Feelin' the tug

I feel torn as to what to do. I hate to willfully neglect someone I know is in need—lonely, desperate for acknowledgment. And I used to tell myself, since experiencing a period of desperate loneliness myself, that no one I know will ever know loneliness; I vowed that I would be there for this person no matter what. And from what I had learned through my reading of Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well, we need others—people need other people—in order to become their best selves. No one can give love and generosity unless they have received love and generosity from others. And I am reminded of one of my favourite books from my undergraduate years, a book that I had sworn had change my life—E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End and the admonition to “only connect.”

Connecting requires energy. And maybe I don’t feel I have the energy to be there for this person. Maybe I’m not connecting enough in general. I have things going on myself—waiting on my green card, feeling creatively blocked, in a mode of conserving funds. On some level, I guess I think that because I’m not weighing others down with my burdens no one should expect the same of me… right now. When I doing swimmingly… then, by all means, come to me, I’ve got great pair of shoulders and a couple of bon mots to match!

But is this really how this should work? What if I were to think of this in terms of energy and energy conservation and how much I have to expend at the moment for this or any other person? If I conserve my energy for dealing with my issues, I draw I expend only the energy that I contain and there is no flow. There is no energy passing through me, only coming from me.

And what if I were to open up the walls of my chamber and let the energy flow out to this other person at the risk of emptying myself out? The energy is transferred from myself to this other person. She opens up the walls of her chamber to let it in. Then what? Does she vampiricly suck me dry of my energy so that I have none left for myself and the things I have to deal with? I wonder if it does work this way. Does it depend on the person I give my energy to?

I go back to All’s Well and Parolles. How could he have learned generosity and humaneness if he’s never witnessed it, never been a recipient of it?

And, I think about a certain principle I’ve been preaching to my girlfriends: you get back what you give. You may not get it back from the person you gave it to, but it comes back to you—even if it’s from another direction. I’ve urged them to have faith in this principle (now that I think of it, I’m not exactly sure why), and now I can see why this had been so difficult to digest. Right now, I’m not sure I can digest it myself!

What the hell. I’ll try it, and I’ll let you know how it turns out.