Live BIG

Have you ever had the experience of seeing something one way, of feeling that you understood something for all that needed to be understood about it, then, years later, someone else says something, or something else happens, and whatever view you thought you had of that thing breaks wide open? That recently happened to me. It was almost magical, this experience. It was like I'd always wanted some water for my mud but didn't know it.

When I was about 22, 23, maybe 24 years old (that was for you, Willa), it was one of my favorite ex-boyfriends, one who I’ve not mentioned in any of my blog posts, until now, who said one of those “somethings” to me that recently became clearer. He said, “You’re big. You are one of the biggest people I will ever know in my lifetime.”

By no means was he trying to infer that I was fat. I was actually quite petite then. Tiny, even. In fact, I was about 25-30 pounds lighter than I am now. I knew he was complimenting me. And, at the time, I thought I knew what he meant. But I now know that I didn’t, not exactly. Not completely.

Perhaps that is why what he said has always resonated in me. Maybe the things that really mean something, the powerful things, are meant to remain within us. Even if we don't know why they are hang'n out, just chill'n inside, they're probably just lingering until we can get a good hold of them.

That would make sense, that we might need to build up steam to catch up with whatever is bigger than we are at the moment those occasions first present themselves in our lives. And, maybe the good stuff, the stuff that is, indeed, wonderful, and stuffed full of meaning, isn't meant to be chewed up in one sitting. It could be that those things are supposed to amplify throughout our lives. They are supposed to become like good friends that we get to know better over time, instead of being like the experience of eating a big, fat steak. The one we get full on right before we get drunk and fall asleep and can’t remember shit.

This ex-boyfriend of mine went on to say, “You’re just different,” and he also said, much later, after we’d broken up but remained friends (neither of us could take the long-distance relationship thing anymore), “Just because we didn’t work in this life doesn’t mean we won’t work another time. We will always be connected. We’ll have another chance,” he promised me.

I would never forget that promise, and I would never forget that he used the word "big" to describe me. More interesting, is how big this guy was. And no, he wasn't fat, either. He was Brad Pitt’s body with a curly, blonde mullet. (Oh, relax on the mullet. It was the early 90s. Michael Bolton look-alikes were hot then.) Yes, this man was so big he was unlike any man I'd ever met, then, or have met, since.

This guy, he knew who he was. Boy oh boy, did he. One time when I asked him why he wasn't going to visit his family when they wanted him to come for the holidays, and when I implied that he was, perhaps, acting selfishly, and went on to insinuate that he should do it for them (make that visit), to that, he said, "Selfish is the last thing I am being. It's not a good time for me right now. I wouldn’t be there. I'd be at work, busy in my mind. But if I go when I can be present, then I'm not visiting just because they want me to. I’ll be visiting because I also want to go. Therefore, I will be there, not somewhere else. It'll be a better visit for everyone."

How novel. The idea of taking care of oneself so that one can better take care of and be present for those they love. Yes, he was a pioneer.

He knew we were going to meet, you know. He told me this on what was, technically to be, our 3rd date. He said he'd had a feeling that when he came to California (on business) that he'd meet someone who would be very special to him. This feeling washed over him while walking on the beach. (In retrospect, it's kinda cool that he was the first guy I had sex on the beach with.) "The instant you spoke to me I knew you were the girl," he said. (I was waiting tables back then and he was a customer in the restaurant I worked at.)

He was not psychic. However, he, like me, was very much in touch with his intuition. He was also very tuned into a great many things spiritual before metaphysics and/or spirituality was fashionable.

What I really loved about him, was that he was an engineer, and he was, in that way, an apposing anomaly to the force of the free and spiritual mind he also was. One of the first spiritual teachers of my life…a numbers man, that’s poetry.

He really was insane smart with numbers and all things engineerish. He could look at one of those math problems, which takes most people two pages to write out/figure out, and could work it out in his head, then go out drinking, a lot, and, hours later, come home and write the solution down as though it was already written on the paper. That used to turn me on to no end, watching his brilliance in that way, and in other ways.

Yes, this man, we'll call him the engineer, remains to be, in my mind and in my heart, so much more than I can imagine most people being and, as such, just having known him, he still adds to me. Imagine having someone see in you things you haven't even grown into yet. That is, well, it's…indescribable. It's big.

I have had dreams about the engineer that do not seem like dreams. We are not making love or doing anything you'd expect someone to do with a hot ex-boyfriend in their dreams. We're just being. He's just there and I am just there. Often we’re talking about what’s gone on in our day or what is on our mind as it pertains to our life. And these dreams, while I feel a little weird to admit it, always feel more like outer-body rendezvous. I've not had one of these dreams in a very long while, years even, but, having written about the engineer, I will likely have one soon.

