Ode of the Same Story Twice

February 7, 2021

___________________________________

“Stay in your lane, asshole….”

I’ve said that to many a driver in my life (haven’t we all?), but in recent years I’ve said it far more times to my Crazy Hysterical Reactionary Internal Storyteller (CHRIS). He’s as much a part of me as my size 11 ½ feet where my middle toe is longer than my big toe, the weird birthmark I have around my belly button, and my innate ability to apply a M*A*S*H quote to any real-life situation. 

Except CHRIS is out to really mess me up – unlike my feet, birthmark, or Hawkeye Man Crush. 

CHRIS is deviously creative. CHRIS can be devastatingly subtle, or unbearably loud. CHRIS can be the first to arrive in a crisis and the last one to leave my best party. CHRIS can arrive disguised as a friendly Muse, or arise out of my internal fog like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come (or WTF). CHRIS can appear to soothe while actually poisoning my thoughts and feelings. CHRIS pretends to look out for me, when his goal is to bury me in a fetal position (typically because of whatever story he is telling me that I am believing). 

CHRIS sucks. 

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about him this past week, because I’m sick of his shit. 

I’m sick of what I let him do, and of seeing him wreak chaos in others that I care about (he may have different names with them, but he’s the same. Give yours a name – it helps). CHRIS needs to stay in his fucking lane, and if I can’t run him off the road, I hope to at least get him so tired of chasing me that he exits my highway. 

CHRIS is always loudest and strongest around what we care about most, because those are the things that can, paradoxically, bring us the most pain – our jobs and livelihoods, the dreams we hope to make reality, our family relationships, or the deep love for someone we fear losing or yearn desperately to have one day…and then somehow not lose.

CHRIS has chimed in on every one of those areas of my life over the years, and I’m sure he’s proud of his work at various spots. Last week my therapist (and, yes, everyone who emailed in to ask – she IS a rock star) helped me see CHRIS’s handiwork about the “blew up my life” story, and once that Cat was out the proverbial Bag, I saw others that he’s been working on and some that stopped working a long time ago. I also recognized CHRIS doing his worst in some people close to me, too, but those are their stories to wrestle with and tell. 

Instead, I will just share one of those CHRIS stories with you – one about the ubiquitous Love We Hope To Find Then Never Lose.

CHRIS has twisted me up around a lot of various things in my life, but never more so — or more thoroughly — then on this issue. From a very early age, when I identified boys as bullies and girls as safe, the story of “finding the love I’ll never lose” coursed through my mind and my emotional veins and arteries more than just about anything else. CHRIS had a lot of help, too - television, movies, peers, cultural and religious expectations and exhortations, you name it. So much out there seems to indicate not only what the kind of love you find and never lose was supposed to look like, but also how to act/be to get it and keep it.

The messaging was as crazily mythological as it was confounding to me, even well into adulthood. I needed to be “good” and “upstanding” but also “tough” and “exciting.” I needed to be attractive and compelling, but also mysterious and accessible. I needed to be down to earth, but had better have a good amount of money. I needed to be humble, but I also needed to stand out from all the other suitors out there (as if such things were finite, like pie). 

CHRIS essentially pushed me to play a role to achieve a certain outcome, instead of figuring out who I was and just being that. And of course when playing that role didn’t work, CHRIS’s story had a twofold effect; there must be something fundamentally unlovable about me, and/or there must be something really wrong with the women from whom I sought that love that I would never lose.

It was an untenable way to build relationships, and CHRIS knew it. By the time I was actually old enough and far enough along in life to seek and build partnership, the stories about myself and other people had become so much of my “reality” that I could not function well in those relationships. I wanted love, but didn’t know or trust how to either give it or receive it. The stories CHRIS wove didn’t allow for my own healing, or forgiveness for others not living up to my ridiculous expectations (which are simply resentments waiting to be born).

CHRIS helped me create a mental list of criteria and attributes that no human being could ever reach. Hell, no Greek goddess could have ever reached them, either. Which meant, of course, I was always disappointed eventually with the real person in front of me. But instead of looking at the folly of my own stories, I made all our failures about them. Naturally, I never gave myself a list of all the ways in which I needed to show up better for someone else. Why would I? The problem was never “me” — it was everybody else.

It took me a long time to recognize and unlearn all of that.  Even then, it took time to show up differently in my relationships (of all kinds, but especially romantic ones) and not hold anyone to “A List.” The CHRIS stories were so constant, for so long, that even though I learned not to listen to them I still didn’t know what to listen to instead. 

