She's a pleaser.

I am guilty of always saying what people want to hear. What I mean by that is I tend to avoid certain types of everyday conflict by giving a person exactly what she or he wants to hear. Even when I do tell the truth, the truth and just the truth, that too is because I know that it is exactly what the other person would like to hear. I am well liked that way. To those who value honesty, I appear the most honest person they have ever met. To those insecure enough to need to hear certain things I am kind, and so, oh so nice.

The problem is that it is becoming harder and harder for me to tear down that facade when I am talking to myself. Glennon Doyle writes about “pink dirty bunnies” that women have. My very dirty bunny, so dirty it would repel even Hades, is the need to have my life seem coherent to people who interact with me. It is as though if they have a hint of doubt into the cohesiveness of my trajectory they will somehow perceive me as a hippy, happy-go-lucky, an unwise woman. Or even worse, they will use the word “girl”, and I grew up back when I was still a child.

But then, can you ever really make sense of anybody’s life? Their choices, their fears and their passions? You can never know what truly hides in the deepest corners of another person’s universe. You can never truly know how they feel when they see a sunrise, and what desires and what pain it ignites in them. You can never truly know the extent of the impact the person’s past experiences had on them. We all process reality, emotions differently. There are some very logical people. Like my partner. It baffles me, really, how much this person can process every single thing in life entirely with his brain. When I think about moving, for us to be together, I immediately travel to the moment I drive away from my yellow house’s driveway. I imagine seeing my roommate wave. I see her in my rear-view mirror. She has a tear in her eye. We both know we became sisters. Here I am, another person in her life driving away. I think of others that have a piece of my heart with them forever. I think of green, oh so green, trails in my favorite park. And of the small town my mother met her long lost friend, for lunch, for a moment in which eternity was captured. I think of my high school graduation and then of every time I had to say goodbye to everything that became my everyday reality in the moves that came before this. I don’t think of the job, I don’t think of the logistics as much. Given everything I have ever done in my life I, too, know that everything that I truly want to do is there to achieve and there to be figured out. It is as though I don’t even need to dive into those topics. They are surface, they are easy. My brother once said “If it is not impossible, it is easy”. I live by that. But what if everything that I think and everything I know, and everything I think I know is somehow wrong? What if he is right and it all always boils down to what “makes sense”.

I choose to trust my gut. Oh what a crazy exercise that is. Trusting your gut. As children we are taught to carefully evaluate our options. As grown ups those are reinforced. What step can we take to get closer to the socially-conditioned desirable outcome? What step can we take that will take us closer to achieving everything this world, this society, has told us we should want. Trusting my gut sometimes mean that I do have to take the leap of faith and make decisions I can’t rationally defend. The key here is not to pretend to be a lawyer in the courtroom of human choices. Not my partner, not my mother, not my brother, not my friend. None of them need to understand the “why” behind the step I want to take, and the shoes I want to wear as I do that. Loving another person means we understand their autonomy. Every person is an entire universe. We need to trust. We need to trust that our loved one is tapped in to who they really are and are doing exactly what that inner drive whispers in their ear. They need to know that they do not always need to understand. Some feelings are there to never be put into words. Do you remember the first time you looked at another human being and felt so deeply in love with them? Can you honestly tell me you can sit down and write about that so much so that I fully understand? Can you really claim that I will be able to feel it too? The way you can sometimes feel the rain falling on your shoulders, when you read a story crafter by an amazing artist?

He tried to use scissors once, to cut the meat in my house. I interrupted him, utterly surprised as I had never seen anyone try to cut meat, meat (!), with scissors. Fast forward, several months later, I stand in the middle of his mother’s kitchen. You can guess what happened next. She picked up a pair of scissors and cut through the tendons of a very dead chicken. Ultimately she achieved the same results another person with a knife would. She just used a different tool. What if there is not a more substantial difference between reasoning with your brain and listening to your gut? I want to question that because it brings me closer to my partner. But there is a piece of me that thinks there is much more to it. There is a part of me that feels that if I make decisions with my brain my life will never be wild, or magical, or happy, or bursting with love. Instead it will be cold and lonely, and perfectly logical but oh how gray.

Life is not about living safely, living rationally, it is about experiences. Sometimes those are more difficult than others. Sometimes the experiences leave us shivering at night. My gut has never failed me. I have always stood there, at the end of the day, some nights with a glass of red, and looked at the sky, and felt that I was exactly where I was supposed to be at that given night. Regardless how light or dark times well. All part of my journey.

This pandemic too is a chapter I find hard to navigate. I say what people want to hear all the time. Mashing my inner guide and my realness like an overcooked potato. I question my gut and sometimes there is a very dark cloud of doubt surrounding what I feel like it is right. None of us have all the answers. But I think the answer here is to sit still. Sit still until we can feel it in our bones, that what is good for us next. And in the meantime, I will keep the peace by telling people what they want to hear. Who knows, maybe the next chapter of this story will be the unlearning of that?