My promise this week was to "tell someone a hard truth." I don't know what mindset I was in when I created this promise, but I am now kind of aghast at the ego I possessed when I wrote it. Who am I to assume that I possess some form of truth that someone else "needs" to hear. I know myself well enough to know that it was an exercise in honesty more than any innate desire to be bossy, but the promise still makes me shiver a bit with shame at my hubris.
As the week unfolded though, I came to understand my promise a bit differently. So, in the method of an English teacher, I revised the promise, but this wasn't an intentional move until the moment presented itself and I realized that what I wanted to do was to confess something, to reveal something about myself more so than directing advice toward another. As such, my weekly promise now reads like this:
I had a difficult conversation this week with a loved one. Due to the personal nature of the conversation, I am forced to talk about it in the abstract, omitting the person's name and the nature of the conversation, but I will be able to get at the root of the promise I made and why it changed.
In the course of a phone call to check up on a loved one, things got deep. Real deep. Unexpectedly deep. And heated. I found myself locked in a verbal skirmish with this person, and I could tell that they were on the defensive. I was on the offensive, so I can't really blame them for their reaction. I took it upon myself to tell this person how their life was, how they should operate, and things they should do in order to "be ok." As I typed out that list, I am again struck by how large my ego must be if I believe I can tell someone that kind of thing.
In the midst of the conversation, the other person turned it back on me. They began pointing out how egotistical I was (not in those exact words, but the sentiment was the same). I backpedaled in an effort to correct my loved one's impression of what I was doing. I was trying to get them out of a funk, to light a fire of joy, to get them out in the world to try new things, but I had framed my "argument" in all the worst ways. I was getting nowhere.
At one point, this person questioned my motives, and I found myself saying this, "I guess I'm just in mourning myself. Mourning the old you, the person I want you to be, which is my own baggage." The moment I said these words I knew them to be true. I knew that I had just gotten to the heart of an issue I didn't know I had. In pushing the person to embrace the things I wanted them to embrace, I was trying to mold them into something they were not. A person they were not. That is my fault. That is my emotional work. This person does not have to be the person they were, for they have had big experiences in the past couple of years that has fundamentally changed who they are. My responsibility is to love them for who they are now, without caveats.
I'm actually still reeling from the confession, reeling from an epiphany about myself that has forced me to look inward in order to understand my own relationship with this person, and I realize now that my relationship is broken. Not irreparably, maybe not even drastically, but it shows me that I have work to do.
Relationships are a two way street, and I was asking my loved one to shoulder all the responsibility for it. The load would be too much for anyone to bear, and so I am left puzzling through my place in it, sorting through the mutual baggage and checking I.D. tags for which ones are mine. I can't ask this person to carry everything, and so I sift and sift through my own responsibility here, looking for a porter to help me.
That's how the conversation ended. I sought a porter, outside help, and I offered to go to counseling a couple of times a month in order to improve the current conditions I find myself in. That was my olive branch. That was my solution. That is me carrying the load. Now it is time for the other person to debate whether or not that is a working solution for them. I hope it is, for my ego is humbled enough now to admit that I don't have the answer. I don't have the magic bullet that is going to "fix" things, and I now realize that the problem doesn't lie outside of myself. I am implicated.
Telling someone a hard truth was a misstep in my promises in that I didn't phrase it right. I hadn't captured the exact meaning of what I needed to do this week, but I was observant enough to catch the error in the sentence, and so I set about revising. I confessed a truth this week, and while the other person was present for the confession, I was both confessor and recipient of the confession. This week found me being honest with myself in a way I hadn't expected. My promise changed me, which, at its heart, is the entire reason the promises exist.
Next week's promise should be a little "lighter" in tone.
Sounds like there was always some opposite polarity in this relationship? In my experience the polarity IS the source of energy which maintains the connection. Like magnets, its the opposition that attracts. Sounds cliche, but if you take the analogy further, you'd find yourself in an infinity loop (the figure eight laying on its side). The orbits of two points on the loop sometimes are repelled equally, and impelled equally by the magnetism (or gravity, lets mix some metaphors eh!) When they pass too close on that loop, the conversations get very personal, and deep like you said. I almost see the heated coronas of two massive suns agitate as they pass through the dark; phantom tendrils of super-heated plasma reaching out, embracing and retracting. The funny thing... how can u ask a rock to change its magnetic properties? Can counseling really achieve such a feat? If not, I guess the best one can do is enjoy the brief alignments, consciously avoid mourning the movement away from the other - knowing it is natural, lawful, and damn near unavoidable. We all behave like bloody atoms anyhow, so whats to worry eh? "They" figured that out before the frickin industrial revolution, when "they" said, "As above, so below". So much in so few words. Amazing.
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