How to Be a Human

The beauty of being human is that we are incredibly, intimately near each other, we know about each other, but yet we do not know or never can know what it’s like inside another person.
~John O'Donohue, poet, theologian and philosopher; author of Walking in Wonder: Eternal Wisdom for a Modern World

Among the worst is the unknowingness. We were so sure, weren't we? We were certain that this man with whom we made vows would never betray us. So when he's revealed to be someone capable of something we thought him incapable of, it frightens us. It calls into question everything we thought to be true, everything and everyone we trust. We stare into the abyss. 
Yet what's revealed when we learn of a partner's betrayal is something that was always true: "...we do not know or never can know what it's like inside another person". 
That was true the day we took our wedding vows. It's true on D-Day. It's true today.
What's also true is that we don't fully know ourselves either. Learning who we are is our life's work. 
Most of our unfaithful husbands are as shocked at their behaviour as we are. There's a famous (and famously unethical) psychological study – the Milgram experiment – in which people believed they were doing harmful things to others but continued because an authority figure was directing them. 
I'm no longer convinced by anyone who insists they would "never" do something or that they are certain they would. Most of us don't know how we'll behave in a situation until we're in that situation. 
Case in point: Did you think you'd stay in a marriage if your partner cheated? I thought I'd be outta there in a hot minute. Yet, here I am.
Part of staying in my marriage meant accepting the frightening truth that I hadn't really known my husband. Not completely. I knew him, of course. I knew that he was practical rather than frivolous. That he worried about growing old. I knew that he loved dogs and tolerated cats.
What I didn't know, in part because he hadn't yet admitted it to himself, was that so much of the pain of his childhood drove behaviour that was inconsistent with his stated value system. How to reconcile ourselves to someone who believes in his own decency yet betrays his wife and treats sexual partners like objects? 
It's only by acknowledging these contradictions – in others but also in ourselves – that we have any hope of truly knowing others and knowing ourselves. As long as we're willing to pretend the shadows don't exist, we're lying to ourselves. As long as we think we absolutely know another's heart, we're lying to ourselves.
So...where to go with that?
We embrace the beauty of being human, which is to say, we embrace the beauty of imperfection, of flaws, of screwing up. We do what we can to keep our hearts open. To learn to love our own flaws even as we attempt to soften them, to file off their sharp corners. 
Accepting others' humanity is not the same as accepting their poor treatment of us. That's where boundaries come in – to remind others that they are either free to respect our boundaries or to take their circus elsewhere. It starts as an inside job – with learning to go easy on ourselves for our imperfections. (My beloved Mary Karr puts it this way: "It’s not like I’m not an asshole—people know the ways I’m an asshole and it’s within the realm of acceptable asshole-ocity.") And when we're able to do that, it becomes a default setting. We are easier on others. We don't tolerate toxic behaviour (boundaries again!) but we learn to live with the various ways we all kinda assholes. 
My husband is a sex addict. Even though he no longer acts out, I cannot pretend that his addiction isn't there. What I can do is accept that truth while realizing that I don't know what that's like for him. Perhaps I will never know. And there are undoubtedly other secrets he holds, secrets he's still discovering. 
As I continue to discover my own. As long as we're scared of our secrets, they control us, whether consciously or otherwise. (We're only as sick as our secrets, right?)
O'Donohue notes that "we know about each other". He doesn't say we "know" each other. Because we will never fully know each other. We will never fully know what it feels like in another's skin. We'll be lucky if we die fulling knowing ourselves.
It's contrary to everything we've been taught about love, isn't it? That love is "you complete me". That love is "soul-mates". "My other half." 
I regret to inform you that it's none of that. 
Love is choosing to figure out who you are alongside someone else working to figure out who they are. Love is choosing to fix your broken spots alongside someone else who will support you in doing that. Love is believing that life with this person, even in his brokenness, is preferable to life without him. 
The beauty – and yes, the challenge – of being human is the unknowingness. And opening our hearts to it anyway.

Radical Dangerous Hope

"It's much more dangerous, much more radical to hope."
~Mary Karr, author of Lit and The Art of Memoir

I am an incurable optimist. Hard-wired for sure but spurred on by a childhood marked by addiction and neglect. At night, in bed, I would curl up inside my hope to muffle the screaming and thumping in the bedroom beside mine. Believing, with all my heart, that things would get better. They had to.
They did. My mother got sober, my parents stayed together and I got the hell out just in time to take my dysfunction on my twenties roadshow.
That decade, like many people's early adulthood, consisted of falling madly in love and either being heartbroken or breaking someone's heart. But no matter, I always figured I was on the path to where I was supposed to be.
I graduated with one of the least marketable degrees possible. I worked retail, folding pants and watching the clock, until one day the area manager offered me the chance to take over a store. More money than I was accustomed to. More responsibility.
No, I said, convinced that something better – something I dreamed of doing – was on the horizon.
And it was.
I got the job at the magazine.
I dumped the wrong guy. Met the right guy. 
I got married. A year later I was pregnant. A routine test revealed the possibility of an abnormality with the baby. The odds weren't great.
I prepared myself for the worst but hoped for the best.
She was born healthy.

Hope sometimes gets a bad rap. It's passive, they say. Naive. It's pie-in-the-sky. Better to be realistic. And by "realistic", they mean pessimistic. Better to aim low and be pleasantly surprised than aim high and risk disappointment.
But hope isn't about sitting around waiting for fate to smile on you. It's the energy that points you in the direction of where your dreams lie. It's the reason you can go in a different direction than everyone is telling you to go, to imagine yourself where you want to be rather than where you are. Hope is the keeper of both happiness and disappointment, author Bryant McGill reminds us. Hope is eyes wide open to what's in front of us, but eyes also trained on the barely discernible future where we can see the shape of what might be.

My hope took a beating around D-Day. I felt like a fool for being an optimist, surrounded by a cultural chorus of "once a cheater, always a cheater". I felt as though the universe had stomped on all those dreams I'd had for myself. My happily-ever-after dreams. My chutzpah that I was as entitled as anyone else to a loyal partner.
For awhile I took refuge on the plain of lethal flatness or "the dead zone". But all it got me was a life wrapped in gauze. I didn't really feel...anything. Sure I was dodging pain but I was missing out on joy too. So I fought my way back through fear to hope.
Hope that I would not only survive this agony but emerge from it somehow stronger. That my husband would fight for me, for our family, for himself. There were absolutely days when my hope seemed utterly misplaced. When I redirected it toward hoping (all the while working hard, so hard) that I could dispense with so many of those old messages that made me feel unworthy, that made me feel as though what had happened was comeuppance for my daring to dream big. After all, who the hell did I think I was?
But somewhere in there, between hope and sweat and tears, I realized that what I'd spent my whole childhood hoping for – that tomorrow could be better than today – was true even, especially, in the darkest period of my life.
It's true for you too.
Tomorrow can be better than today. And if it's not, then the next tomorrow can. And the next.
It's audacious to hope. It's dangerous and radical, as Mary Karr says, to imagine that things can be better.
But to give in to cynicism, to believe that life will deliver only more pain, isn't an option. Despair is no place to live.
Hope isn't about crossing your fingers, it's about grabbing your life with both hands and an open heart. It's about bending toward the sun that nurtures your growth, even when that growth takes you far out of your comfort zone.
Hope isn't wishful thinking. It's not about fantasy. It's about meeting people exactly where they are and inviting them to come along toward something better, knowing full well that they might not be ready for the trip.
But we are. Our bags are packed and we're ready.
And hope is the fuel that will take us the whole way.