So
I’ve been considering different life paths I can venture down and one of them
that I had actually wanted to pursue 5 or so years ago is journalism. I’ve
always loved magazines for their usually succinct stories and articles and
their visually captivating images. Recently I’ve been following an online
magazine for young girls and women started by a 16 year-old wise beyond her
years. It’s called Rookie Magazine and was created by Tavi Gevinson, a girl who
began blogging at the ripe young age of 12. She started as a fashion blogger,
but is now more interested in feminism, according to Bust Magazine. Anyone can
submit to rookiemag.com though not everyone gets published, so I decided to try
sending a little essay. I used to abhor writing essays and would drag out the
writing process for as long as possible until the night before the deadline
when I would speed-write my way to an unexpected A. Now, I actually enjoy
writing and connect positive connotations to the word “essay.” Perhaps this is because I can write
about whatever I want now and the added pressure of getting a good grade is
gone.
Anyhoo,
this month’s theme for Rookie is Faith. A few nights ago, they were still
asking for submissions- photos, essays, articles that pertained to the subject
of religion, spirituality, etc. I wrote this piece late at night, listening to
Rookie’s Gray Winter Days playlist, but the next day the call for submissions
changed to the next month’s theme: Mythology. Ah well, I’d still like to share the
essay, so here tis:
The Soul-Searchers
Paris,
March 2010.
Waving
from the other side of the security check at Charles de Gaulle airport, I watch
as the shadow of a young man disappears with his suitcase following close
behind and his “soul mate” sighing far behind.
How
did these two come to the conclusion that they were “soul mates?” What are “soul mates” even? Do they actually
exist or are they just romantic notions created for comfort and dramatic
effect?
I’ve
had two and a half years to ponder these questions and after much research and
experience in the form of movies, TV shows, music, books, and conversations, I
still have no real answers, but I do have some ideas.
Soul mate, n.,
a person ideally suited to another as a close
friend or romantic partner. The key word in this apple dictionary definition is
“ideally.” In my opinion, it definitely takes two idealistic people to believe
in the possibility of being soul mates. All the cynical and/or practical people
I’ve talked to dismiss the idea, laugh at it, or fail to even comprehend it. This
young man I met in Paris, let’s call him J for the sake of privacy, was a
devout liberal Roman Catholic. He
attended Mass every Sunday even when he couldn’t completely understand the
service in French, yet he was quite open-minded and never forceful with his
beliefs. A self-proclaimed idealist and an aspiring architect, he internalized
a moral architecture constructed from the building blocks of his Catholic
upbringing and shaped by his own divine designs of what is good and what is
not.
For some reason, I found myself attracted to his
moral uprightness and intense faith in God and the Catholic Church, not to
mention his kind face and fine physique. Though I myself was agnostic, I had
always been interested in religions, having gone to Christian and Lutheran
elementary schools and having taken a Comparative Religions class in high
school. In trying to get to know him and his faith, I discovered that he had a
girlfriend to whom he was wholeheartedly devoted, but who was on the other side
of the Atlantic. One thing led to another and soon, he and I found ourselves
deep in conversations about love, Buddhism, and the Bible. I had been reading a
book called True Love by a
Vietnamese-French Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hahn. Hahn spoke of many different
kinds of love, but there was one that intrigued me most. As an idealistic and
hopeless romantic, I was always searching for the ultimate love, a love that
defied all boundaries, a love that couldn’t be fit into a category like
motherly, brotherly, or loverly love. When I shared this idea of an ultimate
love with J, he didn’t judge me at all but listened with an open heart and ear.
He found that kind of love in God and Jesus and I thought I found it in him.
That was a mistake. He told me I was his emotional and spiritual partner, his
“soul mate,” but there was one little problem: he already had a partner who I’m
sure was just as emotional. Being the naïve, inexperienced college junior that
I was, I believed him with all my heart and soul when he said we would end up together,
despite my awareness of his existing attachment. Granted, he did say he was
having doubts about his relationship and was growing surer and surer about us,
so my belief wasn’t based in complete naïveté.
Well, he went back to his girlfriend, didn’t break
up with her, and let me cut off complete contact and connection with him
without putting up a fight. At the time of the cut off, I felt the most intense
pain I had ever experienced- my stomach twisted into millions and millions of
knots, my heart tried to burst out of my body in order to escape the mental
agony brimming over in my brain, and my soul was confused and disheveled by the
huge rip that was left by the severing of our everything.
Two and a half years later, my stomach, heart, and
soul have repaired themselves and have grown stronger than ever (Kelly Clarkson
really is right when she belts “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!”).
I’ve fallen in love with other young men, dealt with and survived more broken hearts, and
have learned a lot about what I want and need in a relationship.
It’s nice to know that I’ve met one of my soul
mates, but I don’t believe he is my only one. Yes, we connected on a deep
emotional and spiritual level and I’ll always be thankful for that, but there
were other levels on which we didn’t connect, e.g. comical or cultural. I
learned not to depend on one person for everything. If I have to depend on
anyone, it should first and foremost be myself. That ultimate love I’ve been
searching for may be the love one has for oneself, not self-centeredness or
egoism, but compassion and faith in one’s own being. Once you can love your
whole self, you can start to love others wholly and completely. That is my
belief, but of course, like everything in life, it’s subject to change.
Amen.
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