Skin & Soul

Posted on 10/24/2011 by Jane Devin

I catch sight of myself in a mirror on a Sunday morning, with dark circles under my eyes and my hair a mess of untamed waves. My naked face, with its freckles, crow feet and laugh lines, doesn’t look at all like I remember it — I’ve got fine hairs on my cheeks and when I smile, my eyes crinkle. There’s a scar and three skin tags on my neck.

When I brush my teeth, the two lines between my brows furrow. When I wash my hands I notice that they are as strong and square as ever, but the veins are more prominent and the skin is looser.

Naked in front of the mirror, I am sundark, timescarred and agesoft. I am a woman of Skin and Soul. Skin/soul. Skinsoul.

I am a dichotomy of memory and being. I am the sharp collar bones, long rows of ribs, and jutting hips of my youth. I am also the full breasts, protruding belly and thick thighs of womanhood.

I am nineteen on the inside, nearing fifty on the outside, and most days I don’t feel a minute over 25 except in experience.

It’s a sweet trick my soul plays: A sleight of years, a vanishing decade or two or three. You will go on, my soul says to me, feeling young and often innocent. You will keep dreaming the biggest of dreams and believing in the most fantastic things, because you are my child and you will always be younger than me.

Skin, though, refuses the heady smoke of the soul and faces the mirror head-on. It wants to be recognized for its long history of accommodation. For the many times it has been stretched around the twin swells of pain and joy, and been pushed to its limits by circumstance and choice. For the thousands of hopes and burdens it has carried — the stillborn dreams it has grieved and the living ones it has nurtured — for all that it has raised up, clung to, chased after, let go of and run away from, skin wants to be acknowledged. For all the joys it has housed, the secrets and fantasies it has harbored, and all the loved ones it has sheltered like a protective mother, skin wants to be honored.

Skin says remember. These age marks and accidental scars, these generous arms, thick hips and wide feet have lived through the experiences that helped create soul.

Skin carries the handprints of rage and violence as well as the fingerprints of tenderness and affection. It is layered in sensate memories of love and cruelty, vulnerability and passion, beautiful wants, desperate needs, and thousands of human-to-human connections.

Skin has been warmed by lovers who have been accepting of its faults — who found solace in its uneven planes, tender breasts and soft belly — who have kissed the calloused palms that caressed their faces, rested their heads on the slopes of weary shoulders, or settled into the open arms that held them while they slept.

Skin has offered up comfort to children, friends, and even strangers. It has been a sanctuary and a blessing and, on occasion, a prison and a curse. It’s been shunned, starved and humbled. Sought out, desired and lusted after. It’s been burnt, cut, scraped — but it’s also been healed, bathed and cherished. It has forgiven everything but time and forgotten nothing except, on occasion, its own limits.

The soul and skin together hold all the stories of the human world — stories, that if laid out feeling by feeling, touch by touch, word by word, could fill the bookshelves of heaven and hell and all the spaces in-between.

The skin-soul of the heart has been filled up and deflated so many times that it’s become a thing of lightness, a blood red cloud hanging in a colorful sunset to be lit or cooled as it pleases, shifting as it needs to either bask in the waning sun or seek refuge behind the mountains.

I am not the woman I ever imagined I’d be, but now that I’m here, face to face with a mirror on a Sunday morning, feeling both old and young, wise and naïve, experienced and innocent, I think this must have been the plan all along. To be not too much of one thing or the other — to neither fly too high or be grounded too long, but to give equal time to both body and spirit. To dream as well as to do. To learn to live skinsoul instead of skin/soul.

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Love, Purpose, Openness & the Lessons I’m Learning.

Posted on 10/15/2011 by Jane Devin

I loved you on purpose. I was open on purpose. – Ntozake Shange

Sometimes it feels like I have pocketfuls and pocketfuls of love, but nowhere to spend more than a penny or nickel of it at a time. As a currency, my love has always fallen short. I am a pauper. . .holding out an abundance of spare change—an embarrassment of coins—in a world of clean, crisp checks torn from a book I’ve never owned. – Excerpt from Elephant Girl

Could it have finally happened?

Have I have learned to love myself on purpose? To be open with myself and others on purpose, without fearing failure? To spend my pocketfuls of love wisely instead of tossing all my coins into a murky wishing well?

A few months ago, I surprised myself with the realization that, even though my life is as unsettled and uncertain as its ever been, I haven’t felt unhappy for quite a long time — not in a way that diminishes my sense of self or that shakes the foundational core of who I am — not in any significant way.

This revelation was surprising to me because the past two years have been filled with new challenges and life experiences, including a few that were painful, and that caused me to question my most deeply held beliefs about love, loyalty and relationships. There was a time that I nurtured, breathed, imagined and exalted those beliefs. I held onto them as if they were sacred ideals that would somehow, one day, tangibly fill a vacancy.

I cherished those beliefs and still do in some ways, but the difference between now and then is that beliefs aren’t all I have. The wide gap that once existed between my reality and my beliefs has narrowed considerably. I’m living the life I want to live, even if it’s sometimes difficult. Like children that have grown up and left home, wishes aren’t my sole focus anymore — I carry them in my heart, but they’re no longer my biggest reason for getting up in the morning. I’m excited about possibilities now — things that stand a chance of becoming real.