Anyway, I recently watched a Barbara Walters Oscar special. Sandra Bullock (SB) was on and she was the one who said the something that turned the engineer's words from mud to water. Barbara had asked Sandra about her finally getting married, to Jesse James, when she, Sandra, had before appeared not to want to ever be married. SB had apparently insinuated as much to Barbara in the past. (Remember, I am always paraphrasing my understanding of things/conversations).

And Sandra said, "You know, I'd always had this feeling that if you got married it was like the end of who you were.” I got that. I felt SB was saying that she feared the end of her because of marriage. I even remember one of my best friends, Eve, saying the same thing before she married her husband. It was her worse fear, that she’d lose her self to him or to the union, or worse, to both.

But, while I got what I thought she meant, that’s never been the case for me. I have never feared losing myself. Not to marriage. Not really. Not specifically. I get how fierce the need can be to hold onto oneself and to not want to get lost in the tide that can tow one under when the relationship takes over and the two people in that relationship are no longer themselves but have, instead, become a "couple" a "them". But, that fear, what she said about marriage, what she seemed to fear about marriage, that wasn’t the mud-to-water good smack her words gave me.

It was when Bullock explained why Jesse was the one she did want to marry and said, “I just never met anyone that was bigger than me," that the light went on. That, oh that, um…hello dear clarity! Hello SB succinctly putting into words what I’ve never been able to say and never really knew, consciously, that I didn’t have the words for before.

Somewhere I think I’ve always been trying to explain this concept. Shoot, when I was only 17 years old, and I still cannot believe I said this to my mom (as I was well trained, my generation, not to cuss, speak out, speak up, or anything of the kind, to our elders), I said, "The man who has got bigger balls than me is going to be the man for me."

Really? This was what I chose to say in response to my mother suggesting that I might need to keep my silver tongue at bay, and that my personality, already then a bit of a presence in a room, might need to be reined in a bit so as not to scare men off. Yowza, that says something about me. I couldn’t contain me even when I didn’t know me.

Those words just shot out of my mouth, the balls reference. My mother and I, both stunned by my use of the word “balls”, in any context that meant a man’s balls, did what we were supposed to do. We, riding on the heels of two different generations, a repressed Leave-it-to-Beaver generation, hers, then mine, her generations’ polar opposite, a pot-smoke’n-F!-the-Vietnam-war-make-love generation, acted like it never happened. I never said what I said. I didn’t say balls to my mom. I didn't make it worse by describing the balls as big. Under the rug and out of radar it all went. She asked me if I’d made the salad for dinner yet and we moved on.

But, even at 17, I think I knew it wouldn’t be okay for me to be fine with a life and with a love outlined by society’s black and white definition. I’d felt, even as young, and as seemingly unaware of myself, as I was, liberated by and standing on the giant shoulders of the beautiful women who came before me. Trails had been blazed, and I got that, even if I couldn't say it out loud or describe it yet. Shoot, dolphin shorts and zip-around-the-crotch pants had replaced dresses and kitchen aprons. I would have to have been a corpse not to feel the change in the air.

But, it’s so much more than that, more than that call inside, more than the wanting something beyond the generational template that one has been told to sign up to. It is a big, gigantic deal being lucky enough to be a part of a history, of a time and a generation, that not only says that it is okay to recognize and cherish every part of who you are and where you’ve come from, it is now your duty. The freedom of being able to make your own choices is unmatched. But it goes deeper than understanding that you MUST honor the past, you MUST honor yourself, and you MUST honors others.

True, we don't always honor ourselves. I have some one-night-stands in my early twenties, some past bad choices in friends and in men, and some really shitty jobs I stayed in way too long to prove that. But, so what. We fall. Now and again, sometimes too much, we warble and wonder what is best. We don’t always know the answers.

But enough have gone before us and have suffered so that we don’t have to. Therefore, why not prove that their suffering, our own suffering, that all the mistakes we're supposed to learn from (even if we need to make some of those same mistakes over and over), are worth us evolving?

That’s become my evolution, you know, to take myself seriously enough to be able to look at myself when I need to, and to not take myself so seriously that I’m too hard on myself if I do something that sucks. That’s why it’s always made sense to me that I’ve wanted someone for myself who is just as willing to honor and to protect me in the way I’ve learned to cherish myself. Why wouldn’t I want someone as big as me, if not bigger? And when I say big, I don’t mean bigger in that way big means bigger as better. I mean being big in recognition.

We all need to be seen. As you may recall I’ve said this before, and I have no problem repeating this a thousand times. We need to be seen for everything we are and for everything we cannot see in ourselves. We just do. And when someone is bigger than you, and/or you are bigger than them, that just means that they can see you and you can see them. That’s as big as it gets.

