Good Tiff-Tiff Hunting (the email response I sent to Tiffany last night)

As I wrote below, Tiffany wrote a very short email to me last night, making sure I got home safely the other night (Tuesday 7/8/08), and also letting me know that she wasn’t going to hang out with me tonight (Friday 7/11/08), which using my mad brain power I had already assumed wasn’t going to happen. Our egos just don’t play well together. Our souls do, they get along just swimmingly. But our egos, not so much; things are a bit tense between the two of them. So, anyways, I wrote and sent the following in response to the email she (her ego) sent to me….

You were perfect, Tiffany. And I don’t mean perfect in some idealistic and absolute sense. I mean you were perfectly awesome, perfectly acceptable and worthy of complete acceptance and love, just as you were. You were perfect just as you were when we first met, when we first corresponded, when you first pursued me and tried to woo me and get me interested in you (I was interested in you from the get go), when we were together in Half-Price books or Jo-Beth, when we were together at The Pub, when we were on your back porch, when we were on your couch, when we sat by each other at the tennis courts, when sat next to each other at the beautiful dinner you made, and when we were together upstairs each of our four times, and when you wanted to do more with me than I knew we should at that point. There was nothing I wanted different about you, there was nothing I wanted to change, there was nothing I didn’t accept. It was perfect. To kiss you, to touch you, to be kissed by you, to be touched with you, to be alone with you in conversation, everything was just as it should be and just as I would have ever wanted it. I accepted you completely as you were. I was hooked. I wanted to know more about you, to continuing knowing you more, to continue the journey, to deepen the knowledge of each other, to deepen the sharing, to deepen the connection, and to live it even more fully. But I want you to know this and hear this clearly: there was nothing about you I wanted to change or that I didn’t accept or that I thought was going to be unworkable or less than awesome for me and match up incredibly well with me. I had no reservations, no hesitations, least of all about your intelligence or level of development as a person.

And then your ego—your fear factor, the shadowy, dark, unenlightened, frightened voice of doubt (can I really be this fortunate so quickly to have found someone I might like so much, someone so perfect for me? Could a relationship with someone really be this amazing and effortless? Am I ready for this? Am I enough for him or is he going to find me boring and reject me?)—showed up and reared its ugly head and started slingshotting me because it was afraid. It started rejecting itself and its own happiness, its own potential for being accepted for exactly who you are—your child accepts you and loves for exactly who you are; why should it be such a strange notion that someone else out there, someone not of your own creation, might also find your perfectly wonderful exactly as you are? And if this someone finds you wonderful, does that then mean he must also have something wrong with him, because deep down you don’t accept yourself? You are perfectly wonderful just as you are. You were perfectly worthy of getting to know better. So why this self-rejection? Why this lack of self-acceptance? Why do you talk of your inner self so unkindly, calling it “Jell-O”? You are completely awesome just as you were when you first showed up and when you pursued me and when you lived from your love and your passion and your happiness. There was nothing I wanted to change about that person. I only wanted to get to know her better. I trusted you were going to be what you claimed to be, and what you projected yourself to be. And I was honest about who I showed up as and who I was projecting myself to be. No overselling, no representative. There was nothing I wanted to change about you; you were awesome as you were. There was nothing you wanted to change about me; you accepted me completely (at the time) for who I was. Everything was lovely and just as it should be. All was right in that small corner of the world. Two souls had found each other. Two souls had been brought together for something extraordinary, holy, real, and rare.

Did I want you to grow as a person? Why, of course, I did. Growth is life. But it was clear to me even at that point that the direction that you would be going and growing was completely compatible with the direction I was going, and maybe even had already gone. I simply wasn’t worried. Your inner work was a non-issue; to a first-rate intelligence it was a non-issue. To the ego, the dark side, that second-rate and frightened intelligence, however, it was a potential big issue. So what concerned me was when you demeaned yourself as being Jell-O inside. That wasn’t true. It wasn’t true then. But . . . it may be true now. You may have bought into that illusion. You may have self-hypnotized yourself with it. You may have allowed what’s best and most lively and vital in you to have been hijacked by your ego—your fear, your doubt, your darkness, that little voice in you that says you aren’t good enough, that you don’t deserve happiness with another, that you’re not ready for it or strong enough to sustain it and live it. You have certainly been feeding that illusion for the past few weeks and investing more and more heavily into it—especially every time you reject yourself and slingshot me (which is one and the same choice whenever you make it). You may be at the point where it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy; you may be at the point where you need to believe and make it so. It’s clear to me that you’ve talked yourself into a problem you didn’t have.

