I'd planned today to write about all the difficulties I have encountered in my relationship with Lilianna as a result of my own competitiveness. I was careful to set the stage with my two previous posts on the problem of comparison, and I have been thinking about this next-in-the-series entry for several days now. To top it off, last night I went with Travis to see Black Swan, which – if you cut out the eating disorder, the mortification of the flesh, the controlling mother, and the ballet – was eerily on-target given what I planned to write about me and Lilianna.
However, I'm just not feeling it.
That whole competing-with-Lilianna thing seems like an ancient relic, a brittle voodoo doll with matted hair and glassy eyes I once dreamed up. Maybe some mummified version of it will rise from the dead at some point in the future (God forbid!), but this morning it's safely mouldering in the grave.
So, in order to say anything about the way I felt about Lilianna in the past, I'm going to have to exhume some passages from my journal.
The first time I ever mentioned Lilianna in my journal was in December of 2005:
I've gone out to lunch & dinner w/ [Rick], whose wife [Lilianna] is madly in love with another man [Robin]. I then talked to [Lilianna] for probably 2 hours last night....I liked her – she seems like a really sharp woman. Talks a bluestreak though – more than I do.
(All you lovers of textual analysis out there: Notice the COMPARISON? And here's an irony for you, for good measure: earlier this morning, I read this same journal passage aloud to Lilianna over the phone, and then proceeded to talk a bluestreak about the movie Travis and I saw last night – she got the plot, the thematic analysis, evaluation, connections between the film and our own experiences, some half-baked philosophizing about beauty, art, and the drive toward perfection ultimately becoming suicidal, plus a reminder about my favorite Hawthorne short story, in which a too-perfect woman dies – until finally Lilianna gently cut me off with, “Honey, my phone is going to die.” So, really, who talks more than whom?)
In January of 2006, when Lilianna and my husband began their relationship, my jealousy was partially characterized by a feeling I'll call “competitive” – though I suppose this is not at all unusual. I've included my jealous not-quite-rantings in a previous post, so I will repeat just a fragment of the relevant journal entry here:
...I had stopped feeling compelled to hate either [Lilianna] or myself. I still don't know how to truly like both of us – it's such a paradox! – but I have more faith in my ability to live in & inhabit that paradox.
The jealousy faded, and a genuine friendship with Lilianna began to blossom, but I persisted in comparing myself to her, or her to me, in all kinds of ways: innocently enough, at times, but the effects were insidious. The flagship journal entry on my core issue with Lilianna was written in August of 2006, not quite a year into our complicated romantic network's history (we had dubbed ourselves the “Metaphive”):
So ultimately I have to figure out how to feel okay about myself despite the fact that [Lilianna] has a greater weight, in the cosmic sense. She's the one everyone caters to, including [Parker] – because she's higher maintenance, and I can be counted on to be reasonable. If [Lilianna] is having an issue, it's “Hold the phone,” if [Lilianna] just wants to say something, it's, “Can you wait a sec, Viny?” And I don't know how much comfort I can take from the fact that I'm so reasonable. I have this little sense of revolt, every time, that frequently leads me either to bad behavior (“See! I can have issues too!”) or to a kind of low-grade depression because I want to matter as much as she does and am afraid I don't....I feel like [Lilianna] is pretty damn demanding, and that everyone (including me) seems to think she's worth it. My trouble starts when I compare myself, then, and decide that not only am I not demanding, I try really hard to be accommodating & flexible and understanding – and that this is not even really appreciated; it's just expected. And it does nothing to balance out the equation, either – [Lilianna] still has more clout. The other day [Parker] was remarking that [Lilianna] was still sexy even when she was upset, and I said that kind of rubbed me the wrong way, because I know for a fact he doesn't think I'm sexy when I'm upset. He said, “Well, you get combative when you're upset.” Apparently [Lilianna] can get upset in a sexy way, woohoo for her. Anyway I look at this discrepancy, or what I fear is a discrepancy, and it's difficult not to conclude that if I want more attention, love, desire & appreciation, I should be more like her – that this being reasonable and patient and even-keeled thing is way over-rated, and that actually my approach just guarantees a life as invisible woman, as doormat-girl. But I don't like feeling this way, and I believe that it's probably only going to hurt [Parker] (and maybe [Rick] too) if I get into a virtual power-struggle with [Lilianna] just to prove my own self-worth relative to hers. Seems to me that someone has to give that up, and that someone is going to be me and not her. It's just the way our personalities are. I don't think she even realizes, most of the time, that she calls all the shots....
