One Heart Is Enough
“Until we can understand the assumptions in which we’re drenched we cannot know ourselves.”
I always assumed I came from a happy family.
My parents were still married, after all.
Apparently, that’s where I set the bar. Getting – and staying – married was the holy grail.
We were very close, I told myself and others, and close is good. Close is the goal, right, at all costs?
I did not yet understand the sometimes-subtle differences between closeness and enmeshment, care and burden, curiosity and projection, support and interference. I did not yet see where all of these lived in me.
I also assumed that if someone was upset, either I had somehow caused it or I should at least try to somehow fix it. After all, people being upset is not ok. That is what I believed.
I assumed that I would go to college, marry a man, have a job, buy a house, save money for retirement, and go on vacation. As a child, I assumed if I was really interested in something, that meant maybe I would get a Ph.D. in that subject.
I assumed my life would basically look like the life I had growing up.
Writing these assumptions, I see two things.
One is that it would be accurate to reword all of the above, swapping out “I assumed that I would” for “It was assumed that I would…” These assumptions, expectations really, I thought were my own came from outside of me, namely from my family of origin, who in turn came by them from their families of origin, and from the “norms” in which I was steeped and socialized from birth.
The other thing I see is that if my life as an adult would essentially replicate the one I had growing up, that also meant I would carry with me all of the adaptive behaviors and all of the internalized beliefs about who I had to be in order for that life to work.
It didn’t work – but that’s not the story.
The story is what happened after I broke the tablets, the commandments, the rules, the givens, the prescriptions – and began to inscribe my own truths on my life, on my very body, instead.
I was on Zoom catching up with a friend the other day. “Want to see my tattoo in progress?” I asked her, eager as a kid at show and tell. I pulled off my fleece and turned so that she could see the entirety of my right shoulder and arm, with its birds and blossoms and branches. “Tell me about the heart,” she prompted.
As is not unusual for me, more and more so these days, at first I wasn’t sure what she was asking about. Then I realized she was referring to the intricately accurate rendering of an anatomical heart just above the scar near my elbow, where I had melanoma three years ago. “Oh, that heart!” I said, feeling slightly silly for not making the obvious connection in the first place.
I told her how this tattoo had evolved. It began with a chickadee on a branch, and then I had an image of that branch being a continuation of an aorta. The tattoo on my right forearm, from about six months earlier, is a matryoshka doll who reminds me to love and care for all of my parts, especially the littlest ones. “And yet,” I said with a clarity I made sure I myself was taking in, “there is only one heart.”
I assumed that I knew myself so well. I even prided myself on this. At couples counseling, just months before the day I ended my first marriage in a pronouncement as swift as it was shocking, my then-husband said, “Jena knows me better than I know myself.”
The story was that I knew both of us. I was the holder of everyone’s selves. And the truth was, of course, so much more unwieldy than this – uncontainable, far-reaching, stubborn, and unwilling to conform to any externally imposed shape, namely the shape my life had taken up to that point.
The thing with assumptions is that as they crumble, so does the ego that propped them up with such smugness. Or is it the other way around – the assumptions doing the propping up, so that when they fall, the ego, like humpty-dumpty, cracks open and something, someone more real comes forth, surprising everyone, most especially herself?
This is the kind of either-or question where the answer is “yes.”
Assumptions are like a throne for the ego, and the ego holds up the assumptions as if they are objects worthy of reverence and respect. To let them break is to break some code I didn’t even know I’d agreed and adhered to. No longer willing to fill my role as wife in the way I’d come to know and experience it meant saying “no,” really for the first time ever.
Becoming a wife a second time but in such a completely different context has continuously meant radically relinquishing old assumptions about family, marriage, gender, communication, conflict, happiness, and how things are “supposed” to be.
A dozen years after one of the hardest periods of my life, the one when I stood by my own knowing even as grief and guilt threatened to engulf me, I have come to see just how powerfully the assumption that my job was to make sure everyone else was happy has steered my choices and dictated my responses.
More assumptions will no doubt come to light, and I’m glad for this. It means I’m alive. It means I’m paying attention. It means I’m growing and hopefully expanding my capacity to connect with more ease both to my parts and to my people. For it is that sense of uneasiness that tips me off more than anything that some assumption is humming below the surface; when my face flushes and my ears go hot, when my chest tightens, that’s when I know I’ve got some listening to do.
To this day, when I see the word “thoughts” in an email, my heart starts pounding. And yet the more I’m able to listen to the parts of me that made so many assumptions their gospel, the more compassion I wind up feeling for younger versions of myself – and the more I truly remember that I am grown now.
Sometimes other people will not be happy, maybe even because of me. And it’s not my job to change that. In fact, who was I ever to think I had that kind of power?
The power I do have is to let things be new, to know that deeply caring for others does not mean being responsible for their emotional lives.
The power I do have is in releasing myself from the oppressive assumptions that I have to have everything figured out, that I have to get things exactly right, that I have to know exactly what I think about everything at all times, that I have to anticipate everything that could happen (especially the things that could go wrong), that I have to be tuned into everyone’s needs, and that I have to be available to everyone for whatever they need, when they need it.
In other words, the power I do have is in letting go of the need to be a paragon of perfection — as a wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend, a mother, a coach, a writer. To look out the window at the sun-warmed trees, to see that the tiny buds are plumping up more with each passing day, and to simply enjoy watching the slow-moving clouds, the enterprising birds delighting in their spring work. To sit with my own one heart, trusting that it is enough.