The Alchemy of Love

Spoiler Alert: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho is discussed, including the ending.

The quest for love consumed me for most of my life, which was a dark and twisting labyrinthine affair filled with frustrating dead ends, prison cells of my own creation, and more monsters, both within and without, than I care to count. There was a gnawing, aching, ravenous void inside me, a black hole of self-loathing and depression, and my warped mind believed for decades that love was the only thing that could fill it up. It turns out I was right, but not in the way that I thought.

There is nothing pretty about desperation, and I was desperate for decades. Not being alone was an obsession, and it is easy in the throes of such a state, to craft masks, place them on others and convince yourself that this is love each time some infatuation skips down the path towards you. At its worst it can convince you that relationships that are perverse inversions of love are the real thing, or will be if you just give a little more of yourself, even though you are so so empty. You will take anything that fills the hole, even if it doesn’t nourish you. Sometimes, even if it poisons you.

Unconditional Love seems ubiquitous, present in not only every form of media, but on display in mothers’ eyes in every grocery store, and figuring hugely into peoples’ bonds with their pets. Yet, once the complexities of two fully-developed human consciousnesses enter the equation, even if love hangs heavy in the air, power structures made of competing priorities tend to form within relationships, resulting in conditions, compromises, and sacrifice. The balance of unconditionality almost inevitably becomes lopsided, and things begin to slip away.

I spent decades on that slippery slope, searching for a rare resource that seemed scarcely to exist, kissing princesses and frogs until my lips were chapped, and a few demons who made them burn. Each connection becomes a conduit and it’s easy to race along the path like a burst of conscious electricity, moving at nearly the speed of light, so full of hope that your combined energies will be used to power some great machine, that it is always a shock when the circuit grounds out and fizzles into nothing but wasted effort.

The results of these failures can be catastrophic. Part of it is the resultant inversion of worldview, where hope is replaced with dread and doom and loneliness, back to things being in black and white. More than once, these defeats left me not just longing to die, but low enough to do something about it. It is said that insanity is repeating the same thing over and over and expecting different results. By that definition I have spent most of my life insane.

It would be easy to place the blame on Hollywood for making me think a manic pixie dream girl, one of those seemingly heaven-sent individuals whose quirks and unique worldview allows them to infect others with hope, joy, and zeal for life, would solve all my problems, but the sad truth is that I met plenty who fit the bill along the way, however, I was too blind to understand how the process of self-actualization must unfold, and a refusal to acknowledge my own deficits doomed every iteration to failure, setting off the cycle again.

I have since come to understand the importance of transcendental experiences to disrupt patterns that keep us in distress. For me this came in the form of ketamine therapy, where new neural pathways were created, allowing me to finally break the cycle of torment by freeing my capacity to think beyond the well-worn ruts of repetitive processes that led me always to grief and despair.

The largest revelation, and perhaps this will come as no surprise to most people, is that self-love is a crucial component in a life well lived. Blame it on trauma or the resulting nihilistic worldview that can result from being made to feel helpless and without control again and again, but eventually it became apparent to me that absent this sense of self-respect and appreciation, I would repeat these cycles until they killed me.

Sick people tend to be drawn to sick people, and I was no different. For years, when someone I cared about would have to go inpatient at a psychiatric facility I would give them a copy of The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, in which a long-sought treasure is revealed to have been underfoot the whole time. Though I understood this conceptually, and it has always seemed like an appropriate allegory for people suffering in a certain type of way, the magnitude of the parable was lost on me until I could see more clearly. In the wake of the ketamine I was able to find the manic pixie dream girl I had looked for my entire life. She was within me.

It is impossible to learn lessons about love without other people, which is what tends to make arriving at such realizations so painful, as all too often it turns out that the whims of others’ hearts are beyond our control, despite the consuming desire to affect changes therein. However, this insight, which I ignored and rejected for most of my life, as it was too painful to acknowledge, can be couched in hope, once one recognizes the breadth of one’s ability to change themself.

The genesis of self-love may start small, with the sense of self-acceptance as tiny as a grain of sand in the palm, something that can barely be seen, though it can be felt. Despite its microscopic nature, mindful reflection, positive affirmation, dedication, forgiveness, gratefulness, doing unto others as you wish was done to you, and a thousand other opportunities in any given day can lacquer that tiny grain, just as an oyster creates a pearl, until it is big enough to fill the void inside. Only then, I fear, does one become capable of loving others the way they truly deserve to be loved.

I spent ages searching for something without, woefully ignorant that the process had to start within. Upon realizing this, I felt foolish for distributing those copies of The Alchemist, without at all understanding the message of the story. For someone obsessed with metaphor, I had completely missed a big one, but that all changed a few years ago.

A crushing lesson followed. I found what I thought was the love I had always wanted, and for the first time ever, walked along that path without letting my fears consume me and ruin things. Instead of trying to use this love to fill a void, I instead used my newfound resources to build a thing, and it was wonderful while it lasted, but then it fell apart. What I realized during those dark times was that honest intentions and hard work are not a guarantee of success in any endeavor, perhaps least of all affairs of the heart.

After that final heartbreak I reevaluated again. Examining the years I had spent dedicated solely to seeking love, which I thought would complete and fix me. I started to believe that I had nothing left to prove to myself in the arena of love. Having beaten myself senseless against the rocks for decades, feeling as if I had nothing to show for it, I came to see the treasure beneath my feet.

My best friend is a psychiatric nurse practitioner, and we spend a lot of time talking about mental health. I read all of the textbooks from her doctoral program, and some of them touch on self-love as an important component of achieving self-actualization, but much of that talk is lost with the industry’s emphasis on pharmaceutical interventions. I have come to believe that more focus must be placed on teaching how to truly love oneself, as once that system is in place, it becomes possible to achieve real peace. This is largely a result of having an innerscape of wonder, where merely pursuing lines of thinking and understanding is more fulfilling than chasing whatever it may have been that caused distress in the past. For me, this meant becoming my own manic pixie dream girl.

Where does this leave me now? These days the news features stories about the epidemic of loneliness plaguing denizens of the digital age, implying that technologies that could have brought the world together have torn us apart, something it is difficult to disagree with. Yet, I feel as if I am inoculated against this scourge, as I am surrounded by love, both within and without. My many amazing friends provide a steadfast bulwark against the emptiness which plagued me for so long.

I never wanted a traditional life, merely to be surrounded by people who make each day better, and I am now amazed to find that I have exactly that. My mother and sister have always been there, but I eventually realized that a bevy of relationships I had cultivated with a number of other incredible women fill my days with joy and wonder.

There are stresses, of course, but with this coven of support forming a web around us, when one strand sags, the weight is distributed and none of us need fall too far before we are caught. Much of my time these days is spent trying to find the right words to share what I’ve learned in an effort to give hope to others who are still struggling. Much of this comes by way of trying to generate and broadcast that unconditional love that escaped me for so long. I cannot say with certainty if it is working, but it has been a while since I’ve given anyone a copy of The Alchemist. I’ll take that as a sign of progress.