I will not abandon you

I will not give up on you

Nov 15, 2022

Hello y’all,

I wrote this piece as a gorgeous snowfall nestled me in last night. It carried me through the darkness and awakened me into a shimmering winter’s dream. Now, as nighttime hangs heavy here and the snow is already forgetting itself, this piece can’t wait til morning to be shared. As I finalize this post, a fuzzy little being is lying on my foot, her nose nuzzling at my ankle.

I’m still squeezing the water out of my soggy life in the aftermath of this Scorpio (a water sign, if you didn’t know) eclipse portal. I’ve been inconsistent here and that is a reflection of how I feel internally in myself as the last three months have been relentless (in beautiful and challenging ways). I feel more here, now. I feel excited about what’s going to bloom here. I feel so grateful that you’re here, riding these waves alongside me.

I mentioned I would share the second meditation with paid subscribers but recording it evaded me this week. It’ll come in time. Soon.

In the meanwhile, if you feel moved to drop me a note, I’d love to see your words reflected here.

Leave a comment

And if someone you know might want to wade into these waters with us, please bring them along.

Til next time, with love,

Rachel

Words I had never spoken before slipped off my tongue. They hung between us, not dense but weighted. Tangible, animate, persistent. They didn't evaporate immediately like water on a hot skillet, like the thousands that came before, spat for the last hour of war, singed into a stinging mist. No. These words hovered. Like a spell they enchanted us both. Eyes locked in shock. Disbelief. Time stopped.

I didn't know I was capable of conjuring such a thing. Not between us, not in this way, not in a moment so acute the whole house could explode with the combustive intensity between us. These were words I didn't want to say. Not with a scorching rage burning in my belly. We were trapped in this unyielding fight for years, and I felt unseen and unheard every single time and all I wanted to do was flee or conquer. I didn't want to concede. I didn't want to collapse.

And then these words came.

I said them and they felt foreign through my teeth, transported in from somewhere else, my mouth the vessel for some other intelligence. They were words beyond my reach, far past the edges of my willingness.

Or so I thought.

"I will not abandon you. I will not give up on you."

Sometimes you say to another what you mean for yourself.

Sometimes you say (or someone says to you) something so generous, that everything, everything changes. The relationship. The way you perceive reality. Life itself from that point onward. Something cracks open and another dimension is revealed. A layer, an imprint, an idea glazed over the truth instantly dissolves, and you see something deeper beneath all that shielded your view, all those protections and defenses that existed until something pure shattered through. Yes, the feelings and the fight are valid, but underneath it all – where are we actually unified, where are we inextricably bonded, how do we get to the place where we are undivided?

And when I said it, I didn't mean I would cling for dear life to toxicity or to abuse. No. It was to say: I see your wounding, and I see the you beneath it. I see the child you. I will hold the mirror up to your wounds and your truth, both of them here before me, and I will stay strong as you grow your capacity to distinguish between the two, to dismantle through love everything you've built to protect that child, sometimes ugly, sometimes violent. I will not allow myself to be unsafe. I will have the courage to see what’s really happening here.

"I will not abandon you. I will not give up on you. And I will hold my boundaries."

I was ready, after years and years of work, to reach a third path, not me versus you, but something new. A transcendent compassion. An observer's perspective.

"There is a child before me in an adult body. There is a child before me throwing a tantrum. There is a child before me whose greatest fear is isolation, rejection, abandonment. There is a child before me who is so internally disorganized, so profoundly dysregulated, world war 3 is exploding inside them."

I was ready to no longer internalize their pain as a reflection of me. I was ready to trust in my own unshakeable dignity, no matter what I heard from them. I was ready to be accountable to the ways I was actually not loving this person because I consistently refused to see how much pain they were in, because I wanted something from them they did not have the resources to give.

Love is not enabling someone's worst self. Love is not sycophantically believing in the illusion of someone's egoic perception (self or societal) and defending that against appropriate accountability. Love is not fawning over someone's ability to triumph within this violent culture by becoming themselves a monster.

One of the most potent definitions of love I have yet found was also bell hooks's favorite as shared in her precious text All About Love.

