The Epiphany

So I have just returned from my super long Labor Day weekend in Chicago with my best friend Miguel and my new best friend in the Chi, Miss Dominic "Dawgs". Good times were had by all as will be shown at a later post (once I am done Photoshopping the pictures from my new camera.) No I am not airbrushing, just cropping and reducing size. *Giggle* okay not even I believed that one!

The trip was not, however, without its low points. Specifically, I felt depression's downward tug while driving on Lake Shore downtown and at Club Zentra. Significant events relevant to my last relationship unfolded at these exact two locations. My memory was vivid enough on Lake Shore that I was able to recall what was said as we passed each ridiculously over-priced store. Being at Zentra also brought back vivid memories of that bitterly cold weekend. It brought back more than I cared to remember around the group of people who were there with me to have a good time. But as the saying goes, God does not close a Walgreen's without opening a CVS. Or something like that. If you are lucky He also opens a Target.

My epiphany came so quickly and with such crystal clarity that I am tempted to believe that it was divinely inspired; or maybe I was just lit and my brain farted. Who knows? The point is, epiphany in mind, I got my hot sweaty ass off of depression's bench and brought it to the dance floor. What happened was that I finally saw the blessing in the lesson that had been evading me from the moment I became single (yet again).

And here is this lesson:
Nothing in this life is truly yours, be it a person, place or thing. The moment you buy into the delusion that someone(thing) is yours, you open yourself to loss. (I made the concession later that perhaps your soul/mind/conscious is the only thing(s) in life that you truly own.)

I realized that (like the rest of the world) I was buying into the societal deception that you are somehow less of a person if you are not married or at the very least "bunned" up. It seems we also need to own the person we are dating/married to in order to be someone acceptable to society. The idea of ownership when it comes to dating/marriage is quite evident in our very language: "He is my man/woman." "I am his/her husband/wife/girl/boyfriend." "I belong to you." Virtually every love song and broken heart song has at its core one person owning another at least in an emotional sense.

So what if two people want to own each other? What is so damn wrong with that? Well the answer is absolutely nothing. The problem is that more often than not, one and sometimes both members of mutually ownership-based relationship erroneously believe that they are in one! Just that weekend I saw two examples of MRI (mistaken relationship identity), where what someone assumed about their relationship was in fact not the reality. What made these situations all the more tragic was that though the true nature of the relationship was painfully obvious to everyone external to the "situation", the party internal to the situation was absolutely clueless. Since coming back from Chicago I have seen even more examples of MRI's in both hetero and homosexual relationships.

No, this is not my personal endorsement of open relationships. (Though it seems to me that the longest lasting gay relationships are those in which there is some sort of "agreement" between the parties though upon close reflection, I know I would never be able to successfully participate in a relationship with these "agreements".) What this is an endorsement of is a total revamping of my outlook on my personal relationships, platonic as well as non-platonic (while I am at it).

People are not meant to be owned either literally or emotionally and up until this point that is the expectation and the assumption I have been making with the people I dated seriously. This only sets me up for frustration and irrational anger when it becomes obvious that 1) the person does not want to be owned and/or 2) they dont want to own you.

After acknowledging what the problem is, I have caught myself reacting in the "old" way several times. More often than not, I can stop, run a mental diagnostic, analyze and then move on. Sometimes even knowing it, I react anyway like the knuckle head I sometimes am. If only personal re-programming were as easy as recording my favorite shows on my DVR...