Tell Me Who Wrote the Book of Love (spoiler: Experience Did)

I like information. I like reading. I like having a question and then finding out the answer. I look at a problem with a curious nature and build a hypothesis that I investigate further until I can confirm my suspicions or inform myself on the facts.

This is a natural process. I’ve fostered it in my children simply by engaging their own curiosities as well as my own.

We have sought knowledge around animals native to the west coast as much as we have been known to seek out specific aspects of local history. I never take for granted how incredibly blessed we are to have access to research and documentaries and whatever else we might want. If we have a question about pretty well anything, we can quickly and easily find ourselves a means to an answer.

When I was little it wasn’t quite so easy to find answers from the comfort of my home. I still had a deep curiosity, though, so my answers to my unanswerable questions mostly came from the library.

As a tweenager I spent a lot of time reading about dogs.

I guess it was one of my first adhd interests. I would borrow the ultimate dog book week after week and study the breeds and behaviours of canines.

I always wanted a dog.

I was an apartment kid and it just didn’t make sense for us. As an adult I lacked the illusion of stability because we were renters and it, again, didn’t seem to make sense at any point. I wanted a dog but I couldn’t argue against the very valid cons of the situation.

To be fair, though, I still can’t. There are plenty of reasons for a family not to have a dog in the home. I still don’t own my space and I am certainly not independently wealthy.  The reality is that these two main factors in fact aren’t likely to change. Likely ever.

I’m in my forties. So, what? I just never get the pleasure of sharing my life with a dog?

I refuse to accept that fate.

So, when the opportunity arose and I glanced around, I was the adult in the room and I made the decision to add a dog to our home.

It was the correct decision, by the way. She’s added immense joy to our lives.

One of the weirder parts of adjusting to being a solo entity is how often I make a decision and feel immediately like I’m going to be “in trouble”. In the aftermath of a major decision I will have a very intense spike of anxiety because of repeated exposure to specific stimuli. I have a voice inside my brain that accompanies me throughout the day and roleplays all the ways a person might see me and believe me to be irresponsible and without logic.

To be crystal clear here: I have experienced this erosion of my belief in my ability enough that I commonly regard myself in this way. As I’ve previously mentioned, people who have the operating system I have will be subject to substantially higher number of negative responses from peers and authority figures alike.

I haven’t really looked into it but I can’t imagine this phenomenon is unique to me. In some cases I will allow this roleplaying game of mine to dictate someone’s future response to the point where I become avoidant or sneaky to try and counteract something that’s fully imaginary.

This is how it was when I made my mind up about the dog. It wasn’t as though I’d never had the conversation with people. I already had every so-called logical, realistic reason why I shouldn’t do this rattling around in my head, I wasn’t super excited to hear from the peanut gallery.

I am a girl with a blindspot or two, alright? They call it “inattentive” but my attention is pretty dedicated in weird directions. This falls into the inattentive category without question because I didn’t think about the leash.

I wasn’t intentionally hiding the plan, though. It’s just that I wanted to be mentally prepared for hearing things I didn’t want to hear (but that weren’t going to shift my resolve, either). Opinions were irrelevant, I told myself. I am the captain now.

He gestured to the leash hanging from the key rack by the door.

“and what are we walking?”

I can’t recall if I outright said it or if he deduced from silence on his own. I know that I immediately told him, “I know it’s stupid-“

I didn’t get a chance to say much more. He said, “Woah! I don’t think it’s stupid at all!”

I can remember standing across the room and hearing him list the virtues of adding a dog to our family. I remember trying to pretend hot tears weren’t already streaming down my face.

He asked why I was crying and I told him I wasn’t. He smiled weakly and said, “what is this? What did I do wrong?”

I couldn’t say what had happened but I knew it wasn’t wrong at all.

It takes time for me to understand what the root of the outburst is. I need my head to clear before anything makes sense.

I was so sure I knew how he would react to me. I was so convinced I would be defending my decision to an adversarial force I hadn’t even thought about what agreement would look like.

I was crying because his unwavering support and belief in my ability are shocking. I was crying because this reaction was so unexpected I was emotionally blindsided.

Betrayal can happen slowly, over time. It can happen in the erosion of your confidence in small doses.  A betrayal can happen in the way a person shows up (or doesn’t) over the length of time you give them to do so.

The same can be said for how things rebuild.

There is a quiet restoration in consistency. There is room for trust unlike anything I’ve ever had when the message day in and day out looks like, “you are exactly who I want to be with, even when it’s tough”.

I have spent my life wanting a knight to rescue and protect me from all the things that hurt. I started to implode under the weight of my expectations of the role of others in this process.

It all came down to a single question in the end. It was so simple after all the acrobatics we had done for so long, I found myself asking, “why are you so okay with hurting me?”

See, the answer to the question isn’t really relevant to the story at hand today. By the time the question was asked I think my level of heartbreak was far beyond repair. What matters is that this was the absolute undoing of what i thought I knew. This is that lesson that comes at you until you’re willing to learn it. Applied to dozens if not hundreds of scenarios that had unfolded over two decades, this was the only question I ever should have been seeking to answer.

Or rather, “why are you so okay with him hurting you?”

I’m seeing now that I was at a significant disadvantage, though. Today there’s someone in my life who consistently and clearly makes choices in his life that demonstrate his commitment to and love for me and my kids. Today I get to share my time with someone who reinforces his position in my life through consistency and open communication. Today I live in a place where reassurance is so natural, security can exist where it hasn’t before.

There wasn’t an encyclopedia available to me that could have altered me the way two decades did. Only lived experience can change the, “why are you okay with hurting me?” into, “why do I keep letting you?”