Because I’m a 46 year old woman still struggling with the anxious/preoccupied attachment style formed in my childhood, there are people who are still in my head who no longer want to be in my life. Sometimes I wonder if I still yearn to be in contact with these people because my feelings for them (or my memories of my feelings for them) are interwoven with my life-long interest in the topics that I wish I could discuss with them.
Right now, I’m toying with the idea of making “Letters Imagined in the SEL (social-emotional learning] Dunce’s Corner” a somewhat regular type of post that I write for this blog — thoughts that would be directed to my muses if they still wished to be within earshot.
Maybe the more that these thoughts evolve — from imagined conversations with people who are forever unattainable to my own creations that are put out into the world to be read by people who are actually interested in my thoughts — the less I will feel the ache of rejection.
A friend (with a sexual orientation incompatible with my own) finally admitted, a year and half after I first started calling them my “intellectual soulmate” (my significant fondness thinly frosted with a joking tone ), that they feel smothered by my unflagging enthusiasm for communicating with them and my emotional neediness. They fear that I am trying to turn them into “some sort of ‘other [spouse]’ who shares many of [my] literary, philosophical, and theological interests.” They made it clear that this ‘second spouse” agenda is burdensome.
This hurt, but I could sense it coming. It is probably why I started clinging with a grip reinforced by intense fear. The unpleasantness of my hurt doesn’t mean that what they said was completely untrue. We are well matched when it comes to interests and abilities, and there are enough personality and experiential differences to make things interesting. I am addicted to our banter and wish it could go on for hours. There are lots of museums and historical sites that I would love to explore with this person. Maybe if I hadn’t been so effusive and clingy, they would be willing to go to a museum with me 1 – 2x a year. I made the mistake of appearing insatiable. Grrrr. I do appreciate that this person took the brutal honesty route rather than the ghosting route.
We are now taking a break, which I have struggled to honor . . . so I put on the dunce cap and drag the stool to the corner and let the cone announce to the world that I am far from possessing the emotional skills necessary to function as an adult.
The following is a conversation that started with a text from me to someone who can only be my “intellectual soulmate” in my head whether we remain in contact or not.
I was driving to work in the morning and the sight of the bare trees limbs covered with snow in the pink-streaked, purple sky of dawn was so beautiful that I actually heard myself gasp audibly.
I texted my muse as soon as I parked my car at work. This is what I wanted to talk about:
I’ve heard that what separates human beings from other animals is that we tell stories.
This was the first time that I’ve thought about the difference between what beauty means for animals vs. what it means for human beings.
While beauty plays a role in the propagation of species — both animal and plant — does it mean anything beyond that instinct to survive through spreading one’s seed?
Even though beauty has a place in human sexual attraction, I think most people have had experiences of beauty that seem completely separate from sex. . . .but are they really? (This question isn’t rhetorical; I’m thinking as I write.) Do experiences of profound beauty give us sex-like experiences of heart-stopping euphoria without the limitation of human bodies and fluctuating levels of chemical attachment to human partners?
Immanuel Kant’s idea of the sublime presents beauty as an experience that is a gateway to something spiritually transcendent. Are human beings different in that there is something about our consciousness that allows beauty to be more than what moves us to mate?
Or is that sense of something else, just something that evolved to help us survive?
Is there anything beautiful that exists outside this game of survival?
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