Broken Heart

“If someone else gets what you want, what you know you would be great at, it will break your heart,” TBB told me yesterday.

Maybe. But the key is that I live everyday broken-hearted, letting go of dreams to stay small enough to not be discomfiting to my parents.

The real pain to me is if I have a dream, a possibility, because then, when my heart starts to heal, it can be rent apart again under the weight of my parents fears and limits.

TBB says that I wouldn’t be selfish doing something for my future, and my sister agrees.

That’s true, of course, but it isn’t the issue.

It’s not that I wouldn’t be selfish, it’s that I wouldn’t be selfless.

And being selfless feels like what has been demanded of me all my life, down to yesterday afternoon where the expectations of a simple shopping trip demanded I be there without being there. My mother wouldn’t even keep track of what she wanted to return, let alone the reciepts that went with the purchases. I just had to let go of the $20 silk jacket I wanted for myself as she returned it, just be selfless once more.

Get the ego out of the way, say the Eastern masters. They don’t mention the part where you replace it with the will of a self-pitying narcissist, though many of the gurus, well, they do have their own sense of self.

Hope may be the thing with feathers, but a plucked chicken never has to worry about falling, though her life may be short, fat and consumable by others.

Living with a broken heart, being in relationship with pain is the survival solution that has seemed to work for me.

And changing it now, well, lots of big blocks.