.   The most important tool to mending hurt is mutual understanding. 

Trying to reach understanding with only limited honesty, certain things never on the table for discussion, is supremely challenging.   If the relationship means enough to you it is possible to find the patience to wait, even though it may seem impossible to be that patient at certain points.   As long as you don’t lose your temper there is a chance of repair, even with the prickliest, most defensive of characters.  The hope is that at that point mutual honesty will also be restored, everyone wiser for the long, terrible disruption of good will.