SYTB 16: Clear The Set!

Pt 1 Getting ready to start rolling!

Imagine, you are watching a western movie. It’s a very climactic moment. The cowboy has just scared the outlaws off a young widow’s farm. She looks up with admiration to the tall, blonde cowboy who is still catching his breath from the gun fight. They move closer to one another. She opens her lips slightly. You can hear the two of them breathing, and it’s so quiet, you hear the sound of your own blood pulsing through your ears. Then you hear, “so, the coffee last week was terrible. Did anyone else try that coffee from last week? It sucked, dude.” Some random executive who just stepped inside the frame of the motion picture production is looking at his cell phone and yapping away to the production crew on the big screen in front of you. It’s IN the shot!

In reality, a film with that background noise in it would not have made the final edit. They would yell “CUT!” and that guy with the cell phone who got in the picture would likely be fired. One of the biggest priorities in film is to clear the set and make sure everyone else is silent while shooting. No one outside the intended cast playing their critical roles is in the frame.

As I’ve been saying since the first lesson of this course, your boundaries are your frame for the picture of your life. If you haven’t properly cleared your set and gotten all those non critical voices quiet, you will not be able to create a good quality picture.

We have talked about some of the detrimental voices before, the ones that run through our minds unconsciously running us down. We learned to work through that and change even our subconscious, negative self-talk.

Today, we are talking about ghosts. These are grievances from your past. They keep showing up in your production in climactic moments and ruining the picture for you, and the kicker is: they aren’t even there. There’s only one thing you can do about them. No, it’s not setting up a trap, strapping on your proton pack, crossing the streams and blasting them into another dimension. The answer isn’t Ghostbusters. I’m talking about forgiveness.

Forgiveness is one of the most underrated and misused concepts known to man. Forgiveness is often misunderstood as something you give to someone else. It is misinterpreted as forgetting the past. The biggest myth of forgiveness is that it is about anyone or anything else but you. The etymology of the word “forgiveness” comes from the idea of giving love as once before. I am under the full conviction this is talking about the flow of peace and love from your heart into the world. It’s about you being able to give love again.

It’s been said that unforgiveness is like “drinking the poison and hoping the other person will die.” When you are in a state where you can not find forgiveness in yourself, your heart hurts and you block the free flow of love in your heart from going out into the world. Fear takes hold, and your ego warns you that should you love again, you risk getting hurt again. Your ego decides for you that the risk is not worth any possible reward. Every time you try to feel love for a person, even one who is dead, who is far away or who no longer has anything to do with the picture of your life anymore, you feel this cold, hard wall go up. You just can’t allow the love in your heart to flow freely anymore. Who is any of that really hurting?

Forgiveness is not about the other person. It’s about you being able to love again as you did before.

Forgiveness is not an invitation back into your life or your picture.

I dated a guy when I first moved to Virginia. I have jokingly referred to him as Valdemort in other essays. That’s the villain from Harry Potter who “shall not be named.” He was my own, personal, “old, you-know-who.” Jokes aside, I was very much in love with him. I decided to move across the entire United States from nearly the furthest tip of the continental west coast to almost the furthest point of the east coast. It’s not to say I hadn’t wanted to leave Southern California. If you’ve been there lately you might see a full picture of what I saw the foreshadowing of 15 years ago. I knew California was not a place I belonged. Nevertheless, I just couldn’t get myself to leave. I wrestled with the idea for a good five years. Then, you-know-who came along, and gave me the much needed motivation.

Valdemort (I can’t help but giggle calling him this) offered me the opportunity to stay at his house while looking for a job and a place of my own. The arrangement was supposed to be temporary. We only knew each other long distance and as such had never dated exclusively. The arrangement was that we would be friends at first and date from a closer geographical proximity. We wanted to decide if we had long term relationship potential. About a couple days before I had left California in my SUV, packed up and had my itinerary of stops mostly mapped out for the long drive east, Valdy called me. He said, “Hey, you.” He always said that to me in such an endearing way. “What day are you getting here to stay at my place again?”

I explained I would be there just before the Easter weekend, probably some time on Good Friday. It was going to take me about three weeks to travel starting on March 8, 2008. I was working as an art model with bookings across the country doing photography gigs along the entire route.

Valdemort then proceeded to tell me, “that… might be a problem. You see, my mom and my aunt are coming to stay with me that weekend. I didn’t realize you’d be arriving on the holiday itself. I won’t have a place for you to stay when you get here. Our Easter plans are also kind of a private family thing so I won’t even be able to see you until they leave. I can give you my credit card, though, and book you a hotel nearby so you have a place to stay when you get here.”

“Wait, are you saying I will have to be living out of my SUV for three more days because you are too embarrassed to tell your mom you invited me, a friend, to stay with you until I found a place? This doesn’t make sense. I can’t even stop by and meet your mom or say ‘hi’ to her?”

Valdemort was firm. “No. I just don’t think-”

“Wait, is some other girl staying there with you that weekend? That stalker girl you said you stopped seeing?” I interrupted.

He was slow to answer. “Well, we aren’t together. She’s just here from Pennsylvania for a job thing in DC and needed a place to stay.”

