The Tree, or why words suck

Things are better now. I seem to be on a path to repairing things with my family, and my identity freefall seems to have slowed. It feels like lot of parts that had been moving in me are aligning again around a center. Not perfect peace, but much better.

But that's hardly an interesting update, let's throw in one of those languishing draft posts:

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I have things I want to say to rationalists. I think I currently suck at genuinely explaining rather than persuading, and exposing how I arrived at a given conclusion ahead of why I think the conclusion is right. 

But, one can dream. I hope one day I can have learned enough to write something awesome that has something to do with this:

I have a strong desire, on the level of a life's goal, to explain something I consider key to securing an understanding of the full extent of our biases. It seems to be something often, and paradoxically, and ironically missed by those who'd most want that understanding, due to their identifying strongly with their rationality. 

It's good to identify with your rationality, because then you'll love it and perfect it, and cultivate a taste for uncovering influences that could secretly hurt it. But it can be bad, inasmuch as the more you identify with your inner warrior against irrational biases, the deeper the horror implied if you should ever come to recognize your target's location within the center of your actual beating heart. I might begin to wonder how much my warriorship was motivated by avoiding the worst truth of all, myself as an irrational actor. But if this is truth, it's a really important one to update on.

I think what I perceive, if true, could make this discovery easier, by showing how it makes sense for us to be in this predicament. As it seems to me, the Moloch behind the curtain is the origin of words, which results in their unconsciously dual purpose and dual effect.

To illustrate this, please picture a tree, which is the human soul. (Or "human brain-and-heart", "human thoughts-and-emotions" -- whatever you like.) 

The tree's form consists in the trace of two motivations, two flows of energy: one goes up, one goes down. The upward energy is our motivation to absorb the light of truth, to grow (inwardly) loftier and more diverse through meaningful contact with the outside world. The downward energy is our motivation to stay alive, strengthen pathways to basic survival needs, and wax peaceful and secure among our dearest tribe: the people we most rely on to locate or orient our identity and role in the world. 

We rely on words to make progress in both realms. The tree forms branches by means of words: words implement the distinctions necessary to understand and predict the world. The tree also forms roots by means of words: they allow us to implement the connections necessary to identify with and communicate with our tribe. 

"Implementing distinctions" and "implementing connections" are opposites. That's the first problem.

Worse, the connection impetus of the roots has a certain power advantage over the distinctions impetus of the branches. The world of roots -- paths of connection, emotional experience, purpose, and desire -- are the context in which each of us came upon our most foundational words, in addition to just being the "proper" purpose of words from the perspective of human evolution. The connection impetus is both where our words' heartfelt meaning comes from, and their primary concern. The roots are necessary to the branches; the branches much less so to the roots.

The way we form our concepts and beliefs with these words reflects this. For all our conscious reaching toward the correct, objective distinctions and associations between concepts, the words we use to do this remained pinned (in proportion to their meaningfulness to us) in their subconscious origin, the emotional power that bestows their turgor. It's to this extent our words are at the mercy of those associations with which we acquired them.

It doesn't have to be hopeless. If our branches succeed in finding sunlight, that energy can be used to feed the roots, growing new ones and deepening them in a better place. Our love of real knowledge in the world can and must enlighten our emotional territory, to make it more aligned with reality and its more accurate distinctions. We should do the hard, slow work to evolve our whole root system into a structure better than the default, one that maximizes both sunlight access and water access, according to a proper understanding of the constraints bestowed by the terrain -- wherever it was our seed happened to drop. 

The way in which I think this process usually fails is through horror at recognizing the sheer level of irrationality we'd be uncovering within ourselves, particularly in those words, phrases, concepts and associations that run deep into our childhood. To succeed, we must learn to understand that this is actually a signal of the power these words contain, enough to become motivated to uncover that power so as to bring it under our conscious sway. We can also be motivated by a different fear: the quest to control that power is ignored to our peril. That's the force that will go right on controlling our path whether we like or not. It must be recognized, respected, cooperated with, and won over just as some massive wild animal would be made tame. 

As messy as our start may have been, this is the energy allotted to us -- perhaps in the form of a religion, or some other way love was conveyed to us that we may recognize as false or having false elements -- and we must respect it for what it is. 

