Honesty, the Love synonym

Earlier today, while I was out weight-walking an image stopped me in my tracks.

A tiny bright red leaf lay on a dry grey tarmac with no other life anywhere near it. Until, as I was taking the photo, a gust of wind brought into the frame an even tinier ocher colour leaf. As if to say to the Red “you are not alone anymore, I’m here with you now. Everything will be better and easier now you got me by your side”.

This got me thinking about the nature of support.

Particularly, the kind of support we are looking for when we are stalling. When we know we are ready to commit that act that terrifies us yet something is holding us back. Something is missing — the last coble piece to pave our exit path.

If we were open to love, we have probably attracted a soul mate and are soaking in the unconditional love such union blesses us with. If we have earned it, we have a good friend or two whose nurturing love and support we can really feel . If we can afford it, we may have a therapist challenging us to step into the space of our greatest resistance.

But I witnessed in others — and experienced it in myself — that all this, as helpful as it is, has easily not been enough.

And I think it’s got something to do with honesty and trust.

We may not trust enough our therapists because we pay them to support us — do they believe in us because we pay them or because we are intrinsically worthy of their faith in us? Also, it’s an unequal relationship. And I don’t mean one is a trained expert and the other brings problems. I mean, it’s inequality of exchange — one is giving money, other the support. But to balance things out the roles would need to be interchangeable — the therapist to bring their money and shit and the patient their support. For that however we have friendships.

The problem with friendships though — like with any other love relationship — is that because you love what you have with the other person you may compromise parts of yourself to keep things great between you, not rock the love boat that your friendship is. Like boats some friendships are built to withstand harder knocks than others. But all have a tipping point. And not knowing where that point is may be the thing holding us back from being our bravest even with our truest friends?

My own experience with needing support to be my bravest hasn’t been so much in friendships — so far so lucky — but in my love relationship. Not knowing where our tipping point was, held me back numerous times until I just had to give our love boat some hard rocking or I was going to topple over all by myself. And rock hard our boat very much did. But we’d eventually manage to steady it. Our boat always changed course as a result and we with it, but sail away we continue.

So, by empirical deduction I conclude that unless we can be unconditionally & painfully honest with our friend, therapist or lover — and they with us because the reciprocity is critical! — we may struggle to find the kind of support that will take the breaks off our stalling engine and deliver us to our bravest, strongest, bestest selves.

But there is a fourth option, I believe.

If there’s no one in our life we are able to share our unconditional honesty with, we need to give ours to ourselves.

But that’s another topic all together! For another time…

Off to soak myself in a bath now.