by tashmcgill | Aug 19, 2015 | Culture & Ideas, Spirituality
On the corner of my street there’s a street lamp shining bright on the intersection of suburban roads. There’s barely a car parked in sight; from the end of my driveway I can count just three. But there under the spotlight, is the corner dairy (a 7-Eleven of sorts), the bus stop and an Indian take-out store. In which the lights are blazing and the door wide open despite being 12 degrees celcius. ‘Well, they’re optimistic,’ I think to myself, my inner monologue dripping with cyncism.
It’s 9.00pm on a Tuesday night and I’m crawling inside to finish a fraction of what needed to get done today and the remnants of a to-do list going back to Friday 2 weeks ago. I’m feeling deflated and empty; I have been for days actually. Everything feels like a fight in which I keep getting ‘No’ for an answer and while I’m not losing – not yet defeated, I’m desperate for a ‘Yes’. For a win, for a step closer to the dream.
I’m close to throwing a tantrum in the face of the Universe. A grown-up one, with big words and everything.
I go out to dinner, to movies, for a wine or three, parties for kids and friends come for dinner and all of it’s good for a moment, until I’m back left with myself. I’d just like a ceasefire in the warzone I’m in, a truce where the Red Cross comes storming in to simply bandage the wounds and nurse me along a little. I’m so hungry for kindness and connection I’m almost like a child who wants to be indulged simply – because I do. I’m close to throwing a tantrum in the face of the Universe. A grown-up one, with big words and everything.
Not for anything trivial like love or biology or even the politics of sexuality and refugees, although I can make a pretty good case there. No, bigger things – like ‘why is meaning so hard to grasp and so much of life filled with meaninglessness’ and ‘why do we live with a sense of displacement and crave belonging’?
I’m almost convinced I could make a winning case to demand answers but the biggest battle I’m fighting is Me. Fighting to let go, to hold on, to give love and stay soft-hearted when I’d rather put up defensive offense. Battling to submit to other people’s methods, to collaborate when I love independence, fighting not to let go of my love of excellence and fighting the urge to say many times over, I call ‘bullshit’.
(I’m sorely tempted to call bullshit on inspirational social media posts, on mindfulness and yoga mantras, especially on religious politics and the politics of religion. I want to remind everyone that you’re just an entertainer on Facebook for an audience you determine and that the strong, independent woman is as much of a Unicorn as winning can be without someone having to lose.)
The biggest battle I’m fighting is Me. To find peace in the midst of ambition, a little give in a world of take.
Most of this could be solved by hibernating for a weekend or three, resting in good company that doesn’t mind taking care of me a little. Strong, capable, independent as I am – I need a little reminder of what it’s like to play. To laugh. To feel good. To feel alive. A gentle reminder that work isn’t everything, even when it seems like it’s the only thing. I probably just need some good sex in good company, with a laugh or two.
And all this probably has nothing to do with the Indian take-out store on the corner.
Except the flashing neon ‘OPEN’ sign now flashes in the front window and sometime in the last week they’ve added twinkling fairy lights. Where the door used to remain closed it’s open to the street and there’s even a sign on the curb of the road. There’s a bus that stops across the road once every 80mins or so, and a tinny house on the opposite corner which is probably mutually beneficial. I’m not sure who they’re hoping will turn up. I’ve lived here five years looking at that same corner, same tinny house, same Indian store and all of sudden they’ve opened the door. The hopeful audacity of it. Open doors, defying belief and daring the neighbourhood to place an order. That if you try, they will come. If you stay open and welcoming, people will turn around and look after you. If you fight just a little more, ‘No’ might turn to ‘Yes’.
It’s easy to turn my cynicism audacious, to make the bullshit calls loud and clear. To turn up the volume on everything but hope. It’s harder to choose a hopeful audacity. A plucky bleeding courage that keeps on playing anyway. A hopeful audacity that compells me to put on my unicorn panties and rise again tomorrow. To keep on battling for a yes.
by tashmcgill | Aug 10, 2015 | Friendship, Love & Marriage
I have something to tell you but first I must give you two definitions. Be patient with me, but come along with me to this place.
