Walk With Me (#52): Before I Go…
An advice column for folks who don’t like to be told what to do
In case you hadn’t heard, I am moving this column over to my Substack newsletter, Let Your Life Speak. Today is my last weekly Walk With Me column here on Medium. Please join us over at the newsletter!
The last year has been transformational for me. My life is very different now than the life I was living when I began this project a year ago. Yet I have still managed, through all the transformation, to show up here every week. I’m very proud of that.
For my last weekly column, here are three of my favorite questions and answers from the last year. They’re all about relationships of one kind or another. Relationships make the world go ‘round, and confound us all the while. I hope one of these will help you puzzle through your own questions.
Walk With Me (#17): The World Will Break You (Open)
Dealing with our parents once we become adults ourselves should be easier, right? Except so often, for so many of us, it’s not. We still carry our traumas from childhood. They carry their own traumas, which often caused ours. What do you do when you can’t be present for your parents in the way you wish you could be? How do you make peace with yourself?
The opportunity that we have, once we step firmly over the threshold of mid-life and into the beginnings of our elder years, is to let our unhealable wounds soften us. We can look around and really, finally, viscerally understand that everyone carries some deep broken place inside of them. We can see how they flail and fight, often, to resist surrendering to the weight of that pain, which only increases the weight. And we can feel how surrendering to the breaking of our hearts breaks us wide open.
Broken wide open, we find the most aching, tender compassion for people. We live and breath grace into the world.
You may never feel like you can make amends with your mother, that her pain and her death will always hurt deep, deep in the recesses of your soul. But you can transform that pain point into a container of exquisite tenderness to hold the people you love now. That tenderness can walk with you everywhere you go.
Your mother did love you wildly, in all of her brokenness. Take her wild love and give it to the broken world. That is how you make amends. That is how you carry her with you. You do the thing she couldn’t do. You go beyond her, which in her heart of hearts is likely all she ever wanted.
Walk With Me (#20): Men Disappoint Me
Friendships between straight men and women can be complicated, especially, it seems, for men. However, understanding that patriarchy hobbles men, as well as women, doesn’t mean they get a free pass to be, frankly, emotionally stupid and entitled. Women don’t do men any favors by making excuses or taking responsibility for them. Period.
I do think that one of the unfortunate ways in which straight men are damaged by patriarchy is that they are taught emotional intimacy with other adults can only be experienced tied up with erotic attraction. They tend to only experience emotional intimacy outside of their families and children, assuming they experience any emotional intimacy there, within the context of their sexual relationships with women. When they experience emotional closeness with a female friend, even if that friend is unavailable, often the sexual attraction just comes along for the ride.
Women are given much more latitude to develop emotionally intimate connections with all kinds of people without triggering romantic or sexual feelings. Do women who sleep with men sometimes develop romantic or sexual feelings for their male friends? Absolutely. But because in women’s lives emotional intimacy and sex are not so constantly tied to each other I think it is easier for women to think consciously about how to deal with the sexual attraction piece in a way that respects the friend and the friendship.
It is the mark of a man who takes responsibility for his own emotional material if he can feel sexually attracted to a woman he’s friends with and keep his mouth shut about it, until or unless she is available or communicates clearly that she’s willing to receive that information.
Walk With Me (#23): Can You Divorce Gracefully?
Divorce is earth-shattering for most of us. Still, it is possible to get through it with some grace. To do so requires integrity and self-compassion, neither of which is easy. But you can do it. Promise. I did.
All of it comes down to this for me: we are always responsible for how we treat other people, regardless of our emotional state. I don’t think that “I didn’t mean it” or “I was just angry/sad/overwhelmed” are ever excuses that are acceptable for adults. From beginning to end, I stand behind every single thing I ever said or did through my divorce because I have to. There are no take-backs. I don’t get out of it because I was in crisis and the whole thing was an emotional shitshow. Would I do some things differently now? Yes, but only because I know more about myself and how to move through the world as the person I want to be, which I only learned from going through it as exactly who I was then.
Setting and maintaining emotional and communication boundaries while you move through this process allows you time and space to make sure you can stand behind everything you do or say. It may seem like a burden, but it is building the strength and integrity to make you not just graceful, but formidable. Formidable can be useful when you’re in the world alone again.
That’s a wrap, folks! Thank you for being with me during this crazy year. I hope the column has helped you. It has surely helped me.
I’ll still be re-posting material from the newsletter, Let Your Life Speak, over here on Medium intermittently, but it won’t be such a regular thing. The newsletter appears magically in your email inbox every Monday and Friday, so if you want regular access to my writing you should come on over and subscribe.
Thank you for walking this journey with me. Love to you and yours.
XO, Asha
