What is Love? (Try not to dance like Chris Kattan)

Earlier this week, a client asked me what love is.

I’d never been asked that before.

Three separate images, all set to music, flashed into my head at approximately the same time. That’s how my brain works. Ever seen Scrubs? My head works a lot like JD’s. Let me just show you:

Image 1: I Wanna Know What Love Is (Foreigner). Quintessential butt rock.

Image 2: Moulin Rouge. "Love is...like oxygen! Love's a many splendored thing, love lifts us up where we belong, all you need is love." I don't have every word to this soundtrack memorized or anything. 

Image 3: Yeah, the no-brainer. Night at the Roxbury.

If you experienced all of that media as overwhelming....well, imagine living YOUR WHOLE LIFE in the inside of my head. It's a little crazy up in here.

So anyway, back to the story: I’m sitting in my office, all of these images and songs competing for space in my brain. I felt a strong compulsion to start bobbing my head a la Chris Kattan. 

Meanwhile, my client sat there, blinking at me, having just asked me an important question.

I stared wordlessly at her for a lot longer than either of us probably expected, far past what is socially acceptable. (Therapists do a lot of weird socially unacceptable things with silence, I’ll admit it. This one was unintentional on my part, though.)

Pretty sure my face looked like this:

Finally, I opened my mouth, and all I could think to say was, “Damn girl. I don’t know. But let’s work through that question together.”

And so we did. She was able to tell me a few things that love looked like and felt like to her. And I validated her experiences and added a few thoughts here and there. After she left, though, I sat still grappling with the question. What is love?

I’d always thought Duke Ellington said it best when he said, “Love is indescribable and unconditional. I could tell you a thousand things that it is not, but not one that it is.” I *ironically* love this statement—the honesty of it, the embracing of the ambiguity of love’s definition. Yet sometimes I crave definition and simplicity, and at these times, the ambiguity unsettles me. How can you know something is there if you can’t define it?

I suppose atheists have been asking the same thing of people of faith for centuries: How can you believe in a god that you can’t see or define or have proof of?

Yet, I’ve never talked to anyone who didn’t have a least a little faith in love. Who didn’t share some universal thoughts on what it is, and what it isn’t. People can’t describe it worth crap, yet they know it when they feel it.

So many questions linger within me, though.

Such as—what about when love gets complicated? When is gets all mixed up with one’s history, experiences, and other emotions? A bulk of my caseload is adult clients who have been abused as children, usually by a parent. So often, they grapple with still loving the parent that hurt them, and intense guilt or shame for that love still being there. Love, so celebrated an emotion, tears these folks up.

Which is a decent segue into this question: Can love really go away, all the way away, once it’s been there inside of you? Or does some bit of it remain, always felt, even if just a shadow of what once was, a faded imprint on one’s heart?

And what effect can we even have on our internal experiences of love? Can we make it go away if we want? Can we make it stronger if we want? How much of this operates outside of the sphere of our control?

Oh man, it’d be nice if just one thing in life could be simple. I want this to be simple.

In my desperation, I turned to those who, by default, give me clean answers.“What do you think love is?” I posed to my kids this morning. Their sleep-heavy eyes squinted as they mutually leaned their bed heads back into their cold car seats. “I don’t know,” Evie (8) said. Jonah (7) feigned sleep and said nothing.

At supper I asked again. “Did you have time to think about it? What is love?”

Evie said, “I think love is a heart.”

I can get behind that.

And Jonah shrugged and said, through a full mouth of Mac N Cheese, “Love is love.”

Indeed, son. Love is love.

Though apparently I can’t tell you what love is, or what it isn’t, I can beyond the shadow of a doubt tell you with a certainty that passes even my own understanding—and I never feel certain about much of anything—that I feel love when I look at those kids. I know what love is when I look into their sweet round faces, hold their grubby hands, or get the privilege of hearing their giggles.

I suppose maybe that’s simple enough.

****

How do you experience love? What is it? What ISN'T it? Can it go away once it's there? Share your thoughts in the comments: 

Dear Grieving Person-- I see you

Dear Grieving Person—

I see you.

You’ve lost someone. Or possibly, you’ve lost something dear, something precious. A marriage. A dream. Your health. Your livelihood.  

