choices

My blog has been plagued with spam views which creeped me out and made it difficult for me to write for a while. It also made me question my choice of putting myself out here in this uncertain space. Questions about vulnerability, being judged and feeling silly came up. But its something I love doing and I am back.

I am looking at Shams Tabrizi’s lines that I have copied into the inside cover of my journal.

‘…Human slowly advances when he accepts his contradictions.’

Often I know I am truly alive by the conflicts raging within my body and heart. Contradictions that cannot be resolved, merely observed. Today I am thinking of whether or not I should continue writing the boiling frog memoir I started. Just about 3000 words written and already so many intense moments and emotions have emerged. Will writing this take me to healing or bring up past events that will tear my life apart again? Will it mess up my current stable relationships? Should I write it as a fictional account or a true story? I must do it, I don’t have to do it. I will find answers but probably not today.

My mind lingers lightly on a confrontation I was faced with this weekend. A friend felt that I had not been there for him when he had needed. This friend had lost someone very close to him. Someone who was mother, father and probably friend in the days of his childhood. My husband and I had been with him when he got the news and stayed with him till he made preparations to leave and was wanting to sleep.

Then deep in our own crises I checked in on him through his social network bleeps and wrote a message there. Satisfied he had many friends around him I put him out of my mind. But he had expected me to follow up and ask how he was. Contrastingly my husband had expected him to get in touch with us once he returned to Singapore. I on the other hand had no expectations from him or from myself about this.

So, three months later when these questions emerged I honestly answered them. He reacted with hurt and made a choice to not take the conversation further and break contact with me.

As is my habit I first tried to understand his viewpoint. I know his choice came from hurt and disappointment. A sense of trust betrayed. After a bit my focus changed to myself and I found that I felt that I had done nothing that required an apology. The lines from Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s 'The Invitation' came to mind.

‘It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me

is true.

I want to know if you can

disappoint another

to be true to yourself.

If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul. If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.’

I had quoted these lines to another friend in 2002 after defending a choice I had made. She at that time had felt betrayed and abandoned by me. I had admitted that I had not realized she had needed my support and then proceeded to explain myself. I too had been going through a crisis that she had not observed and had chosen to keep my energy close to myself. Both of us had spoken our feelings and our friendship had come through stronger. She being a poet herself had acknowledged the painful truth in those lines and said she wanted to live in a way where she would not betray herself.

To be able to betray another to be true to oneself is not an easy choice. Any betrayal whether of self or of another is painful. But so often we make a choice that will make us look trustworthy in the eyes of another and in doing that break trust with ourselves.  In both these incidents I had made a choice where I had disappointed another and was seen as faithless by them.

But in the first case the relationship was strengthened and in the second it broke.

As I continued to think of the current relationship dilemna I also touched a strong anger within. In these same months my family also had been through strong storms. Besides the stress of moving and of being cheated my daughter had been ill with the high fever of a kidney infection in a foreign land, my mother depressed and in pain and my husbands mother had surgery in both eyes. We were grieving the loss of two well loved pets. Friends whom I had not seen in a year wrote or called one of us when they realized what we were going through. But this friend did not contact us at all. There are different sides to any story and its good to be reminded of that.

Every conflict teaches me something about myself and the boundaries within which i operate. Here, I was left with questions about friendship, what I look for in a friend and what I will give and receive in relationships. It is part of the de-cluttering I began earlier this year. Over time I have come closer to living my core values in relationships and mostly i am happy where I am. 

I also see that to be true to oneself one needs to first know oneself and not be afraid to follow the dreams and questions that might lead through disturbing paths to reach this knowledge. And so I might have come closer to the choice about continuing to write that memoir.