The Truth About Love

Act I: How Disney Did Me Dirty

Dear Readers, All Five of You Who I Appreciate So Much,

Promises and baking are a wonderful start, but they live on the skin’s surface. I want to go deeper if I may, all the way to the marrow if I dare. After all, I write because I like organizing words into stories and thoughts, but I keep writing to reach the Truth.

I’ll admit that I am a little scared of the Truth. Confronting the Truth together is even more intimidating than going at it alone. When you confront your Truth by yourself, it will still change you, but you can choose when and if to ever acknowledge it again. When other people know your Truth, though, I suspect their very knowing keeps you accountable to wild transformation. I want that. Or at least I want to get as close to that as I can.

I want to talk about Love.

I don’t want to talk about finding Love. I want to tell my story about looking for Love, and all the loneliness and vulnerability that came with that journey.

Let us begin.

Once Upon a Time, I was born. I was born, I think, looking for Love. Perhaps more accurately, I was born as Love, like any other being, and I responded powerfully to the Love of others. At first, Love arrived through my caretakers and family. This felt wonderful, all hugs and giggles, warm fabrics, quality time, food I loved (read: pasta), and rapt attention.

In my formative years, I was so lucky in Love. I remember being adored. Celebrated. Spoiled, somewhere between perhaps and definitely. I particularly remember the Love of Papa, my grandfather. Papa took Love to the next level. He showered me with a specific kind of attention that (over?)nurtured my self-esteem. He recorded me “reading” to myself in babble talk when I was a toddler and played me the tapes at night to help me fall asleep. When I was a little older, he set up a microphone in the basement, where he often cooked in the adjoining kitchen, and played pop songs so I could croon along. I loved dolls, so he built me a doll house. He roped someone he knew into calling me on the phone one year and pretending to be Santa, so he would know exactly what I wanted for Christmas. His sweetness healed every slight and childhood heartbreak, and it was buried with him when he passed. I have never found another quite like it. This was the light side of Love.

At the very same time, very early on, the dark side appeared, namely when I was taught the importance and primacy of Romantic Love. I call it the dark side because it would develop into a source of suffering in my adult years that distracted me from my purpose and joy. From what I remember when I was young, no one ever talked directly to me about Romantic Love or even told me how important it was that I eventually found a husband. No one had to. I heard that message loud and clear, everywhere I looked. The older I grew, the louder it got.

The earliest and most culpable source of this messaging for me was Disney movies. I was obsessed with them. All of them, in their colorful VHS covers that smelled of plastic and promise. Papa had them lined up on a shelf, every single one that came out. Disney movies captured my attention and provided my first lessons in womanhood. Disney taught me that women could love nature, thrive in her own community, be born to inherit the throne, but their story would not end at its happiest until the prince fell in love with her. Whether these princes had anything in common with the women, how they treated the women, whether they could speak in full sentences — all unimportant details, just as long as they showed up and saved these women from their single lives. We never saw what life was like after these women married their princes. That part was left to our imaginations and mine told me that this was when the real magic began.

All I had to do to find a prince and live happily ever after was to become exceptionally beautiful. Oh, and skinny, of course. Very, very skinny. I could do that, I thought. Since all of the Disney movies had magic, my little self believed with all her heart that she could attain beauty through my own magic of superstition.

Cut to Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, Illinois, where my family often took me for fun. By often, I mean a lot. Probably most weekends. My mother tells a story about when I was four years old and some adult asked me the name of my preschool. To my mother’s chagrin, I answered, “Woodfield!” I remember really enjoying Woodfield Mall — the escalators, the white shiny floors, and the very best part, the fountain. I cannot recall who, but someone along the way showed me all the pennies in the fountain and taught me that if I threw a penny into the fountain, I could make a wish that would come true.

I have never told anyone this, but I only ever wished for one thing as a child: I wished to grow into the most beautiful woman in the whole world. I did not only make this wish in the fountain of Woodfield Mall, but any fountain I encountered. I would beg the grownups for pennies and then, one by one, make my only wish, every single time. This persisted all through my childhood and even into high school.

Papa and I

In the past few years, I read about an exercise done in therapy in which you talk to your child self or inner child. You can ask questions, you can tell her what she needed to hear at the time, or you can simply spend time together to get to know her. The point, if I am remembering correctly, is to gain understanding about where your motivations as an adult come from and help you heal from beliefs or situations that harmed you as a child.

