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| Image credit: Photo by WolfS♡ul on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons |
When I was little, my Brownie troop went to visit a home for children with disabilities. I got the impression that somehow all of us normal kids in our spiffy uniforms were somehow supposed to cheer their lonesome lives. At some point in the days preceding this visit, I also got the romantic notion that I would meet my new best friend there. She would be (in accordance with the only picture I had of people who were disabled) wheelchair bound, and thus, different and separate from other people, but otherwise much like me. In particular, she would (like me) have retreated into a world of books, since no one else in her real life would be able to relate to her. I pictured myself walking into a large, sunlit room where I'd see here quietly seated in her wheelchair, wearing a neat white dress with a lavender sash. Then I would sweep in and see past the wheelchair that blinded the rest of the world to her specialness and discover a true literary kinship of the soul as we discussed Nancy Drew over cookies.
When actually confronted with a room full of disabled children, I cowered in a folding chair in the corner, silently praying that we'd leave soon. The room was dim and noisy, lit with fading fluorescent bulbs. Everything in the room was some dull shade of brown: the floors, the walls, the folding chairs. None of the children wore crisp white dresses, although some were in wheelchairs. They couldn't speak or read or eat cookies.
When I went to college, I thought that I would at last be where I belonged: in a university full of like-minded and like-valued individuals. I pictured dorms an classrooms filled with sensitive, but not too pretentious, poets. We'd enjoy reading T.S. Eliot together over tea and cookies. That image shattered when I left my door unlocked one morning and went down the hall to use the bathroom. I came back to find a drunken frat boy, smudged Greek letters painted on his cheeks, passed out on my bed wearing nothing but his jock strap. He'd been too disoriented to find his own room and had definitely already tossed his cookies in the men's room next door.
When I got married, I thought I'd finally found my one true love: the person who would finally fulfill and complete me for the rest of my life. But less than six years in, I was (yet again) looking for a new kind of soulmate; I searched the rooms of my S-Anon meetings looking among the other partners of sex addicts for my new best friend. I listened to each share trying to find one that I could really relate to. This friend and I would understand each other completely and go out to coffee shops together the meetings and heal as we shared over cookies. I never found that person. Everyone told a different story and none was completely like mine.
As my recovery progressed, I began to see that this — my constant search for the one perfect person who would complete me — was part of my dysfunction and my own warped thinking. And I stopped looking. I realized that there were times in my life when I hadn't been looking. I had joined a parenting group without giving much thought of making friends, just looking to give and receive support. I started blogging to write, not even realizing it was a means of social networking. I went to events at my children's schools. In some cases I just had pleasant conversations, in others I met people who have deeply enriched my life every day since. No one of them completes me in every way, heals every wound, fills every emptiness but each makes my life more beautiful in his or her own way. And I suspect I would have missed that if I were evaluating each person only in terms of how well they fit my perfect image of a parent or a writer or a friend, just as I missed so many chances to see what others had to offer: the children I didn't meet as a Brownie or the college classmates I dismissed or the other women in S-Anon whose stories seemed unlike mine at the time.
I was thinking about that as I went to my new COSA meeting. I'm no longer looking to this meeting to give me something, to provide me with that perfect person whose recovery and story I relate to in every way. I'm trying to go in open to the experience, whatever it may be. And if my experience has taught me anything, it's that I'm bound to find a lot more there than I'd ever get from an imaginary soulmate. And if I want, I can even bring my own cookies.
This post was originally published at The Second Road.
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