Love and Fear

“I don’t have an act. But I’d love for you to applaud me anyway.”

It seemed like a joke at first, and for a second we just sat there. How could you sign up to do an act in a talent show and then ask for applause instead?

It didn’t take long, though, before all forty of us were clapping. And then somehow it built on itself, so that before we knew it we’d gotten up from the floor and were jumping up and down, stamping our feet, hooting, shouting his name.

At first we cheered for the audacity and fun of the idea. But a minute or so later, my throat scratchy with shouting, it seemed like there was a second wind, a second wave of energy through the crowd. And now we were clapping not for the idea, but to celebrate this man himself.

Suddenly we were clapping and shouting and whistling and stomping for his just BEING. Not because he’d done anything or been anything in particular, but just because he is.

Sort of like the way we touch a baby’s tiny translucent fingers and feel awe just because it is, no need for it to be anything else.

Only this was for an actual adult. Flaws and all.

I found myself wishing, as we clapped and shouted, that each one of us could stand at the center of a circle and be applauded. But then I realized that we were also cheering for ourselves – jumping and hooting and shouting for each other and for ourselves, just for being alive on this planet today.

This week the things that scared me most were about opening up to love’s possibilities.

On Monday night I stood shivering near an Arrivals sign, with cars speeding by to pick up passengers and that sort of zoomy, fast-moving feeling that an airport seems to spur. I was wearing a chauffeur’s cap and carrying a sign reading “Mr. _____.”

I’ve been dating the man whose name was on the sign for the past few months, in an often-euphoric but sometimes-turbulent courtship that counts among its challenges the fact that spans more than two continents.

So why was I wearing a hat and carrying a sign? I’d made a silly joke about sending my of-course-nonexistent chauffeur to pick him up. Also, several of the suggestions people have had for me lately, in terms of “things that could scare me,” have been of the street performance variety:

“How about if we do a little improv theater on the sidewalk in Berkeley?” Or –

“How about if we go to Voodoo Donut in Portland? You can buy a voodoo-doll donut and stand on the street, pricking it with a needle so the raspberry filling oozes out like blood. You can mutter darkly about the misdeeds of an ex-boyfriend, or something, while I stand a few yards away and clutch my chest, fall to the ground…”

I found excuses at the time not to act on either idea – a good sign that they fall outside of my comfort zone. And that, of course, meant that I’d have to do something similar soon.

So here it was: not as creative as the Voodoo Donut idea, not as interesting as the improv surely would have been, given that the instigator of that idea actually knows her way around a theater. But something that scared me, nonetheless.

It turned out that my little piece of performance art had nothing on the rest of the week. What takes more courage, really, than to open yourself to loving someone, with all your flaws, with all their flaws, with all that risk of being hurt – in small ways, today, and maybe in bigger ways in the future?

The commitment I made to myself this week was to show up every day, with all the questions and vulnerability that love can bring, and be as authentic as possible. It may not sound scary, but it was.

One of the things we talked about this week was what love means to each of us. Well, actually we only talked about what it means to him, because what he said caught me off-guard and left me sort of babbling. It was something like this:

“When I say I love you, it means I love all of you, including the parts I may not like as much. It means I love the whole package, and that I also love the people who matter to you, because they are a part of you.”

In other words, it sort of sounded like “I applaud you, celebrate you, just for being.”

Yikes.

At that talent show, after we jumped up and down and shouted and clapped, I asked the man on the receiving end what it was like. He said that it felt like a physical wave pushing toward him, almost like he had to step back at the force of it.

Funny how when we finally hear what we’ve been longing for, it can scare our socks off.