I grew curious about my child self, finding it striking that she only made this one wish. Her discipline perplexed me. I understood why she made this wish and the source of the messaging, but I wanted to dig deeper to find out what this messaging made her believe about herself. So, I sidled up next to my child self when she was about seven years old. She was just about to make her wish with a penny at the Woodfield Mall fountain. I sat on the stone edge of the fountain while my child self stood facing the opposite way, toward the fountain. She was grasping her penny in her fist. I looked over my shoulder at all the pennies on the fountain floor. I smelled the chemicals in the water. I marveled at the the height of the fountain and how it didn’t get us wet, but just sprinkled us with wish water once every few seconds.

What are you wishing for? I whispered to her, although I already knew.

Can’t tell you. My child self said.

How come? I asked.

Because then it won’t come true, my child self said, exasperated that I seemed to be an adult but still didn’t know this basic concept of wish-making.

What if I could say for sure that your wish would come true if you only told me and no one else? Would you tell me then? I asked her.

My child self stared at the water, her long kinky hair piled into a pony tail at the very top of her head, secured with a hair tie that had a brightly colored pair of blue sunglasses attached to it. Her little belly rounded underneath her tee shirt, and it pained me to think of how soon she would learn to suck that in.

No. My child-self answered.

Really? I pressed. Even if it was sure to come true anyway?

I can’t tell you.

Okay, but why not?

My child self reddened. She didn’t have to answer. This secret embarrassed her and came with a shame she didn’t understand.

I feel badly about it now, but I then played a trick on her. I said, Is it okay if I tell you what I wish for?

My child self, intrigued as I knew she would be, nodded enthusiastically.

I whispered into her ear the “wish” that felt more like a curse. I said, I wish that I could be the most beautiful woman in the world.

My child self’s eyes widened. She looked at me gravely. That’s MY wish, she said.

Do you ever wish for anything else? I asked her.

No. She said.

Can I ask you something? Why do you want to be the most beautiful woman in the world?

My child self looks surprised. She had never considered this question. She soon had an answer.

You won’t tell anyone? She said.

I won’t, I swear, not until you tell me I can, I say.

So I’ll find the prince I’m going to marry and everyone will love me.

And why do you want to get married? I ask.

At this, my child self laughs. She finds me ridiculously silly. So that I’ll be happy, ah-duh! She rolls her eyes — an expression she learned recently. And rich! She adds.

Do you think, I ask her, that you could not get married and be happy? Or that you could not get married and be rich?

My child self does not hesitate in answering. No way, Jose.

Well, what if it turned out that you grew into a pretty woman, but definitely not the most beautiful woman in the world. Do you think people would still love you?

Yes, she said. I was just about to breathe a sigh of relief until she added, Just not as much.

Oof. You’re killing me, kid.

This conversation with my child self revealed a lot to me about my pursuit of Romantic Love as an adult. Even as young as four or five years old, my child self 1) already wanted Romantic Love; 2) believed that she could not simply be and have Romantic Love, but she had to become something else to get it; and 3) thought Romantic Love was something she had to trick men into with her devastating beauty. No wonder I struggled so much as an adult, who never stopped searching for Romantic Love and believed deep down that the fundamental parts of me had to change if I was going to trick someone into being with me for life.

Now, good on Disney that their fairytales have a come a far way since the ones in my youngest years, but the messages encoded into the moral fiber of impressionable little self did not evolve as easily. It required about twenty years of self-reflection, situationships and solo dinner dates before I finally arrived at the fact that I would never find the prince. I would find many lovely partners, but the happily ever after simply did not exist.

I even lost hope in normal, run-of-the-mill Love. The kind that works well enough to see you through the end of life, or at least most of it, with a quiet happiness. The kind that may not light your soul afire, but keeps you company as you try to make sense of this life while inching closer to death. It finally sunk in that no one was going to dramatically save me from a curse with one kiss, my love of reading would not lead me to the library of a beast who I could change into a suitable man, and my size 11 foot was definitely not fitting into any glass slipper. Disappointing, yes, but nothing compared to the looming dread that there might not be anyone at all, actually.

Of course, my first problem was that I was looking for love in the wrong gender. I have an older cousin who witnessed my coming-of-age years. She likes to say that I wasn’t gay my whole life, but that I just decided recently to be gay. These statements annoy me because they discount my entire history, but I let her go on believing whatever she wants because I owe no one, not even my closest kin, an explanation. But were she to ask, I might just point out that aside from all the Disney princesses of my youth, zero of whom fell in love with another princess by the way, I was also raised in a Christian Baptist cult.

Now, let me tell you how that affected my pursuit of Love.

To Be Continued...