I’ve grown in the last two years, in the last few months, and even in the past few weeks. It seems I’m on a path of quick turns, slow transformations and gradual realizations. I’ve made some life-altering personal changes — too many to recount here (and reason enough to write another book) — and the ones that have come the hardest have also been the most gratifying. Here are three of them:

I’ve Let Go of My Expectations of Other People.

For years, I wasn’t secure about anything in my life. I never knew what tomorrow would bring and had great, big fears that my carefully patched together world would unravel at any minute. I think this is the reason I held tight to my expectations of other people. I felt like I needed some sort of anchor — something I could count on — and if it couldn’t be a stable home, a paycheck, or even my own life, then it had to be other people. I expected friends, family and even acquaintances to share my beliefs about loyalty, love, truth, respect and consideration. If they did, then I felt valued as a person. If they didn’t, then I felt defeated in a very personal way — as if I’d been betrayed or totally disregarded.

There’s no question that people can act poorly and be hurtful, sometimes in surprising ways. In the last year alone, I’ve been lied to and about, been the target of someone else’s need for internet drama and had someone I deeply care about show me how very little they cared about me. At one time, these hurts would have consumed me. My fragile sense of security with other people would have felt broken. And all that was truly good in my life — all those people that had shown love and support — along with all of my bright moments and achievements — would have faded into some distant background.

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment of change because the process was gradual, but my expectations of other people no longer exist on a grand, all-or-nothing, thought-consuming scale. If someone acts in a poor, dishonest, or unloving way, I no longer consider it a reflection of my own worth. If someone lies to or about me, I don’t wonder what it is that I have done to make them uncomfortable with telling the truth. If someone is disloyal, I don’t internalize it to mean that I failed to do something to engender their support. In other words, I stopped thinking that the choices other people make are really about me. They’re not — even when they think they are, they’re not. Character is character, caring is caring, and love is love. How other people choose to act, think and express themselves has everything to do with their own spirits, and not a thing to do with mine. It’s a lesson that took me 49 years to learn, but I’m finally free from the self-made burden of having my sense of personal value or security hinge on people’s actions or approval.

I’m Speaking My Heart & Then Consciously Moving On.

I used to debate interpersonal issues and argue for my beliefs — a lot. I’ve always been a very passionate person, especially where it concerns fairness, relationships, love, social structures, empathy, thought processes, politics — well, everything really. And it all felt so very important to me that I not only wanted to share my beliefs, but also to convince others that hey, I’ve given this considerable thought. . .and this is why you should agree with me.

The passion that has served me well in writing has worked against my personal relationships. While I’m very fortunate to have close friends who love me despite my occasional philosophical outbursts (or rants if you prefer), when it comes to the rest of the world I’ve realized that trying to change someone else’s already made-up mind serves no higher purpose: it’s simply an exercise in frustration and futility.

I’ve learned to speak my heart, share my feelings, and then consciously move on. It feels good now to say whatever is on my mind — to release my thoughts and emotions — and then choose not to dwell on the matter. After all, I know my passions inside and out. I know why I feel the things I do. I know how I’ve reached whatever thoughts I have. As I’ve become more self-aware and confident, it’s become less important to debate with others. I am who I am because of my own life, spirit and experiences and others are who they are because of theirs. Live and let live. It seems we all learn what we need to learn, when we want to learn it, and not before.

I’m Setting Boundaries & Realizing That Being an Open Book Doesn’t Mean Being Open to Everybody.

I’ve made some really bad decisions in my life, but I don’t think that being open about my life is one of them. As a blogger and writer, I’ve put the worst of myself out there as well as the best. I keep the book of my life open for the most part, because I believe that keeping secrets adds to a sense of shame. So I’m gay and out of the closet. I’m fallible and talk about my many mistakes. I’m a woman who’s had a lot of experiences and when I feel compelled to write about them, I do.

There’s a difference though between putting the stories of my life out there for public consumption and letting myself be daunted by the criticisms and beliefs of other people. For the most part, writing has been an affirmative experience for me. I have the privilege (often sacred) of hearing personal stories from other people, particularly women, who resonated with my work in some way. I am humbled nearly every day by my interactions with readers, some of whom have become good friends.

It wasn’t always this way. As in other areas of my life, whenever something “bad” thing happened with my writing, it overwhelmed the good. I used to pretty much cower when I was hit with harsh judgments or hurtful perceptions about my writing. My tendency was to absorb criticism rather than to consider its meaning and source. If someone told me I was a lousy writer or human being, part of me believed them.

In the past couple of years, though, I’ve come to realize that the most wounding critics are those who don’t really read my stories (or other writer’s stories) at all. Maybe I was naïve, but I never knew that there were people who read articles on domestic violence just so they can tell women that they brought it on themselves with their poor choices. Or who seek out posts on poverty so they can rail against the laziness of the poor. Or who troll the internet for stories about obesity just so they can tell overweight people how gross and undisciplined they are. Instead of reading for understanding or knowledge, the wounding critics search in-between an author’s lines to find something to bolster their own preconceived beliefs and sense of superiority. If someone’s in pain they must have a victim mentality; if someone is sad or grieving, it’s because they don’t have the right attitude; if someone is sick it’s because they didn’t take care of themselves. All of which provides the wounding critics with a narcissistic ego boost that’s meant to convince themselves that they’ve done a better job at life than other people.

