We are all connected...

There's kind of this running joke in the lesbian community about how inevitably, we're all connected, because in one way or another, we've slept with someone who's slept with someone, etc. The point is not that we're slutty...but about the fact that we're a small community. I use this as an example for two reasons. One, I am a lesbian and I can relate to this experience. Two, and more importantly, the truth is that--gay or straight, black or white--all of us are connected. We do a disservice to our existence, our spiritual and emotional progress, and our interactions with one another to ever believe anything less. Maybe you disagree. Maybe you believe that somehow you can live and behave in whatever manner is fitting for you and it has no bearing on who comes after you and tells no story of who came before you, but it does.

My whole life I tried to escape many of the behaviors and beliefs that I grew up living around. I thought if I could somehow get far enough away, surely I would finally be able to flourish in my individuality...as if somehow outside of all of the chaos or pain, there existed in me some perfected version of "self." What I refused to want to accept or believe was that the very essence of my thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors were in one way or another a direct result of how I grew up. My dismissal or rebellion was a reaction to my past--not an escape from it.

We all in our own ways do the very thing I believed I could do--escape our own pain. The problem is--because we are all connected--every effort we make to escape our own pain has the potential to create or reawaken pain that others carry within them. The things that may be insignificant to us, may be greatly significant to others because of their own journey. We may have lived our lives feeling no one ever heard our voice and so we are determined to yell and scream in desperation now to be heard. We may express this in the company of someone who was yelled at during their childhood and we, inadvertently, cause them to feel their own wounds and vulnerability when they are around our "outbursts." We all unconsciously, subconsciously, or consciously engage in this exchange of connected pain on a daily basis--whether anyone else makes us aware of this.

So, what can we do? Some people would say we should all be in therapy working out every childhood issue we carry in us. Some people would say nothing. There is a wide spectrum of solutions, but I believe that the only true solution, the only lasting solution, is love. When we truly live the spirit of love, we are able to recognize both our own pain and the pain of others. We are strengthened, not weakened, by this recognition, because once again, we realize that the pain connects us. We can understand another's suffering, because we know what it means to suffer. We can hold another person who weeps, for we know the despair and emptiness we have felt ourselves. This is the very essence of empathy. We fail ourselves and each other when we fail to show empathy. When we carelessly or selfishly believe that somehow our pain is different than someone else's or that we are different from someone else.

Rather than running away from my childhood or from fear of embodying my parents' habits, I heal myself and the world by finding empathy for their human weaknesses or flaws...for my mere ability to have empathy requires the recognition that I, too, am imperfect. I can't help but question what the world would be like if we truly lived as if we are all connected; if we understood that everything we do and say truly does have an equal and opposite reaction; if we could look at ourselves in the mirror and admit that we have probably injured more people than we care to admit and that only through love will we ever be able to see and repair what is broken.

May you understand that my pain is your pain though it may be dressed in a different mask, and may you awake to commit for the rest of your days to love, truly love, fully love, at last.