Love is problematic to define these days. A single word has been stretched through the ages to encompass many things that are not love. We have come to know love as a feeling, as many feelings. Feelings of acceptance, belonging, desire, companionship, friendship, trust, fulfilment, lust. Many of these feelings are about the Self, the Ego. In it’s most basic human habit, pursuit of love is an egocentric, the language of love is a lazy lens through which we seek meaning. We hope to satisfy our inner turmoil through external means. As if love applied externally, from outside of us, will heal our wounds and complete our emptiness.
Here is what I believe about Truth. Truth is a way of being and seeing in the world. Truth is not seeing things as they are, the definition of black or white, good or bad Truth and therefore freedom to live truly is not found in determining what is right or wrong. Which is why Truth leads to Truest Love, the kind of love that sees the possibility of hope and redemption in all things alongside the darkness. Truth lives in a world that is both good and bad, redeemable and hopeless.
Truth is bigger than us. Sometimes we forget Love can be too but we tend to reduce it to feelings; a transaction record of good and bad feelings that we keep within us. We try to make Love fit the emptiness we feel inside when perhaps we could fill that space with truthful things instead.
I am angry with you, I am happy about this. I feel conflicted in this belief. I am not sure about this situation. I am confused. I am undecided. I have decided and you will not like my decision.
This basic kind of love almost always involves a transaction with another person or people. “I felt loved because of what you said or did. Because of how you touched me or laughed at me, I felt secure, weak, sad, rejected, loved, desired.” Truth brings us back to self and the universe. Who am I? Who are you?
Truth looks inwardly to express something external into the world. Love searches in the world for something that will answer the internal. If you pursue Truth, you will always have a gift to offer the smallest or largest gathering of humans, because you can live outside of your own need.
So to the crux of it: I wrote here that I was giving something up – trying to determine the What-Is, What-Isn’t and What-If.
I have not given up on Love, but I have given Love up. I have given up Love for Truth. Not to give up on Love itself, but to give up the chasing of it. I am willing to embrace a life that does not rise or fall or find it’s definition in the way I am loved or find love in relationships with people. I am learning that accepting myself wholly is a most worthy endeavour, despite what feels uncomfortable and risky. Where I fear loss, I remind myself that being fully alive in this wondrous body and mind is a glorious pursuit. I am not bitter, I am not defeated nor deflated, I am not fatally pessimistic. I see a different type of future, where I, loving Truth most of all, might find more truthful love in any variety of expressions.
Truth is already waiting for me, within my grasp and with a sustaining, life-giving, soul-filling pulse. If I do not choose Truth, I might accidentally let go of it to chase Love and for what? Truest love settles within me and longs to be sought out, if I would just embrace Truth as a way of living and let her be revealed. She who is I.
Strong, idealistic, creative, sarcastic, witty, playful, sexual and sensual, a dreamer and doer, demanding and deeply emotional: this is just the surface of truth in my life. Lonely, brave, terrified and sometimes irrational, I am always well-intentioned and I try to demonstrate Love in my actions even when my words are firm and furious. I am passion in flesh and blood, letting nothing from my grasp without a fight if I desire it. And I desire many things. I desire. I am desire.
Yes, I have chosen Truth over Love and it has done nothing for my loneliness. But living in Truth is also accepting no external force can calm the inner turmoil. Not even your idea of God can resolve that which is unresolved within you if you cannot accept Truthfulness as a way of living. To choose Truth is no miracle cure for loneliness. Truth is key to embracing your loneliness.
Love promises the Ego there is comfort, security and belonging in being known.
Let me be explicitly clear: the more time you spend chasing this kind of love, the hungrier you’ll be. No one will ever love you hard enough, deep enough, true, rich, kind or fast enough. It will never be enough.
Truth tells you there will always be loneliness within your life, that grows and shrinks accordingly to your chasing of Love.
Truth will help you accept rejection and love deeply in the midst of your own sorrow, celebrating in times of sadness and of joy because Truth is always bigger than us and invites us into a bigger way of living.
Truth has always been the gift I have to offer, so I could not be more at home with myself than to give all else up to embrace it fully, and therefore myself.
Do you struggle to forgive simply through loving someone enough? Love is not the path to forgiveness. Truth is the path to forgiveness because the transaction is not based on putting things to rights but rather telling the truth of what is and what might be; side by side.
Do you struggle to show people your true self for fear of rejection or losing relationships? You require Truth to become fully yourself. Choosing not to live out of complete truth for fear of losing relationship, status or influence is a Catch-22 that quickly traps you into people-pleasing. It’s as if you begin to reject your true self so others won’t.