I realized I turned a corner in the way I view criticism when a reader of Elephant Girl wrote me to tell me that I’d gotten it all wrong. She was raped by a family friend when she was 15 and didn’t turn promiscuous like I did. She also found all sorts of support for healing when she screwed up her courage and told her dad about the rape. “Your book sends the wrong message to other survivors,” she reprimanded. At first, I didn’t know how to respond. The account of my rapes is factual — they occurred decades ago and I was a child — and the past is already done. Even if I could rewrite my history, I wouldn’t do it just to make other people feel better, or to make them like me more as a person or an author. Elephant Girl is my story and I own everything in it, even the ugly and uncomfortable parts. Other people’s stories, thoughts and experiences are their own.

I finally wrote the woman back. “Tell your story,” I encouraged her. “There’s room in the world for all experiences, including yours and including mine.” And with that, I was done. I didn’t dwell. I didn’t absorb her words, take them to heart, or feel like I had to apologize for her disappointment.

I’ve learned that being an open book doesn’t mean I have to be open to every judgment, perception, or criticism. It took me all these years to finally “get it” but this basic lesson has taken root. Take whatever is valuable, meaningful, and well-intended and leave the rest behind.

Much of my life has felt like a game of roulette. I’d bet on as many people and situations as I could afford and wait to get lucky. I’d give my heart, love, efforts and even possessions to anybody who expressed an interest in them and hoped that I’d win loyalty, love and care in return. I’d throw all of my chips into a game of chance and pray that at least one would hit the right number.

I’ve learned that the best odds of being happy don’t come by way of accident or luck, but by having a clear and strong sense of purpose. It’s late in the game, but I’m beginning to see the value of my own life and spirit, instead of relying on the words and actions of others to tell me what I’m worth. By loving myself on purpose, with a fully conscious mind, I can love others on purpose, with reason and intent, instead of haphazardly or by chance. I can love more fully, more openly, and with more just cause.

By choosing to be open with myself and others on purpose — instead of by accident, impulse or passion— I’m less likely to feel stung by hurt, rejection, or misunderstandings.

I’m owning my own life, bright and dark, triumphs and mistakes, scars and beauty. I refuse to be a pauper anymore.

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Maybe Someday, Baby

Posted on 09/09/2011 by Jane Devin

In desperation, we scrambled to make it to bus stops, factory doors, and daycare centers. We carried our heavy loads, balancing children on our hips, and tried to forget there was a time when we would have stopped to pray for, or at least consider, the lives of those less fortunate.

We lost many things on our journey. School pictures, cherished albums, love letters tied in teenage yarn. We had no place to store the proof of our memories, so we left them roadside, along with our burned-out cars, or gave them away like we did the bright, youthful clothes we no longer had occasion to wear.

We traded dreams for practicalities and tucked our stubborn hopes away in empty pockets. Our skin grew pale as we traded iron for baby food and protein for something that was 10-for-a-dollar. In parking lots, the women with their late-model key chains and freshly styled hair scurried to move their children away from ours, as if poverty, with its day-old bread and generic boxes of rice cereal, was catching.

We shielded our children from glaring or sympathetic eyes and, with never-enough guilt twisting in our stomachs, somehow always managed to find an extra dime for the gumball machine or a quarter for the merry-go-round outside. At night, as they rested in the crooks of our arms, we read our children fantastical stories of faith and transformation: ugly ducklings that turned into swans and earnest frogs that became princes. Wanting to believe in miracles ourselves, we read with animation, perfecting the voices of wicked witches and wise fairy godmothers. It’s never too late, we taught them, to become the person you were meant to be. At the same time, we feared our own lives were cautionary tales with no assured ending. We knew that hope without any real, tangible possibility was futility. We prayed that it would be different for them — that the things that had proven impossible for us would not be our children’s curse to bear.

We taught them to read and write, and drilled them on spelling, numbers and songs so that when they went to school with the sons and daughters of the women with the late-model key chains, they would not feel the weight of their hand-me-down clothes or five-dollar shoes, but take pride in their achievements.

Under a set of fluorescent lights or out in the elements, doing tedious work that required no special skills except the labor of our hands or the strength of our backs, we tried to grow numb, thinking that if we could sever the nerves that attached emotion to circumstance, we might not feel the depth of our own despair. We might not feel the empty space left behind by lost potential, or the oppressive pain of not being fully alive — of being nothing more in the working world than a nine-digit number with 10 expendable working fingers or a strong, replaceable spine.

Yet, we knew the feeling of half-dead wasn’t dead at all. It was only a shrunken, dried-up sponge of emotions waiting for the next disaster, reflective hour, or inescapable conclusion to burst its cells open and overflow. At unexpected times, while in the middle of work or staring out of a bus window, we often found our eyes watering with the pressure of a spirit looking to find its way back in — to be heard, acknowledged and perhaps even nurtured.

And when our children asked questions about the future, all we could tell them is the same thing we told our spirits. Maybe Someday, Baby.

Maybe someday the cupboards will be full.

The night will not be frightening.

We’ll find a car that runs.

Our hopes will turn into possibilities &

the ugly duckling will turn into a swan.

It is also what we told ourselves in the hours we were alone, when we were not only resourceful mothers or strong-spined workers, but women with soul-needs of our own. We told ourselves that everything that we never had or that we lost along the way would be found or rediscovered. That there would be new pictures to frame and set upon a mantle — a future full of love letters, ticket stubs and pressed flowers to revisit on a sentimental winter’s day — and a little black dress with no practical purpose to hang in our closet.

Maybe someday, baby, we promised ourselves

There won’t be as much to fear.

The panic will subside.

We’ll pick up the guitar or paintbrush again &

walk barefoot along an ocean shore.

