LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Anita Moorjani!
The deadly approval of others
Dear Lovelets,
Here’s another story that someone told me, but I don’t know where it came from, and I probably don’t have the details right. So gather around, children, for Story of Vague Origin Time!
You know how there is such a thing as master meditators, who go off alone into the wilderness for years on end to sit in silent contemplation of the world? (I have met a few such people, so I know them to be real!) Well apparently, many of these master meditators report that upon their journey to enlightenment, the very last thing to go, the very desperate last thing that still hooks the ego to the outer world, is this basic, joy-disrupting thought: “What is everyone thinking about me?”
Somebody can be up there in a cave in the Himalayas for years of solitude and meditation, communing with their breath and with divinity itself, and yet their mind keeps turning back to thoughts along the lines of “Do they approve of me? Are they mad at me? Did they ever love me? Why did they stop talking to me? Do they ever think about me anymore? Have they forgiven me? What would they think if they could see me now? Why don’t they understand me? Why have they never accepted me?”
They, they, they. Always those thoughts arise, pondering what the mysterious “they” are thinking.
It is very hard to get free of this line of thinking, is what I’m saying. Even when you aren’t around people anymore, apparently the people are still controlling you. (Or rather, your thoughts about the people are still controlling you.) But it is dangerous to allow those thoughts to go unchecked — as our special guest, the extraordinary Anita Moorjani, found out when she sat down to write a letter and was given an earful about how constantly seeking the approval of others will shatter your spirit and make you ill.
What does unconditional love have to say to you about approval-seeking, dear hearts? Let’s find out!
Love,
Your Lizzy
PS. This beautiful story touched me deeply last week, and I want to make sure all the Lovelets have a chance to see it: it’s about how a grand friendship was forged in Barcelona this year between LFL alum Teneia Sanders and Lovelet Amy Brown. Read about all the magic here. I love this community with all my heart!
Dear Love, what would you have me know about seeking approval from others?
Well, dear heart, you almost did it. You very nearly achieved it! You very nearly once crafted an appearance of life (please note that we said “an appearance of life,” not “a life”) that was impeccably well-ordered, that looked perfect from the outside, in which you did not make a single misstep or any visible mistake that might have cost you the love and approval of your family and culture. You got married. You got a good job. You were about to have a child (or were planning to). You had a house with gardens. You were the perfect wife, perfect daughter, perfect neighbor, perfect sister, perfect worker, perfect woman.
And it almost killed you.
Sweetheart, can we put it simply? You know this to be true. The closest you have ever come to suicide has been when you tried to live your life so perfectly that you could not be criticized or corrected by anyone. You put a sheen of impenetrable lacquer over your entire life, over your spirit, over your whole being, so that you would look, dress, speak, and act the way they wanted to.
And who were they? Everyone. All of them. Anyone out there, outside of yourself. But the “they” who were closest to you were the ones you were most trying to please. Though you never really allowed yourself to be seen, because you couldn’t even see it, your real spirit, hidden under all those layers of pandering and adapting, conceding and accommodating, entertaining and writing thank-you notes.
When all the time, there has been a deep, terrible, unspeakable secret that until very recently you never even let yourself know: you are the happiest and most free when you are alone and creating — ABSOLUTELY alone (not just alone in a room in a house where other people live but mythically alone, swamp witch alone, hermit alone, mystical saint in a cave alone, utterly, beautifully, gorgeously not just un-partnered, but totally alone)!
How could you be the perfect wife, daughter, sister, neighbor, worker, woman when you are perfectly alone, and there is nobody to judge you and nobody to compare you against? YOU CANNOT. And that is the beautiful thing.
Quick, tell me the most wildly free moment of your life — ha! We already know it. You were driving a jeep through the jungles of Costa Rica with the windows down, barefoot, on a rutted dirt road that may or may not have led you to your destination, whatever that even was. Monkeys were swinging above you, you were singing loudly to yourself, glimpses of the Pacific Ocean glittering to your left through the trees — and what was the greatest joy of it, what was the thought that kept electrifying your spirit? NOBODY KNOWS WHERE I AM.
Even now you get a deep, illegal-feeling thrill out of that. Some of the closest people in your life didn’t even know what country you were in that week . . . oh, how glorious, how free!