“Love is the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth... Love is as love does. Love is an act of will -- namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”
― M. Scott Peck

James Baldwin, of course, offers another exquisite definition:

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”

Love is a demanding teacher, an exacting force. Love is the fiercest enabler of evolution. Love is the holy fire that burns away everything that is not us. Love is being able to withstand that fire, to ask for that fire, to hold space as that fire does its sacred job of clearing any maladaptive, antisocial yet functional mechanism ready to release that we had to construct to survive the harshness of this contrived world.

I sit here tumbling in contemplation about a real love ethic.

I hold this principle: "no one is beyond redemption". Living this way has lost me friends over the years. They watched me do the work of holding faith in someone's growth and they feared for me or resented me, but either way they didn't trust me. They wanted me to give up. Then they gave up on me. And that's the point. I feel we're giving up on people too easily, leaving people to cause an insane amount of damage to themselves or others because they are continuously abandoned by those closest to them. So they move further and further out, wrecking wider pain. Until they are captured by vaster systems of violence, like incarceration. But rarely are they brought in close. Rarely are they seen. We’re giving up too easily on people and we’re losing too many people to unnecessary violence that could be halted by our refusal to treat anyone as disposable.

In bell hooks's text, she says 'abuse and love cannot coexist'. I want to offer something that may land for you as wildly controversial, if it’s not already bold enough to challenge bell hooks (whom I love, who I wish we could check in with and dialogue about on this one, who I imagine I probably misunderstood… anyway, I hope you’ll stick with me and bring me your reflections in the comments. I welcome them.)

I think love always exists.

I don't think there are places of lovelessness.

I think sometimes people abuse and love simultaneously.

I know this through my own life. I know this because I was loved and abused simultaneously. I know this because sometimes the love I got was such a fearful love it showed up as pain. I would never wish my experience on anyone, but my journey has demanded from me that I speak with blade-sharp honesty about it because too many of us are existing in realities of abuse-love entanglement, and if we say this cannot be true, we suppress the paradoxical complexity that needs us to loosen this knot.

When I first read those words of bell’s, my whole nervous system softened.

It wasn’t love, I said to myself. I wasn’t loved.

And for years I felt resolved. Until an even more immense confrontation arrived to my doorstep and said, “but if you deny that you were loved, you deny your own truth, and isn’t that its own form of abuse?”

I don’t sleep easy by saying “abuse and love cannot coexist”. I stay up and wrestle with the deeper question: how do we love without abuse? How do we liberate abuse from our culture? How do we know love without violence?

I think sometimes people are so terrified of love, so hurt by being chronically unloved, so agonized about being rejected from love... that all we get from them is their pain, their fear, their cruelty... all of it a reaction, a defense, but not their truth, not their innocent child that arrived here as love.

I think we underestimate how terrible our education on love is, how much so many of us struggle to love.

It is sometimes easier to reject than to reflect.

It is sometimes easier to blame than wonder.

I am not settled by casting people out for their cruelty. I want to know why it happens.

I said it. I said it right into the center of the love-abuse storm. I said "I will not abandon you. I will not give up on you. And I will hold my boundaries."

And everything, everything changed.

A tsunami of tears. An inner child who wept and wept and wept and wept for all the decades they were forced to live under this burden of self- and other-destruction. These words collapsed the battlefield. Together, we looked squarely at the base fear that every terrible thing was tethered to.

"I love you. I love you in the way you should have been loved. It wouldn't have had to get this bad, this scary, this dangerous, you wouldn’t have had to be abandoned, exiled, ostracized. That never should have happened to you and then it wouldn’t have happened to me. I love you."

The abuse eased and then dissolved. The trauma softened and then disappeared. The fights lessened and then evaporated. They were no longer relevant. There is still tension, there is still work, but that is what healthy relationship is, that is what love is, a constant choosing.

We are practicing love without abuse for the first time, when for many lifetimes before us such an idea was impossible. There was too much giving up.

I said it, and the war stopped.

Thank you so much for your generous presence here. If you value what you find here and would like to support my work, consider leaving a heart and/or comment. It truly means so much, and I always love to hear from you.

hi•ne•ni

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