Maybe someday, baby, we’ll find love.

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The Life-Changing Nature of Lies

Posted on 03/19/2011 by Jane Devin

I’m at a point in writing my memoir where I am admitting some really ugly truths. Those closest to me know what they are but I’ve never made them public. If I were to think about how other people might judge me for my past, I might never write this book at all. So I don’t think about writing in terms of possible consequences—I think instead about how even the worst truths aren’t as devastating as the best image-keeping lies.

The child in the Hawaiian print shorts is very likely my brother or sister. I tend to think brother, but there’s no way to know for sure. What I do know is that this picture was taken in June of 1959, on a Navy base—2 years and 7 months before I was born. The girl sitting on the floor is my eldest sister, Dawn. We look nothing alike. I look nothing like my other older sister, Dianne, either.

I look like the child in the flowered shorts and so does my son. Same coloring, hair, lips, eyes, and ears. Same face shape and expression when tired.

This picture was discovered and given to me after my mother died, but she wouldn’t have told the truth or given me a name even if she had lived another six decades. She was married when I was born, to a man that was so obviously not my father that it only took me about five years before I began suspecting the truth. It took 30 years beyond that to get her to admit her infidelity fully. Still, she wouldn’t tell me anything about the man who fathered me. I don’t know his name or his nationality. I don’t know one-half of myself and it’s a blank history I’ve passed on to my children. I suspect that the affair between my mother and biological father wasn’t short—that he was also married and stationed on the same ship and Navy bases that my stepfather was.

This post isn’t about unsolved mysteries, though. I’ve sadly reconciled to the fact that I have almost no chance of finding out who the child in the photograph is or who my real father is—my mother had no close friends and held onto her secrets tightly.

What I want to say—what I want to scream, really— is that this is why people should not lie. Not to their children and not to others. Lies are not contained in a neat, singular vacuum. They have far-reaching consequences, for the liar certainly, but even more so for the ones who have been told the lies.

My mother was ashamed of me and her husband resented me. I felt it, I knew it down to my bones, but I didn’t know why. I turned myself inside out trying to be better, trying to understand why I could never, ever be good enough. I was about seven the first time I ever thought about suicide. My child brain reasoned that since I was the source of her misery, my death would make my mother happy—and nothing makes a child feel so good as when they can please their mother. Over time, as my own pain grew, my suicidal ideation became a self-comfort. “If it gets too bad, I can end it.” I comfort myself during hard times with the same thought today.

Most people, even the very young, I think, can feel the truth of a matter even if they don’t know the finer details. If a person feels lied to, even if someone close to them is insisting that they’re telling the truth, then there’s probably some divide between the information that was wanted and what was offered. My mother, for instance, used to point to my birth certificate as “proof” that her husband was legally my father. Legally is not actually—it didn’t square with the truth I wanted—but to her it was close enough. As an older child, she tormented me with teasing games of misinformation when I pressed the issue, telling me my father was Rod McKuen, Warren Beatty, or some stranger she met in a bar. Later, she’d recant and go back to the birth certificate. I can laugh at some of the stories now, but it’s not a happy laugh. There will always be some part of me that craves the truth even if it’s almost impossible to find.

A woman I recently met felt that something in her twenty-plus year marriage had changed and that her husband had grown more distant. At first he denied her feelings and then he blamed work, tiredness, and even her—if she didn’t nag him about it so much, maybe he’d be happier and more interested. For two years, she wavered in a space of swallowing her own feelings for his comfort, hoping he’d recover, and rising up to ask for the truth, or counseling, or some clue that she could work with. In the end she found out that he’d been having an affair. It was a brutal revelation, more so because it came late and it didn’t come from him. When faced with the truth he admitted to it but now, a year or so after the fact, what lingers for her isn’t the infidelity, but the two painful years she spent living with a lie, desperate to reconcile what she felt with what she was being told.

Two years, thirty-five years, or a lifetime…lies cause far more pain than honesty ever could. Had I been told the truth as a child, I might have better understood the why of being treated differently than my siblings. I might not have internalized the shame and resentment. Today, being told the absolute truth, under all circumstances, even if it has to be dug out of rock hard ground, might not be so very important to me. Had the wife been told from the start that her husband was having an affair, she might not feel so bitter about the two years she spent feeling desperate, abandoned, and confused.

People lie for many reasons, but one of the major ones is to make themselves look good. Denying the truth of my father meant that my mother didn’t have to admit to being unfaithful. Other people wouldn’t think less of her. How she looked in the eyes of others was more important to her than the pain her lie caused me or even herself. It couldn’t have been easy for her to have and raise a child she did not want. Had she been willing to be more honest though, she might have given me up for adoption and saved us both from decades of turmoil. She might have looked bad to family and acquaintances for a while but the shame she felt would not have been as long lasting and the consequences not as heavy.

I’ve no doubt that the woman’s husband lied to look good, or at least better, too. He didn’t want to admit to an affair because that would mean that he was responsible for doing something unethical. It was easier for him to put the burden of their failing relationship on his wife because he could still look like the good guy. He wrote the story of an overworked, tired man with a nagging wife and wanted her to follow along until maybe, at some point in the future, when it was more convenient for him, he was ready to leave home and start a new life with someone else.

