Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
The personality is political. I want to believe that a man understands himself, knows what he’s doing and why. I want to believe a man knows that his words and actions impact others and, ideally, I want the man to understand how his words and actions impact others. Empathy.
In terms of a relationship, I would probably settle for him knowing that his words and actions impact others (me) if he was open to the idea of thinking about the how and even why. A big ask. I know.
I enter into romances with trust and respect; not blindly, but yet with a sense of fairness that I hope I never lose through the bitter twistings of the process. This is why I insist on thinking as long as it takes to understand situations that have transpired, believing that knowing what went on will be useful to me when I next go toward intimacy.
Strangely unsettling to the process comes a sense that the more I learn, the more difficult the task of finding or inventing intimacy becomes. This isn’t through karma/cosmic structuring, but the fact that if I apply what I have learned, I will stumble on matters that are more advanced, more difficult, than what presented itself before. If the problems seem to be monumentally more ridiculous, it is because I am able to solve simpler problems.
I recall an occasion at Curves with a member who didn’t like me. I was skinny, she was fat. Sometimes that is enough. I found out she was studying to be a counselor. I decided to give her the opportunity to help me, hoping that this would alter the relationship. I wanted to take myself out of the position of authority (on body size) and place her in authority, to instruct me. This was an attempt to end her suffering. Her hatred of me. Not taking these things personally, I didn’t really care if she hated me. It isn’t essentially my ambition to be liked. I told her my problem. It had to do with a man I had been involved with who I believed was a narcissist. Months after it ended, I was excited to be getting somewhere as I saw how his personality had interacted with mine. She interrupted to say something like, “You mean you can’t move on until you understand what was going on with him?”
Um, yes. That’s right. Isn’t that sort of the idea? Isn’t that what people are doing? Maybe not. I venture the opinion that a person entering counseling as a profession might see the value in understanding what happened.
Yesterday at Curves I weighed and measured a Muslim woman who attempted to explain Ramadan fasting to me. “It is so that we can feel what poor people feel, we can feel what it is like to go without food and water.”