“A job thing over Easter weekend? She’s coming when I was also supposed to be moving in with everything I own in my SUV from across the entire United States and at which time your mom just happens now to also be coming?” I asked. “It sounds like this girl is out from PA to meet your mom and spend the holidays together right before I move in to find out if we have a future together.”

He was silent.

“Ok, well, don’t worry about your credit card and your hotel or anything else. I already have the trip planned, I’m packed, I’m on the road in two days. I don’t know where I will stay when I get there. Maybe I’ll like somewhere better along my route and just go back there once I’ve finished my work. I might see you when I get to Virginia, if I get to Virginia, but don’t count on it.”

I can’t say I “broke up” with him because we were never really dating. But I drove across the country. I spent Easter in North Carolina with Marion Skydancer and Thea and The Greenman who I had only met in Ashville, right when I arrived to do a photo shoot with Marion. Thea and Chuck sang and played guitar while I was there. We held a farewell ceremony for their white wolf dog, Washee.

The entire trip across the country just kept getting more beautiful as I drove. I ended up finally getting to Virginia. I found comfortable accommodations couch surfing for about three weeks with a generous chiropractor who had a spacious house and 50 acres of wooded farmland in Warrenton, Virginia. Eventually, I found a place to rent in Stafford and then in Alexandria. Ultimately, I did see Valdemort again. We saw each other off and on. We’d start to date, but not exclusively. He’d hurt my feelings. He never stopped seeing the stalker. She even robbed him once. Stole three of his credit cards and ran them up to their very steep limits. I hate to say he probably had it coming. He probably had it coming. Ultimately, he hurt me a lot.

When I finally got settled in Virginia, I was studying ministry. I would take these classes, feel more emotionally mature and try to date him again. I kept thinking that if I was better emotionally, maybe it could work. This was a learned behavior from 35 years of trying to fix myself so I could keep a relationship going with each of my abusive parents. Eventually, though, with Valdy, he really broke me. That’s a story in itself.

The point is that some people are not good people. It doesn’t matter how you work on yourself or fix your heart. It doesn’t change them. It only changes you. I had stop believing that everyone I met was probably a good person, and that the only reason I couldn’t have relationships with them was because I was just too sensitive. If I could just get over my sensitivity and vulnerability, it could work. It took some work to unlearn that false belief system.

I don’t know when I forgave Valdemort exactly. I just know that it happened with time and space. I knew I was on the other side of forgiveness when I stopped being angry or hurt. I could tell my stories about him, and it felt like I was sharing a documentary of something that happened to someone else. I had no attachment to any of it. It no longer felt personal to me. I could love him again. I knew he was no where around to make me regret that decision. I knew and loved him enough to be honest about who he was. He was not a very nice person. When we first met, he said he wanted to leave the world a better place having been in it. That was the first time I heard that phrase. I admired him for saying it. But, I’m being honest about him now. The only way in which he is leaving the world a better place is by giving women like me a chance to outgrow him and love ourselves enough to use whatever strength we possess to walk away from him, despite his ability to lure us back into his web of lies and deceptions. Lies come from weakness. If you love people, you are honest about them. Valdemort lies. He’s weak. He hurts people. He’s a bit of a sadist. I love him like a person could love someone on death row. “I know you are not a good person, but I love you, anyway.” He meant something to me once and played a part in getting me from point A to where I needed to be. “I love you, but feel safer knowing you are nowhere near me.”

Sometimes, this is what forgiveness looks like. Sometimes, it’s loving someone who is in a care facility to keep that person from hurting himself or herself or others. Sometimes, it’s loving someone knowing that prison is the best place for them because it’s the only thing that keeps them from manipulating the public, scamming them out of cash and resources, getting random girls pregnant and simultaneously robbing people for drugs. I have loved a lot of people in my life who were in a lot of situations. Some relatives. Some friends. Some lovers.

What hurts the most in life, what blocks that ultimate production from being made in your picture is not allowing love to flow from your heart to the world. It’s walling oneself in. It’s not being honest about people, and it’s trying to restore a form of a relationship that needs to be left on the cutting room floor. That’s what it is not to forgive. Real forgiveness is about being real. It’s about getting the set clear and separating yourself long enough to let the hurt go. It’s about crying and being angry and allowing the steps of grief to happen for a moment. It’ll feel like a long time when it is before you, but it’ll feel like only a moment once it is behind you. Once the grief is gone, the love returns. I forgave Valdemort, but more importantly, I had to forgive myself for letting that happen to me. I put myself in his reach over and over again. I had to be angry and sad with myself. I had to love myself enough to protect myself, removing myself from his reach and to hope for something better.

I stumbled in to a café for a job one night not long after I removed myself from Valdy. It was a café that he had told me about a few months prior. It happened to also be a place Aaron, my current husband, played guitar once a month. Letting go gave me the grace to create the life I truly wanted and deserved. Feng Shui principles dictate that space creates a vacuum. Once I was ready to let love flow, a love rushed in to return it to me.

Forgiveness is for you. Do it for you.