Probably the inevitable example is the word God. If you once believed in God and are now an atheist, and you still find yourself feeling any bit of disturbed emotional reaction to that word, you should invest a decent effort to find out why. That disturbance isn't due simply to some inherent falseness in the word, unless you also feel the same disturbance at the word flurfleboopagetti. There is energy trapped behind that word that once fueled you, but now is working against you. Part of you may be assuming something like, "God once existed and was there for me; but now, he does not exist and is not there for me."  

But this is false, because whatever was true then is true now. Find a way to release any such energy and let it flow toward you again, because it's yours and belongs to you.

Atop a sad pile of post-drafts: an update

I need to tell you more things now. 

Mainly, it's because I'm in a very different state from where I was in the last post, and I want to correct the record. Incidentally, there are some mechanisms I want to try to map out about my interior life, and I find that takes place a lot better in written rather than spoken form.

Recently, three things have happened:

• my Dad died suddenly just before Thanksgiving,
• I lost my faith, and
• my immediate family and I are basically emotionally estranged. 

These are all related. In particular, the second is closely bound to the first. The third is like the icing on the bummer-cake -- not a lot to unpack there, but it makes me feel really sad and so it seems worth listing.

But anyway, starting with Dad seems like the right place. Losing him turns out to have changed my inner landscape in unexpected ways. 

Though gentle and joyful at heart, Dad, a mechanical engineer at the same oil refinery for 40 years, was in many ways the stereotypical old-school, old-church, repressed British Protestant. Long ago, as a tiny child, I once had a genuine emotional connection with him but then lost it forever one day -- a typical event in family life (cf. the demise of Goofball Island in Pixar's Inside Out) very much in keeping with his inability to acknowledge his own emotions. I'm pretty sure one major cause of my religiosity was that little girl's enormous store of pained, thwarted desire for connection with her religious Dad, since that would please him so much. (Also, good grades.) 

Although I was aware of this causality while Dad was alive, I don't think I would have predicted his death would cause me to lose my faith. But I think it's safe to say that's what happened. 

I since have begun to recognize certain key concepts like faith in Jesus Christ and Church membership as so many APIs cemented in my interface with my dad. So long as he was alive, if I budged those APIs -- if I were to bring them "to the surface" to examine them objectively -- I would see that their position in my mind was outdated, the position would move, and by the same action I would lose a connection to my dad. This I simply could not do -- I could never abandon my dad. Our mutual reliance on each other's support and spiritual-pseudo-affection was too foundational. I could hardly lift a finger to push one of those concepts up toward the light before a pang of terror that originated in a roughly two-years-old (and therefore stupidly strong) version of my emotions stopped the procedure. 

This strikes me as in keeping with the deeply relational origin of words -- words as communication -- an origin so drastically (and tragically, and infuriatingly) at odds with the nature of reality, the thing they purport to describe. When as a child I went about setting down the whole irreversible edifice of my knowledge of all things, I wasn't building a picture of the world that my dad fit into: I was building a picture of my dad. I learned about the world inasmuch as it helped me reconstruct the thing I most longed to see, the affectionate version of his face.

When he died, the experience was almost mystical. It may sound odd, but in my search for a proper "goodbye" the evening of his death, I considered myself to behold him again the way I did a few moments after I was born (I had been told we'd given each other a big long stare). And from that place, I said goodbye, with all the enormous joy and sorrow, and much longer period of loss and longing, accounted for. And I at last felt closure. The two-year-old gripping those words so tightly, so that she could catch a glimpse of her Dad, finally loosed her grip.

And so it seems to me I lost my faith and saw the stakes involved in the same stroke. 

What I actually mean by "I lost my faith" is difficult to encompass. In those first few weeks, I had thought my felt-connection to God had died with him. But I think now, that doesn't seem true; there still seems to be some sort of sense of God in my emotional landscape. 

Nonetheless, his death did cause an odd sense of relief that had very much to do with religion. The relief felt due to the end of the semi-subconscious mental process that was expending an extraordinary amount of energy stretching my identity across a version that could maximally interact with James, and one that could maximally interact with Dad. 