There are common lies of omission and less commonly, differing definitions. My ex-lover would insist that she loved me but her actions toward me didn’t match her words. In the end I didn’t feel loved, so the chances are that I was not—at least not in any way that would have matched my definition. Love invites in, it doesn’t shut out. Love is special and rare and not easily replaceable. Love is willing to fight for itself. Everyone has their own definitions of what love is and isn’t. Had I known that her definition was so far off from my own—had she told me that her feelings about love were, in fact, quite opposite, I might not have invested so much of myself into loving her, and the end of our relationship would not have been as fraught with confusion and anguish. I would have been quicker to forgive her for not being able to return the same kind of love I gave to her, and I would not still be working on healing months after our final goodbye.

Lies are not solitary, isolated events. They change people—mentally and spiritually—which means they also affect that person’s present and future—and never, it seems, for the better. Lies add pain to situations that are all ready painful. The truth is not always kind but at least what people might feel as the result of an unhappy truth is real. It’s not clouded with confusion, suspicion, and lack of knowledge.

A harsh truth might cut deeply, but only the first time it’s told. Lies, on the other hand, are like a continuous poison that can seep into years, even decades. It’s easier to heal from a swift truth than a slow, drawn-out lie.

For that reason I’m all for telling people, including my own children, the truth even if it doesn’t make me look good. I know I’ll recover faster and so will others.

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The Woman I’m Going to Marry

Posted on 02/05/2011 by Jane Devin

The other day at Starbucks I had an unexpected conversation with a stranger. Afterward, I wanted to run home and tell my partner all about the beautiful, older woman who had just finished a meeting with her husband’s younger side dish. I had the same urgent feeling of wanting to share earlier this month, when the moon was a peculiar shade of bright yellow, hanging over a purple mountain. “You’ve got to come see this,” I wanted to say to someone. Of course, there was no one there. Instead, I walked up the gravel road to return to my empty hotel room and another chapter that needed finishing.

I was born independent, or so the story goes, but that’s not really the whole truth. I’m 90% water and earth and 10% fire and steel, (give or take a few points in either direction depending on the circumstances), but it’s the 10% that keeps me single. The same fiery passions and beliefs that initially draw certain people also tend to bring about the end.

That 10% has also saved my life, not once, but several times over. Fire and steel gave me a spine and lent me bravery when needed. They allowed me to stand strong and survive crises. They’ve given me clarity and truth when winds and waves left things muddy. For these reasons — and simply because I like this part of myself — I refuse to devalue it, especially in the name of something I feel so passionately about: Love.

I believe love should be fearless. It should be able to withstand scrutiny and hold its own in a debate. It should have more answers than questions and more courage than cowardice. Love, to me, should be a deeply felt conviction — something worth standing up and fighting for no matter what the opposition is or how strong in numbers. Love should seek to loosen restraints, not create them. It should actively nurture all that it promises — it should be fiercely loyal, encouraging, and honest. Love should seek, above all, to be genuinely happy in the long-term. Sweeping things under the rug or ignoring the elephants in the room can only ever be a temporary convenience, and when the pile grows high or the room gets crowded, there’s little space left for love — instead, there are resentments over things not said when they should have been said, and open wounds that have grown past the point of healing.

I believe in love so strongly that I refuse to settle for less than what I believe it could be if I met my match — someone who believes with as much conviction as I do in the sanctity of love, its power and courage, and its ability to raise people up to the highest plane possible.

After my recent experience with fake love, I learned that I’d rather be alone with my ideals than together with someone whose “I love you” (at least towards me) meant as much to her as “I’m hungry, pass the potatoes.” I don’t want to be in someone’s life as a convenience, a stopgap, or an in-between lover. What I want — and am ready for — is the real thing.

I want marriage, traditional or not, with all the bells and whistles — the tough times, the great times, the waves and rifts, and the romance. I want the mingled laundry, cosigned holiday cards, daily routines and occasional surprises of a loving partnership. I want to be someone’s cheerleader and have them be mine. I want to look at the same person every day and feel like I understand and love them just a little bit more than I did the day before. I want to share all of me with someone and know that they love me enough to do the same.

I have friends who believe, passionately, that you can manifest the lover you want by consciously envisioning, in great detail, who that person is while still leaving the door open to other possibilities. I’ve always challenged the “think it and it will come true” philosophy, but so many of my friends insist that it works that I’m willing to give it a try. Here is the love that I’m manifesting:

For now, I’m going to call her Kim. She may be an attorney, but not a rich one because she does a lot of pro-bono and charity work. Or she may be in some other field she enjoys and volunteer only on occasion. She’s taller than I am, somewhere between 5’8” and 5’10”. She’s not thin or heavy, but she’s got a strong build. She likes animals, especially dogs, but limits herself to two or three. She prefers summer to winter and likes to spend time outdoors. She watches TV on occasion but isn’t addicted to it, and her favorite music is from the ’60s and ’70s. She’s got a great sense of humor that’s balanced with her ability to be serious. She’s out of the closet and feels no need to hide our relationship from friends or family. She’s a thinker, not just a reactor, and she’s also capable of spontaneity.

She’s kind but in a genuine, heartfelt way—not in the way learned from Ms. Manners books and social convention. She’s trustworthy. When she says something, she really means it — her words truly are her thoughts and can be counted on to reflect what she authentically feels.

When I ask her what she wants — out of life, our relationship, or from me — she knows herself well enough, and trusts me enough, to answer. She doesn’t respond with “I don’t know, what do you want?”

She’s not a coward and she’s willing to name her beliefs even if they are ones I don’t share. She knows that love can accommodate differences of opinion as long as they aren’t harmful to the relationship.

