Leap Anyway, part 2

This is the story of a leap of faith that didn’t land so well.

This is part two. Part one is here.

When we last saw our hero (me), after many years of starting over… “I had carved out a safe place in the world that I could stand on for, probably, the rest of my life. But it’s lonely out there on your little shelf of stable rock. […] What I really wanted was for someone with a pre-existing protected barrier to invite me into it.”

The Opportunity

I met a woman, we fell in love. She lived in San Francisco, I lived in Denver. That could be fine forever. Every 6-8 weeks we spent an intense 4-5 days together. During that time we put our lives on hold and did nothing but be swept away in the whirlwind of each other. It was completely unsustainable, but it didn’t have to be sustainable, and that let it be so much better than reality. When you don’t need to maintain a reasonable level you can burn so very bright.

But we wanted more. She had a large shelf of reality in the Bay area already cleared and protected. She very much wanted to invite me into it. I came to test the ground and it was clear that I could not fit into her life. There wasn’t room for me there.

Fuck it, let me be plain. Our desires are audacious and ridiculous and we spend so much time hiding them, because of how ridiculous what we want really is. I can want the unreasonable. What I wanted was to be invited into my girlfriend’s home. Her husband wouldn’t be cool with that, and pushing for it would put too much strain on their relationship.

You’d think that would stop a reasonable fella. But.

But she keeps saying she wants to merge our lives and nothing can stop us.

But the Bay area is so perfect, this is where my tribe is, where I feel like I belong. There is so much opportunity there.

But there’s months between now and when I’d move, many things can change.

But I want it so much.

Most importantly, if people never acted unless there was no risk, no one would act at all. Assuming risk is part of being a grown-ass man—you know you can fail and you do it anyway. If I don’t make this jump when I have this woman on my side I’ll never jump at all. She’s more ally than anyone could ever hope for.

I have spent too much of my life not being courageous. I have stayed in Colorado when better opportunities showed themselves on multiple occasions. When all the other first-generation rationalists were moving to Berkeley, I was drinking my life away in Denver. I am tired of being a coward, I’m not happy in Denver anyway.

So I close my eyes, pray for a miracle, and take a leap of faith.

The Leap

I knew this wasn’t going to work long before I arrived. I acted as if I would be invited into a safe and stable life. I was being told the goal was to merge our lives. I wanted to be taken care of and brought into my girlfriend’s social networks and not have to worry about creating a secure place of my own. Isn’t that what it means to share everything and merge lives? I realize it’s incredibly selfish to just show up and be taken in, and to figure out what I can offer in return afterwards. Nothing like that was promised, and I knew it wouldn’t happen. But I acted as if maybe, maybe somehow it would materialize like magic, because that’s what the words mean.

I did not get that, and of course I didn’t get that, that’s not how any of this works. This is the kind of thing children want. This is the kind of thing a pretty young lady can aspire to. Not a middle-aged man. I had made an outrageous bid, beyond what was even fleetingly entertainable. The only remaining move was to withdraw gracefully and let us all pretend I’d never asked. I began the process of breaking apart my little rock shelf in Denver and bringing what pieces I could to a different part of the Bay.

Being self-sufficient isn’t just a responsibility to oneself. It’s a responsibility to everyone around you. Existance requires constant work to pump negentropy into human-shaped bodies and shelters. Anyone who doesn’t do that for themselves is stealing it from others, often from those they claim to love. If you’re requesting something from others you better have something they value to offer in return.

I have a history of overplaying my hand. I go too hard too fast and make an ask far too big. That’s the really hard part, having to hide my embarrassment. I had really thought that I could just slip into someone else’s life without finding a way to pay for it. I know that men need to stand on their own. Being able to do that, and extend it to others, is the whole point of men. What the hell are they even for, otherwise? I had offered the wrong things to the wrong person. I needed to instead go and rebuild a stable rock shelf here in the Bay and then return with a merge offer of something valuable. I had tried to ask for what I’m supposed to provide, and tried to provide what I’m supposed to request. The shame burned deep. At least as a child I didn’t have the capability of offering anything of value to friends. Having the capability as an adult but failing by willfully closing my eyes to reality was humiliating.

And now I’m stuck starting over in a strange land at an age I should already be established.

Leap Anyway

Despite all this I’m glad I made the leap I did, and I’d tell my past self to do it anyway.

I love Dr Frank N. Furter. He wants the impossible. He wants to be beautiful and desired and outrageous. He wants everyone to love him, and to have sex with them all. He wants to be adored like a gorgeous woman would be. He has the audacity to act as if reality can accommodate his desires, and creates the closest thing he can to his dreams. Reality does not have room for him, and he is punished unto death for wanting too hard and too visibly. He could have lived silently, dreaming but never being. Instead he held nothing back to find out if he could have his desire. He had to try with everything he had in order to know. He leapt for his dreams rather than bending the knee to reality. He died defying it.

I was a coward too long. I should have leapt more often. Too many people never try hard enough for their insane desires. I want to have the courage of Frank N. Furter. I want to leap for the stars. Leap knowing that you’ll often fail. Leap knowing that you will feel so much pain when you fail, and you’ll be incapacitated for months. And even if you never succeed, even if you only ever get pain from these leaps, it’ll still be worth it in the end. It’s better than living cowed and fearful, never knowing if maybe, just maybe, your desires really could have been real. Even partially real.

It’s been a few months since my leap and things are going well. So I went about starting a new life. I’ve done it before. Yes, it was the hardest restart so far. The combination of loss and hiding everything I was feeling from everyone led to several weeks of severe dissociation. Culture shock was a bitch. I worry that restarts will continue to get harder, and I don’t have many left. But I’m not out of the game yet, and my little shelf is growing: I have new friends, I’m joining a brand new group house, and I’m at InkHaven getting my writing tools back into good working order. Maybe in a little while I’ll have a cozy safe place worth showing around.

And to be completely honest, if another truly insane opportunity shows up, I just might grab up everything I can carry in my two hands, and leap again.