Friday. Rainy and chill. Sarah will be here in a few minutes to do her magic.
Rook wandered around this morning, calling for Tali to come chase springs with him. The Tali-come-play call is pretty distinctive, which is how I’m able to discern his intention. He was willing to chase springs without backup, so there is that.
I’m lately reading all kinds of things about how the information about Who We Are that’s given us by our parents/caregivers/peers as children stay with us all our lives. There are so many agreements to these posts and articles that I’m starting to wonder where are the popular children who excluded and taunted us now?
That aside. . . it comes to me that one can accept other roles, once one is free from the father who explained very patiently how very lazy you are, or the mother who tried to “beat sense” into you, and, yes, the other children who thought you were weird — and they probably weren’t wrong, given the rest of it.
I, for instance, lucked into friends who valued “weird thinking” as “creative.” Since several were themselves highly creative individuals, I had to believe that they knew what they were looking at. So, I began to take my own stories, and my attempts at writing them down, not as a waste of time, but something that had some value. Since being “weird” seemed to be attached to my art, I slowly began to try to work with my brain — an exercise that continues to this day. While we still do distrust each other, we’re no longer constantly at odds, though I’m aware that being weird when you’re old is a risky business all its own.
Back to the supposition that the lessons of childhood never leave us — even though I was learning to embrace my art, and had produced a professional persona that got me through the day job, I was staggering under the weight of the old lessons when I met Steve Miller.
I’d never met anybody like Steve Miller before. I may have said this a time or two. Steve had . . . let us say that Steve had a Powerful Vision of himself. He paid for this in other ways, but his Best Self was strong, resilient, affectionate, protective, intelligent, and creative. He projected that image — believed in that self — so strongly, other people were swept up into it, believing and supporting it.
Certainly, I was.
Steve treated me as if I were brilliant, creative, beautiful, and strong. And I believed him. It wasn’t just paint and wallpaper; I did believe him, and I began to behave as if I truly was brilliant, creative, beautiful, and strong. I was Steve Miller’s partner; I could conquer worlds.
. . . which we did, together.
This is not to say that I don’t occasionally yell at myself for being lazy, nor that I don’t occasionally feel, truly, worthless. But neither did I boomerang back to the All the Old Lessons when Steve left.
So.
My wandering thoughts for a rainy Friday morning.
What thoughts occupy you this morning?
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