Dear Murtaza:

“She is just too beautiful, she suffers a lot, and I want to help her… I feel her pain, I want to make it less… I told her I love her”.

“(My love) only seems to bother her….she told me she is not interested in love, she just wants to live.. she misunderstand what I meant by love”-

– what comes to my mind: it is painful to love a person who is suffering. You want to take away her suffering, you’ll do anything for her… because her pain is your own. But your love, your most beautiful, powerful emotion that can move mountains inside of you- makes no difference to her, it doesn’t take away any of her suffering.. instead, she doesn’t understand it, it bothers her. She doesn’t want it.

This is what I felt for my mother who was suffering. Loving her was too painful for too long. By the time I was a teenager, I decided to never love anyone ever again. To this very day for me, love and anxiety/ pain go together, hand in hand.

“There is a person on the other side of the world, listening to this, actually talking to me, and what a wonderful person this is”- as wonderful as you are.

“She is also from Iraq and had similar ideas, she is just too beautiful”- as beautiful as you.

“I wish that I actually do something for such person, something that somehow benefit him”- that’s what love wants to do: to benefit the one loved.

“It hurts me to know that I can’t help her, I tried everything”- love hurts when it does not benefit the one loved, when it makes no difference.

“I always like to imagine my love for her is more like an artist loving a painting he saw, just admiring the details, appreciating it”- it is safe to love a painting. It is often dangerous to love a person. A painting will not punch you or call you names, it will not humiliate you, it will not falsely accuse you, it will not call you Unworthy and turn its back on you, facing someone else who is deemed Worthy.

“I felt guilty for not doing what I can to be a better person, to be liked by her, maybe it’s the job, maybe it’s my pessimistic views, maybe its my desires and goals, I wish I was exactly what she wants, maybe she will love me then, what would that cost? To me, everything”-

– a young child needs the love of his mother/caretakers (the adults living with him) as much as he needs oxygen, and he will pay whatever the cost. When for too long, whatever he pays/ gives-away makes no difference (no love is coming his way), he stops paying the price, and he guards what is left of him: he will not give away any more.

“When we first talked, I didn’t care much how you see me, but to just see me, the real me, then accept and understand, that’s the point, that’s the hard thing for me to do, since both my mother and uncle have this ‘this person have to like me’ belief, and I had to fight this. I might take it too far sometimes, but I see it as an absolute win, to be myself in front of people that I know exactly will hate me/dislike me”-

– I think that you decided long-ago, with passion, to never again pay the price, the price which you paid as a young child: trying to get your parents/adults in your home to like you (and stop hitting you) by smiling at them, saying words, doing things).

I think that you and I, in our respective childhoods, tried very hard to be liked and loved but we did not succeed, we never received the merchandise we paid for (love). Fast forward, we get glimpses/ moments/ snapshots of the experience of love, but neither one of us knows how it feels to love and/or be loved on an ongoing basis, without fear and pain being in charge, do we?

anita