Tag: relational labor

The Magical Other is a Myth I Believe

Yvet Youssef

1. Friends as mythic heroines

My Friend is a lens that helps me see myself more clearly and I am the Eye that beholds her beauty. My breakfast in the morning is an amalgamation of external influences. The beet smoothie, the oats with a pinch of salt, the sunflower seeds, the caraway, the raw cacao, the chia, the chai mix in a ziploc bag from Carbondale, the lavender syrup rose water matcha late… I’ve invented nothing, I just blend it all together, and remember with each ingredient: The moment you have shown me your particular ways is the moment I’ve changed mine. It’s so obvious at breakfast time. It’s much more subliminal in the ethereal waters of Being, how you’ve changed the ways I’m seeing, how you existing in my orbit adds an invisible structure to my days that keeps me anchored in my center.

All of this to say, I wouldn’t be who I am without you, Friend. Wouldn’t stand on my own two feet so firmly. Wouldn’t be so sure about what to eat for breakfast. Or if I’d spur myself into motion without sensing the reverberating echoes of your incredible life being lived by none other than you. Specifically. It’s a miracle to know and be known by you.

I see us like a constellation of celestial bodies attuned to one another’s evolution. And my bowl of oatmeal as a devotional practice. I know how that sounds. And I know you understand exactly what I mean.

2. Dating as Odyssey inward

I try to figure out the shape of who you are. And sometimes I focus so intensely I forget I am also a part of our meeting.

On dating apps I’ve seen dozens of people announce they’ve got their lives in order, they are just looking for that last puzzle piece to complete the picture. 

I look at the shape of who I am. These natural borders, irregular like dried up river beds from tears, corners bent and chipped away, craters from meteor impact, broken up and sewn together with light from the stars. Nobody with their life ‘in order’ has the type of puzzle I could possibly fit into.

And anyway, Love doesn’t allow herself to be reduced to a puzzle piece that completes an image of a comfortable existence. Whoever keeps such a fantasy has never known Love, or really just wants a static prop for the theater production of their life.  Love will mess up your whole puzzle to leave it unrecognizable when she’s finished, she discombobulates the scene, table and all, up in the air in irreverent enthusiasm. Want order? Do not fall for her.

I trace your outlines with my finger. Imagine your expanse. Somewhere our puzzled eyes meet and even though our maps are written in entirely different languages, our landshapes wrap peninsular limbs around one another. Already changed by your borders and boundaries. Already shape shifting to reveal more of who I am. You imagine my expanse and the Earth quakes under my feet.

Love and Shadow Work

Yvet YoussefLeave a comment

“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”

– James Baldwin

If I love you, I don’t want you to be stuck, I want you to grow. If I love you, I don’t want to get stuck, I want to grow with you, for you, for all of us. To me the very purpose of being in a relationship is to grow with someone. I have no interest in tranquility if it is housed on a gurgling cesspool of unconscious dysfunctional behavioral patterns. Such tranquility is a farce, it is not real, it is not peaceful. Peace can only ever arise from making conscious that which hides in the shadows of our being. Carl G. Jung referred to this as shadow work. And it is precisely in (conscious, self-reflective) partnership with another person that such work is particularly feasible. Why? Because when I see you – truly see you – day in day out, and if I am the slightest bit aware, those shadows of yours are going to announce themselves to me sooner or later. We all have them. In this inevitable process I will feel those shadows hurled at me with sharp clarity, at which point I can say: “Hey, you! Look at this. Here’s something to dig into because it hurts me and others”. And you, dear one, can do the same for me: “Your behavior is painful to me, let’s address what is happening here”.

And guess what happens through this type of relational labor? Peace happens. Peace happens within the awareness of the chaos. Peace happens within the acknowledgment of the pain. The moment we are conscious of our destructive and dysfunctional behavior, is the moment we can heal it, is the moment we can breathe a sigh of relief. That is what it means to me to be in a loving relationship; to trust someone to respectfully call out my bullshit because that person cares about me enough to see me do better. If we can lovingly do that for each other, Love will continue to grow, intimacy will continue to deepen, life will expand in richness and in meaning. To Love you is to see you and to support you in becoming the best possible version of yourself, which in turn helps me become the best possible version of myself. Such Love is evolutionarily, reciprocal, and regenerative.

Unfortunately, we are collectively pretty terrified of being uncomfortable. And if one thing can be said about shadow work: It is ridiculously uncomfortable. However, dismissing discomfort is much like closing the curtains to life. We have been duped by the sugary platitude of “Happily Ever After” to buy into the false idea that relationships are there to make us happy. As if it’s even possible to affix a transitory emotional state to a lifetime of perpetual changes. Philosophically we can likely agree that it is questionable whether it’s even possible to gain happiness through external acquisition. There is surely a correlation between wellbeing and having our basic human needs met, but there is a limit to how much joy can be derived from external goods and services. If happiness is an inside job, it should come to no surprise your new fling isn’t gonna give it to you. Yet in the realm of relationship we seem so addicted to this infantile storyline: “Godspeed ye innocent lovebirds carried into the distance on a sparkling carriage just smiling happily and chugging along ad infinitum towards an elusive horizon! Your coupling grants you entrance to the ranks of well-adjusted extras in a lifelong Colgate commercial!” Not only does it sound boring AF, it’s delusional as all hell. This is not fucking Pleasant Ville, you’ve got a life to live, buddy.

We are humans, we die, we lose loved ones, we meet sickness, misfortune, we grieve, we fail, we fall apart, we are wrong sometimes. Sometimes we are wrong a lot. Try to smile through that. Happy yet? What’s that? You are telling me you can’t sustain that radiant smile of yours for all of eternity? Is the denial starting to hurt? Is it beginning to feel weird? You see, I am not in this life to witness a staged performance of perpetual happiness. To be clear, I have nothing against ‘happy’ as an experience. Bless ‘happy’. I just believe we have been misguided to measure our success in life, as well as our sense of worth, on how long we can sustain a state of happiness. But happiness is not an achievement you lock into for life, it is a gift, and it arrives on our doorstep naturally when we align with our essence and learn against all odds to love ourselves fiercely and deeply. The only way we can love ourselves deeply is through a systematic dismantling of all of the places where we are in denial and full of shit. And yes, indeed, we can lovingly see each other through such a process*.

So, in lieu of a feigned smile, please give me your pain, your struggles, and your mistakes. Let’s work through the reality, the grit, the rawness, the really disturbing shadow of it all. Allow me to love you entirely and let’s be real about all the places where we have more work to do. Let’s dance through the truth of our humanness together. Let’s marvel at the messes we’ve made. Let’s shake our heads really hard. Let’s sit for a moment in how much it hurts. Breathe through it. That’s where freedom and laughter simply come to greet us on their own accord. It is such a glorious relief to surrender to the realness of it all. I am in this life for the remarkable joy of “Evolving Ever After,” instead.

* For the record, I am speaking from a perspective of personal relationships here, but this very same process holds true for our collective struggles as well. From the micro to the macro – everything is connected. James Baldwin has written extensively on the role of truth-telling in relation to racism and other injustices in our societies. True patriotism – the love for a country – thus resides in the people who dare to shine light on the horrible shadows of our nations, because only through such labor can we even start to imagine peace. Healing can only begin when we uncover the festering wounds of our collective past and present and start scooping the puss out. No, it isn’t pretty, but it is what Love does when it cares about something.