She accepts me for me but understands that, like her, I’ll always be a work in progress. I’ll grow and evolve and occasionally change my mind or rethink my beliefs. She will, too, and that’s part of what will make our relationship exciting — we’ll grow together and teach each other new things along the way.

She isn’t intimidated by the part of me that’s fire and steel, because some part of her will be the same. She’ll understand that a roaring fire doesn’t mean the house is burning down and that steel isn’t used only to make swords. She’ll respect my passions because she’ll have her own.

Compromising is a natural part of a relationship, but neither of us will demand the other change some essential part of herself as a condition of love.

Our weaknesses and strengths will complement each other. She’ll be good at paperwork things, like insurance and balancing the checkbook, and I’ll keep the refrigerator stocked and the kitchen clean. She’ll handle car repairs, and I’ll take our pets to the vet.

She’ll understand that being able to contribute to her happiness is important to me. I derive a lot of pleasure from making someone I love happy, and she’ll let me do these things without feeling like she has to “earn it” or like there has to be a quid-pro-quo trade. She’ll let me make her dinner or help her with a project because she knows that doing nurturing and helpful things makes me feel good. If they didn’t, I wouldn’t want to do them. Likewise, she’ll add to my happiness by doing the things that are in her heart to do.

We’ll be strongly bonded, but not one of those couples that always have to do things together. We’ll recognize the value of having separate interests and occasional times apart, because when we come back together we’ll be recharged and have new experiences to share.

I don’t know if “Kim” will come to life in any tangible way — she may remain a figment of my imagination — but writing about my ideal partner, especially in light of my recent disastrous and painful relationship, has helped me clarify what being in love really means to me. It’s too beautiful and special a thing to waste, or at least it should be, and I’m determined that if there’s a next time I fall in love (I don’t take it for granted) that it will be with a strong, loving, kind, slightly fiery, honest person — the right person for me.

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Maybe It Wasn’t Really Love After All, Just Some Kind of Starved and Crazy Hope

Posted on 12/20/2010 by Jane Devin

Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings. – Anais Nin

When you open yourself fully to someone else, when you let another person in past the point of reservation, it is certain that the future will somehow be altered.

There are things that will always remind me of her, and they will come to me in painfully bright flashes. The white tea scent of the Westin Hotel. Fluffy towels. The songs of Marvin Gaye, Norah Jones, and Elvis Costello. Garnets and rubies. Holding hands in a car. Cosmopolitans, well-ironed clothes, striped blouses, airports, parking lots, bars, and resorts. Too many cities and shared meals to count, and too many bewildering memories of either anger or tears in her eyes. The barely-there fragrance of her cologne, and the grace of her hands. The one time after an argument that she kissed me like a woman possessed, even though she’d always told me she didn’t like to kiss like that: She liked kisses that were soft, more lip than tongue, more gentle than possessive. I kissed her then the way she kissed me, and I came to hunger for that kind of lightness. Slow, almost lazy passion, the sensual brush of her lips on mine, the deft flight of her pale fingers over my body.

Today, I’m sitting in a hotel room in New Mexico and all the floodgates are open. Awareness has washed over me but instead of feeling cleansed, I feel bruised. Beaten, as if something integral to life depended upon my making a bet and I foolishly chose the longest, most impossible shot.

Months ago, in this same room, not long after our first meeting, I lied on the bed and spoke with her for hours on the phone. She wanted a picture of how I was feeling, and I took one for her. We then went on a breath-holding journey of almost-there wishes and maybe-soon hopes. I felt like a wide-eyed Alice in Wonderland to her wise and grinning Cheshire Cat (although to be fair it’s just as likely that I was occasionally the mad hatter and she was the Queen of Hearts). Eventually we both fell, but into different spaces, miles apart, irrevocably separated by all the incongruent things that first drew us together. She was amazed by the capacity of my heart—I was calmed by her sense of stability. She found joy in my adventurous spirit—I found something that felt like home in hers. She resonated with my stories—I found reprieve in her sense of humor. But none of it was really real for her, it was a well-played but flimsy house of cards at best. Now it can only be unreal to me, and she can only be a distant memory of palm trees and slender hips, blue cabanas and backrubs, and rabbit hole arguments that (I realize now) were meant to keep me lost while giving her an out.

I love you hard, she used to say.

And it was hard at times but (I thought naively) not impossible. Not if I could get past the brick walls of her fears and shame, and not if I could shed my own insecurities and trust that when she told me she loved me she meant all of me, and not just the way I made her feel when we were locked away in private, skin-to-skin, with no one the wiser and no one to judge how she could have fallen so low as to love someone like me—unpedigreed, too blue collar, from the wrong side of the tracks, an unsuccessful writer, a blogger.

She lived in terror of any potentially dirty laundry that, left unchecked, might blow into her carefully fabricated life. And nothing—not love or relationships, or even her own ideals—mattered to her more than: What might other people think? How could she ever stand the humiliation of not fitting in or measuring up or being judged as less than perfect? And what if other people knew she was gay— what would her children, her family, her friends, and a whole world of acquaintances and strangers think? One time, she even reprimanded me for saying the word “gay” while dining in a restaurant on the off chance that someone in her broad circle of acquaintances might be lurking around a corner. When I called her on it (I used the word about myself after all, not her), she got angry. I was putting her—her whole life—at risk. “I’ve lived this way successfully for 47 years,” she told me shortly. “I know what I’m doing.” And from the outside looking in, (which is the only view she really cared about), she was successful. She wasn’t truly happy, though, or comfortable. I rarely ever saw her relaxed or in any kind of natural state except in the bedroom, and even then there were rules to follow, and things that could and could not be said or done.

