You Cannot Share Everything.

A Meditation on the Interior Life.

There is a primal need within the human person for surrender. I read once that the nature of the human person is to be a gift. The sentiment is repeated in literature and philosophy throughout civilizations of all times. It’s in Genesis, it’s in Homer— Lucretius famously writes about the mutual self-surrender enveloping generation and destruction in De Rerum Natura through the image of Venus and Mars, Love and Strife. This idea that the self exists to be given haunted me from the first moment I heard it, because I have always been an all or nothing kind of person. People ask me a remotely personal question and some sort of dam breaks and a deluge of information that they didn’t quite ask for comes out. Whenever I am caught into friendship with someone they are suddenly knit into my soul—everything that is mine becomes theirs, even things that I should not share. Romantic interests become fragments of my identity, introducing a kind of intimacy I never intend to invite but become dependent on as a bedrock of stability.

This phenomenon has exploded in the last three years of my life. I thought that I was becoming a better person, that I was mastering self-gift, because the deepest and truest parts of my soul were empty. Yet, the side effects of my perceived self gift include (but are not limited to): severe artist’s block, self doubt, a dysmorphic view of my body and personhood, a loss of innocence, and a loss of identity. This problem, which gnawed at me from the moment I stopped having the emotional space to write, became unavoidable in the trenches of my first New England winter. I then began a line of questions which led me to where I am now, to the final questions:

1.) Can you give of a self that does not exist? The Answer: No.

2.) How do you retain yourself? The Answer: By not sharing everything.

You cannot share everything. Everything inside of me pushes against it, and my social media feed certainly titters to the contrary. People seem to share everything to the last time-stamped second of their day. How else are you supposed to keep the conversation going? How are you supposed keep people captivated if you cannot share everything?

These words ebbed into my mind on an evening run six months ago. I’ve always wanted to be the kind of person that runs, but only last year did the want turn into a need. Spending my life as a student of philosophy, theology, literature, and classical mathematics is one of the richest lives I can imagine living, but a life in the mind stimulates the mind. The body is left a thin-blooded thing if not for intensity. I started running to process the questions which simmered up out of seminars on the most universal, deepest wounds of the human race. I ran to sleep at night and to be at peace in the day. The habit continued even into the rest of summer and my evenings were full of runs.

I was already sweating from the still-hot setting Oklahoma sun, but I put myself through the paces of warming up my muscles and joints anyway. Things started to leave my head. I stopped thinking about the guy I was having relationship troubles with at the time, stopped thinking about how I was going to save enough for my semester abroad. The future and the past dissipated: the only moment to be lived was the one in which I was, transitioning from an embarrassingly slow warm-up to a steady state run. My parents’ house is conveniently exactly halfway down our dead-end country road. It’s half a mile to the stop sign and half a mile to the dead-end. That night I chose the dead-end, which wanders down through the woods until it pulls out at the Bullgate, an expansive property overlooking the sandy-banked river, flooded from tornado season.

For the duration of my childhood, the Bullgate was owned by a gentleman raising cattle. He recently closed his business and the land was bought by a couple that sits in front of my family at Mass on Sunday. They gave us the code to the padlock and their blessing to wander the property and the riverside. That evening I jumped the iron fence for the first time and ran along the Mars-red road.

The sun blazed orange, low in the cloudless southwestern sky. The atmosphere bled out hazy pink and yellows into the evening heat. Purple bull thistles and prickly bluestem poppies and sprays of white and yellow wildflowers stood above the tangle of brush and fine green grass. The beauty overwhelmed me, tears rushing to my eyes. I felt, for the first time in a long time, the gentle invitation of the Almighty God to communion. The sky and the earth blazed and a sensation somewhere between agony and satisfaction and surprise consumed me.

I felt the sudden overbearing need to take a picture, to text somebody, to capture the moment but my phone was half a mile away. I drank in the sights, my soul hanging at the edge of ecstasy. I asked, How do I have a relationship with other people and God at the same time without losing the ability to create?

And then those strange words came to me in reply: You cannot share everything.

It seemed counterproductive to deep relationships at first. If I could just keep talking, I might have a lot of friends—I wouldn’t end up spending my entire summer vacation alone, running in the evenings for fun?

The six months that have unfolded since that evening run have been spent meditating on those words—you cannot share everything. I’ve thought abundantly of Christ’s hidden years, of the Gospel’s direction to retreat into one’s inner room, of the last words in the Gospel of John: “There are also many other things that Jesus did, but if these were to be described individually, I do not think the whole world would contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25).

You are created in the Image and Likeness of a God Who gives Himself to you. Creation is offered to you in its entirety. You are made to give of yourself, but you have to have a self to give. The Blessed Virgin Mary, who held things quietly in her heart, sets an example to us. There is goodness in listening to understand instead of to respond, in experiencing things to enrich one’s own soul instead of proving its worth.

I share this meditation on not sharing with an almost Lucretian irony. Yet, this is a reflection more than it is an exposition, and that is what was missing the past three years. Learn to live no longer as a satellite for your experiences to ping from person to person on a highlight reel. Your experiences make up who you really are.

When I returned home from my run, a text inquiring about my run awaited from a well-meaning friend. The medicinal pill of truth still sat on my tongue, and I was presented with the opportunity to spit it out or swallow it and retreat into a revived inner sanctum.

“I had an encounter with the living God,” I said. “So, pretty stellar.”

+AMDG+

the river at sunset, six months later.