Heartbroken

I've spent the last two weeks visiting my brother, who lives in Amsterdam. I live in Portland, Oregon.

I spent the entire first part of my flight, the flight from Amsterdam to Frankfurt, crying, because I am heartbroken to be so far away from him, and heartbroken that it was special that we got to be together, and heartbroken that I don't know when I'll see him again, and heartbroken that it's the longest we've spent together since he was eight and I was seventeen.

I am heartbroken that although he is the family member who lives furthest from me, the family member who lives closest to me is still over a thousand miles away. And that even were I to give up the things I'm willing to give up to be closer to my family (my job, my house, some of the community I've developed living in Portland), it wouldn't be enough because the rest of my family would still live hours and hours away by car or plane.

We live so far away for ordinary reasons, and I am angry that these ordinary reasons are encouraged, that if we weren't to have moved so far away from each other for ordinary reasons, we would have been seen as failures in some way, that I would have seen myself as a failure for not making the choices that lead me away from my family. I want the ordinary reasons to be because being with people you love, who love you, who want to have healthy and compassionate and honest relationship with you is the one of most important things to having a good life, second only from having those with yourself.

I feel angry that the culture I live in has told me otherwise, that I believed it, that many of the people who I do love also believed it, and that no one ever said to me, "Please stay. I want you to stay with me. I want you to be here with me, in our shared community," because supposedly, to say something like this is selfish, is holding back the person you love from better opportunities, from becoming a better person because of a better school, a better job. But what could be better than being held; how can you better find yourself alone and scared than when surrounded by community who will hold you?

I don't have children, but I have parents and I know enough people with children to know of some parenting techniques. One suggests that, to help the baby best learn to self-soothe and sleep through the night, the thing we ought to do is to provide the baby's physical needs, put it in a crib, have some sort of loving good night habit and then to leave the baby by itself, where it will often cry, sometimes for quite a while, before it falls asleep. This is quite common, and the idea is that, if the baby is held until it falls asleep, if someone stays with it, that it will become dependent on these adults, it will not learn to be alone and self-soothe.

I think this is bullshit.

Another method makes more sense to me and is basically the opposite: when the baby cries, someone goes to be with it. This does not mean that the baby is constantly entertained or that it never has to wait for someone to finish peeing or something or that the baby is somehow spoiled with attention (how could that be?), or that it is never left alone or to its own self. It just means that when the baby expresses, in the only way it can, "I need help!" someone helps it.

Knowing that you will be helped when you ask for it, even if you have to wait, even if ultimately, the only help that can be provided is that someone is there with you while you have your big feelings and figure them out on your own, is the way to learn how to figure them out on your own, that your big feelings are not reasons for people to leave you, are not reasons for you to ignore your own big feelings and this means that you can figure out how to deal with your own big feelings, which is the closest thing I can figure out that self-soothing is supposed to be. It doesn't seem to me that self-soothing is crying yourself to sleep or ignoring the feelings that make you want to cry.

For a long time, I wanted to travel alone. And I didn't, for lots of reasons, some financial or otherwise practical, but also because I was scrambling and scrambling to be myself and have that be enough for me to be. I was alone. I was scared. Traveling alone would only increase those experiences. It would be alone and it would be scary. But I found some attachment in the form of my partner and in the form of getting to know myself better and then I could travel alone because I could be alone and it would be all right, I could be scared and it would be all right.

All of this is to say: community doesn't hold us back. Being held doesn't mean we're not individuals. Having consistent access to love and help means that we can make big choices on our own, that we can investigate ourselves closely that we can learn to be around someone else's big feelings because we know how to be around our own. Interdependence makes us more independent. Community makes us more self-sufficient. Being loved makes us more successful.

This is what we give up. This is what we are encouraged, expected, desired to give up and this is so because it makes us weaker, more complacent, more willing to go along with hierarchy with power with the things that we could more amply topple if we had each other.

This is what I've given up in pursuit of one without the other, and I am heartbroken for it.