You're annoying and I love you
On who we let in and how come
A NOTE FROM M.G.
I’ve been meaning to share more, to write more, to post more. But all too often I come up against myself; call it imposter syndrome or something more mechanical, less melodramatic — nonetheless it stops me in my tracks every time I’m on this dot com. In an effort to shake that misguidance, today I’m sharing a passage right out of my own personal journal, from over four years ago, edited for clarity and brevity. It’s about embracing others as they are — so that we might learn to love and accept ourselves more fully. I’ve paired these words with some photos from Father’s Day (my first as a father myself).
Remember them now how you’ll remember them later. In our finite lives, we spend far more time complaining about the many inconsequential faults of others; the kind of thing that we write off as a personality quirk in a eulogy.
For now, we put them on blast in our private conversations — but in the days to come, when they’re no longer here for us to enjoy their presence — we will see these quirks as uniquely them.
I think without knowing it explicitly, much of why we love our friends, and especially our families, is because of their faults — for their faults embody their personhood and highlight how we love them despite them.
When we learn the things we don’t like about our peers, we settle into a space of growth. If someone stays in your life, it means that you have decided that you can accept some things you don’t like about them, and that they transcend those issues for you; that they are not just more than their faults, but an amalgamation of their better and lesser attributes. We are not settling – we are growing and empathizing.
Who we choose to grow with, and thereby accept the faults of, says much about who we are and are choosing to become.
It is exactly the faults we see through in others that we learn to forgive in ourselves. Furthermore, if we wish to be forgiving of ourselves, it may be fitting that we seek out in our lives the troublemakers and personalities that awake in us these specific discomforts. The way out is through.
We become our forgiveness – our grace is what shapes our future self.
Grace, I feel, is a curling and wavelike motion that crashes and builds on itself. The tension that washes away our fear through confrontation and fruitful deliverance.
We cannot transcend our current and present selves without the waves of grace that we extend to ourselves and others.
Moving past the self, however, I go back to my original thought, which had much more to do with how we treat others in the immediate and short-term. Some of what I come up against in my day-to-day is frustration with the people I am doing life with. I know, for me, it is important to reframe how I experience this frustration by thinking of these individuals how I might if they were to suddenly die.
So much of my frustration must be born of placing an infinite condition on a finite life. I have to learn to see the insignificance of my frustration in light of your significant existence.
February 1, 2021
There’s something here to be said for change and integration. I can see myself now as the person who both wrote these words four years ago, and the person whom after becoming more a person who can live these words, then took these photos.
Me and my people, like you and yours, are imperfect. And I’m sure at least somewhat to their chagrin, I prefer to see them that way — to make photos of them that way.
What lies so damn prominently in the word ‘imperfect’ however, is the word ‘perfect’. By comparison to a gratuitous, heavenly standard you win my heart of hearts. You are im-pishly perfect, you are ours, you are annoying, and I love you.
