This one goes out to the one I’ve left behind. Reading J—’s blog about all of his profound and meaningful thoughts and experiences has made me worry that our attempt to get together one more time before he disappears into his new life will not a be a success. And it’s made worse by knowing that I can’t easily express this sentiment to him; I think he’d be offended, or at least feel tempted to see my trepidation as a symptom of my perceived inferiority on the spiritual scale. These microtonalities of feeling and self-regard are extremely difficult to tease apart and see for what they are, and it’s rare to be able to talk about them honestly without one party or the other feeling resentful, misunderstood, or judged; at which point the conversation turns into target practice in the No Man’s Land between the two positions.
And of course my worries might be a projection of my own negative feelings about myself onto someone else, so that I can more comfortably perceive those feelings and work against them.
Maybe I’ll be able to talk about this without coming off as pathetic. (It feels pathetic writing about it.) But I think that there is something really difficult and hard to deal with in the dynamic between people who know each other well, when one becomes zealous about personal or spiritual growth. One finds it easy to discard the other, who finds it hard to understand the other’s new-found direction.
Many marriages end this way, as do many friendships. Here’s hoping that I’m not on the chopping block.