Then, a few years ago, the effects of all this hit its lowest point in terms of the elusive “love that I had always wanted and then would never lose.” For maybe (actually, really truly) the first time in my life, I knew who I wanted such love from, and from that person alone. It was wonderful to feel that desire, that certainty. But in the end, CHRIS got me again. I was so focused on getting that particular outcome, and so afraid that anything other than that would doom me to a life without love, that it short-circuited and limited everything that was real between me and this person. In short, the very thing I feared happening I made happen. She certainly had her own CHRIS to battle and her own demons to face, but I was unable to see even that and - out of compassion, or at least recognition - relax and allow us to just be who we could be to and for each other.

Something based on Reality, not my stories. 

Instead, in not getting the outcome I thought I wanted, I focused on her “failures,” which were really just more stories. What was she really about? What had she not told me? What things about her could I trust or not trust? Did she really mean all the things she said and did? I had a million theories that I called convictions, a million more fears that I called intuition, a million fake conversations with her that were really just my wounded ego’s latest civil war.  It all did nothing useful; I inevitably felt bad about myself and angry and distrustful of her, and that was all I got from all my fruitless effort to “find the answers.” 

If I did focus on myself, it was on all the things that I must have done wrong. When did I say the wrong thing? When did I make a mistake? What should I have done differently? Why didn’t I see the reality of her blank/blank/blank/blank [all made-up shit]?

When the stakes felt the highest in this Most Important Of All Questions, CHRIS again had me tied in knots, unable to see how all the cords twisted together to tie me up. And hence, I had no clear idea of how to untie them.

See? This is why CHRIS sucks. 

[Editor’s Note: Don’t worry, folks. That’s not the end of that particular story. Just keep going. It gets better.]

Though I probably sound angry about CHRIS, I am not really. Not at the moment. But this past week I’ve been thinking a lot about him – and to be clear, he is the stories I make up about others, myself, the future, etc. – because of the major (and no longer true) story I discovered last week that CHRIS has been telling me for years. After that revelation, I couldn’t help but revisit some old stories of his, and also find some new ones that he’s been slowly cooking up. As I did, I divided those stories into two categories- the ones that I tell myself about me (which I call “my side of the street”) and those CHRIS makes up about other people (“the other’s side of the street”). It’s on the latter that I’ve kept coming back to throughout the week, and I blame the Greeks. 

Yes, the Ancient Greeks. Their mythology, to be specific. 

In last week’s post, you might’ve seen that the book on my nightstand was Circe by Madeline Miller. It’s an exquisitely written book, one that I’ve taken my time reading. I described it to someone as like reading a painting, if words were the paintbrush. It’s also given me a crash course review of Greek mythology. And talk about a lot of stories where made up perceptions of others collide with things like fate, chance, and destiny to create tragedy, farce, and the outlines of human frailty and strength. No wonder we still read Greek mythology today – it’s all so wondrously and frighteningly FALLIBLE.

Just like us. 

Within big human questions like What About Fates and Is There Only A Crappy Afterlife, If There’s One At All, the other constant in Greek mythology is that every character gets themselves into trouble at some point because they’re making up bullshit stories about someone else, and in the process are trying to control some sort of outcome for themselves out of fear. They each have a CHRIS. If they are mortal, CHRIS ends up killing them. If they are Demigods, death just takes longer to arrive. If they are gods and goddesses, then they end up punished / exiled / chained to a rock to have their livers perpetually eaten by birds. 

So yeah, as we see in Greek mythology, CHRIS never takes anyone anywhere good in the end.  Which is what makes CHRIS the great universal warning scream from our Ancient Greek forebears:

STOP MAKING UP SHIT ABOUT WHAT OTHER PEOPLE DO AND THINK AND FEEL ABOUT YOU!  LOOK AT YOURSELF INSTEAD!

(I imagine Prometheus shouting this to me daily, straining against the chains binding him to solid rock. Not really. But thanks for Fire, Promey. Much love. I like barbeque and camping a lot. Actually, maybe it should be Odysseus shouting it at me from across the River Styx – that dude’s CHRIS did a number on him in the end. He’d know to warn me.)

Much like with CHRIS, it would be easy to say that all Greek mythology is purely cynical about humanity, the nature of existence, the afterlife, etc. CHRIS is the real power in Greek (and maybe any) mythology, not Zeus or Helios or Athena or any of those other Ancient World Avengers in Splendid Loincloths. 