Of those two rivers of truth-intuition I spoke of earlier, it appears that when Dad died one's "lowest point" began to vanish,  eventually leaving one river much plainer to my heart and mind. So although I currently feel more interior peace as an agnostic, the experience of having seen those two rivers has left me in deep skepticism of the validity of any river at all. I don't feel myself to know more now that this happened; I may know even less.

But knowledge of these rivers does have a certain usefulness that I can work with. I can embrace the relational aspect of this river, and be true to its flow. After all, the presence of another human being in one's life is a sort of truth, if of a different kind, which can be respected for its own rules.

Although there remains in me a contradiction -- the emotional part of me still senses what I've called God, while the rational part acknowledges little to no evidence he really exists -- I know now for sure that "agnostic" is more true of me than "Catholic". I'm agnostic in my gut feeling because I'm with James. I'm with James because I assess his influence in my life to be deeply healing and positive. If it weren't for that, I would have likely called myself a Catholic if it meant I could have stayed in the same tribe as my mother and brother. But this is not possible -- My efforts to communicate failed in a definitive way after Dad's mediating powers no longer applied, and they've made plain they consider my current state to constitute a betrayal of God. I'm so emotionally kicked-out-of-the-nest I'm not to even mention my upcoming wedding. So I find my membership in the agnostic tribe to be an accomplished fact.

This surely comes off poorly, to admit that I'm liable to switch teams whenever it happens to suit me. But I can now clearly see the process of my self-labeling, whatever that may imply about me. 

It's freeing -- it would even have freed Carmelite-me years ago, realizing (in a moment in the library one summer evening I clearly remember) that for all my appearance of holiness, swathed in toque and veil, I was actually -- no, really actually for real -- nothing but a sinner. Even as far as my deepest convictions, I was never doing anything but looking out for myself. I even remember trying to think up a scheme for manifesting my sinfulness if I were dismissed: the leading idea was to spend all the rest of my days as a Wal-Mart cashier wearing a T-shirt that said "SINNER". Pretty brilliant, eh? 

But it seems the surfacing has happened in a much more authentic way, and I can't help but appreciate that. Can't really expect any kickback of virtue-signaling credit upon becoming an agnostic. It even nullifies that enormous pile of Carmel-credit that I was most definitely attached to. Elegant, really.

I have to add -- for whatever the above is worth -- things are still confusing. 

In which Kathleen vacillates

I have a social media post I need to write, and I don't know how to write it. So I'll blog all the thoughts flitting around that post and maybe that will help it take shape.

It's a post intended to publish the fact that James and I won't be getting married in the Church. It is something James has asked me to write, and which I think I'm still only partially on board about, although I think his reasoning makes sense. 

I'm partially not on board because I dislike kowtowing to the narrative that this is a big deal. As previously noted on this blog -- true off my chest, what matters to me is the commitment, not the religious flavor, since (in terms of a broad average of feelings) I have no particular taste or distaste for Catholicism at the moment, nor a fear that God would punish me for lacking it. But I'm also partially on board, in that my marriage is not something I particularly want to a) hide or b) have blow up in my face socially when revealed as a fait accompli.

Not marrying in the Church makes sense for us as a couple, because neither of us are set to accept the rights and obligations of a Catholic marriage. James is an atheist and, at the moment, I actually have no clue what will come out of my mouth when my kids ask me about God, so -- this has been a change -- I now think it would be likely dishonest to swear it will definitely be what the Church teaches. Meanwhile, seeing as we are both mentally healthy and have liked each other a whole lot for a very long time, marrying does check out.

But I've already experimented with one dear Catholic friend in trying to explain how it could make sense to choose to marry a good person I love very much, while acknowledging that it might not make sense to marry in the Church, and found it didn't really work. So I need to try to anticipate this reaction on a broader scale.

What are the reactions I need to anticipate in my audience of firmly-ensconced Catholics? Let me try to imagine myself reacting as if I were one of them, as indeed I was a relatively short while ago.

