My friend Kelly is an educator. I think she is roughly my age, which is roughly 39. And she tells me recently that the older she gets, the more she understands her work to be educating others on how to love her. I like this. I do not like that. This is what I need to feel safe. Others do not often know, though we fault them.
Kelly tells me this self-education is freeing her from shame and anger and pleasing and stuffing and suffering. She tells me this self-education is what it looks like for her to live more comfortably, in reality. Less crushing expectations, more non-anxious narrations. I like Kelly.
So, let me teach you how to love me.
Let this be the year I make a manual for you, which perhaps is less a manual (I am not a machine) and more of a letter, only one I am mostly writing for myself that you may read. You are what they call in the Publishing Industry my look over audience, as in look over the shoulder. A welcome witness to the book of me.
The Publishing Industry admonishes art for one’s own sake (not marketable). Coincidently, the Christian Industry does, too (not charitable). A love letter to oneself? An exercise in exhibitionism if shared. The habit of tortured girls, bored women. Perhaps then a manual on how to love a woman in mid-life can never be for its own sake but is always unavoidably political (if it must be.)
What then if I wrote this letter to God? Then, I could argue that the endeavor of self-education is unavoidably theological, too (if it must be). Because for millennia, we have been learning how to love God, taking for granted that God knows how to love us. God is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient. God needs no manual on us, surely? (Psalm 139:1, You have searched me, and you know me.) But how lovely to receive one, no? How lovely for God to receive my bid of connection.
If God is like a parent, how lovely to learn what you may already know but in your kid’s own words, own scribbles. Would you not celebrate the disclosure with ice cream? And if God is like a friend, how lovely to receive a text, a call, that says, “I would like to inform you that I do not drink coffee, and I talk to my dog like a toddler, and I think my nail beds are one of the most beautiful, elegant parts of my body.” And maybe you would say, “Yes, I know,” but there’s something in the mutual knowing that, I think, I hope, would draw us closer.
My friend Fatimah calls this practice of self-education “exegeting our own lives.” As if our lives, like scripture, are sacred texts. As if we, too, are deserving of inquiry and interpretation. (Do you think me heretical? she asks. You’re asking the wrong person, I laugh.) I’ve spent so much of my life, my schooling, exegeting God’s texts. I’d like to—it feels time to—acquaint God with mine or, if you prefer, acquaint me with mine. Maybe this is the only real way I can have a relationship with God, with myself, with others, that withstands the next forty years. I need this mutuality to feel safe. And if not mutuality, then at least self-knowledge which is, of course, another word for self-love.
I have not been to church since the new year, though I watch it online, in peace. Instead, I’ve been waking up on Sundays after Rush leaves for church. Our girls go to church, too, an hour later on foot. I listen to them cook eggs, bicker, snicker, shower. They lock me in when they go. I read ten essays in Ross Gay’s Book of Delights and then I write my own. I catalog my loves, my ways, how my beautiful, elegant nail beds house a perennial trail of dirt. The noticing endears me to them, endears me to me.
Kelly says this is the work of aging.
XO,
Erin
P.S. The Book of Delights by Ross Gay is my new sacred text. There’s a newer version out, too, called The Book of (More) Delights if you’ve already long discovered the delight of the original.
P.P.S. Another old delight, this We Can Do Hard Things episode with Melissa Urban, author of The Book of Boundaries. A needed and timely reminder that educating others about you is an act of love.
P.P.P.S. Local to the Triangle? I’m on a Galentine’s panel with some pretty cool ladies, talking about aging, identity, family, community, and leading with heart on February 8th. Register here.
Yes to all this, especially this: "As if our lives, like scripture, are sacred texts."