Sometimes I think I am really smart, and I am often not shy about admitting to this arrogance. I may not always do the smartest things because often they are really hard, but I at least know about a lot of things.
But when it comes to women, I find myself in some familiar darkness. It's ironic since almost all my friends are women. And when they have problems related to men, I have never felt I didn't understand, never felt any "darkness", any murkiness. I may not have the best advice, or any, but their conundrums, their dilemmas, I never failed to understand. I am talking about myself, my own struggles to understand what I want from them, how I want to connect with them.
We just passed by a telephone line hanging to a pole that stood by the banks of the river that opens up to the port of Bridgeport. On it a growing line of pigeons enjoying the view of the rising sun on this very warm day. It will be the warmest day since the year started. The memories of the endless blizzards are melting away on the streets and in the minds of these commuters who fail to talk about what a relief it is to have no snow in sight (at least coming from the sky). The weather is like my life; you never know, you want patterns, you want some sense of stability, but if you just accept that changes are not only normal but exciting, you find smiles on your face even while others are mourning at the news of an impending storm.
That's how I've been feeling lately. I don't know how or why or really when it started. I don't feel numb, which was what I was afraid was the case. I don't feel jaded. I don't know if it's because or in spite of the recent storm, or blizzard, with that latest rejection. I don't know if there have been other factors that had helped me overcome the pain of the rejection, or that the rejection itself lent some peace to my new life. The difficulty of dealing with rejection stems from growing up needing to prove myself all the time. In particular, to my parents, who never seemed satisfied at what we have accomplished. While it is great that I have come to understand that their behavior stems from their dissatisfaction with themselves, I still can't just turn off the switch of throwing tantrums with a rejection.
But the most difficult rejection to take is from women. Looking back, starting with the most recent rejection, there's a part of me, hopefully the rational part, the part that would lead me out of this dark labyrinth about women, that understands how foolish my behavior is with rejections. I have heard my woman friends tell me how sexy it had been for them to meet a man who kept his cool when she rejected him, who genuinely was happy to just continue with whatever friendship connection they had, who didn't make them feel bad for not wanting him for whatever reason.
"Sexy". What does it mean for me to carry that adjective? Not just to carry, but also to emanate it. I saw pictures of myself from high school, or worse, before that. I saw pictures even of later, college, graduation. Who is that guy hiding in broad daylight? I remember only a few years ago a friend, no, more than one friend, said I was slowly changing into a man. Being sexy, being a man.
The tango club ran a Valentine's Day charity milonga this past Saturday. I was in a hurry, as always, before going there. I put on a red shirt with my favorite blazer, complemented with a pair of nice black pants. I felt good. I felt good less about how I would impress the ladies but more about just me, that I impressed myself. Not in a narcissus way, but that I felt connected to myself. I felt I wasn't hiding like I have been for almost all my life since coming to this country. It has a lot to do with my mother, but also with being an immigrant not always feeling welcome, and being a teenager not feeling always welcome is even worse. I have a picture of me when I was in junior high school, with a white blazer, rockstar glasses, and an electric piano in my arms. I took that picture by myself, hiding in my room. I wanted so much to be someone else. That's normal for teenagers. But what I am understanding now is that it wasn't that I wanted to be someone "else", like a rockstar; I wanted to be that happy me. I might have wanted to look like someone else, walk like someone else, but really, deep down, I wanted to explore where the happy me was. Somehow, after that picture, I stopped exploring. Maybe because of my messed up family with all the disconnections. Maybe because I was an immigrant dying for the approval of the white people, especially white women. Maybe I just wanted to hide behind my brain, my books, my Harvard degree because those are the things my parents thought highly of, even if they had never said anything good about them. I don't know.
A friend of mine told me that winning a woman isn't really that complicated. It can even be easy. I just had to be patient, be cool, be confident, and above all, be loving. Loving even to the woman who rejected me. What's difficult, I think, is me. The struggles I have to connect with myself are what make it extremely difficult to do those simple things to "win" a woman. After five years in tango, after feeling progressively more confident that most women want to dance with me, I still am afraid of the rejection, the big R. It doesn't make strategic sense to freak out, to throw tantrums, when a woman says "No", but that's what I end up doing.
In this new life not only did I get a two-foot blanket of snow, a simple but moving letter from my mother, a job that I loved getting early and taking the train to (and work in), not only all this and more, but also, I get to feel connected to that part of me called the man. It is that disconnection that makes me feel I am in the dark when it comes to woman, that I can't still express love to a woman who said no, that remains a source of my unhappiness. I realize that many men are in the same place. I realize that many men may have a woman in their lives, but it doesn't mean that are more connected than I am. I can see from the way they're dressed, they way they hide behind their generic designer-brand jackets that spoke of money but not of connection. But I don't want to be them; I just want to be me.
I noticed yesterday, I realized, really, that most people I interact with at work are men. This is a major change already in my life. I talk to men all the time. Yesterday I had to talk to a lot of them and very frequently because there were problems with the software. I really enjoyed it. I always was a little surprised to see my enjoyment. I was keenly aware of the discomfort in parts of me coming from being with this strange species called "men", to which I belong. And as I have alluded to in an earlier blog entry, the man I speak most to is an Asian man. I think I am ready to connect to these creatures that resemble me much more than all the woman friends I have. I finally feel I am ready to be a man, to come out of the darkness and when I finally stand from this side of the gender divide, I can better understand how I feel and what I want from the beautiful people on the other side.
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