Reflections on the self and relationship
by Cindy Myska, DailyHap co-founder
I walk alone. Alone, alone, all alone. Sometimes the alone-ness is deafeningly silent and maddeningly empty. Sometimes the alone-ness is peacefully warm and quietly beautiful.
I embrace the alone-ness. I embrace it because I have realized that I am always alone. And yet, I am also always in relationship, never alone, always reflected in the world around me. The dichotomy of existence.
My daughter wrote a poem when she was in junior high school. It was called “The Girl with Two Shoes” [Ed note: it was actually called “The Dichotomy of My Existence”] about a girl who was equally at home in a tennis shoe and a high heel. She was acknowledging the weird dichotomy of being a girl who was an athlete, a basketball playing machine who could run a 5 minute mile, and a girly girl, a shopping mall machine who loved to adorn herself with clothes, jewelry, and, of course, the quintessential high heels.
The dichotomy of my existence is equally magical if I can push myself to understand it, cherishing the dichotomy rather than making any part of me wrong. I am alone. No one else can ever be me. My sisters are close approximations, the three of us born within three years, and yet we are not the same. We have remarkably different experiences growing up in the same family. I am alone in being ME. I am alone because I AM ME. I am alone because no one else is ME.
So the best thing I can do is embrace my alone-ness. Once I do that, I can reach out of my true self to the reflections of myself in the world, to the relationships around me. I can be both alone and in relationship. I can BEST be in relationship when I recognize that I am alone. Relationship suffers when I try to rid myself of the alone-ness through another person.
If I try to get someone to join me in being me, I have become needy. If I believe someone else can erase my aloneness, I have become codependent. If I am in relationship with people who seep into me and try to erase my aloneness, then they are not respecting my boundaries. If someone tries to dictate how I should be me, they are manipulative. All of the icky stuff, the demanding, hurtful, needy stuff of relationship comes about because I forget to embrace the dichotomy of my existence.
But when I remember, I am alone. And I am always in relationship.