She was uptight and closed-off in many ways, but in our most intimate moments she seemed to want my encouragement to open up—to tap into some forgotten bravery and conquer the dread that held her hostage. This, too, was part of our almost-there, maybe-soon journey. I was the hope-pusher and she was the reluctant optimist. She often saw my best wishes for her as pushy, even unkind, but at the same time she wanted to hear them. She wanted, I think, to dabble in the realm of possibilities while still clinging to the fears that she felt kept her safe and away from the frightening territory of change.

Decades-old shame was at the core of all of her fears, and I came to love her more, and more gently, because of this unfair vulnerability.

I had been shamed often and early as a child—marked by wooden spoons and fists, baseball bats, and brutal rapes. In the end, my shame made me rebel. My own sense of right and wrong made me stand up naked and scarred, not proud, but resolute. Because once you’ve been in that kind of gutter, over and over again, there’s really no choice but to reclaim your own body and dignity—not if you’re going to live any kind of life—even if it’s the kind of life other people might look down on because they can’t possibly know that even being a one after being a zero for so long is an accomplishment, even if it’s not the kind that can buy a house or a car or even a day in Martha’s Vineyard.

(I am a one, but I am something, and if she’s a ten—and she believes she is—then it’s by the grace of a kinder god than I have ever known, and I will always be grateful and thank that kinder god that she’s never had her face broken or her fine body split open under the weight of a violent man.

I will thank a different god that my broken spirit rose and rose and rose, no matter how many times it was crushed, poisoned, or stolen. It rose, and maybe not so high, but high enough that I could see that while imagination is a saving grace, life should never be pretended – not for one second, not for someone else, and especially not for the sake of fitting in and feeling accepted, because that kind of acceptance can never be real, and at the end of the day when you’re alone with your soul, you will feel carved out and empty. And if you’re empty long enough, you will lose yourself. You will no longer be able to name what it is you really want or need, and you will just keep flopping like a fish in a shallow pond, anxious to avoid hooks, feeling suffocated, but too afraid to take the risk of jumping out, even if it might lead to something better and altogether more human).

Sometimes she spoke of wanting to be my hero, and god knows I wanted to be hers. I wanted to help her jump out of the pond—I wanted to jump with her into something that would feed us both, without hooks, without fear. I wanted to hear her breathe easily, comfortable in her own skin. I wanted to see her smiling at me, stretched out on the bed, with her ankles crossed and one hand behind her head, content to be with me for longer than a few borrowed hotel hours. Most of all, I wanted her to accept me, and to be proud of us for taking the risk to love. I did not want her to feel ashamed—of herself or of me.

I wanted too much.

Ten years is a long romantic drought, and perhaps I waited too long. Perhaps in that decade of solitude I stored up too many wishes of bright beginnings and happy endings, but when I met her on a winter’s day in Seattle and she bid me to come out of the car and give her a hug, every cell in my body lit up. I stammered and stumbled and laughed as if I’d never laughed before. I watched her hands play over a frosty glass at dinner, and I listened to the first lie she ever told me, and I knew it was a lie, but it was told in the name of shame and self-preservation and somehow that made all right. She had a shell and it needed protection. I would be a patient shell-guard and the truth would come out in time.

She was a shameless flirt, and I took it as a sign of things to come even when she told me, “Oh, I do that with everybody.” She prided herself on being entertaining company, so she took me to a strip club in the city—my first time, not hers—and insisted it was for me. I was the gay one, after all. However, she was the one who seemed disappointed when I didn’t take her up on the offer to buy me a lap dance. Naked twenty-something girls in Lucite heels only make me want to bring out blankets and offers of escape hatches.

We walked along winter streets and stopped in dimly lit Irish pubs. After a few drinks, her shell became a little more transparent, and there seemed to be something a bit fragile and aching underneath. She seemed as lonely as I had ever been, even in a crowd—even while telling me how full and wonderful her life was. Her bright green eyes sparkled and dimmed at turns and even though we were only flirting at the time, when she asked me if I wanted to spoon—when she told me she’d have kissed me if I just hadn’t had that cigarette—I knew that we were just steps away from having an affair. There was just something so empty in both of us, it seemed, and it felt like we could fill each other until the emptiness was gone.

When I know something, I know it down to the bones. I know it in 3-D, in color, in irrefutable hues of potential. I knew that nothing about our relationship had to be hard. It could be, instead, beautifully simple. Every time she started an argument with me—which was often, and always over something trivial—I wanted to shout back at her that it didn’t have to be this way: that it could be any other way she chose, and that if she’d just screw up her courage and choose love instead of everything else than anything she’d ever wanted might be possible. Her friends and family might actually respect her for who she was instead of who she pretended to be for their approval. She might not be so afraid of being harmed, or of being judged, or cast out.

I wanted her to know the triumph of rising even just inches above her self-imposed prison of anxious rules and rigid expectations. She wanted me to quit smoking, be more ambitious, be less truthful, appeal more to the upper middle class, dilute my opinions, throw a coat of gloss over my past, get a real job, be more social and socially acceptable, sell my work, stay in the background, and love her passionately and unconditionally, but much less. So much less that it would be unnoticeable to anyone else.

