Worthy

 

“For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.” 
– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Sometimes I despair of every getting even a decent handle on things. 

Wandering around the streets of Hawthorne with a friend, thinking about trying to find a spot of alcohol and a comfortable place to talk.  In a fit of niceness (an act I am not prone to) I told her that she deserved a loving relationship.  Not with yours truly, but with someone.  I was gently corrected to use the word worthy.

I grudgingly accepted the correction.  But even then, I balked at the thought, thinking that the correction was merely a semantic dance.  I still lean in that direction, but the whole interlude got me a pondering about the whole concept.  Then I got a reminder of Ursula K. over at the Automatic Earth and my thoughts went a veering off to another perspective.

I have been considering chasing women for a relationship.  I feel that I have Simon and Garfunkeled the deal long enough and adequately completed the "parent" check boxes of my life and now deserve the loving relationship described above.  But when you sit down to think about it, maybe that is the real source of my problem.  Does anyone ever really deserve anything? Even if your downgrade the verbiage into the more acceptable "worthy", isn't that just a minor variation off the same theme of entitlement?

I do want a loving relationship.  No doubt in my mind about that.  Mine is one lonely heart and truthfully speaking, I am sick of it.  Being in a simple, monogamous relationship with a loving member of the other sex have been the times of life where I have been the happiest.  The losses of these (more than partly due to my being fucked up) were traumatic and my self-imposed exile was in more than a little bit a response to my concern that I would fuck it up again.

So I sit here during my "office hours" at the Barleymill on a sunny but cold Sunday afternoon, swigging my cider and pondering and writing.  I am trying to tease apart the cognitive dissonance caused by a checkered past, a mind that feels that my claims are justified, and the potential pain of repeated rejection and failure to achieve this lofty goal.

At the end of the day, I have to beat down the feelings of entitlement engendered by the simple word "Deserve", convince my cerebral cortex (which sticks its nose into just about everything) to butt out, and mostly, to accept the pain of rejection that will almost invariably occur in the proposed activities.

Being able to love requires the acceptance of risk.  Perhaps I don't deserve a loving relationship, but I am willing to risk myself for one.