I want what my friend Wolfe calls a ‘big life.’ I yearn to accomplish and create and succeed at so many things — two full and separate careers, several large personal projects (including the one you’re currently reading), and more close relationships simultaneously than most people manage across their whole lives.
I recently had one of those beautifully simple realizations: average functionality just won’t cut it. Average functionality would get me perhaps one sweetheart, several friends, one career, and a hobby or two. Which would make a lot of people quite content, but I know I have the capacity for more. It’s a little like bandwidth: if all you’re doing is email, you don’t need much. But get six or eight browser windows up at once and suddenly a 28.8 modem is excruciatingly slow. I want a T-3 pipeline, upstream and down.
So then why (I have been asking myself over the last few weeks) do I keep choosing to share homes and combine lives with people who have enormous chasms in their functionality? And myself replies: Perhaps because I’ve never thought anyone functional would want a long-term relationship with me.
I grew up broken, and have always believed at a very fundamental level that I would remain broken for the rest of my life. I could learn to compensate for that weakness, and in many ways I have — but I never aspired to wholeness, because it seemed that the opportunity for true healing had long since passed, like a bone never properly set. Instead I sought symbiosis — you compensate for my deficits, and I’ll compensate for yours, and together we might make something whole.
Two may be coincidence, but three is a pattern. T and B and S are in many ways radically dissimilar, but in every case lack of functionality has been a major issue in the failure of our relationship. My own functionality deficits — which I’ve had in considerable quantity — tend to be sourced in depression and insecurity, so I’ve gravitated to people who offered me, at least initially, emotional support above and beyond the ordinary.
In return, I pulled their lives together. I orchestrated cross-country moves in minute detail. I found apartments, I coached them through job applications, I handled credit cards and checking accounts. I spent thousands of dollars on T, who owned about 500 CDs but whose clothes were so universally ragged and sloppy that he didn’t have even one suitable outfit for a casual temp job. B hadn’t opened his mail or paid bills in six months when he moved in with me; I sorted through all the paperwork, created a debt spreadsheet, prioritized repayment, negotiated deals with seven or eight creditors, and made sure that all the checks went out on time. And S ...
S is an alien, a genius, and a child. I intended to say a great deal more about him, and I may yet — but the actual coping with these things took all my time, and now much of it no longer seems necessary. Among other things, he has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which makes basic day-to-day functionality absurdly problematic. I jumped through all kinds of hoops trying to work with him on this, while getting more and more frustrated that he wasn’t making an effort himself. I know he could do much better, because I’ve seen him do it ... when it suits him. But ultimately, S admits that he just doesn’t care about functionality. Like T, he has a huge potential which he chooses not to tap into.
And now ... I don’t know whether it’s the meds or just a run of luck, or some other, more subtle change — but despite the hell I’ve been through with S I’m in better psychological shape than ever. Depression occasionally slows me down ... for a few hours, rather than a few weeks or months. I have more love, more stability, more happiness, more hope than I was even looking for. A dream that I quietly abandoned years ago seems possible again.
I’m beginning to consider that I am not as thoroughly or as permanently broken as I have thought. That emotional wholeness may be within my individual grasp — thereby opening up the possibility that I might be desirable to other whole and functional people.
Oh.
Days later the other penny drops: I already am.