Goddamn It. Just Like Me.

Interconnectedness, with occasional exceptions for annoying people

I believe in the interconnectedness of human beings.

A lovely spiritual belief. Broad, generous, expansive. You could put it on a wall.

My actual relationship with human beings is somewhat less suitable for framing.

I do feel connected to other people. Sometimes profoundly. Someone tells me something honest about herself, and beneath the circumstances, which may be nothing like mine, I recognize the feeling.

Goddamn it. Just like me.

The fear of being foolish. The wish to be wanted. The embarrassment of having tried so hard at something that apparently came easily to everyone else. The elaborate preparations for a future that has declined to follow the script.

I know those places.

And yet, it’s surprisingly easy to forget that other people inhabit them too.

I can look at someone and see her confidence, her clothes, her opinions, her irritating manner of explaining something I already understand. I begin assembling a person from the available evidence, with considerable assistance from my imagination.

A few scraps of information, and I’ve got her figured out.

Quite an accomplishment, considering how long I’ve been working on figuring out myself.

Then she says something unexpected. Admits to being lonely. Laughs at her own vanity. Describes lying awake rehearsing a conversation that has not happened and may never happen.

Oh.

There you are.

And there I am, too.

Identification is a peculiar kind of intimacy. Someone can make me feel seen without knowing much about me at all. She tells the truth about herself, and I recognize something I thought I had been keeping particularly well concealed.

For a long time, my relationships were crowded with calculation. What did someone want from me? What did I need from them? How much of myself could I safely let them see? There wasn’t much room left for curiosity about who they actually were.

Today, it’s different.

Some of the time.

I would love to report that I now move through the world recognizing the humanity in everyone I encounter. That would make a beautiful paragraph. But not a true one.

The truth is that my spiritual belief system and my immediate reactions are often operating on different schedules. I believe we are connected. I also wish certain people would stop talking.

Both things can be happening before lunch.

What I keep coming back to is this: if I am judging myself, I am judging other people. If I can’t accept myself, I can’t accept other people.

When I’m ashamed of being a beginner, someone else’s uncertainty becomes embarrassing to watch. When I’m furious with myself for making a mistake, I have very little patience available for yours. And when I’m preoccupied with how I appear, it’s hard to pay much attention to who you are.

I have written before about turning self-examination into a weapon. I can spend an entire day obsessing over my faults and perceived failures, then congratulate myself on all that serious personal work.

Meanwhile, I have barely noticed anyone else.

There’s a practical problem with that. The interconnectedness of human beings is difficult to experience while conducting an exhaustive investigation of one human being, particularly when it’s my own sweet self.

I am learning that accepting the entire squirming mess of me might leave me more available for the squirming mess of someone else.

I can hear her without immediately deciding what she should do. I can admit that I don’t know why he behaves that way. I can remember how many of my own finest absurdities have proceeded from fear, even when I dressed them up as intelligence, conviction or excellent planning.

This doesn’t make every behavior acceptable. Some people need to be loved from a considerable distance. Understanding that we are connected does not oblige me to hand everyone a house key.

But I would like to stop confusing my judgment of a person with knowledge of that person.

I suspect pain and loss will teach me more about this than I would voluntarily enroll to learn. There is something about having my own life come apart that makes another person’s difficulty harder to dismiss.

I may be grateful for those lessons afterward.

But I sure the hell am not camping out overnight in line to buy advance tickets to Pain, Loss & Grief.

In the meantime, there are less dramatic opportunities.

I can listen when someone tells me what something was like for her. Resist the urge to improve her account. Offer something honest of my own, without making it a presentation about how beautifully I have grown.

And sometimes, I won’t know what happens next.

Something I say may reach someone whose face gives nothing away. She may recognize herself in it and feel a little less alone. I have received that gift often enough to believe I might occasionally give it.

It’s really cool that I may have no idea who she is.

I don’t have to inspect the result or collect evidence of my usefulness. I can tell the truth and leave her room to have her own experience.

Some days I remember all this.

Others, well . . .

But every so often, someone interrupts my assessment of her by being unmistakably human.

Goddamn it.

Just like me.