I don’t think that is all there is to CHRIS, or to Greek mythology. Maybe the written lines of CHRIS and Greek myths are all that, but between those lines is a silver lining, I noticed this week. Greek mortals and immortals alike all had a CHRIS, but they also showed an ability to ignore him. And when they did, they often prospered and found success, inner strength, and peace. It didn’t always last, but they showed us that if it can be done once, it can be done again. And again. In that sense, CHRIS himself shows us what we can do instead of listen to him – we can listen to the OPPOSITE of him. 

There is an opposite, I’ve learned. And who is that? 

That would be CHRIS’s antipodal twin sister, CASSIE - my Courageously Authentic & Self-Sustaining Intuition Explorer. She’s as much a part of me as my penchant for crying at movies, my need for a cup of hot tea every night at 10:00 PM, and my secret desire to go to Mars just to build a Red Sand Castle and put Star Wars action figures in it. 

And CASSIE is out to really build me up - by focusing me on the reality of things, as best I can see it.

CASSIE is consistently kind. CASSIE can be quietly subtle, or unmistakably clear. CASSIE can be the best friend in a crisis and the best bouncer at my best party. CASSIE doesn’t disguise herself at all - she’s a friendly Guide and the Spirit of All the Stuff that May Be Possible. CASSIE actually soothes me by helping me identify, and own, my thoughts and feelings. CASSIE looks out for me, helping me keep my own path clear of obstacles and prevent me from shooting myself in the foot.

CASSIE does not suck. 

I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about her this week, because she is The Shizzle. 

Interestingly, I don’t think I would’ve recognized CASSIE as readily as I did when I did unless I knew CHRIS so damned well in the first place. Funny how that works. Sometimes one has to recognize a lot of lies in order to understand what the truth is. She’s always been inside me, but it’s only recently that her voice has finally grown stronger than her brother’s. As is true with so many things, I first heard her in me by hearing from her in other people — my closest friends, my family, my therapist, and more. Including the person that I mentioned earlier, actually. Her CASSIE is strong, too, and has been for awhile now.

With their collective help, I started to recognize and listen to CASSIE, then act on what I found. By abandoning all the made up stories about others in my past - their supposed motives, failures, etc. - and focusing instead on what my mind AND my intuition (my heart/spirit) told me together, I started to see the mythologies I had built around “finding the love I’d always wanted and never losing it.” And there were many — in that sense, it’s CASSIE who really showed me CHRIS. 

I also saw a truth that I had avoided for a very long time. 

Namely, that real love for someone cannot be attached to a specific outcome and be expected to last. Love cannot be real if it comes with a checklist, or has to look or be delivered a certain way in order for me to accept it.

Take the person I mentioned earlier. CASSIE shows a different reality to that same story. The problem wasn’t that this person lacked love for me, or that she wasn’t being honest with me about who she was and how she felt (she was very clear on both). The problem was I was so focused on the “type” of love that I wanted to get from her (which was really just an illusion of love) that I couldn’t see the Reality of the genuine, deep love that she truly offered me. Because it didn’t look how I “needed” it to, I didn’t seem to want it. And that’s not love — that’s…. something else, far away from love. It did a major disservice to her, and to myself.

All the attempts I’d made to “figure her out” had been pointless exercises when it came to ascertaining the truth. Making up stories about her didn’t bring me anywhere close to the Reality of her; instead, they drove me further away from her by feeding my neuroses and my resentments. Based on myths.

In reality, that storyteller in me —CHRIS — was never right about her once. Not once.

Fortunately, I was able to clear all of that up with her once I started listening to CASSIE instead. And Reality with her has turned out to be far better than all the crazy stories and scenarios I once cooked up in my mind. She and I are both better off - and now know and love each other far better and more authentically - as a result.

Thanks, CASSIE.

Listening to CHRIS, I only made a list of demands, of how I wanted this person to be, instead of loving her for who she is, no matter what that meant for me or us. To do otherwise is to love with certain conditions attached. And frankly, that’s not love - that’s imprisonment or hostage taking, and a recipe for disaster in any kind of relationship. I’ve seen it happen to people around me throughout my life, and I’m sensing that many of the problems we run into in our relationships - no matter their type or duration - stem from these stories / lists / expectations / demands that we put on each other.

We get ahead of ourselves. We focus on expected outcomes in order to feel secure in the love we have and to try to turn the hope that it won’t go away into a reality. For me, CHRIS had me wanting love without any risk, connection without any vulnerability, and the feel-good illusion of love rather than the truly intimate, vulnerable, sometimes-painful-but-always-meaningful reality of it.

CASSIE taught me a lot; she not only saved me from my own flawed ideas about love, but also helped me mend many relationships that had been damaged by me (and CHRIS’s stories) over the years. Those people know who they are, and I’m beyond grateful that I now know better how to give real love to them, and accept it in return from each of them.