...It would feel as if something had possessed her, some primal need to be with her lover had robbed her of her better reason. She had been seduced or taken advantage of and, in her shame, turned away from the vision of Catholic teaching as the energy pulsing through and binding together the great mandala of interior and exterior harmony, the great sacramental, the equilibrium of love and obedience. I would be making guesses at what had broken her deep inside, or if she had always been broken. I would immediately be sniffing out the story that she had built to make this action excusable to her mind so as to call her out on it, to show her the worst dissonance between this story, this jagged outgrowth, and that lovely (but essentially centripetal) mandala. 

My response to this has to be something like: a) my lack of inner conformity to Catholicism is demonstrably traceable to Carmel, not James, b) I'm not playing along with the story expectation because I'm not interested in stories ahead of making life decisions that make sense and c) if I were to play along: when forced to choose, should we really see that mandala of God's will for our lives as essentially centripetal and constrictive ("don't do things that step out of bounds"), or centrifugal and expansive ("do things that increase happiness and peace")? 

Considering c), James would probably prefer I preach a bold epic of purity and freedom from stories. I do agree this is more like truth, but I still see value in tracing those old lines, for the sake of communicating the good things I've perceived in a language my friends can understand. Without bridging that gap, many would not be able to hear a bold epic at all, only something scary and cold, possibly evil.

But..it's not really just for them. I want to tell myself this story and allow myself to believe it on some level. It's part desire to feel the joy and peace of it, and part fear of the alienation and despair I feel when it's missing. I could call it my subconscious, or some other name, but it's the part of me that craves stories that justify my actions as pursuing a higher degree of communal life. When not fed, that part of me, thug-like, holds my inner peace hostage. And especially in Covid isolation, that part isn't going anywhere soon. 

By speaking in a Catholic voice about our marriage, I would enjoy the heck out of myself. But what sort of game am I really playing? It feels good because, as a Catholic, I'd become a goddamn black belt at canonizing my emotions and justifying my actions. It's hard to resist picking up that familiar old sword when facing the great yawning mass of potential-judgment that is my whole Catholic network. I'm just so good at it. The urge to flourish it just a little feels slightly crave-y.

Where is this really coming from? 

I want to downplay the implicit cult switch cemented by my marriage because I don't want this event to present to the world as a rupture between the old Kathleen and a new one. I don't like this idea that James changed me. Somehow, women should change men, but men shouldn't change women. 

This isn't entirely nonsensical. Women are the ones with an inherited instinct to keep a centered stance, all samurai-like, on the role they have ascertained would provide them the most sheltered possible position within their community because -- you know, child-bearing and all that. If I were to substantially budge from this stance due to a man, that means the flighty, male seed-spreading instinct has trumped the stable, female child-nurturing instinct, and we all figured out a few thousand years ago that the latter should generally win in order for society to develop in a positive way. But taking our breeding instincts as a guide for how almost everything should work (as we seem to do a lot) is a pernicious fallacy indeed.

The truth is James did cause change in me, and still is. Carmel drained me of affection for Catholicism. But if James hadn't persistently hacked away at some doublethinks in my underlying beliefs, they would have moldered in a deep corner of my mind, too load-bearing of my Catholic way of life to ever be touched again. 

This process of changing me wasn't as clean as I'd have liked. I haven't always felt happy about it. I often wished James could just lay off being so opposed to the Church, my main source of security, particularly at those moments when marriage wasn't on the table. Assailing my relationship to the Church at that time felt, honestly, rather ridiculously futile on my end. 

But as marriage began to emerge as a possibility, this unleashed the potential for change in me as well as a fair bit of chaos. I felt angry and scared as my instincts grew schizophrenic in their assessment of who was the better source of security, and whether I needed to suppress thoughts that contravened one, or the other, in order to be safer. My integrity proved rather sucky: I learned at least to check myself along the way as to whether I wouldn't really go back to acting and thinking a certain way if James dropped dead. (I've also lately started wondering how I'd start acting and thinking if the Catholic Church were to go extinct.)