And when was the happiest time of your last few years? When you went to New Orleans and stayed alone at your friend’s possibly haunted house in Tremé during a rainy Louisiana winter, and you worked on the appalling middle section of ALL THE WAY TO THE RIVER, writing the terribly awful part, the descent into hell that you and Rayya experienced. And all you did for those 10 days was pace through that ancient house like Medea, like Lady Macbeth, weeping and feeling, and taking three baths a day, and writing more, and weeping more, and then putting your head back after every page or so and wailing, howling at the ugly heartbreaking awfulness of what you were writing — God, wasn’t it GREAT? Wasn’t it great to be so alive and true? Creating so honestly, to be alone with your own history, with your own story, with your own beautiful, horrible grief?
And what is your best day of the week, each week? Thursdays, when you unlatch as much as you possibly can from your phone, your emails, the tethers that connect you to the outer world and you wander alone in the blessed silence of your own being, puttering around your old house in your old underwear, letting the world take care of the world, while you and Pepita make plans to do what you both want to do more than anything, which is to go into the woods alone and chase bears.
Are you hearing a theme?
Alone, alone, alone!
While the media wails about a loneliness epidemic, you long for nothing more than more of it — more silence, more stillness, the privacy of your own imagination, your soul undisturbed, unperturbed, uninfluenced — to feel your own heartbeat, to be in communion with a God whom nobody taught you to believe in, but whom you found in your own private searchings, to sleep diagonally across your own bed, to make your own art, to eat the little weirdsy meals that a 56-year-old woman makes for herself when nobody is looking, while sitting at the kitchen counter with her unbrushed teeth reading a brilliant novel and speaking aloud to the novelist, who may be dead or alive (who cares, you are in communion)!
What model did you ever have, what model did you ever see in your family, for a woman as free as this? None. And nothing but shame is heaped from culture upon the heads — the gloriously shaved heads — of twice-divorced childless women who are also lesbian widows. Where was there a model for THIS? Who taught you to be THIS? Nobody. You never saw anyone who lived like this when you were coming up. Who taught you how to set the boundaries that you have set in recent years that defend this glorious, wild solitude? Nobody, my love. But this is simply what you are, when you allow yourself to run away from the need to be pleasing to others, and when you stretch out the tendrils of your imagination as fully as they can reach, and when you live in your own messy unvarnished truth, and when you don’t even need to tell your critics to fuck off anymore because they don’t even know where you are — they can’t even find you anymore.
My love, my love, nearly every family and every culture of the world admires an obedient, subservient, dutiful woman. The world wants you locked in a certain set of responsibilities that are limited and limiting, small, tight, and wrought with self-sacrifice. But whenever you try to do that, whenever you try to get their approval you nearly die — every single time. It isn’t safe for you to seek the approval of those who would confine you to nothing but tiny ill-fitting roles and then judge you on how poorly you are playing them. It never was.
Fail at it, my love. Fail at those roles. Every one of them. Spectacularly.
Because here’s the thing — they still won’t approve of you. No matter what you do, they still won’t approve of you. They’ll just be watching and waiting for you to make the next mistake. So fail immediately, and hard. Be a disaster: it is the agent of your liberation. And once everyone is done shaking their heads at you, then you are free to be forgotten, and to come back to the wildness of your own heart and the unfettered jungle of your own imagination. Which is where you found us, the Spirit of Unconditional Love — not in careful obedience, but in a reckless, primal howl of longing in a dark night of the soul, when, once again, you were absolutely alone. That’s where you heard our voice for the first time. This is where you found the highest, most powerful love. In your blazing holy solitude.
Remember what Martha Beck taught you: true love liberates the beloved. This is our voice, the voice of unconditional love, trying to liberate you even more. For you are our beloved.
If you think we want anything for you more than we want the utter, boundaryless freedom of your spirit, then you don’t know who you’re talking to. And who you are talking to is LOVE. True love, your love, our love, THE love.
Okay, little beast. That’s all. Do whatever you want today. Do whatever you want. Be true to your freedom. We are right here with you, eating it up like candy.
Prompt
Does this look familiar?
This prompt is for anyone who has ever related to Alice (which we secretly suspect is most of us!) — Dear Love, what would you have me know about seeking approval from others?