I see how hard you work to care for others around you. I see you apologizing for your own emotion when you can’t muster a smile, or when you break down in front of others. You draw back, as if you’re afraid to infect them with your sadness. And those around you draw back from you, uncomfortable, also afraid to catch the sadness.

If those around you don’t flee, they aren’t always good company. They’re searching for the “right things” to say, and in so searching, often say the wrong thing. “She’s with the angels now” “God must have needed him more,” and the worst, the ultimate insult to you, the griever, “Everything happens for a reason.” 

It’s all a bunch of bullshit, right?

Grieving is lonely. Grieving can isolate.

For those of you whose grief isn’t obvious—perhaps you are of the variety who have lost a dream or your sense of yourself, rather than a person—or perhaps you’re feeling grief for someone you think that you “shouldn’t” be grieving—your ex, your estranged father, this girl from high school who you used to be friends with but had fallen out with—you are especially lonely. How do you seek support for something you are afraid or ashamed to articulate? How do you reach out for understanding when your feelings defy your own understanding?

I see you.                 

                                                                                              

It pains me to see you, but I see you.

Sometimes I am the steady, compassionate therapist. Sometimes I am your rock and provide the place where you are safe to talk about the range of things that you feel, without judgment, without being shamed for “not moving on fast enough.” I ask about your loss. I ask you to share memories of the person that has gone, or of the dreams that will no longer be. We can do that together and I won’t back away from you.

Sometimes I am the well-intentioned but bumbling friend or family member. When I’m in my office working, the distance that I must maintain as a professional provides me with a shield— translucent, but still useful. When I’m outside of my office, shieldless and unprotected, I feel vulnerable. I feel raw. I get scared. I panic and forget what it is that I can do to be a comfort to you. Even though I know better, I’m afraid of catching your sadness. I flee—maybe not physically, but emotionally.

Sometimes I’m the griever. Sometimes I’m feeling the loss of something or someone in my life so poignantly that I’m not sure I have the capacity to be as open or as present as I’d like to be with you, griever.  Please forgive me.

Often I am all of these things at once.

But still, even in all of that, I see you.

I have hope for you.

I can tell you now that the grief that you’re feeling won’t go away. You won’t “get over” this. No one “gets over” loss.

Here’s what I think does happen:

If you are a vase, the grief is the thing that tosses you to the ground and shatters you into a million tiny shards. You think, How am I ever going to put myself back together? You think, I am never going to be the same, even if I do get the pieces back in order.

And you’re right. You’re never going to be the same.

Day by day, though, those pieces are going to find their way back into place. You keep putting one foot in front of the other, and it will happen. Some of those pieces are not going to want to stay in place. Some are going to fall out, over and over again. And yes, even when you think you've got yourself in order, you aren't immune to breaking again. And again. Sometimes when you least expect it, a piece will pop out, or maybe you crumble to the ground entirely, and you will think "Am I ever going to be okay?"

But progress will be made. In time there will be less crumbling, more assembly.

True, the pieces are now going to be joined by glue—you will be solid, and whole, but you’re going to look different. Some of the cracks are going to show. Some of the joints are going to be tenuous. Some pieces might not line up perfectly, their edges too ragged to bond solidly. Maybe some little pieces, the shards that broke off and flew away, too tiny to find, cannot be replaced. Maybe you let those tiny spaces be there. Or maybe you fill them with gold.

When you’re reassembled, you’ll be beautiful. Potentially stronger in the places where you’d shattered.

Even when you’re reassembled, the hurt doesn’t go away. What happens is that your heart makes room for it, and over time, as the pain finds a home where it can rest, it becomes less heavy, less gut-punching. Less likely to mess with your concentration or your ability to get out of bed. In time you’ll be able to notice the pain, breathe through it, and keep moving even as you feel it. It’s a miracle of humankind that we have the capacity to do this.

One day you will smile or laugh and not feel guilty for smiling or laughing. One day you will be able to hold the pain and simultaneously hold within you great joy, great hope, restored wonder.

Someday, someday. These things will happen in time.

For now, griever: just grieve.

I see you.

I am you.

