I once wrote in this publication, “Any time your ego wants to be right, prepare yourself for another six weeks of spiritual winter.”
It was part of my piece, “Everyone you know is living in a universe all of their own,” and the general theme was that each person has a spiritual curriculum and set of experiences that determine how things are perceived on their end.
No one person will ever “see it from your point of view” …. ever. I’m sorry to say it. I wish it weren’t so.
Many of us will ask, “Am I right?” or “How am I right?”
I used to ask those things a lot.
Being “right” means safety for most of us. A more beautiful question I’ve learned to ask is, “How am I wrong?”
I’ll preface by saying if you can allow your mind to be malleable, you’ll understand that you can be right and wrong at the same time. Everyone can be, and is. For that, there is no right nor wrong, just one giant orb of which everything is encompassed. The orb is what is. Right and wrong are facets of the orb.
In the Eastern world, paradox is very simple to grasp. In the typical Western mindset, opposites contradict, not coexist.
(“Andee… Can you stop with the jibberish and tell a story?")
I will… It’s an older story, but new readers might enjoy it.
My father died on Christmas Eve, 2018. A few days later, I got on a plane to California and drove from San Diego to Seattle with my ex-boyfriend.
The trip was planned- I was not changing it. My father did not have a funeral— just a gathering at his house, which I had no desire to attend.
I felt that much of my spiritual “work” regarding my father was finished. I was intuitively called to be near him when he entered hospice. By complete happenstance, I was alone with him in his room when his childhood friend Danny arrived to visit. They had been estranged for 12 years.
Danny and I swapped “Dad” stories while he lay there unconscious, unable to wake up or speak. Long after Danny had left, my father came back to consciousness and said he knew Danny had been there. He told me I had to call him.
“Dad, I don’t have his number,” I said. And without missing a beat, my Dad recited it from memory. My father, who barely knew his own name an hour prior.
What happened next was a miracle. My Dad rallied, got transferred to in-home hospice, and he, Danny, and their friend Mike spent much of the last month of his life reconnecting.
I felt good about my contribution to the end of my father’s life…. I was also fine with writing it off as “time served.” My father had been a complete pain in the ass for many years, causing a lot of emotional and psychological distress for our family. I was happy to be done with it.
My trip to California was very ABV-lubricated. Ten days later, I returned home, happy to carry on my life in 2019, free of my father and all the annoyance he brought me.
I continued to run and train. I ran two marathons, one in Milwaukee and one in Chicago. I hiked in the mountains in Utah. I went to Doha with my job to open a restaurant. I was having a fucking phenomenal time.
Then, the end of the year came, and with it, things came up that I thought I’d buried so deep I’d never see them again.
First, my ex-boyfriend (whom I drove that long road trip with) took his ex-wife on a trip to Ireland at Christmas time. I failed to mention she almost died that year of an extreme medical anomaly, and he was making good on a promise to her. We had continued to be quasi-romantic, and even though I was appreciative of him taking her, I was also hurt by this. I was hurt that they would visit the parents of my dear friend, who had been my regular bartender in Times Square for over 11 years. I was upset they’d possibly share a bed, or their bodies. Somehow, the reality of my hurt intensified with each day.
I ignored my feelings about that… until I had too much to drink on Christmas Eve, and it fueled a level of rage inside of me. I was crying, drunk, angry, yelling… I didn’t know what to do about all the big feelings. I’m not even sure I ate dinner… I don’t remember that day much.
The next day, as we always did on Christmas Day, we went to my father’s house (where my stepmother still lived) for the first time since his death, almost exactly a year prior.
It was weird… being there. Weird, that the last time I was there he was death rattling in the next room. Weird… What remained of him was a container of ashes placed in the room near the leftover seafood and Christmas decor.
My stepmother brought out a box of my Dad’s watches… I saw before me every watch he wore from the 1980s until he died.
Upon seeing those watches, I remembered loving him, and him loving me… I remember looking at the gold one from my childhood and seeing that watch on his tan arm as he drove me to school in the mornings. I remember our Peter, Paul, and Mary tape, and listening to “Puff the Magic Dragon.”
