The past month has been overcast. It has rained frequently, and my mind has been gray. I’ve been lost in a maze of rumination, frequently bumping into walls of linear transformations and remedial computer science. I’ve deferred writing my blog entries to the point that what I should have written on, like permutation matrices or cold email outreach programs, are too far in the rear view mirror to write effectively about them. But this here, it’s about a swelling emotion that is very present, and I’m now just clear enough to articulate it. So let’s get back on track, let’s blow away the clouds and let the rain wash my mind clean. May these words help me find clarity and peace.
Torn relationships have been a defining feature of my life. As far back as I can go, I hear screams, and see places where I’d hide from pain. I never had a substantive, lasting relationship with my mother. I was deeply betrayed by my father, and so learned that he never loved me either. I’ve lost contact with my siblings for more than 14 years, despite repeated attempts to reach out. I wear scars of neglect, rejection, and loneliness.
For the better part of the last six months, my insides have been churning for a lady I’ve loved. My mind understands that her heart wants what her heart wants, but my heart doesn’t get why its love, so genuine and pure, isn’t wanted. I can speculate why, but it doesn’t soothe.
This has gotten me thinking about a fundamental hardship of life. Perhaps the fundamental hardship – one-directional, unmet love. The iconic example is the love for my mother that I never felt returned. John Lennon once sang about exactly this:
“Mother, you had me, but I never had you. I wanted you, but you didn’t want me”
There’s the love for my siblings that don’t communicate with me. Love that is burning rage at my father. And a deep longing for an amazing woman that isn’t returned. I believe this is a feeling most of us can relate with. A love that hurts so bad that we want to take it back.
That disappointment of love left unmet often metamorphoses into animosity and wrath. These past months I’ve burned with pangs of rejection and played audience to the theatre of insufficiency. But this time something is different. And so I write.
I’m a passionate person. I know that life can be incredible. I can be enraptured in fascination, excitement, and plasmic emotion. I’m also prone to disappointment that leads to despondence. I find myself staring across canyons between what could be and what is, driven beyond reason to leap off the cliff to somehow reach the other side.
Carl Sagan said that “For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.” And most of us inherently know that. But what Sagan didn’t say is that what is most unbearable is the vastness of unmet love. And we modern human beings are often lost in this space, cold, panicked, and resentful. We resent life that isn’t what we want for it to be.
My thoughts of this woman – I want, I want, I want…maybe it can be, maybe she can see, maybe she can discover this beautiful love that I’ve found that we can share…
But this isn’t love. This is animosity at life and self-directed wrath. I let the resentment and disdain of unmet love get to me. Thoughts led to thoughts, winding back through stories I told myself, and the clouds formed, and I hid.
I’m not a religious person, but as of late I’ve started praying, trying to communicate with the more-than-this. Trying to connect with something I can feel but can’t understand. Maybe it’s just like Stevie said, “when you feel your life’s too hard, just go have a talk with God.” And so I did. As if extending a cosmic hand cupping truth, an epiphany was given.
All these years of hardship, of loneliness and fear in the wilderness, of cries “why me?”, they led me here. I could never have met this lady, or my dear angel Komal, were it not for what seemed for so long like absurd misfortune.
It wasn’t misfortune. It was providential preparation. It was the bitter pill, the growing pains, the burning fever. It was my great fortune that led me to these people. And it all felt alright. All the uncertainty, anxiety, longing, sorrow, it felt alright…at peace. And it feels alright now as I write this. I’m on the right path, and life will be ok.
And back to the love, because that’s really what it’s all about. The painful transformation, the brush with divinity in the immaculate form of a woman on a mountain, the reconnection with my mother, and empathy for my father. The unbridled passion and dreams, in parallel with acceptance and the release of my expectations upon life. Of looking at the canyon with awe.
I’m learning to let love be. To feel the pain, and embrace it in all its vastness. I’m learning to aspire and work towards what I, puny, simple human Andre dream for life to be – that’s love. And to accept what life is, and what it becomes, because that’s love, too. As I sit here, I’m feeling overwhelmed with gratitude, and awe, and sadness, and hope…I call it all love
In the song “Manifest”, Lauryn Hill sang she’d “loved hard once, but the love wasn’t returned.” Grasping at unmet love, she said, is “pain suppressed that leads to cardiac arrest.”
“I was blessed, but couldn’t feel it like when I was caressed, I’d spend nights clutching my breast, overwhelmed by God’s test”
She was blessed with unreturned love, tested by God.
And so am I. And maybe you too, dear reader…
I am blessed…
God’s test…
I am blessed…
God’s test…