In general, this does mean one of the nastiest-sounding versions of my story checks out: a good Catholic girl lost her grip on her faith because she fell in love with an atheist. Blugh, I hate typing that. At the risk of splitting hairs though, I feel this doesn't quite convey the right image. My love for James has not been a great wall sealing off a spiritual center I no longer enter, but the window through which grenades continuously drop into it, right on my now rather uncomfortable head. James has made me at turns furiously defensive of a right to hope God exists, and terrified of my desire to speak to Him. 

Meanwhile, I had a chance to observe something new in myself, not without disgust though. It was how my sense of what was true acted exactly like a river whose shape, location and speed depended quite simply on the path of least resistance to the lowest topographical point; in this case, the point of maximum personal safety. I began to be able to flip back and forth between my two centers of gravity and feel two different rivers, each covering their own stretch of land: their own allotment of allowed thoughts.

I like that I can now see this about myself. 

I dislike that my sense of self is now the weakest it's ever been. Although I grant this is not objectively bad, I do remain concerned about its prognosis. I always seem to be making another guess at what my points of reference ought to be, only to watch them slip out of focus shortly after. I don't feel entirely sure that my changing is actually evidence that James has helped me see the truth more, or simply that James has stronger convictions than I, and that I'll keep slowly sliding toward his worldview while he stays more or less the same. A part of this concern is that I'm not perfectly certain of James' potential to be legitimately updated by me in turn. Perhaps, as the party more lenient toward emotional semantics (sc. one of those touchy-feely types), I will always rate as a second-class source of information that a true rationalist would never really countenance. I don't know.

That's about the shape of it. There's no sense in pretending that I'm more sure of myself than I really am, though old habits are hard to break. So I'm finding it wholesome to try to embrace more fully my mother's assessment that I've gone off the rails.

In one sense, I really have gone off the rails. In another sense, I've chosen to assume the risk of using a different method to discern the existence and direction of the rails. This doesn't really work in the physical world, or in the world of fundamentalism, so I'd rather not get overly defensive about my rails being the real ones. There's no real rails: rails, too, are a story. Reality, the experience of my life, is far better than any story I could tell.

That seems a good place to end: the part where I tell you that what I'm really talking about and really invested in is something words weren't built to communicate.

The below again, but with less snark

I wanted to add an angle that's a little less snarky. What I'm saying is that accepting that love is nowhere felt like the first step to accepting that love is everywhere. 

It does seem a fair bit like detachment a la St. John of the Cross, who says we have to let go of things according to our natural way of wanting them, in order to truly taste and enjoy them for the first time. Our attachments are the stories our instincts weave like nets to rope good things in: "Her love should come to me because she is my mother," or "His love should come to me because we're compatible and I want to get married." It's a way of relating to the world more suited to a child, whereby we see good things primarily in how they relate to us. We let go of some as we get older, but the deeper stuff tends to stay. It's not that it's wrong, exactly.

But I'm convinced happiness comes from seeing even these more deeply needed and wonderful things in that detached way. Not in relation to us, but as they stand in themselves. To the degree I learned and accepted that love-coming-to-me was nowhere, I could feel for the first time that love-beautiful-in-all-hearts was everywhere, and sense the comforting warmth of it. 

To be comforted and warmed by reality! Who would have thought?

But this is damn hard, and in my case apparently required some serious trauma. So I'm not sure it's something you can really just do, to be honest. But anyway, I may be wrong in my assessment about these things. It's just how it appears to me now.

A small one on paranoia and why it's super fun

I had an acute paranoid episode in Carmel. In that mental state, I was following an expected "storyline" for the day's events that were entirely outside of reality (I would leave on a train that very day to the Carmel of Philadelphia, I would bring my Novice Mistress with me, I would explain everything to her on the way and she would weep with understanding, etc). But more importantly, I realized with firm conviction that everyone's love for me was fake.

The funny thing is, I still think everybody's love for me is fake. Sure, some people care about me, but it will never be that all-encompassing kind I used to secretly hope for. Just like how I now think of my need for stories, I've come to believe my need for total loving-acceptance is based on a lie. 

As a byproduct of our long lineage of ancestors who had great survival skills as babies, it seems we're on an eternal hunt for a mother's "unconditional" love. We all want to reignite that gut recognition that there is someone out there who can feel my own pain and needs as their own, with urgency and even despite themselves, and render me safe.

