by Tom Tomaszewski | Dec 13, 2023 | DESOLATION, FRUSTRATION
DESOLATION / LUST
I’m not sure what I mean. I was thinking, if only Pete Shelley and Beyoncé had done something like Shane MacGowan and Kirsty McColl. I love all that stuff. I suppose I’m getting into the selfishness of love. In the first place it’s totally selfish. When I feel and say, ‘I love you’, who’s feeling the love? Me. And then, sometimes, perhaps, the other person feels some love. Saying ‘I love you’ might confirm something, spark something, fire something up.
If you aren’t aware of all this stuff, especially the bit about love being selfish, read on. This piece is about conditional loving (the kind of thing I was doing thinking I’d have loved Pete Shelley and Beyoncé to have done … I don’t imagine they would have loved it, really.).
It’s like this: if I say ‘I love you’ so that I hear the same thing coming back to me, so that I feel loved, maybe I should have kept my mouth shut. If I say and feel ‘I love you’, I hope I pick my moment so that it may be the right moment for you. Cuff it. What love sounds like, actually, isn’t up to me. It’s a multi-person thing.
The other thing: if I do or say something expecting some gratitude I should possibly never have done it. Not always, but usually, doing something and expecting someone to be pleased won’t end well.
Hoping is another matter.
Someone said to me the best thing ever about love: faith, hope, trust, they said. These are the ways love can happen between two people. Loving involves being open to another person and if you feel desolation in your life, or frustration, I suspect you have spent many hours on your own with your love. That’s devastating. What can you do?
Anticipate the selfishness in love and mediate it. That’s all you can do, really. Look for it in your loving and in what you hear from somebody else, and don’t necessarily recoil when you find it. It will be there: it’s a matter of what is also there. The love +.
Love + might dispossess. It may do something that works against the ‘wanting you to be mine’ thing, like what happens in that stupid children’s game, Buckaroo , where something trips and all the baggage flies off. The possessiveness of love can pull or push other people, the ones you say you love, into carrying you and all of the stuff you find too much.
Filter love as you send it and as you receive it. Imagine love like a postcard rather than a letter. ‘Wishing you were here’ rather something in a sealed envelope. It’s always the sealing off that’s the problem. Sealed off people can’t love or be loved. Sealed off love can’t be felt. Sealed off thoughts can’t be loving.
Anybody can see what’s on a postcard, and of course there are times when you can’t show what you feel (or face the consequences) and only a letter or even something more secret will do. But imagine, just imagine, somebody fair-minded, someone who you’ve never seen show contempt, and trust what you feel they might think of your message.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Dec 12, 2023 | ALIENATION, HESITATION
ALIENATION / PLAY
Leo Bersani wrote that ‘contempt cements the couple’. What seems paradoxical is revealed to be a most powerful form of bonding. Contempt makes somebody or something a strange object of desire. To feel contempt is almost to feast on someone. What a loss it can feel when someone contemptible slips out of sight.
If contempt plays a large part in your life it may have come as an answer to your panicked sense of alienation. A sense of not being part of things, of being disconnected. Feeling kept at a distance, unable to play life’s game you look for a loser who can take the brunt of your despair. More than likely you’ll bond through contempt, too.
Contempt allows politics to find an enemy: left hates right; right hates left. If you’ve ever been politically active you’ll have memories of meetings where someone or something on ‘your own side’ was savaged for not being right or left enough. Politics all too easily becomes a feast of individuals attacking those closest to them.
Bonding through contempt is like keeping a menacing beast. Take your eye off it and it will savage you. Groups who pass time lacerating others will rip into one of their own for the tiniest of reasons – and especially if somebody does something that might threaten them to feel ashamed.
Contempt is a terrible, violent anaesthetic to shame.
Fortunately contempt is easy to get out of your life. To quote Bob Newhart: ‘STOP IT’.