And so this is where the fun began.

And so now I’ve meet your ego—cold, afraid, lifeless, dead eyes, cowardly, dark, going through the motions, timid, a shoddy frightened secondhand entity. And in doing so, my ego has come out; it’s been drawn out and put into play, despite myself. Reactively, weakly, hurt, reeling, maybe even cowardly, I have let my ego—my fear, hurt, pain, confusion—get the better of me, just as you have let your ego derail and hijack what’s best in you.

And so here we are in complete and utter darkness. In complete and utter chaos. Two egos where two souls should be. Two ugly egos where two beautiful, light, vibrant, engaging souls should be. Two people were brought together for something holy and rare and uplifting and melodious. Two people were brought together because they might just have been perfect for each other as they were. And then one ego, and perhaps even the other, has torn it asunder.

Can it be healed? Can the hurt be transcended? I know I am capable of it. It’s not even a matter of “forgiveness” in the sense of “selective remembering”—I am just that resilient. My best friend when I was child—his name is Glenn—he and I used to get into fights—fist fights—all of the time. And he was stronger than I was and had been roughed up and toughened up by his older brothers. And so whenever we would get in a fight, sometimes I would fight back, sometimes I wouldn’t, but I would invariably come up on the short end of things, getting beat up or pinned or punched in the face or the stomach or bloodied, and go running home crying and hurt. But, but, I would always get over it. And fairly quickly. As in within 30 minutes. For whatever reason, getting beat up all of those times (something like 700 times, I kid you not) never touched my core. After 30 minutes or an hour or so, or the next day at the latest, we would be back outside playing as if nothing had happened. (and just fyi, Tiffany, my record was not 0 wins and 732 defeats; it was 1 win and 732 defeats. The last time Glenny and I got into a fight—we were still probably 11 and 12 years old, I fought back like I had never fought back before. I jumped up and hung from a tree branch and did some sort of pseudo-judo kick to Glenny’s stomach knocking him to the ground and knocking his breath out, and then I jumped down, sat on his chest, pinned his shoulders with my knees, steeled myself, firmed up my inner resolve, and then punched Glenny in the eye and gave him a shiner. Then I promptly got up, left him crying on the ground, and ran home to my house, and locked the door and emotionally recuperated in the bathroom for a while. Then, 30 minutes later, Glenny and I were back to hanging out; we were even wrestling in the neighbor’s front yard. But we didn’t fight. That was our last fight.)

So success for me is not defined as “fall down 8 times, get up 9 times.” It’s more like get beat up the first 732 times; win the 733rd time. So I still may be good for another 728 or 729 rounds or slingshots. I only care about the final encounter. And about you and playing well and completely with you.

I don’t know what to do or what to say to you. I don’t know what to say to the person you have chosen to become (I call it your ego, your house-builder; the one who puts up blocks to love) now in this situation. I don’t know how to love your ego and your darkness and the frightened places within you. I just don’t know how to do it. I am incompetent, a klutz. But I do know that I’m always ready and available to play with what’s best in you and to even be slingshotted again afterwards (still got something like 728 x’s to go!)

But I don’t know what to do with your ego, your darkness, those cold dead eyes I saw you look out on me with for the first time last Tuesday, and those cold dead fingers you touched me with (or that I touched myself with). I don’t know how to play with your ego, Tiffany. I’m not that enlightened. Neither my ego nor what soul I may have knows how to play well with another’s ego when it shows up. That much my life and my past has taught me. All I know is to try and continue to reach out to you from what is best in me, from my depth, from my soul, and see if any of this makes it to a similar region in you—and if finds good soil in that region or only rocky ground, or if its quickly choked and snuffed out by weeds of fear and anxiety and hate and self-rejection.

My suspicion is that if we have first-rate intelligences, then we will find a way to make this work, a way that involves compassion, understanding, forgiveness, selective remembering, seeing each other as imperfect and flawed but worthwhile REAL people, love, tolerance, self-extension, self-confronting, self-examining, courage, will, truth, objectivity, and laughter.

But if either of our intelligences is second-rate and can’t hold two opposing ideas in mind and still function—if we can’t both tolerate insecurity and the unknown and still fully and courageously live the questions—then chaos will win out, our egos will get their way, and something that could have been so amazing and rare and transformative and healing, will be no more.

With great care and regard for you, Tiffany, a regard and care that you may have never experienced before from another adult human being (other than your family). I mean, I am trying, Tiffany, I’m trying to be the shepherd.

Your John-John 24/7

~ by John 24x7 on July 11, 2008.