You can’t fix another person; another person can’t fix you. Get over it.
It’s easy to think that we can make things better for someone else. By being there, by saying the right words, by doing something for them. Unless you’re a doctor, it’s not going to happen, except in your head.
And the other side of this is to believe that someone else can make things better for us. The right person will make us feel the way we want to feel. Maybe the way we feel we deserve to feel.
That belief leads to serial monogamy, infidelities, or desperate loneliness; all the manifestations of the emotional version of an addict doing a ‘geographical’. And the thing about moving to a new place to escape your problems is that you take yourself with you. And that’s the problem.
If somebody other than you really could change the way you feel, then it simply means you’ve handed control of your life to someone else. That’s bound to end well.
I’ve been thinking about this today because I was reading Long Quiet Highway by Natalie Goldberg and, at the start of Part Two, she tells the story of how she arrived at a spiritual retreat and begins to discover what she has been missing thus far in her life. Then she gets a message to call her mother and is told she must go home because her father is on the verge of a nervous breakdown on the back of his brother’s sudden death.
Goldberg feels it is important to return to care for her father. To be around him. To be there for him. To fix him.
A visiting rabbi at the retreat advises her to stay where she is and she does so — with some relief. The story ends with this wonderful sentence:
A month later, without my help, my father was back to normal.
That perfectly pitched ‘without my help’ sums up what I have been trying to say in this short piece.
Trust yourself to fix yourself; trust yourself to be surplus to requirements.
