A while back, I briefly dated a talented, intelligent artist who, on our second date, said: “Liz, I don’t want to talk about the past. Not mine. And not yours. I don’t care who you once loved, what you did in your life before me, or what you thought. All I care about is who you are right now and what we are doing together right here …”
… as if I just magically appeared on planet Earth as a fully-formed human being sans the history it took to get here. I mean, how does that even work?
For some – many even – this idea of the past being left in the dust doesn’t sound so bad. It resonates with the Buddhist principle of not letting your past rule your present, as in “be in the moment” – one of the key self-help mantras of our age.
In fact, they made a movie about this kind of past-eschewing love called 50 First Dates, starring Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler. In the flick, Barrymore’s character suffers from a memory-loss disorder due to some kind of catastrophe I can’t remember, but which leaves her without recollection of anything that happens after the disorder began (and, conveniently, in the bloom of her youth).
Based on movie-land logic, Barrymore’s forgetful character gets to fall in love with Adam Sandler’s love-struck character every single day as he woos her anew because she can’t remember the last date she had with him the day before, or many days, weeks, months before. Meanwhile, Sandler’s character, whose memory is intact, has the privilege of loving Barrymore’s character through time.
It's my guess, however, that Sandler's love won't last beyond 50 dates since pretty soon they'll have nothing to talk about because she can't grow, while he can’t help but grow (although his attachment to memory-loss girl suggests he may not want to grow).
They won’t have an accumulation of shared memories to recall as they sit on porches or in restaurants, or fights to have grown through and laugh about in hindsight, or any kind of history that gives weight and substance to a relationship over time. In other words, the present is nice, but it quickly becomes the past, which becomes the stuff of conversation and relating, which is the basis for love because co-creating memories and narratives is the very process of love making. And sharing (painful) stories about our past is the process of love deepening. So, how can you have love without a past?
This nightmare – yes, nightmare – of a love with no past, however, is a love that many of us (well, maybe not the Dalai Lama) carry around in our love-starved hearts. Nightmare Love looks like this: you meet someone you think is swell, but over time as they start to reveal themselves as the warts-and-all prince and princess frogs they are, you think, “why can’t you be the royalty I thought you were when I took a mental snapshot at the beginning?” Our fantasy of the beloved is like a digi pic – fixed in the eternal, colourized present. Or, if we are little more evolved, our fantasies are like the movies, where painful pasts are resolved in forever-happy presents. Until, that is, the movies go all Purple Rose of Cairo on us, with characters walking right off the screen and into someone else’s sunset. And that’s when real love actually steps onto the stage.
“Love is not safe.” That’s what my guru/therapist told me years ago after a terrible break up. Up to that point, I had been wasting away from anxiety and fear over something that had already happened – losing someone I never had. I was living in the past-perfect-continuous tense – as in “Everything had been going well until my world fell apart” – in which the past-painful event trumps any current reality.
Why do we fear our past so much? Because it hurt the first time around and we are scared it will hurt again if we don’t deep six it. We cope through control (or a false belief that we have control). Many of us had some kind of childhood experience in which we did not feel unconditionally loved (or worse). And we thought that lack of love was because of something we did. So, we tried to do something to get that love, which often meant trying to control others. Whatever it took. And, much to our detriment, we have kept up the habit.
For some, control comes in the form of forgetting. If I forget, I don’t have to feel that scary pain again. Easy. Done.
I admit I have this special capacity for forgetting, like Drew Barrymore in 50 First Dates. I often (always) forget what I learned the day before. Such as, “love is not safe.” Or, “surrender.” But unlike Drew’s character, I also don’t wake up each day blissfully ignorant of what happened the day before (the real day before, that is, not her day before: i.e. the day before her short-term memory loss began).
Instead, I wake up in a rage because I remember that I don’t have a satisfying career, or that I never made good on my Master’s degree in painting, or that I still have not finished my book. I wake up terrified that I have lost my passion, or that I never really had any. I wake up heartbroken because I remember that Andy died. I wake up hopeless because my family will never recover, we will never stop longing. I wake up exhausted and bloated because of all the sugar and/or wheat I ate the day before to distract myself from my pain. I wake up in despair because I cannot seem to break the patterns I have worked so hard to break. I wake up wondering if I am capable of love, lovable enough to attract love, or whether my destiny is to end up a lonely dog lady with a wardrobe of exceptionally stylish winter outfits for my hairless dog.
I can certainly understand why forgetting the past is such an attractive idea, as it is for my artist friend who hinted at a dark family secret so horrible as to make him commit to forgetting at the expense of embarking on a relationship that could have helped him overcome that pain. He needn’t have suffered alone. But his commitment to forgetting blinded him to the possibilities of a healing love.