So clearly the steps are: get over resentment, drop the fear, decide to be okay with things as they are & stop worrying about what some perceived inequality implies about our personal worth, our cosmic weight, if you will. And work on being comfortable with – appreciating and celebrating – who we are, without worrying so much about external validation. Because if external validation means a competition (real or imagined) with [Lilianna], everyone loses. Whether that's fair or not fair, it's a fact, and needs to be understood as a given rather than something to fight against. (I do keep feeling like I want kudos from [Parker] for being so good, though...sigh.)
In retrospect, dear readers, my dire prediction – if external validation means a competition with Lilianna, everyone loses – turned out to be absolutely correct. Lilianna and I developed a deep and abiding love for each other, but there was a little competitive cankerworm in my heart, and eventually she got close enough to me that she began to feel its sharp tooth gnawing at her own heart. There was a breakup of sorts, a period of time during which she and I were not in contact at all, which lasted from November or December of 2008 until about April of 2009. It was a very difficult time for me.
The following journal entry was written during that period, in late March of '09:
I wonder if [Lilianna] really did value me or if she just said she did. Has she only started missing me recently? Will there ever come a time when she REALLY misses me? What could possibly have hurt her so badly? Even @ bottom, the sickest truth of it – which was that yes, she was a victim of my need-to-feel-better-than, I can't see why I am so dangerous. My wanting to feel superior doesn't make me superior – doesn't actually diminish her worth or her power, does it? She's behaving as if a real act of violence has been perpetrated against her, by me. And yet she might easily say something similar: that her need for control did not strip me of my power or make me subordinate to her; I didn't have to cast her as the Captain of the Team. I don't know if or when this will all get sorted out. I don't know what I have to prove (aside from “I'm not so bad, really”). I feel like I look at all this yucky stuff about myself and say “Yuck!” but I still like myself; why can't she like me too? [Parker] knows me & still likes me. Hell, even [Scott] still mostly likes me (though he may be more ambivalent about it).
A lot of what hurt Lilianna about my competitiveness, I think, is that she felt like it stemmed from the fact that she's a woman, not a man – and I falsely perceived her to be a competitor rather than the loyal friend she really was. I'm not saying there's nothing to that gendered argument of hers – but my own feeling is that I'm just too fucking competitive, period.
Three days after the previous journal entry, for example, I was busy comparing myself (unfavorably, I might add) to my husband:
Look at [Parker]: he can put together a sprinkler system, plant an aesthetically pleasing garden, build a stucco wall (not to mention design one so it doesn't fall down), write a novel, tile a kitchen or bathroom, learn to sew or play the piano in a matter of weeks, speak Mandarin and Italian, put together governance documents for the community, sequence the salmonella genome, write a scientific paper – I mean the list goes on and on! And what can I do, really? Um. Weeding? Of things [Parker] can't, won't or wouldn't do, I can think of dancing* and performing fellatio and that's about it. Not that those are skills not worth having, just that the list of things [Parker] can do that I can't or would totally suck at (no pun intended) is a lot longer! And WHY am I in this comparative space? Is it just my curse to hang out in Compareville all the time? Why must I be down on myself or down on others?
(*Parker has since learned to dance, thanks to Burning Man.)
And that's quite enough of that.
So I'm sitting here at Travis's computer – I spent the night with him, and saw him off to work this morning (i.e., I made him some tea, ironed his shirt and pants, and, clad in his bathrobe, waved goodbye at the door: “Bye, honey,” I said, giving my best '50's-era housewife imitation, to which he responded, “Bye, hon – see you tonight – that is, unless you're with that other husband of yours.”)
When I wrap this up, I will head home to have lunch with my husband, my 3-year-old daughter, and my super-extra-bestest Lovely Lilianna, who has stopped by to visit Parker after spending last night with her lover Paul.
I'm very much looking forward to it.
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