Stuck. The lid to my cherished teapot, the one my mother surprised me with when I moved to New Jersey, the one I made the tea in that we shared, was stuck in the pot, wedged in by an action I hadn’t witnessed.

The fact that my husband was responsible for this freak accident, while at the same time stating “I don’t want to be blamed,” infuriated me.

Standing at the kitchen sink, desperately trying to free the lid without breaking it, felt emblematic of the state of my life: solving problems not of my making. Relegated to this position not because I wanted it but because while my husband’s instinct was to call the pot fucked, mine was to fix it, and I resented him giving up on something that wasn’t his to give up on. 

This pot has lived with me for over 20 years, burnished by use, keeper of this memory that I can’t erase: the only time we ever talked privately. The only time I felt listened to by you, the one time we connected. 

___________________________________________________

Do you remember the morning you came over and we had Turkish tea and talked? Just you and me, everyone else asleep. You were newly heartbroken—wet with it, like a just-hatched chick—and vulnerable in a way I’d never seen before. I told you she had traded down, and you flinched. The wound was still too fresh; the intention not to poke it, but to find a way to salve it for you, make you look up from your momentary sorrow and see love in another face. 

It was significant that you were open in a way you’d never been with me, and maybe that was partly my fault. When we first met, what I felt overwhelmed me, and I was at a loss for how to respond to it.

For a brief moment, with the intensity of feeling, I thought you were the man I’d marry. I’d had these nascent feelings for someone before, but both of us had been too young and inexperienced to assemble them into something cohesive. I carried an invisible wound from this experience, one I’d only see fully many years later. 

This time, however, I was older and supposedly wiser.

The feeling I had for you was exactly what I’d envisioned when I met the man I hoped to marry. Passion, desire, without a discernible limit to any of them. It was difficult to turn away from the potential of being met by and meeting someone on multiple levels: creatively, sexually, emotionally, intellectually.

When I think about it, that was a lot to expect me to hold back at 25. These are things we are told we should just give in to, especially when we’re young and unencumbered. But it was a lot to shine on someone all at once, too: a tractor beam of offering and attention that could scare away the most grounded of beings, which it so happened you were not.

___________________________________________________

You were suddenly vulnerable, and whatever defences you had were gone for the moment. I had your attention for a few glorious moments and that was all I’d ever wanted. We talked, and shared tea, and it drew you out of your momentary predicament. 

I always hoped you’d come back, and gift me with more of your undivided attention. More curiosity about me, more of you. 

The last time I saw you, you approached me, but it felt like you were assuaging some guilt. A mutual friend had treated me poorly when I didn’t reciprocate his feelings, but had strong ones for you...and someone must have mentioned it to you. He’d once disdainfully told me that if you and I got together, I would have mothered you, as if it meant I would have given you care you didn’t need. I think he said that to me because he wanted that mothering for himself. 

I never knew exactly why at the time you said “he’s got some strange ideas about women,” as if I wouldn’t have known that already. I realized the two of you had talked about me. You made an overture that in hindsight, I’m unsure about: were you suddenly interested? Or maybe just lonely? 

I told you to take care of your heart. I had given up the idea that you wanted me in any way, I had begun to see that there might be other people who wanted what I had to offer, recognized my worth without needing to think twice about it. That they might also offer things I hadn’t considered in my feelings for you. 

I remember watching her sit on your lap, at a party, when the feeling of being unwanted by you was at its peak. I could stand it only a few minutes, then I drove myself home, parked my car on the street and sobbed for a good hour before I could bring myself to go inside and sleep.

At the time, I chalked it up to an inexperienced me. I burned for you, in the way you read about in books, see in movies. It came from nowhere, I didn’t know what to do with it, and when it was clear you preferred anyone else to me, it made me doubt myself. 

Funny thing is, had you reciprocated it, it could have been the source of greatest confidence and grounding: to be able to trust deepest, innate feeling. To have knowingness be returned. 

I had dreams for years afterward that you would call me out of the blue, wanting more than the passing acquaintance we’d had. It usually happened when I met someone new: you were the milestone that I measured my sense of excitement for someone against, and no one ever came close. 

I stopped looking for feeling and let myself be bogged down by pragmatics.

___________________________________________________

Looking back at my life, I see a continuum whereby I learned to mistrust my own heart, to my detriment. Something felt strongly is true, it’s in the understanding of ourselves that we unravel what the feeling is telling us, let it guide us to what we want out of life. But the messaging I received was that all strong feelings were to be mistrusted, that somehow I needed to purge feeling from my being. That feeling was weakness, something to extinguish like a candle.

Hold that thought for a moment, because it’s important: the message I got from the people who supposedly cared about me was to be divorced from feeling entirely. Not to learn to understand what my feelings were communicating to me—not to operate from the heart, and become more adept at it—but to try to wrest feeling from myself like pulling my own beating heart out of my body with my bare hands.

When I think of the years I spent at war with myself because this felt like an impossibility, I don’t cry, I collapse like a building imploding.

In the midst of a mid-life transition that has been disorienting and—this is the word that comes to mind—gnarly, I have had to reconnect to that pure feeling being that I was all those years ago. Because she is who I am, and I need her to go forward.

What I’ve accepted is that feelings don’t have to make logical sense to be true. We will still be safe in our emotions without over-intellectualizing them into vapour. It’s in trying to batten down the hatches and make things fit certain templates that we lose a part of our essential selves in the course of living. These are important because they’re the idiosyncratic facets that make us who we are, not some replicant of parents or friends. Not some somnambulistic adherent to socially accepted ways of being that render us without discernible identity.

Feeling is identity, and it is the one honest and authentic way we connect to other humans.