On Paths and Fearlessness

Earlier this week, I was having a discussion with a boy, and we were talking about a friend whom we have in common who is twenty-four. And she's doing something that, by just about every thirty-something's standards, is thing you just know not to do. She's involved with a married man. Not a married man in a questionable relationship, a married man who's thoroughly married. And the boy I was talking to, who is in his late thirties, started in on how awful it was, and didn't she think about what she was doing to the wife and the children and the family and what would she say if that wife walked up to her and said, "I just want you to know what you've done to me and my family."

And I just looked across the table at him and said, "She's twenty-four. I did horrible things to people when I was twenty-four. You've already admitted to me that you cheated on lots of women in your early twenties. She's twenty-four. She has to do those things in order to really understand that that's not the person she is."

I took my niece to dinner tonight. My niece is also twenty-four. She's really put together for a twenty-four year old, probably more put together than I was at that age, but she's still trying to figure out who she is in a lot of ways. When you ask her what she wants, she can list a lot of "things" and "situations." She wants somebody to love her, but she can't describe for you what love is other than it would make her feel valuable and safe. She wants to be married, but because she wants security, not necessarily because she feels that she's ready to know which parts of herself she'd need to compromise to be in that kind of relationship. In fact, when you ask her about which parts of herself she'd be willing to give up to be in that kind of relationship, she answers "none," which made me laugh. She wants a career, but she wants it because she wants people to view her as successful, not because she herself understands that she's a person who needs to "build" or "create" or have something tangible to succeed at. She can tell you all the things she wants, but she can't tell you the things about herself that really make her want those things. It was an interesting conversation.

Ah, I was young once, too.

Both of these girls are close to me, and, with both of them I feel a certain parental type of responsibility to help them grow into versions of themselves that they can love, because neither of them are quite there yet. And when, at the end of dinner with my niece, she asked me how to get to that point, I found myself coming back to the same philosophy that I've always had. I said to her, "You have to walk the path in front of you fearlessly. You have to let yourself get hurt and rejected and to fail. And you have to hurt other people, too, if it's what's necessary. You can't be afraid of hurting other people because sometimes it's the only way that you learn what's deepest inside of you. Really, you just can't be afraid of any of the things that hurt out there."

I was thinking about it on the way home, and I think that, when I think of the people I know who are the least happy, it's because they're still wrapped up in insecurity, in the belief that being rejected or being hurt or failing in front of others in some way makes them less of a person, or a less valuable person. But that's so not true. It's experiencing those things that makes you into a complete person, and a person who understands both your happy, optimistic side and your darker corners. Because we all have darker corners. And the only way to start to understand those corners and what they mean to you is to live fearlessly and to be willing to feel everything. Everything.

Today I made a choice that will end up costing somebody I care for deeply their job. And I thought about it before I did it, but determined that in the end I am, at base, a person who will look out for myself first. And I fought that realization about myself for a long time, and I got myself into some unhappy, miserable situations because I wanted to deny that that was the person I am. But it's not. And there are probably a lot of reasons that I'm like that, and the most simple would be that nobody's ever really looked out for me for me. And it's not my best characteristic. But I'm okay with it, and it's who I am. And I have lots of other kinder characteristics to counter balance it. And the times in my life when I've done real damage to people have been when I've tried to fight my own best interests in favor of somebody else's.

Not every thing about every person is good. I do feel badly about what I did today. I could have made a choice that would have protected the other person from what's inevitably going to be a very bad spell for them. I could have made that choice. It would have been the wrong choice for the person I am. In the end, I would have hurt more people, more awfully, than what I am in this moment.

Sometimes, I struggle with the fact that I am not an intrinsically good person, but I suppose really, if we're being honest, who is? I struggle with the fact that when pushed up against a wall, I will choose what is best for me before anybody, and that includes my little brother, whom I love more than anybody in the entire world. And no matter how much I always work on myself as a person, I know that I will never change that about myself. In some ways, people are who they are. I suppose if I had a child that might change. But my point is that when I start to struggle with the fact that I can be mean, I can be self-centered, I can amputate people from my life when they no longer bring me positivity with surgical precision, I stop myself and just remind myself that I have other wonderful characteristics. And I wouldn't know that, wouldn't have had to dissect and graph myself until I understood the good and bad parts, and what I can compromise and what I can't, and what I can change and what I can't, if I hadn't been willing to live all of the good and bad moments without hiding from them as I walked along my path.

And so, when I talk to my niece and later when I talk to my silly little friend with her married boyfriend, that's what I'll say. Get hurt, and hurt others if you need to. Don't do it intentionally, but don't run from it if it's what's in front of you. It's the only way you learn where the next step is on the road you're supposed to be taking. Be fearless. Absorb the pain. In the end, you can't love yourself if you don't know yourself, and you can't know yourself if you don't explore yourself, and you can't explore yourself if you're hiding from anything that may not be picture perfect.

And I hope that when my little twenty-four year olds are closer to thirty-four, they are where I am, which is to say very happy with who they are and able to say the following:

a. I want somebody to love me because I have things to share that you can only share in the type of unguarded relationship that you can have with somebody who doesn't expect you to be perfect and who understands that you are not always a good person. And because those things that I want to share are powerful and special, and I will feel lacking if I have to hold them to myself instead.

b. If the right situation to be married presented itself, then I'd want to be married, but if it meant compromising my need for space or independence or the ability to share my love with all of the other people in my life, then that wouldn't be the right situation for me. I'd rather be happy than married.

c. I don't want a career. I want something that makes me feel like I have purpose. If, at any given time, what that is involves a career, then that's the right situation for me. But it may not always.

d. My definition of what makes me a success or failure, a good or bad person, is whether I wake up each day and love myself. I pretty much love myself.

That's what I want them to be able to say. I hope they walk the path to that place.