There’s more going on than I care to talk about here. So much change is on the brink of rushing in. It’s hard, frightening, confusing… but I’m not here to talk about that. Christmastime also passed. I drove to work a few times past a homeless man that keeps standing alone in the cold with a long beard and dirty clothes with a sign that reads, “Will work for food, God bless” and I stopped to give him five dollars, and he thanked me kindly. His eyes were red, either from the cold, or thankfulness, and he said “Merry Christmas” and “God bless,” and I said the same thing to him, because even though I’m not a religious man, the meaning behind it tugs at my heartstrings anyway. It’s the idea behind it, I guess.
Then every day when I passed him, I felt obligated… so I kept stopping and giving him 5 dollars. So I did this three times, and now I wonder what will happen when the time comes and I drive by because I don’t have five dollars of cash in my pocket, because I’m not a rich man. But I’m glad anyway that I did what I did, and I’d do it again, and probably will.
But I’m not writing a post about that, either, necessarily. I wanted to write very briefly about something that’s pretty near to my heart. I want to write briefly about it, because I’ve been doing a whole lot of thinking about this book that I’m (still) writing called VALENTINE, and what to do with it, and how to fix it… and all these lingering doubts I had about the way I wrote it after getting what constructive criticism I did from readers. There’s one thing that bothered me more than anything about the book, and it was a big one: the message, the theme… it got muddled by the end.
I don’t want to spoil the book, and I don’t plan to talk that much about the changes I want to make to fix it, either. Because obviously, no blog post will do justice to what I’m trying to say, exactly. That’s what the book is for. Instead, I wanted to share a video that summarizes an important lesson that I want to put into this book. It’s also been extremely important to me, in my personal life, and something that was really rough for me when I was a teenager. I think it’s rough for most everyone when they’re young adults, and something most of us still struggle with…
This is part of an interview with famed psychologist Erik Erikson who proposed eight stages of psychosocial conflict in the human life. He says there are great battles that we wage in our minds, and with our personalities, and the outcome of each defines who we are as human beings, and how successful we’ll be in understanding ourselves and one another. It determines how happy we are with who we become, how positively or negatively others might see us, if we live a life of love and well-meaning and die happy, or if we look back on our lives alone and filled with regret. The one that struck me the hardest was one of the hardest battles I had with myself, to figure out who I really am, and it was called intimacy versus isolation. Erikson, the psychologist who designed the theory, explains a little bit of it himself in this video.
“Intimacy is really the ability to fuse your identity with somebody else’s without fear that you’re going to lose something yourself… to be intimate, you have to [sic] have a very firm identity already.” – Erikson