CASSIE has shown me that I am not lacking love in my life. Romantic love is still a work in progress for me, but that’s true for all of us no matter where we are, who we’re with, or for how long. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, by letting go of the CHRIS Myths about love, and accepting those that I love (and who love me) without making up stories in the process, the Reality of love in my life is being revealed more fully every day.

It’s been in front of me all this time. 

It’s there, ready for me to accept it, and those who have given it to me are willing to accept it from me in return. And though this may sound sanguine, it’s a truth that I know in my bones and beyond — when it comes to love, I’ve got nothing to worry about. I have plenty from others and from myself. And it’s that last part — myself — that CHRIS hid from me for so long. And that kept me from seeing the Reality of others. 

This week, amidst all the Greek mythology and reflecting on the pulls and powers of CHRIS and CASSIE, I reveled in the calm and peace this Reality brings me. It’s not present 100% of the time, of course, but it doesn’t need to be for me to know that it exists. More and more, when I realize I’m not listening to CASSIE, it’s getting easier to hear her again.

I stop what I’m doing. I ask myself, “What story is CHRIS telling me right now?” When I have the answer, I do — nothing. I let it sit. Why? Because CHRIS relies on me to build onto his initial story to make it more powerful, to make it truly destructive. So if I just leave his story alone and don’t add to it, it rots right where I leave it, like a piece of fallen fruit left on the ground. Just being aware of that story, and aware that the truth is elsewhere, robs CHRIS of his power. And then, CASSIE doesn’t need to do much. She just points me back to myself, to my own questions about my assumptions, my fears, or whatever is in the way of seeing the Reality of me being okay.

And I am okay. I’ve said before and it’s worth saying again — each of us has survived 100% of all the stories our CHRIS has thrown at us, all the real pains and losses of life, all the setbacks and tragedies and uncertainties. Each one of us has survived every single one of them. And so, weirdly, even when things in the world definitely aren’t okay, we have space to be okay ourselves in very real ways. Our track record proves it. And that changes worlds - each of ours, one at a time. 

If we aren’t going to share our stories with the people we are making them up about - in order to see if we are dealing with reality or not - we are better off dropping those stories and focusing on our own side of the street instead. We can’t go anywhere at all on their side if we aren’t willing to just, you know, ask them if our stories are true, completely insane, or somewhere in between. 

Because it is only when we can share our stories - and all the fears and insecurities and vulnerabilities doing so requires, and the risk of hearing that we might be dead wrong - can we develop the intimacy, trust, and connection that is at the heart of any deep relationship. It’s how we can reality check ourselves with each other, learn more about each other, and learn to truly love each other As We Are. And that, in the end, is what we all want for ourselves. 

I wonder what all the Greek gods and goddesses would think. My guess is that they’d have no idea what to do with any of that. 

Fates? Go ahead. Whatever you scheme, it’s okay.  Oracles, too. If more Greeks had believed in their inherent Okayness, maybe the legendary stories we know would be a lot more boring and not as instructive - and likely not as well known. So the fact they didn’t see their Okayness is, um, okay.

But for us, in between the lines, that silver lining of Okayness is clear if we know where to look. 

There’s plenty of love in us, and available to each of us from others. So go and pick some up. It may not look like how you expected or think you wanted or needed, but it’s likely far better than the versions of it you’ve tried to dream up. 

CASSIE says so. And she knows what she’s talking about. 

So listen to her and stay on your side of the street, asshole (and that means me, too).

I say that with love. 

Chins Up, Everyone. 

******************
Thanks for reading My Sunday Post. Here are some important updates from my past week:

Soul Book of the Week: In My Head [Poetry] by J.M Storm (By a car mechanic turned famous poet)

Book (Still) On My Nightstand: Circe by Madeline Miller (I’m savoring it like a fine Olympus Nectar)

Best Show / Movie I Watched: News of the World (Tom Hanks in his first ever Western)

Strongest Earworm Song: Second Time Around by Indigo Girls

Best Meal I Ate: Sirloin Cap Roast (Instant Pot) with Onion/Garlic gravy

Longest Walk / Run of the Week: 4.78 mile run / 19.2 mile ride (Thursday)

Best Recovered Memory: My buddy Seth visiting me back in college and sleeping in my closet

Best Thing I Found That I Forgot I Owned: A solar powered cell phone charger

Biggest Shift In Life Style: Putting myself back on a regular bedtime. Finally (right, Mom?).

Biggest Thing Next Week: Second COVID vaccine dose (Tuesday)