Do you wrestle with loneliness? Truth will set you free to embrace and understand your loneliness, to live with it rather than against it.
Yes, I have chosen Truth over Love and it has done nothing for my loneliness. But living in Truth is also accepting no external force can calm the inner turmoil. Not even your idea of God can resolve that which is unresolved within you if you cannot accept Truthfulness as a way of living.
So I have given Love up for Truth in order to tell you the truth. To tell myself the truth. To live truthfully in the world. Maybe I will also encounter Love along the way, but I will most certainly live in Truest Love.
by tashmcgill | Aug 7, 2015 | Friendship, Relationships
Men and women need each other, and they need to be friends. However, rarely do people write about what happens to precious, life-giving male-female friendships when friends find lovers that are not each other.
I’m lucky to have a lot of married/engaged/commited men in my life. I enjoy their friendship and mostly I love their women too. Sometimes, my dear male friends have become so because I loved their wives first anyway. I’ve successfully negotiated relationship mergers before.. guy friends who have married and their wives have become as close as the husband ever was.
But it’s tiresome, heartwrenching work because there are moments you have to sacrifice the role your boy bestie played, sometimes for years.
A woman like me, needs men in her life. Companions and champions. Buddies and trusted advisors. I need them because I have a wealth of women in my life but if I don’t continue to have positive, thriving relationships with great men – I might risk believing the press that no man you’re not sleeping with is worth your time.
Truthfully, I think these relationship transitions are more important than we realise. The fabric of social groups and communities is woven with the complexities of many different types of interactions between men and women. So while I am writing about my male friends, this is true for many of us regardless of gender.
Sometimes, a rare thing happens and you end up adoring the woman that makes your friend so happy, even more than you loved your friend to begin with. Those relationships are amazing and I’m lucky to have a few of them. Sometimes, the one you thought was never good enough turns out to be worse and you have to bite your tongue from saying all sorts of things. Sometimes you don’t have to say anything because you’re so relieved your friend is no longer suffering. That’s happened a couple of times.
Sometimes, you end up seeing your friends through their weddings, marriages, children and then through their divorces. That’s happened a few times too.
In any of those circumstances, there is a season where your friend is lost to you, replaced by a creature called ‘Stranger That Knows Your Deep Secrets’. Your secrets, once shared in trust between the two of you are now the shared property of your friend and their lover. You have to re-introduce yourself and hope they are equally as trustworthy. You have to hope that they choose to love you, as you choose to love them.
You hope happiness lasts for them, forever. You hope not to lose them forever.
Mostly, the change is within you. You learn to say goodbye differently and hello less often. You grow accustomed to a changed priority, a new role, a different place. ‘Stranger That Knows Your Deep Secrets’ is no longer as available, for good reason. They too, are undergoing personal adjustment. Avoid bitterness.
You have lost your friend for a season, maybe forever. You cannot retrieve him from the place he has arrived at; that’s not your right. You now have only the choice of waiting, hoping and nurturing some expression of a relationship that somehow bridges the stranger he has become and the memory of who he was. In it you become a stranger too; a stranger to his partner, a stranger to the friendship that you had that now merges to be something different.
More often than not, you are no longer on the inside of their life, even though once you shared dreams and thoughts. Indeed, crisis and tears and whispered words float past their ears, the smiling partner who knows enough of your face to warrant knowing a measure of your heart. You will whisper, ‘I miss you’ and it will go unheard in the depths where you needed to be heard.
You will pick yourself up. Your friend may one day return but you are less likely to have the same sense of comraderie you did before. You can’t be forced into loving companionship with his wife, and you can’t force yourself upon them, they are two, they are strong.. and they wholeheartedly go about their existence. This is the way the world should be.
You won’t talk too loudly about it, because boys and girls struggle so much to be friends anyway. You won’t be too demanding. There is no sensitive way to say I love you, but I do not know your wife enough to love her yet. There is a sadness admist your joy in your friend’s delight.
See, in the corner of your heart, you always fear that you had your friend by default .. that he has only room for his mother, sisters, wife and daughters in the woman-shaped spaces in his life. You wonder how you got there to begin with, and you know you’ll never be the same.
His empty space is shaped like a brother, within your heart.