Nobody but my parents ever really came close to that. And even that didn't turn out to mean actual acceptance of my emotionally fully-fledged internal life.

So if I'm in a bad mood, that can be a bummer. 

But if I'm a good mood, that means I can relax and indulge that instinct-hit from literally anywhere. Like an affirming ASMR video on Youtube. Some random chick's benevolence toward her faceless viewers is probably, actually genuine. Why not lay claim to it and soak it in? (I didn't watch Blue's Clues, but if I had, I would have no doubt joined the happily bawling masses that accepted the curiously spiritual power of Steve's loving apology.)

Am I ashamed? Maybe a little. but honestly, not really, because dang it works.

Marriage, and why I don't seem to get it now

I have an engagement ring on my finger. This has never happened before, even though I, consciously or unconsciously, have spent the last 33 years or so hoping to see one there (I think three years old is a good start time estimate). I want to try to describe to you what this is like now, for me in particular. 

I'll start with the part I know: girls.

Little girls in stable traditional family structures know for sure they will get married. They know this as soon as they are informed that being "married" means they will be a "bride" and a bride wears a "wedding dress" and that last phrase is quickly understood to refer to the ultimate clothing, the Supreme Bling. Girls grasp by pure instinct that Supreme Bling is the expression of worthiness in an absolute sense. And of course they are worthy. Therefore, they will of course get married. [Edit: I don't really know how often this is the case. Maybe a lot of girls in these families feel differently. But there's got to be at least a significant subset that feel this way.]

The Supreme Bling concept is the diamond perfectly, lovingly crafted by eternal generations of women to fit the emotional prongs that have simultaneously evolved specifically to make space for it and hold it in a little girl's brain. 

For a long time I had a relatively strong desire for marriage. At one point I started putting some distance between my self-identification and these urges, seeing them as something cultivated by forces outside my control. But that was before I flung my deeply romantic twenty-something self into Carmel with the vigor and glee of the proverbial moth into a flame (except imagine it screaming a tiny, 'wheeeeeee<3<3<3').

I got married in Carmel. What I mean by that is, I believed with all my heart that my profession was that true Supreme Bling. From the inside view, being a nun taking three-year vows as written and one taking them with firm intention to preserve them until death, as we were instructed to do, feel universes apart. I of course considered myself to be the latter nun. I had spent the previous years as a novice in daily awe that our beloved habit was my wedding dress, our rope sandals my wedding shoes. Even today, tears can come to my eyes when I remember them. But the Profession crucifix was the wedding ring, and that was received on the day of simple vows. It wasn't just in my head by a long shot -- that day, Pentecost, was accepted by all observers as my wedding day. I was referred to by my sisters quite simply as "the bride."

When I was unceremoniously ejected a few months later, as witnesses will confirm, I had only one item on my agenda, a fully automatic response to prop up my suddenly highly compromised psyche. I came out, hugged my parents and, smiling cheerfully, asked them to please drive me from the convent straight to the nearest department store. I picked a $50 bill out of the dowry box that had come out with me to buy a sterling silver ring I immediately jammed onto my finger. It felt like abruptly disarming a nuclear bomb that had been hidden and ticking away at the center of New York City.

On top of that, some weeks after I left, the nun responsible for my removal sent our Profession crucifix to me in the mail, saying she discerned in prayer that it belonged to me. I have many things to say about that sister and her own desperate, repressed need to leave the convent. But anyway, it took a few years, and the direct intervention of the current ring's owner, for ring and crucifix to get dumped.

So I hope this illustrates to what extent my marriage piety, just like my religious piety, got heckin bamboozled. Today, I of course still sense marriage as a major commitment and a joyful event. But it no longer casts the spell of grave, from-above momentousness. I think I prefer it this way.

But I get the sense that many of the people I know, particularly those with a religious background, have not experienced this diminishment of the sway of meaning. And now this discrepancy is beginning to hurt.

On the one hand, I've learned that it can mean something to marry a Catholic, over and above the implications for Catholic marriage validity. As for that, I'm open to children and to exposing them to the teachings of the Church, whether the wedding is Catholic or not. But to have the ceremony be Catholic seems to contaminate the affair with submission, or of ownership revoked; there's a certain religious juju. I can understand how it would feel this way.

