“Oh, holy smokes!” I interrupted Mary in the middle of our conversation.  After more than a month, we had finally gotten together for tea.  “I just remembered something.  So sorry, but I never paid my friend, Celeste!”  I went on for nearly ten minutes explaining the slip up, smacking myself repeatedly in the head, and pulling out my phone to text Celeste right away.  Just days before, I attended her kundalini yoga class, and afterwards, we talked, exchanged numbers, made plans to have lunch someday.  I left without giving her any money.

“I completely forgot!” I said, visibly upset with myself.

After the interruption, Mary and I resumed our conversation.  I remember feeling a distinct, palpable drop in the lightness and warmth of energy between us, despite her pleasant demeanor.  I thought she was quietly upset that I’d interrupted her, and I apologized again, explaining how badly I felt about Celeste, but the bad feeling lingered.  I eventually dismissed it as “background noise,” just something in the air.

Three days later, I received a long email from Mary.  She spoke about how I never paid her for park registration in November.  I had entirely forgotten, but she seemed to believe that I did it on purpose.  I had the money in my purse when I saw her that night, but the demands of the evening and the joy of spending time together pushed money matters far from my mind.

She said she felt used.  I was crushed.  I cried for two hours.

A few nights before receiving her email, a relationship ended on a similar note.  Jimmie called late at night and yelled at me in anger for nearly an hour.  I made New Year’s Eve plans without him, and he was understandably hurt.  Yet, before I’d made my plans, I asked him many times what he was doing.  Working all through the weekend on a huge project, he said.  My brother invited me to go clubbing with his friends.  I had invited Jimmie to dance clubs before, and he declined.  He hates it.  I had nothing to offer him for New Year’s Eve, and he was busy.

However, the biggest reason I didn’t invite him was that, as far as I knew, we were not in a relationship.  More than a month earlier, he made it clear that he was looking for someone who would not bring “agony” into his life.  “I’ve met women who have it all together,” he said, “but they’re ugly!  Where’s the hottie who has it all?”  I woke up with him one morning, and he rambled for an hour about how I might reunite with my abusive ex-husband.  I nevertheless remained his friend.

After our road trip, however, he gave me a gorgeous, very expensive turquoise and silver necklace for Christmas.  A few days later, a beautiful scarf.  I accepted them as I would gifts from a friend, but I could not help but notice that he’d given me two things to wear around my neck, and he began encouraging me to spend time in his house even while he was at work.  I considered how he often spoke of his beloved, departed dog, Buddy.  “Oh goodness, I’m not a laborador,” I sighed.  He had essentially given me a collar and a leash.  (I related this to my mother, who took me literally.  I quickly corrected her.  “Hey, I’m hip!” she said.  Ugh, memory erase.)

In any case, Jimmie didn’t call to tell me he was hurt.  He called to tell me that I was unloving, that I didn’t care about him at all, and that I never gave but only took.  As proof, he pointed out that I never replied to his email asking how to number pages in Word.  “I drove you all the way to Madison, and you can’t even respond to the most MINOR requests!  You must think I’m SO LOW!” he yelled.  I was at a loss for words.  As it happens, I started crafting a reply the moment he sent his request, but it quickly became cumbersome, so on that day, I asked him on the phone if I could show him in person, and how soon he needed to know.  The request was not urgent, he said.  During the phone call, however, he exclaimed, “If someone had done for me what I did for you, and they asked me for help, I would have been ALL OVER IT!”

I affirmed to him over and over again, “I don’t think you’re low.  I care very deeply about your feelings.”

Then I broke up with him, or rather, delicately ended whatever it was.

Meanwhile, a deep pain began stirring in my heart.  I never quite realized how deeply I struggle with guilt.  My deepest value, my strongest desire, and what I take as my very reason for being is to bring comfort to others and alleviate suffering.  I will do anything, sacrifice anything.  I don’t care who it is.  I don’t care what they’ve done.  Have you seen the movie Seven Pounds?

This is what Buddhists call “the way of the bodhisattva.”  A bodhisattva is someone or some being who defers total release from samsara until all beings find freedom from suffering.  I aspire to that, more than anything.  Thus, when someone is deeply hurt by me, I’m devastated.  When I’ve wronged someone or profoundly failed to comfort or heal them, I fall apart.

They say “you can’t please all the people all the time.”  To be clear, I am not a pleaser.  In fact, I’m typically headstrong, blunt, and defiant of social norms.  I take exquisite pleasure in not caring what other people think.  Even for those I strongly admire, I often express the sort of irreverence that serves to protect “thinking for oneself” or “finding one’s own way.”  Yet, on more than one occassion, a lover has mistaken my longing to follow “the way of the bodhisattva” for a need to please or gain approval–or worse, for emotional attachment.  My attachment is to being a source of love, which means that the moment someone deems me a source of pain, I am perfectly happy to get as far away from them as possible.  More than once, a lover has responded with genuine surprise when I walked away from him, not nearly as attached to him as he thought, crying not because I wanted to be with him, but because I saw pain and sorrow in our midst.  The lovers I become most attached to are the ones who see the good in me, the ones who see me as a source of comfort and healing (the one’s who actually like me, for God’s sake), and those attachments tend to end well, if they end at all.  But my attachment to loving can cause a relationship with someone once hurt by me (or twice… or many times over) to linger in my world far longer than it should.

There are times in my life when important aspects of the situation are completely obscured by my focus on how I might have caused someone pain.  I can easily become so fixated on not hurting anyone that I become blind to how others treat me.  What I’m beginning to notice is that some relationships simply cannot continue without severe pain on both sides.  It is simply the nature of the conflicting desires and needs of those involved.

I am still searching for a heart of gold, but not in someone else.  I’m looking for the heart of gold in me.  Oh, where is it?  I went to sleep last night begging to know, am I capable of divine love?

Ah, but I know it’s in there.  I have felt it again and again.  It exudes from my center unbidden.  Somehow, I was formed around it.  We all were.  I suppose my only task is to let it out.  Right now, the only thing enclosing it seems to be… guilt itself.