Then you may feel your shame, which will probably feel almost unbearable, until you realise (and this kind of epiphany can change everything) where that shame comes from. Talk to someone who doesn’t welcome contempt. It doesn’t need to be a therapist (the world of psychotherapy is as shot through with contempt as anywhere else).
by Tom Tomaszewski | Dec 11, 2023 | ALIENATION, HESITATION
HESITATION / PANIC
If you tend to zone out and lose track of time set your phone to buzz, beep or otherwise gently remind you to stay present every ten minutes or so. This is likely to feel irritating, but stick with it for a week and see what life feels like. The uncertain sense of coming and going in life, in and out of the present, is tiring and sometimes shocking. It breaks life up, makes concentration hard and may even get you misdiagnosed as having ADHD. You have been dissociating. It’s time to remain more present in your life. Alienation and hesitation go together with this kind of a problem. But I might also say that dissociation is likely to trouble anybody who’s had the odd shock.
by Tom Tomaszewski | Nov 30, 2023 | HESITATION
HESITATION / PANIC
People whose lives feel saturated with moments of hesitation are often people who find in thoughtfulness like a second nature. Their difficulty in caring, because to care might invite PANIC, drives them away from straightforward kindness and tenderness even though they seem capable of it. If this feels like you, don’t PANIC. You do care, but it’s terrifying. Think of your emotional life like a series of ski-runs (I don’t ski but I did watch something called Ski Sunday on television a lot when I was a child: it was like dreaming.)
Thoughtfulness might look deadly to some people but not to you. You’ll have thoughts about most things. The hardest slope for you, the kind of thing that seems to end up in a cloud of snow and disaster is the one leading to genuine tenderness: kindness and gentleness together. When you hold someone or something tenderly you are as vulnerable as they, all of your attention with them. For you, however, there will always be a lot of thoughtfulness going on at the same time … a bit like an engine starting to smoke as it gets overloaded.
The difficulty about a connection grounded in extreme thoughtfulness is that you can relatively easily change your mind. Do you ever ask: why do I keep changing my mind? Those connections will be much easier to move on from than ones where you have truly let the other in. All the way in. And people who you say you love will notice this. A certain self-centredness will become clear to them over time, however much you don’t want that to be the case. They may be in your thoughts, or they may not be. You’ll feel guilty when they are not and maybe hate yourself for what you blame on your thoughtlessness. It’s anything but that.
There is a solution. In fact there are many. Make up your own ones once you see the idea. Get some EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) to get you moving if you feel double-stuck. EMDR jump starts your psychological power of self-healing.
Try this exercise as often as you can.
Practice being connected to the world from your heart not your head. It’s called a head to heart movement. Try it.
HEAD TO HEART
If you move between regarding the world out of somewhere near your forehead, maybe between your eyes, and then slowly drop your attention down to feeling something like a ray of light between your heart and whatever you are regarding you’ll find yourself starting to feel something. I’ve chosen a tree in these amateurish scribbles because they tend not to move and are in fact lovely things we can’t do without. Try it. If you don’t feel anything, try it again. This is not about anything mystical, but something extraordinary: you imagining something differently … from a place where you might imagine you feel love (trust those songs) rather than the sentinel who is your cortex.
And then try with another tree, or a flower, and build your way up to a person. Can you see why you hesitate?
by Tom Tomaszewski | Nov 22, 2023 | MONOTONY
MONOTONY / SEEKING
How can you go searching? Caution is not uncertainty. Enthusiasm is not over-confidence. Being yourself in your life involves working out these kinds of differences, Whether or not you like books and regardless of whether you like Charles Dickens his books are one of the greatest sources of awareness I can think of. When it comes to understanding how to go about living. Dickens doesn’t simply write about things, he writes them, from the heart, from the middle of things, not as if he was an unconcerned onlooker, and usually with the welfare of children in mind. If you really want to give that child in you who could never feel secure a sense of something solid to believe in try Dickens. He knew how to go looking. He cared about children.
