I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
This, to, holds a great lesson for each of us. For when we truly engage whatever is before us, we must put down our old ways of speaking and meet life on life’s terms. This is the key to the life of relationship, no matter how it appears. We must be willing to be changed by what we encounter. Otherwise, we turn everything we meet into us. The great work of translation, whether in language or in how we love, is to see and feel from the eyes of who or what we are called to translate. These inner odysseys await us all.
Mark Nepo, The Fifth Season: Creativity in the Second Half of Life
I’ve been working each day this week on one of my essays for Things Men Gave Me. It’s tentatively called A Title for a Painting and it’s about my relationship with a man named David.1 In that essay, I share how living with him brought me to the realization that I needed and wanted to live alone, for autonomy and to have space to develop my art practice.
One reason I came to that realization was because of how little I was willing to be changed in that relationship, despite my partner’s wish for me to do so. He wanted me to be more open to sharing my time and my art with him. He wanted me to engage more when we argued instead of turning away and leaving. He wanted me to do things with him that he enjoyed, things like flying in a small plane with him as pilot or watching adult cartoon shows like Futurama and Archer with him.2 He encouraged me to workout more regularly.
But I wasn’t there to be changed. I wasn’t open to change through being with him. Earlier this week I said he was treating me as an It. The more important realization I’ve had is I was doing the same to him. That’s the more important thing to write about. It doesn’t feel good to write about it. I feel shame.
Martin Buber again
When you treat someone as an It rather than a Thou (in the terminology of philosopher Martin Buber) you aren’t there to be changed. You’re there to get something for yourself: some material stuff, some physical intimacy, some validation maybe. You’re not moving into the in-between space between you and me. You exist as a sovereign self instead.
In an I-Thou relationship, you are open to being changed. In my relationship with M, I find myself changing. He bikes regularly, for health but mostly to stay in shape for ski season. I don’t want him to leave me behind on the slopes, so I started working out every other day at the rec center. I’m also interested in improving my health because the relationship with him makes me feel more optimistic about and interested in the future.
I’m changing for him by being more willing and available to spend time with someone. We’ve started sharing dinner each night, at my place or his. He cooks me light dinners, and I cook them for him too. I had all but stopped cooking. I almost never cooked for David even as I was living in his house. Of course, I was working full time at the time, and now I’m retired from my corporate career. I have developed my art to the point where I feel confidence in it, so it’s not so tentative as it was when I was living with David. Now I’m ready to be changed.
False goals in a story
But the only reason I could be ready to be changed was I became strong in my sovereign self first. I achieved that through living with David and realizing I didn’t want to live with a romantic partner, not at that time.3 That is potentially a climactic moment in the overall narrative arc of Things Men Gave Me. Living with someone in a committed partnership had been my goal all along, through multiple relationships. And then when I found it, it was all wrong.
In her writing guide Wired for Story, author Lisa Cron says that a story is really about how the main character (in this case, me) realizes she is going after the wrong thing:
And the best preparation for writing any story is to know with clarity what your protagonists’ worldview is, and more to the point, where and why it’s off base. Thus you have a clear view of the world as your protagonist sees it and insight into how she therefore interprets, and reacts to, everything that happens to her. It’s what allows you to construct a plot that forces her to reevaluate what she was so damn sure was true when the story began. That is what your story is really about, and what readers stay up long past their bedtime to find out.
Other writing teachers call this mistaken worldview a “false goal.” In The Anatomy of Story John Truby says, “A character’s false goal is based on a mistaken belief about what will make them happy. They must fail in this pursuit in order to uncover their true desire.”4
My false goal through the relationships, gifts, and breakups that happen in TMGM was to reconstitute my life in the shape it had been in before: living with a committed romantic partner in a big house, ideally married again. This was rooted in my belief that I was okay when I was married and I needed to get into that state again.
Instead, over the course of the relationships, I come to realize that becoming an independent and sovereign self—and an artist—was the goal I really needed to attain.
feeling challenged with writing this week
Maybe one reason I’m feeling so challenged by writing the essay I’m working on this week is that it is the climax of the TMGM story. I achieve what I wanted—living with someone in a committed partnership—and it was everything I didn’t need.
Perhaps I ought to set aside that essay for now. Problem is, I really love the painting I completed for it so I’d like to get the essay done too. That way when I launch an early preview of the work, I can share that painting with the essay.
It might be easier to finish some of the essays that come earlier in the story.
- Not his real name. ↩︎
- I wanted him to change too. I wanted him to give me more space to be me as I was rather than pushing me to change. I wanted him to need less attention and time. ↩︎
- So I did actually change in the relationship with David, but not in the way he hoped I would. I changed to realize that I shouldn’t be living with him. ↩︎
- I can’t confirm that Truby wrote this, but ChatGPT offered it to me as an example of such guidance. I’m going to get a hold of that book and check! ↩︎