In Latin America, February 14 is celebrated as Día del Amor y la Amistad; the Day of love and friendship.
What’s nice about this is that it opens the range of people you can celebrate and the connotation.
It seems that here in the U.S. we celebrate Valentine’s Day as a day of romantic love, or what the ancient Greeks called Eros.
We have a culture of rom-coms and other media that fixate on the couple getting together, fairy tales that start with once upon a time and end with happily ever after. We are attracted to these archetypes as they’ve been instilled in us since we were children. I mean, who doesn’t want happily ever after?
Think about it: Happily Ever After. My goodness, no more pain, fear, or sorrow – just happiness. It appeals.
We look for that happiness outside of ourselves. Inside we are roiling messes – at least I am.
I’m rarely on social media anymore. I can’t bear the switch that happens in my head as I look at someone’s highlight reel and imagine it as their regular life. Trips to Paris, gigantic and sparkly engagement rings, taut and trim bodies, gorgeous romantic partners, fabulous careers and cars, and high-achieving children send me to the ash heap. Good gravy, it is more than I can mentally endure.
Mind you, I know intellectually, I KNOW it is a highlight reel. Yet, my mind clicks into comparison mode and I wonder why I should bother trying. I can’t keep up.
Social media used to be so fun for me – catching up with old friends and sharing little details about my life. But things, Life, started to get really Real for me – the shuttered business, marital friction, aging parents and children, and a cancer diagnosis and treatment.
What value can I contribute to the conversation? Who wants to hear about troubles and woes? We all have them and I think we are all trying to minimize them in our own lives, if not avoid them completely. Better to just not play along, keep my head down in my own life, and try to get out of it.
I turned 51 in December – officially middle-aged, with more runway behind me than in front of me. The last few years have felt like disappointments and shortages.
Oh! There was also the bit about the global pandemic.
I’m left reeling from the hits, punch-drunk.
I know this is the mess in the middle – are you familiar with it?
Let’s say you are putting away laundry.
You’re wrestling with your sheets as you try to stuff them into the overfilled closet. You’re mad; this is a mess! Things are spilling out. Towels are topped with tablecloths. Blankets are bungled up with bath robes. What is the gift wrap doing in here?! Who folded these fitted sheets?!
So you decide to refold the fitted sheets since they look like they were wrapped around a baseball bat and crammed into the corner. But when you pull out the fitted sheets, the flat sheets slip onto the vacuum cleaner and wrap around the extra heater which is also squeezed into the linen closet.
So you pull those out because now they also have to be refolded. And you notice some flat sheets under the bathroom rugs, so you remove those.
Before long you’ve decided – to heck with this closet! I’m sick of it! I’m cleaning this out.
Your five-minute task of putting the laundry away becomes a two-day affair of clearing every item, perusing and deciding what stays and what goes, wiping down all the shelves, and refolding and replacing or removing every item.
Your dining room table, or the bathroom sink, or the hallway floor are piled up with linens and towels, luggage, holiday ornaments and decorations, coats, extra toilet paper, and whatever else you keep in your closet.
Your children are looking for you to make lunch or take them to practice because just a moment ago you were in the laundry room, but no longer. You’re exasperated by any other demands on your life at the moment because you just want to get through this, organize it, get it just so, and then you can be done!
In the meantime, you’re in the mess in the middle wondering whose bright idea it was to organize the linen closet on a Saturday afternoon at 12:37 when a little while ago you had zero intention of organizing the linen closet and now it’s Sunday afternoon and it seems you’ve spent the entire weekend doing this when maybe you would have rather done anything else and it seems there is still no end in sight and you might be feeling the flames of anger and resentment that you let it get this bad or why can’t anyone else see this is a disaster and why won’t anyone else pitch in to help? And you might be feeling alone and stuck but you can’t stop now because there are washcloths and cotton swabs piled up and you’ve got to get through it and get it done.
That’s the mess in the middle. You’ve gone too far; point of no return time.
The mess in the middle is so much of life. We have anchors that can signal beginnings and ends – Temporal Landmarks along the vast landscape of our lives. But sometimes you’re just in the middle of the desert and everything looks the same in every direction. You’re not quite sure where you started and you can’t figure out the end.
But if we can keep going, on the other side of the pile of stained towels and dingy rugs and yellowing pillowcases, we have a fresh and tidy closet and a couple of piles of linens to take to the pet rescue shelter. And moving forward, every time we put things back into the closet, we are a little more careful and attentive because we know what it was like to go through that and we don’t want to go through that again.
Every time we look into the closet we feel a surge of pride and love. “I did that.” We show it off to our friends. We prove to ourselves that even if everything else is in chaos in our lives, the linen closet is ordered. Tremendous satisfaction and peace can come from that order.
We learn a lesson among and from the linens.
It doesn’t have to be the linen closet. It could be your sock drawer, the pantry, the stack of books next to your bed, or your office paperwork.
It’s taking the physical space and breaking it way down, smaller and smaller and smaller goals, bite-size pieces so we stop choking.
This is one of the ways love can look like, the kind of self-love the Greeks called Philautia. This is the kind of love Jesus referred to when he said, love others as you love yourself.
RuPaul said, “If you don’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”
The problem is that we do love others the way we love ourselves, which isn’t very well.
In our focus on finding romantic love, or performing to be loved by our bosses, other lacrosse moms, or by our “friends” on social media, we forsake ourselves.
Imagine if, on a day like today, you treated yourself the way you would treat a romantic partner – took yourself to dinner, bought yourself flowers or jewelry, and did what you wanted to please yourself. Miley Cyrus famously has a song about this right now, which makes me laugh. Like, seriously Girl? Are you just figuring that out now?
What does loving yourself look like? Can you look at yourself in the mirror right now and say your name and I love you?
That’s a place to start.
For better life results, be a friend to yourself first.
As the Christmas song goes, “Although it’s been said many times many ways”, there is truth to it, and like the linen closet, it needs to be attended to regularly.
You need to be attended to regularly. No one else really truly knows exactly what you need or when you need it.
Stop choking down the mess in the middle. Grace yourself with some compassion. Love yourself tenderly. Let all of those romantic song lyrics be about you from you to you. Let this be the beginning of your happily ever after.
Feliz Dia del Amor y la Amistad.