Meanwhile, most of my Catholic family and friends still hold both Catholic meaning and marriage meaning dear. Therefore, if I were to marry outside the Church, that means I'm committing a mortal sin, which means I'm rejecting God, which means I'm rejecting Love and Goodness itself, which implies I have on some key level stopped the beating heart our friendship, perhaps leaving either niceties or fervent prayer for my soul in its stead. I've been there, so I know it's possible some friends simply cannot think otherwise. It isn't a question of amount of love for me. I can understand how it would feel this way too.

I can say with all my heart that the meaning of my marriage is my own. I don't feel a need for something extra bestowed by Catholicness, or any other -ness except genuineness. If God exists, even the Catholic God, I find it impossible this would displease him, or that he would actually withhold his benevolence in such a case. Controversial, I know, but it seems impossible to me that God would be constrained by the form of a Sacrament if he didn't want to be. And He'd know how things balance out in me now: He'd know that any genuine filial impetus for conforming my marriage to the Church was bamboozled out of me, because He himself did it. 

Meanwhile, my chosen meaning for it is not that it become a watershed moment that destroys a fruitful relationship with anyone, much less half my family and a large swath of my friends. Why the heck would it?

I feel I've overdosed on capital-m-Meaning and that I'm quite done with it. But it feels like it lives on in everyone around me: its demands yanking me to fulfill and satisfy here and there and everywhere, except for in me. 

I'm not sure what to do about this. But at the moment, admittedly, it feels less than awesome.

The strong baby war

A dilemma came before me today. The details aren't interesting, but the interior state I found myself in, due to the dilemma, was interesting.

There is a difficulty embedded in our genes. Namely, that all genes worry about is propagating the species. After you've done a good job of that, you can pretty much just die and go to hell. 

Oh, but in order to propagate, of course you should flourish and grow happy and healthy and strong. Physical and intellectual health secure survival to full generative potential, not to mention the social clout to obtain the other half of strong genes. Important baby ingredient.

When my own genes look at me, those generators of the urges I find most meaningful and tender within me, they don't see Kathleen in all her beautiful uniqueness. They see, in potentia, one really freaking strong baby. No, not one, so many strong babies; as many as I could pop out.

This realization sometimes makes me a little put out. Why? Oh, I don't know. I guess because I was beginning to think, "Hey, I think Kathleen is kind of ok." 

I was raised by an emotionally repressed Italian Catholic stay-at-home mom, so I started out suspecting Kathleen was about as wretched and useless as all my poor mother's own unresolved baggage about her self-worth told me I was. Counterintuitively, that was what bestowed my youthful swagger: because, back then, Kathleen and her genes were tight. Sooo tight. 

What is this you exhort us to? "Self-gift?" Spend my entire life doing nothing but pouring out my love on everyone around me until I shrivel into a papery husk of a human being? Is that supposed to be hard? I'm so freaking good at that. I do it without thinking; pure instinct. Bro, I don't even think I have real human rights. I'm just that humble.

When a woman lives without a motive for self-preservation blocking the way to her own death, everything made a crazy amount of sense. I nurtured my hearty sacrificial/maternal instincts (aka traditional family values), which were in turn overwhelmingly canonized by my community as deep selflessness. I was in an infinite affirmation loop.

Then thanks to some relatively mild spiritual abuse, I had this falling out. All these canonizations, affirmations that I should give up basically all sense of my desires and rights -- or at least, the more the better -- began to feel a tiny bit fake. Then a tiny bit faker. Now they're gone.

Having lost that thread, I started trying to be happy in ways that didn't require paying a spiritual debt upfront in the coin of gratuitous suffering. This is an extremely difficult habit to unlearn. But anyway, this had the effect of gradually causing me to think that I might be someone who is worth making an effort to give good things to. Maybe I don't have to die to self just yet -- maybe I'm kind of ok after all. 

But keep in mind, it's only the canonizations are gone. The genes are not. They're here. They don't see even one single baby. 

And they're angry.

(Unfinished. Haha yep I'm never finishing this probs)