We shovel a whole lot of earth over the graves of our terrifying pasts, as well as the pasts of our friends and lovers, as if they were someone else’s nightmare. But one day, I can assure you, the thin, bloodless hand of memory will shoot out from the earth and grab your ankle and won't let go. Now that’s what I call crazy scary. You can avoid that, however, by not burying your past alive. Just a thought.
To illustrate my point, I offer you this true story:
After a week of ten-hour days in a car, driving from Toronto to Vancouver with two dogs suffering from diarrhea, one of which (mine) developed panic attacks at speeds over 100 kms/hour (which meant hours of panting and shaking and digging nails into my legs as he clamoured to magically escape through the closed window), not to mention eating grease-laden food followed by pounds of sugar to help ward off boredom and to keep us awake, not to mention sleeping in questionable motels at even more questionable prices and losing an hour a day as we sped west, adding to our growing exhaustion, I began showing my travel companion every last facet of myself that I loath. The Anxiety-Driven Nit-Picker, the Loaded-Question Asker, the Human Tornado who sucks all the joy from the ride while spitting out pieces of our psyches onto the road ribboning behind us. Without a car of their own, our broken psyches took a while to catch up with us.
On a gravelly shoulder somewhere in North Dakota, as we spilled out of the car so my dog could relieve his bowels once again, I stormed off towards the farm machinery in the near distance, leaving behind two shuddering dogs and one bewildered man so that I could sob in the company of rusty things. Everything I had tried to love in myself during my single years was leaving me as fast as Shy’s undigested food was leaving his wee, addled body.
It wasn’t until we reached breathless Lake Louise and undertook a three-hour round-trip hike at a 70-degree incline to breathless Lake Agnes that I remembered something I had forgotten. As I hyperventilated my way up the trail, I began reviewing my past for clues, cataloguing all the ways in which I have felt dissatisfied with partners for one reason or another, when it hit me. It’s not my partner I want perfection from...
...It’s me.
I could not have gotten there without a past to ponder. And without this newly remembered knowledge, I could not have undertaken the task at hand -- forgiving myself, being gentle with myself, loving myself. Oh, and trying to be nicer to my travel companion.
Which brings me to my definition of love, one I have learned through years of forced, active remembering (but one I have yet to practice with an open heart). The Buddhists entreat us to love the other without expectation of return. That is, love is not about what’s in it for you; it’s about seeing someone else as they are, nightmares and all, and accepting them as that. More importantly, it’s about seeing yourself as you are, nightmares and all, and accepting yourself as is. It’s about the intrinsic richness of loving, of giving, not about giving to get. But you will find you do get when you give anyway. Not from the beloved, although that may happen, but from the act of loving itself. Easy. Done.
So, what does this definition of love have to do with our past? When you reject something from your own life, you essentially reject yourself. And rejecting yourself bears no resemblance to love, nor does it breed love. Sure, something painful may not be where you want to dwell. But pretending that painful thing is not yours is like pretending the nose on your face is not yours. You can plastic surgery the surface of things, but that won’t change the fact that true love is subcutaneous; it exists despite your old nose, and even despite your shiny, new nose.
My artist date feared his past so much he focused on amputating my past in the hopes of misdirecting me away from his own bleeding stump. But here’s my question: what if we had fallen in love? Would he really have wanted me to forget our past then? Would he have wanted me not to remember the time we watched a new TV series together, laughed at the same jokes, then made mind-blowing love? As much as his denial of both our pasts alienated me, I will never forget him. I wanted the chance to love all of him, his past pains and joys, along with the man he was yet to become. He will always be part of my past, one that I cherish. As for him, I don’t know if he even remembers my name. He excised me like a piece of expertly carved-off cartilage.
Denying the past is tantamount to expecting Shy, my barky dog, to recite Rilke in the original German. A lovely fantasy, but it ain’t gonna happen. Whereas the past did happen, therefore, it exists; it is. Also, the past has its plusses. The pain I feel daily (hourly, minutely) thinking of Andy is also what keeps him close to me. The pain I feel daily about other losses and fears also provides contrast for my joys, helping me to appreciate those moments, not to mention helping me with lessons learned. I know that it’s hard for others to hang out with me sometimes when they prefer to forget what I choose to remember. It’s going to be hard for me to remember to love myself through that, and to love them, too. The pain of rejection can make us do terrible things to ourselves and others, like more rejecting.
"The only way through is through," said my beautiful guru/therapist. For me, the only way through is not to reject myself. That’s the only thing I do have control over.
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