Shavuot is a holiday heavy with symbolism. While it marks the end of the counting of the omer, it also functions as a miniature jubilee. The fiftieth day like a tiny echo of the fifty year cycle. And in each of the seventh years during that cycle, acts of rest and liberation are performed, especially in the fiftieth year. And so it is before Shavuot, I find myself letting go of a love that I may not have had a right to claim, the love that I thought was the beginning of my life becoming better and happier. Instead I find myself grieving.
What many people forget is that grief is an expression of love. When my mom died, I had nothing to grieve since my love for her died when she stopped being a parent and became a neglectful bully when I was young. Yet my life has not been without grief, whether that’s grieving my childhood or grieving the adult years that followed. I have cried bitterly over dead friends and dead pets. Now I find myself grieving love itself, finally coming to understand that whenever I have loved someone deeply it has never been reciprocal. I have always only ever been the fool in love, and so the wisest thing seems to be to not love.
For nearly two years, I’ve carried and tended feelings of love for someone I’ve never met. And for most of the time I began to think that those feelings really were mutual. Maybe that was a delusion on my part, seeing signs of love and caring in symbolism and cryptic references the way we fool ourselves by looking for mystical meaning in the secrets of the Torah. Yet sometimes we see what we want to see and we don’t see things for what they are, just as sometimes we see things as we fear them to be and not for what they are. I don’t know if I’ll ever know if I was deluding myself or if I misunderstood and fumbled something good and true. Yet if I ask myself if I’m the asshole here, the answer still feels like a ‘yes’. And maybe that leaves me grieving my worth as a partner as nearly two painful years disappointing someone I both admired and desired. And since she doesn’t want my attention, then I have only guilt and shame for the hurt I’ve caused her by insisting on wishful thinking.
It’s necessary to write this to acknowledge how badly I’ve messed up. I have no one to blame for my heartbreak but myself. And I can’t blame the woman I’ve loved and whole I still smile thinking of even as I cry and scream into my empty bathtub, totally nauseated at everything. All I can do is apologize and give her the space and silence she wanted from me all along. And try, despite not wanting to, to remain open to the possibility that better times will come in my life even if I feel like ending it.
God commands us to choose life, yet I have never been good at obedience. I spent most of my life hating my own existence. This past year I’ve learned to see myself as slightly better than worthless, yet betraying someone I love by loving them despite that being one-sided is far from worthy. And so I find myself waiting for God to make this all make sense. And I remember that if it never made sense, I probably have to accept the absurdity of God’s choice without expecting it to ever make sense.
Already so depressed that I’m only showering weekly, the temptation to slide into further depression is irresistible. Food was already becoming a chore again, with neither eating nor cooking being easy. Isolation instinctually kicks in, my desire to find community inverted, drawn back into the cave of of pain and despair that I try so hard to turn others away from. And yet God commanded us to choose life, the same God I didn’t believe in for three decades of my life and the same one I struggle with to this day. As I live, I don’t find that faith to be dying. I just find it to be insufficient, another unsteady thing to retreat from while I writhe in heartbreak.
“If it’s not okay, it’s not over,” and somehow this is the least okay it’s been, since it seems like I’m back where I started except with more heartbreak and less sense of self. And I ask what the point of this is, why God should let me love someone and only detract from her life in the process that I’m supposed to trust yet only seems to be hurting both of us? Is there a lesson in it? Maybe, it seems like things went so wrong that something must be able to be learned. For my part, I’ve learned that my only worth is in my work and not in what I want despite what people on social media may say about worth. While wants may inform and motivate, wanting what someone else cannot give just hurts both people. Trying to understand ends up mattering less than simply accepting that mutual love may not be for everyone since it requires being able to show up fully. And I remember praying to God let me meet the one and that if it didn’t work out with her, to no longer want love in my life. Choosing life may simply be accepting that there is no choice, life continues even when we do not want to continue.
And so I question where I go from here as it continues, and how. While I may not want to live, while I may indeed want prefer the alternative to life and consider it strongly, I also know that if I am meant to continue living my decision in that will not matter. So my choice is really limited to how I live my life, however long it may continue to be. I have to admit that it’s unlikely I’ll be able to make aliyah without more resources and stability in my life, much less sustain myself in Israel. While I have to question the validity of my faith when I have no immediate faith community, I find myself unmoored as the hope that anchored my life seems to be drifting, and I find that my faith may have been misplaced and ungrounded this whole time.
May your Shavuot bring you the lessons that God needs you to learn. May the Torah teach you more wisdom than I have learned. And may you be free.