When they treasure all the pieces of you, enough that they’d know how to put you back together if you fell, that’s it. That's so it! I don't mean that they are your net. People are not supposed to be our backbone in place of our own strength. Not for the duration, anyway. But if someone knows how many bones in your back a situation has broken, if they are a mirror of sorts, while you're trying to square your shoulders back up, while you are trying to find your up from your down again, well, that’s meeting someone bigger than you. Knowing what those pieces are in someone else, even the tiniest ones that sometimes seem insignificant (but so terrifically make up the whole), that’s really, magically seeing someone else.

The engineer, he could see me. He knew that my big laugh was not flamboyant. He told me that, when I tried to hold my laugh back one time. He said, "Don’t do that." He knew that my laugh was then, and still is, a natural tendency in me and, a lot of the time, I can’t put controls on how I laugh, or how I live.

I want, no, I need to eat, drink in, and suck life up. When I breath in life in that way, without a filter, no straw, it comes back out just as robust. Sad or happy. That's why I don’t know how to love small. I don’t know how to laugh little. I don’t know to how passion down or squelch cries and smiles.

Bottom line: I don't know how to eat less life. I'm a hungry girl, man. And, I doubt I'd change that hunger in me even if I could. I won’t lie, it's tough being me sometimes, but I only know how to do me.

He knew that, the engineer, that authenticity would course through my blood with or without me at the pump. Now, that I am older, I know it too. I accept that about me, that life comes to me like a milkshake, a sweet head rush you can’t stop. And, now that Sandra Bullock said it for me, in a way that says it clearly, I know what I’ve been looking for all this time since my last serious relationship. I’ve been holding out for what I’ve already experienced. I’ve been waiting for another man who is bigger than me.

I want someone who knows himself well enough that he’d be capable of seeing me, as I’ve been seen by the engineer, by Mr. Gold Standard, by a few others.

Non of these men were perfect. I wouldn’t have wanted them to be. Neither was I. Nor am I now. But they were willing; they were just as determined as I've always been to work towards understanding—understanding of the relationship, of themselves, and of me.

That matters.

I know we're all fish out of water. But we are made up of so many little and big things that make us so uniquely, opulently us, it is mind blowing. I’d prefer to meet someone who gets this, too. Seriously, I am sometimes awestruck when I think of what true warrior spirits we all have in our beings. I firmly believe that the way our spirits manifest, what allows others to see in us what makes us so heaven dropped, is divine.

Sometimes we have gifts we share with others, a lot of others, like a stunning singing voice that joins the masses together in concert. Other times the way someone can make another person feel like they are the only one in the room is a gift. Whatever makes us uniquely us, makes us big.

We’re so damn BIG!

So the next time someone looks at you with that look, where they are shaking their head at you because you just ‘got’ them, when no one else has, they are feeling seen by you. The next time a friend, or a stranger, compliments you on something, like maybe the color you are wearing…know that it’s not the color they noticed against your skin. They just got a glimpse of who you are because that color brings you out more. You’ve been seen.

Everyday people see the real us. There are a million little ways we connect and someone notices how big we are. But what we are all hoping for, in our friendships, and in love, in all our connections, is for someone to be big enough to see us a little more than most people can. When that happens, that’s huge!

***

Ahh, shit!

Then, what happens? As this post was waiting there to be posted, as I figured: Eh. I’ll get to it in a day or two, or five, I hear on the radio that Jessie cheated on Sandra. Oohf. Talk about needing a new conclusion to a post. Had I posted this entry without mentioning the cheating thing, it would be like this post had a big piece of parsley on its two front teeth.

So, let’s scrape the parsley off. I’ve said it before, and I just said it a couple of paragraphs ago, and everyone knows it: We all make mistakes. None of us are perfect. We weren’t meant to be. It’s how we learn to live with our flaws and what we do after our falls that makes us so beautiful. That’s what our true character is.

However, when a failing in us hurts someone else, when our need to figure out who we are, how to make ourselves bigger, causes someone else pain, we are allowing our journey to make us smaller. We can say Sandra Bullock was a victim of what they call the best actress Oscar curse, where after an actress gets the Oscar their relationship falls apart, but it does not matter how we call this one.

The fact remains that her husband’s need, any man or woman’s need, to fill themselves up with someone outside of their marriage is a misguided attempt to re-cement their identity. Unfortunately, who we really are cannot be answered in the sex of someone else, one’s spouse or one’s extra-marital affair. Who we are is also not because of, in spite of, or proxy to someone else’s success. Whatever someone else is, becomes, or doesn’t, doesn’t make us up.

If I am not being clear enough, what I am trying to say is that there is a difference between seeing someone else and being seen by someone else versus expecting someone else to tell you who you are or you trying to tell someone who they are. If we are looking for someone else to tell us who we are, we’re living small. Again, you have to know who you are in order to be able to see someone else.

So, if you aren’t living big yet, get to know yourself. But, remember, living big never means living, loving, or searching for whatever is big in you at the expense of someone else.


Keep being fabulous!