She was ashamed of me but she loved me. Hard. Always. Forever, she said.

My romantic view of life collided with almost everything she valued, but she still liked to hear me talk about how one day we might have a dog named Molly and a living room decorated in ocean colors, where we’d spend evenings curled up on the couch, and I’d rub her back until the tension left her shoulders. How we’d fill our cupboards with wholesome food and spend Sunday mornings making love in bed while fresh sheets rumbled in the dryer and a roast beef slow-cooked in the oven. How, on sunny days, we’d walk to the coffee shop hand-in-hand, not caring what the world might think. I’d write her love letters and she’d bring home bottles of wine for dinner. We’d love like no one was watching, and she’d come to realize that no one really was, and that genuine happiness is a more welcome gift to those who care about us than all the anger, paranoia, and emotional pain that comes from living in fear, in shame, and in the closet.

It took a lot of faith and hope for me to love her, and it took a purposeful pair of blinders to ignore all the warning signs. I knew she found me lacking—I knew that in her eyes, she deserved someone prettier, better, wealthier, and more genteel. I knew that my job was to be a mistress and not a partner—to be the wrong-side-of-the-tracks girl that could be wild and free in bed and invisible in the world. Still….

I couldn’t help but use my imagination. I couldn’t help but take a peek behind the façade, where it was easy to see her as a child that was born more sensitive than others. A child who didn’t quite fit in—who was bullied by her older brother, not quite as beautiful as her older sister, daunted by a successful father who made her feel as if she’d never be good enough to earn his respect, and by a prematurely deceased mother whom she saw as loving but somewhat weak, and prone to depression. I saw her as a child who had instinctually learned to defend herself, and who couldn’t stop even when there was no attack on the horizon. As someone who had been made to feel ashamed of her androgynous good looks and hipless body, and who had learned early to place a premium on material things instead of people. Lastly, I saw her as a woman who craved genuine love and kindness but who was afraid it would weaken her and leave her to die early.

I could, I thought, love her into loving me. I could love her until all her walls came down, until she no longer needed to wear three layers of clothes, until she could stand up naked and proud in the light of day. I could love her until she favored sunlight over closets, and holding hands over holding grudges. I could love her until the makeup ran off of her freckled nose, and she finally cut her fingernails. I could love her until she opened her heart and let me in—until she saw that love was bigger, brighter, and more encompassing than anything money or status could ever buy. I could love her until her spirit came out from beneath the weight of fear—until her own soul mattered to her more than the opinions of everyone else.

And I did love her with that kind of bold hope but the walls never came down, they only grew.

“I loved you once,” she told me in the end, “but it was all wrong.”

Reality is perception, she was fond of saying, and the reality is that there was always a question mark at the end of her ephemeral and highly conditional love. I knew that. I knew it was a long shot and probably unwise: We had a working relationship; she was involved with other people; she was ultimately comfortable with deception, and seemingly content to spend the rest of her life in a shallow pond. I was a convenience, an ego booster, a lover and a counselor when needed—and maybe in some ways a theoretical possibility—but I was never going to be someone she could love when the lights were on and the doors were open. I was only going to be another secret shame. Making love to me was a charitable backroom cause but loving me, really loving me, was unthinkable. I was too open, too honest, too poor, too rough around the edges, too unsightly, and too out of the closet. I was too little of everything else.

(‘Cause the love that you gave that we made wasn’t able to make it enough for you to be open wide, no….)

Naked with me, she kept her thighs tightly pressed together and her hands busy. She had a beautiful body and intuitive hands but she liked to make love under the sheets, and when she had to leave the bed she’d wrap the sheet around her like a suit of armor. I begged her not to, I begged her to let me see her naked and whole, but there were things about herself she hated because she found them imperfect, even while I loved them simply because they were part of her, and part of being human. The light stretch marks on her belly and the downy patches of hair that grew on her thighs, and even her own sex, were things that she was ashamed of, and it always fractured my heart that she could not see herself the way I saw her. She was lean and strong, with scattered freckles and smooth, pale skin. I loved curling up next to her shoulder, with one of my hands on her hip. I felt at home there, even in hotel beds. Her body was a sanctuary to me, offering equal gifts of passion and reprieve. And while I lay there, warm and drifting easily into sleep, I would dream. Of a bed that wasn’t borrowed and a love that was wanted, and therefore possible. I would dream that she loved me and let me love her.

(Now that it’s over, I have to wonder…. if she hated the imperfections of her own body so much, what must she thought of mine?)

I have scars that she never saw not only because we made love only in the dark but because I was never real to her. I was a base and lowly fantasy. To put it unkindly, I was a whore. And even women who love women can be whores, falling in love with skin-to-skin patrons who seem to be so much more.

If love is not returned though, then maybe it isn’t love at all. Not in the truest sense. Maybe it’s just some kind of starved and crazy one-sided hope let loose inside of a closed cell.

“Let it go,” she wrote. “Let me go.”

And I have. But there’s still me, trying to unlove what was never real in the first place—remembering how she’d already moved on before starting our final argument—how the argument itself was just an easy out—and how far removed I always was from any possibility of moving beyond the brick walls.

And there are still palm trees in the distance and airplanes flying above. 1,394 emails, three t-shirts, a serape blanket, two pens, a necklace from a tourist shop, and a bag full of hotel souvenirs.

There’s a broken spirit, and it’s trying to rise above but I don’t know if it will. I’m lost and I’m drained and I don’t think I’ll able to love with that much hope again.

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