“Thank you for sharing this. Your love for Maria is so beautiful.
I used to read your blog because I loved reading about the farm and the animals, and I still do. But now I love how you help so many people just by sharing what you and Maria go through in your life. It has helped me through many days of reading through your blogs.
Thank you,
Wendy.”
Wendy wrote this beautiful message to me after reading a post I wrote yesterday about my struggle to help Maria through a severe trauma episode. I don’t know Wendy, but the message meant a lot to me; it helped me to feel that the blog has come much closer to what I wanted it to be from the beginning but was often blocked by my anger and anxiety, and yes, my trauma.
People tell me the blog has improved, which is great to hear, and they wonder how I did it.
It’s not simple; it’s not one or two things but many.
One is getting older, the bad genes often die out, and another is the work I did and still do in my spiritual life. A lot of it is Maria.
But the one that stands out for me when I read Wendy’s message and the words was the time I realized that my anger and old wounds were blocking me from becoming the man I wanted to be, the husband and partner I was determined to be, and the toxic anger I carried from early on in my life.
It also blunted my creativity. It’s hard to be creative when you are angry. There are lots of arrogant and ignorant people out there.
I embrace and accept change, but it is always challenging. It took me a long time to examine myself and figure out how to change and what to be. That doesn’t come naturally; it takes a lot of work.
One turning point I remembered when I read Wendy’s message was the hurt and rage I felt when social media became hateful and cruel, and I found myself in the middle of this poisonous change. When my privacy and intentions were regularly challenged, how much did that hurt me? A lot, it seemed.
I’d been a book writer for years, a best-selling one, working in private and almost always alone. I wasn’t prepared for the hatred and cynicism, and they brought out the worst and deepest wounds in me: hurt memories and pain I mainly had consciously forgotten but that my heart and soul didn’t forget.
I created a blog in which I was open about my life.
I wanted the blog to be a living memoir, so it was and is, for better or worse. When you open up in public in America today, you will become a target, no matter what you say or do. I didn’t expect that. I was too mashed up inside to ignore it or handle it well.
Learning how to deal with that was a profound lesson that altered my life.
I was hurt, and when I got hurt, my only weapon at hand was to try to shame or hurt the people who were pulling me back. I wanted the same things that had been done to me. Anger never works to solve a problem; it only reflects, mirrors, and repeats it.
To be open in deeply divided online/social media America, you better be comfortable with who you are and what you do because almost everything you ever write or say will be challenged, criticized, doubted, and ridiculed if possible.
There are three billion people who can read what I write, and it stands to reason that many of them won’t like it.
You either get stronger, or you get crazier, or you get lost and go away. Many good people I know are afraid to share their lives on social media. It’s a shame that we lost a lot of good stories and messages that way. I won’t be one of them.
Looking back on it, I can’t recall what I was thinking or why the anger was uncontrollable. I just knew it was wrong, and the person who got hurt the most was me.
I turned back to a long-time therapist who knew me very well and was not shy about calling me out. I began meditating about why I was reacting to these people, publishing their cruel and hateful messages.
Slowly, I realized the reality: I was trying to hurt people who were trying to hurt me, to treat them the way they were treating me. This was not who I wished to be.
My life began to soften slowly and gradually, one step at a time. My love for Maria and my life on this farm softened me. I dearly love our animals; I am grateful daily to live in nature. I began paying more attention to life and less to what people thought of me. My spiritual reading taught me a lot about anger and fear. If I didn’t love myself, no one could love me.
Like Georgia O’Keeffe, I did the needed work on myself and flushed praise and criticism down the drain. Accepting who I was was liberating. I stopped posting those messages, reading them, or thinking about them. My big ego replaced what other people thought. Once I came to like me, the stings of other people lost their meaning.
I deleted hate messages and now block them with my fancy software from every posting on my blog again. I wash them out of my mind. They are mostly all gone. It felt like magic.
A good friend pointed out something I should have thought of myself. “The people who sent hateful messages to strangers online are to be pitied, not hated. They are the victims, not you…” Since you have never sent hateful messages to strangers, she said (I haven’t), “then you don’t understand it.”
They can’t hurt you, she said, and you can’t hurt them. And you shouldn’t. They are not healthy, not engaged with life; they have nothing to cling to with the meaning they seem to grasp from hurting others, “and that you get from doing good and loving someone.”
The flower photos I began taking two years ago were the final straw for my trying to hurt people. They softened me up.
As Maria did, and Zip did, and the dogs did, and my Mansion and refugee work did, but now my pantry work, my response now is to do as much good as I can in my life on behalf of the people who have no one but us to help them.
And to love Maria as lovingly, wisely, and gently as possible.
You can’t be angry or intolerant for long when you live with someone like Maria, who is full of love and joy. Don’t worry, I’m not turning to mush. I still have a temper and have little use for the yentas and busybodies and ignoramuses that haunt our fractious digital world. I can still pop off when my buttons are pushed.
Jesus was right. Life is about loving things other than yourself.
The anger will always be there to some degree.
But it only goes deep now and lasts for a while. And I understand the futility and weakness of trying to hurt the people who want to hurt me. I don’t do that anymore, and the blog’s warmth, color, and peacefulness are becoming a gift to others as well as me.
Thanks much to the Wendy’s of the world for noticing. Thanks for sticking with me.
I have changed, Wendy, and so has the blog. Thank you for noticing.