As the watches changed size, shape, consistency, and clunkiness, I re-experienced my relationship with Dad in an instant.
And… I don’t know if, even now, I know how to feel about all of that. It’s layered and complex in its beauty… But back then, it came up as simple “uncontrollable melancholy.”
I started crying… and I could not stop.
I cried for hours and hours.
At one point, my brother was noticeably upset with me. He had brought his girlfriend (now wife) home for Christmas for the first time, and here I was, showing her alllllll the character traits. We all had familial grief and baggage, but I was wearing it like a flashy boutonniere. After all, two meltdowns between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day was … a lot. I knew I could be an emotional drunk but this was over the top, even for me.
He said something to me about it and I said:
“I HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE UPSET!”
(or something along those lines…)
Because I did! I was finally, for the first time in a year, grieving my parent. I was allowing myself to emote. THIS WAS THE TIME! I was HERE FOR IT!
“Look at me, not running, but feeling…..”
And he responded, calmly as he always does, with:
“You do. But you don’t think about how it affects other people.”
And… I didn’t. He was right.
I was right.
And so was he.
I was in need of love, compassion, care, and softness. And, I also did not consider my family. At the time, I was (and often was) a colossal asshole. My emotional dysregulation ruined a holiday more than once, which I blamed solely on the pain I was experiencing.
I was in pain… I needed kindness. I needed to heal. I sobbed into my security blanket for hours that evening like a child who needed to be cradled.
AND, I was also a piece of shit.
My family had to deal with my upset for two solid days. I brought anger and density to our holiday. I infused crappy energy into the space; it was very hard to have joy around me. Who I didn’t know would eventually be my sister-in-law was sharing our home for the first time. I didn’t consider her.
I was negligent in acknowledging the grief of others, and I was bone-headedly unaware of the blithering, slobbery, unreconciliable mess I was pushing onto anyone who came near me.
I think that day was truly the beginning of my asking, “How am I wrong?”
I know how I’m “right.”
I know what hurts. I know the reality I am living in and what beliefs and values correspond to that reality. But how am I “wrong?”
When you’re in a victim consciousness space, everything is being done to you. You believe that you’re at the mercy of someone else, and if there’s hurt, your belief is that it’s someone else’s responsibility to fix it.
You come to find when waking up that your hurt is your responsibility, and even though understanding from others is nice, it doesn’t do much.
I often say, “By the time you get the apology you’ve been waiting for, you’re not even going to want it.”
I learned that the next year, when my mother gave me a long-awaited apology for how she had been, and things she had done.
By the time she spoke those words to me, all I wanted to do was hug her and make her feel better. She was not responsible for my pain, and I just wanted her to not hurt.
I learned that no matter what someone apologizes for, your pain does not go away until you go inside and resolve it.
Your upset comes from your inner disruptions.
I never drank again after that Christmas.
I only intended to be sober for a few weeks to get my mind right. Then, three weeks into it, I remember a burst of understanding and clarity that was nothing like anything I experienced in my adult life after the age of 13 or 14… Where had I been?
I could continue to tell you about the path that unfolded, but that’s not really the topic of this piece.
This piece is about asking… “How am I wrong?”
When you can ask that, you can go forward in love.
None of us are as kind and good as we think, but I believe we all have a genuine desire to be kind and good. That’s why we do as we do. We just want to be good.
Stay beautiful,
Andee
Maybe a friend of mine was right: "You can't heal what you hurt."
In your piece, "Everyone you know is living in a universe all of their own," you profoundly delve into the nature of perspective and self-awareness. Your candid reflections on dealing with personal grief and emotional turmoil, especially around your father’s passing, are both poignant and enlightening. Your journey from seeking to be "right" to understanding and accepting the complex layers of being "wrong" provides valuable insights into human vulnerability and growth. Thank you for sharing such a deeply personal and relatable experience, as this is difficult to achieve.