I've been listening to podcasts. It started on the weekends but has been slowly replacing most of my news consumption. I listen to a few that aren't newsy. Ana Marie Cox does With Friends Like These on which she has the kind of conversations I long to have. Recently she had a conversation with Chris Stedman who identifies as a public atheist.
In my life I've participated in a number of different religions and philosophies. I remember deep spiritual feeling from my earliest childhood. These days I say I believe in God but I don't know what I mean by that. There is often an apt distinction made between religious and spiritual. But these days neither of those really fits. I believe in something. I believe that a butterfly flapping its wings may cause a shift in weather patterns. There are forces impacting us all the time. Political, social and probably mysterious. What I'm not sure about is whether I believe in a responsive personal force.
There's a problematic intersection in my feeling about God and my romantic longings. It's one of the saddest things in my identity. I have felt like meeting someone who could love me would require(s) divine intervention. In many ways this is about being fat but I know too many fat women with wonderful loving relationships to truly believe that. I think it has more to do with my absent father and inappropriately affectionate stepfather. Or some combination of difficult psychology and social bad faith.
I've been suffering a crush on a guy. I'm not sure how it happened. It developed slowly and is based on a physical reaction. I don't know him. The very little experience I have of him leads me to believe that we would have very little in common. At first it was just fun to enjoy feeling attracted to someone. Eros. It feels good. And then I started deteriorating. Because I do want a relationship. So I began to wish that he could be someone who he isn't. I began to write dialogue that would result in a surprise happy connection. Oddly, he doesn't seem to have received his script. I'd like to own the hurt that I am feeling because in a very real way it has nothing to do with him.
There is another episode of Friends Like These on which she talks about a column on sex robots and incels. She says something about people not knowing what incels are and ... I didn't. I looked it up. It's about feeling oneself to be an involuntary celibate. At first I thought - oh that's me! But no. It's not me at all. It's about a kind of entitlement that I don't understand at all. It's angry and violent.
Wanting something that isn't available to you is just no fun. It's no fun materially but we sort of have a place for that. Maybe we feel like if we work hard enough we can get things. Or we just feel resentful and we pout. I feel like certain things are a right. Food, education, health care, housing. And certain things are just about process. We have a process toward realizing what we want.
Love isn't guaranteed. I don't think it should be. I never understand the - you deserve - lines. I don't think we earn or are entitled to love or any expression of feeling from anyone else. We just live in our individual process and sometimes we (pardon the expression) get lucky. Or we don't.
There have been men who loved me. There have been men who brought me roses. Thinking about them makes me sadder than thinking about the men who didn't. Why has it never felt right? Why am I always asking why? I feel like I've worked on this for years and I don't feel like I've gotten very far.
But not long ago I had a strong feeling of ... well ... I'm not sure what. Something like wholeness and peace. I don't know why it happened and I don't know why it eludes me today. It may be in part about this boy drama but ... I'm not sure that's all it is. It may be early birthday blues. Maybe it was too much poetry. It may just be a part of who I am. It certainly has been.
So.
There's no where to go with all this. No easy resolve. I know I'm not alone in these feelings. Not that that helps. I know these feelings will fade. Sort of fall back. Not bite so hard into my day. I am trying to find a way to hold them.
But.
They suck.
I'm not sure I believe in a responsive personal force. Does the butterfly flap its wings and cause the wind or does the wind call to the butterfly, asking for a push?