That's Just Life

Seeking God-figures in partners and partying; in remembrance of my 20-year old self

Sometimes the most profound messages can arrive through the most casual of sources. That was the case with these words that I heard when I was twenty years old. They helped create a shift in my approach to life.

The words were:

That’s not weird.
That’s just life.

And the person who uttered them had been a kind of summer fling, who I only met a few times the summer when I turned twenty and as I was experiencing the emotional aftermath of my very first breakup. The summer fling uttered these particular words in answer to my comment on how weird it was that I didn’t think as much about my first love anymore.

The relationship with my first love had ended around Christmas, so at the time of this exchange, I had had about half a year of falling into the abyss of my newly single status and all the pain and anger and recklessness that accompanied it, with this summer fling being the most recent example of that recklessness.

That’s not weird.
That’s just life.

These words were a stark contrast to my attempts at “being good” or “doing the right thing” even to the extent of trying to control my own thoughts and feelings so they would be “honorable”, in other words, being loyal to my first relationship, even after it ended.

In my mind, there were clear categories of what was wrong/weird and right/normal. And my mind was constantly analyzing whether I was fulfilling my own requirements to fit into the second category (right/normal), or whether I failed, and had to place myself in the first (wrong/weird).

What a relief then, to hear that maybe it wasn’t all in my hands. Maybe life just happened sometimes, and there was nothing I needed to try to control or micro-manage. I could just let life happen.

*

But letting life happen is not always so easy.

For that half a year of being single after my first relationship ended, I had existed in a strange see-saw of on the one hand, wanting to break free from the pain and the memories and the hold of the first relationship. On the other hand, I was scared to do so, because that would signify a step into a new unknown, untethered from something that had so utterly taken up my attention for the past few years.

I had pedestalized my first love and they fell very far in their “fall from grace”, because the pedestal I had built for them was so very high. Too high for a human to actually inhabit.

But this pedestalization gives a clue to why I would even state it being weird that I didn’t think about them as much: I had been so utterly consumed by thinking about them that it was almost shocking to notice how life could be when I didn’t do so anymore.

Maybe this is also the force of a first love. It can be a force that helps a young person detach a bit from their parents and experiment with new ways of being through that new shared space that is created in the relationship. At least that’s how it has felt for me. It was almost like the “God-figures” of my parents were replaced by pedestalizing my first love in their place. Almost like a process of transference, but not quite. Of course, there were additional energies in play. The pull of eros, attraction, romance, whatever you want to call it.

But devotion to any God-figure requires some effort and energy to be sustained. And in my newly single status, I felt like I was holding all this energy and was desperately searching for a new God to direct it towards. I was searching for something new to worship. Or rather, someone.

Into that search, those words arrived and planted a little seed in me.

Maybe I didn’t need to worship anyone.

Maybe I could just let life happen.

Maybe I could try a more casual approach to life.

No one and nothing to hold onto, but still carrying fresh wounds from that first breakup, life felt harsh and empty and painful. So I submerged myself into partying.

At twenty years old that’s what I equated with a more casual approach to life: partying.

So, over that summer, I felt like I existed in a kind of godless existence. But that’s only because I was unaware of how I had just transfered the God-figure I was worshiping from a person, to partying.

Gaping hole in my heart, alcohol helped me fill the wound with soft but senseless clouds and loosened my tense body into the simplicity of dancing. I felt free, but also utterly stuck, because I was reliant on that substance and on those parties to sedate my senses enough that I didn’t need to face my pain.

I don’t see this as bad. It is what it is. Or it was what it was. I can see how that stage of life was a necessary part of the whole.

*

Looking back, I can see these stages repeating themselves, time and again: conscious effort to “do good” and hold on to one thing or one person. Followed by a need to totally break free, and let loose.

In hindsight, I can see how my life path has been a constant movement between these kinds of extremes, in different ways. Again, I don’t necessarily see this as good or bad. I’ve come to understand it as a function of life seeking to understand itself by experiencing different sides.

I’m glad I have some awareness about it these days, so that I am better able to move with these movements instead of trying to go against them. But in my twenties, I remember feeling like me, my actions, and my whole life was a total mystery. Often I couldn’t understand why I was acting a certain way until much later. I was simply not aware of the full picture. New sides of me appeared in the action, and often I was surprised by what rose up.

I can’t say that i’m aware of the full picture even now, but after witnessing enough of these movements between different types of extremes, I have some awareness about these ebbs and flows around which my life seems to unfold.

So, in the autumn after my summer of partying, I needed to go from one extreme to another. I was bored by the emptiness of that casual approach. I had had enough of empty partying. I wanted to feel again. To reconnect with my heart.

If nothing mattered and life just happened, life didn’t feel like life. It felt kind of dead.

I wanted something to hold on to.

Something for my heart to hold on to.

Correction: someone.

In my twenties, the Gods mostly took form through people. Partners. I was in a stage of life where I was trying to learn and understand what relationships were about. I was trying to understand intimacy. But mostly I think I was trying to learn about myself by learning about how I was in different relationships. And I was trying to figure out what felt right for me.

And as is usually the case for me, the way I learned what felt right for me happened by first needing to learn all the ways that it could be wrong.

And so it happened, that my next relationship, and the person I thought would be my safe harbor from the empty partying, was the one who hurt me so deeply that I would never quite pedestalize another person again.

It was a raw and painful experience. But now, years later, I can see the beauty of it. And how funny and ironic it is, that the person I went to for safety was the one who would make me feel so totally unsafe.

And yet, I can see the important role that this experience played in my life as a whole. But I will tell you more about that another time.

To this day, these words ring in my head:

And I think about how we could just combine them into one sentence:

Life is weird.

Life is a puzzle that we can only solve through living.

Though I’m not so sure it will be solved even then.

But at least it will be lived.

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* The images are digital collages consisting of photographs taken in my twenties (at the time of writing, i’m 34).