**
Click here to read Part II in the Dear Griever series: I Still See You. 

When you can't have Mom, eat a Symphony bar

Last night will not go down in history as one of my favorite nights. In fact, if I had the ability to remember what happened every day of my life, and further had the ability to rank those days in order from worst to best, I think yesterday might make the bottom quartile.

I haven’t been at the height of my game lately, which is making my ability to cope with life’s doldrums more challenging.

And that’s where the Symphony bar came into play.

You ever had one of these?

If not, seriously guys, you’re missing out.  Go get yourself one. Now.

Let me tell you the story of how I came to be a card-carrying Symphony bar lover: 

When I was young, my mom used to take these grocery shopping trips to York about once a month. Here’s something you need to know about growing up rural: when you go to the nearest “city” (York had a population of around 7,000—practically a metropolis compared to Exeter, my hometown, population ~700), a place that has an actual Bag N Save, you don’t get just a few things. It’s not a “let’s just get some bread and milk” kind of trip. These trips were a “fold down the backseat of the minivan, get the cooler iced up and ready for frozen goods, clear the whole day for this” kind of endeavor. A $250 endeavor, in the mid-90s—that’s a lot of groceries, folks.

These trips, in the early years, would culminate in much begging for McDonald’s perpetrated by me and my brother. Because York had a McDonald’s, yo. All we had in Exeter was two bars and, starting when I was about 12, a Casey’s General Store. By default McDonald’s was the Mecca of food-loving, obese children from Exeter, of which I was one.

In later years, the “cool” factor set in and my brother and I stopped begging for McDonald’s. Mom would let us get ice cream in the food court area of Bag N Save, and we would sit back there in a booth with our food and read magazines while mom shopped.

And in later later years, Nate stopped going on the shopping trips but I thought I should keep going with Mom to help her bag groceries. (I might have also chosen to go because I needed some hair gel or butterfly clips or a Freddie Prinze Jr. movie or some other gratuitous 90s-Teen-Girl product at the York Wal-Mart, but whatever, let’s stick to the “trying to be a helpful kid” narrative). It was in these teen years, the just-me-and-mom-shopping years, when the Symphony Bar thing got started.

You see, they sold these HUGE Symphony Bars at Bag N Save. I bet they weighed a pound. A pound of the most delectable, delicate milk chocolate with perfect, crunchy little toffee bits and almond pieces. Heaven, I tell you. Mom and I were in tacit agreement that there was no ice cream on earth that could possibly taste as good as Symphony after a hard day of shopping. And so, we’d always get one, and eat part of it on the way home. The remainder of it, Mom would squirrel away somewhere in our house, never again to be seen by me— until the next trip to Bag N Save, when we’d start the cycle over.

For me, Symphony bars are synonymous with comfort. Yes, yes—I’ve done a lot of work over the years to move away from using eating as a coping mechanism, so these days it’s usually not my go-to. I’ve really done a fine job of transitioning my stress-coping into activities like crying, venting, and drinking. Oh, and shopping.

I kid. Mostly.

Last night my defenses were weak, and I felt sad, and what I wanted at that moment was my Mom. I wanted her to be right there so I could lay my head on her shoulder and let her wrap her arms around me. I wanted to smell her. I may have wanted to be fourteen, but I’d take any of these things even at thirty-three. I wanted comfort.

And I happened to be in Wal-Mart. And I happened to be buying Dark Chocolate Kisses in for my office (I have a psychological theory about chocolate and keep some around for my clients. Just call me Remus Lupin, y’all). And I happened to walk by the Symphony bars. And because my mom wasn’t right there to tell me that things are going to be okay, and because it was 11:20 at night and I didn’t want to call and wake her up, I happened to purchase the Symphony bar and eat a good long row of it on my drive home from the store.

Not as good as Mom by a longshot, but the taste and the smell of chocolate and toffee reminded me of home and of easier days. It gave me just enough hope to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Thank goodness I’m going home to my parents' house this weekend. I’ll get the real deal, not the proxy.

Maybe I’ll bring Mom what’s left of my Symphony bar. 

***
Tell me, friends: What things do you long for when you're in need of comfort? Leave a comment below; I'd love to hear your stories.