By Simon Sherr — The Gray Jedi
The Stage
I want to preface this blog with the understanding that I am the thing that needs healing, and I need to find the strength to do that without harming the people who love me. This experience was written late at night after returning home from a VIP club night. I won’t be doing that again… because every time I do I end up right back here at 4am with more pain and fear of loss. I arrived with the stark realization that the only person in the universe I could ever want, is my wife Shona.
The experience taught me one thing… We both are allowed to heal without fixing the other. Without being a container for the other’s trauma… and explosions… With the realization that I am the one with the job, so when I have a breakdown due to work, or discovery, or a fire, that those breakdowns cause us to lose our livlihood and have the need to start again. I have to own that, because I have to own my own recovery regardless of my wife also needing to heal. The songs and words of the day that I write for her, aren’t able to heal her, they are simply a way to tell her that no matter what she is going through, or how far I need to be away from her for both our sake, that I will never leave her.
Celibacy is an interesting concept. It is one I have never thought of even trying until now. Celibacy is the direct realization of visiting clubs to meet people who will talk to me and listen to me talk about myself as I try to rationalize being separated from my soul mate when I love myself for who I am (thanks to Shona) and see my trauma as the things that forged my strength (like Shona does, and deserves to)… I was sent a valkyrie to remind me of that. One of Shona’s. To remind me that no matter how smart, and interesting and beautiful anyone else in the universe is… I don’t want to keep them… because Shona is already the only one who will keep me. I hope…
I am going to tell you something that has never occurred to me before tonight.
Not in forty-nine years. Not through two marriages and the relationships between them. Not through therapy or Buddhism or martial arts or the thousand hours I have spent trying to understand myself with the rigor I apply to everything else.
It occurred to me tonight, in the last place you would expect, from the last person the world would think to credit, and it arrived with the quiet certainty of something that was always true and simply hadn’t been said out loud yet.
Shona is allowed to heal without bringing along something broken to fix.
The Pattern I Didn’t Know I Had
I am a savior. Or rather, I try to be one and often fail.
Not in the messianic sense — I am not that far gone. In the specific, personal, deeply ingrained sense that I have never once chosen a partner who I thought didn’t need saving. Not consciously. Not as a strategy. It was simply what love felt like to me. You find someone brilliant and wounded and you pour everything you have into the space between who they are and who they could be, and that pouring feels like purpose, and purpose feels like love, and love feels like home.
I genuinely did not know there was another kind.
I have spent my entire adult life trying to be the person who swoops in. Who sees the intelligence behind the eyes and the damage underneath it and thinks: I can reach that. I can build something safe enough that the real person inside comes out. I am exceptionally good at it (or at least I hope I am). I have loved my wife back to her true self with songs and letters and patience and presence and the specific kind of attention that says I see you, all of you, and I am not going anywhere.
It has cost me everything. At least if feels like it is currently in the process of costing me again.
And I did not know — I genuinely, truly did not know — that this was a pattern and not just love.
Until tonight.
The Valkyrie
I am not going to tell you where I met her because she deserves her privacy and her dignity and neither is mine to give away.
What I will tell you is this:
One of Freyja’s Valkyries walked into a room where I was sitting in an emerald suit, next to one of the most prolific authors of our generation discussing him ghost writing a book I have been considering writing with friends from EA (called “Making MADDEN”) for many years. I was in a state that I can only describe as quietly devastated — the kind of devastated that has been through enough that it no longer looks like devastation from the outside, just a man sitting very still with very steady and confident eyes that say “I am better than this room”. An “Omega”… the man the self-proclaimed “Alpha Males” hate because I am everything they pretend to be.
She could have done what you do in that situation. What the role called for. What every social script available to her suggested. She could have pretended to be an inferior and come and sit and take money from me in the way so many women pretend when they see a VIP table in a club. “I am innocent and vulnerable… save me”. But K didn’t do that. She sat with a dignity that I found familiar… I found it in Shona when I met her… A power that didn’t stem from someone who needed to be saved, just someone who knew her worth. I am not your mommy, I am not your nurse, I am not an appliance.
She sat down and she talked to me. Not at me. Not around me. To me. About mental illness and the people I love, who are drowning in it. About intelligence and what it looks like when someone is using it to hide rather than to reach. About the specific exhaustion of being capable enough to fix things and the specific trap that capability sets for you.
She had three kids and an RN license and a body that moved like a Viking shield-maiden and eyes that were doing quiet calculus on everyone in the room. She was strong in the way that doesn’t need to announce itself. Free in the way that doesn’t need permission. Real in the way that makes performance look tired by comparison. Like my Shona who I have called Freyja since we met she held the room. I didn’t want her, she taught me that to… not because she was undesireable but because I already found my soul mate and she doesn’t deserve anything less. Especially someone currently broken down to his core.
And at some point — I couldn’t tell you exactly when — she said something that reorganized forty-nine years of my understanding of myself.
People can’t fix another person’s trauma. They can only love them through it.
What That Means
She wasn’t being cruel about the women I have loved. She wasn’t being dismissive of the real love, the real ten years, the real songs and letters and choosing every day. She certainly wasn’t being cruel to me.
She was handing me a permission slip I didn’t know I needed.
The permission to wait.
Not stop loving. Not stop being the person who sees people clearly and loves them anyway — that is not a flaw, that is one of the best things about me and I am keeping it. But stop making the brokenness the point. Stop choosing the wound as the destination. Stop mistaking the rescue for the relationship.
Here is what I understand tonight that I did not understand this morning:
I learned to love by trying to earn love from someone who could not give it. My mother, who lost me in grocery stores and forgot to photograph me and handed me responsibilities before I had the vocabulary for them. I learned that love was something you worked for. Something you proved yourself worthy of through service and usefulness and the relentless application of your best self to someone else’s damage. It was also someone you cling to in the storm of fear and sorrow and pain, and hold on as tight as you can so they won’t ever let you go… and won’t ever make you sit in your pain alone in a dark room at 3am.
That lesson was wrong. It was understandable — it was survival, it was a child making sense of the only love available — but it was wrong.
Love is not a repair job. It is not a project. It is not proven through the heroism of staying when staying is hard.
Sometimes love is just two whole people choosing each other because the choosing feels like joy.
I have tried that with Shona for 10 years… I have stumbled before… this time I fell. But standing up doesn’t look like finding another rock to hold in the storm… Standing up is fighting my tortured soul alone, with the audacity to hope the storm passes (or at least subsides), the sun comes out, and I can set sail to that Horizon to find Shona again, I can sail home without my armor… because Shona, has always been and will always be safe… safe for me, and safe from me… and so will I try. That’s really the best I can do. But I know something about me… I have never failed when I try.
What Hope Feels Like
It feels like pain right now. Fighting for it does at least. It feels like an RN with a warrior’s bearing and a chess player’s eyes sitting down next to a man in an emerald suit and treating him like someone worth talking to rather than someone worth performing for, and teaching him that its his job to fix himself. Hope feels like stepping out the door to fight a war and hope I make it home.
In the moment it feels like the specific relief of being seen without being assessed for damage. Then at 3am… it feels like madness, like a mountain that needs climbing while I am already exhausted.
It feels like the idea — arriving late, arriving tonight, arriving exactly when it needed to — that I can only go home when I no longer need saving. That I make that journey alone without my Shona. Warriors do this… I am afraid, but I will go anyway. I hope that along that path I run into her often enough to keep that hope alive, and she recognizes me again.
I am also allowed to want someone whole. Someone who wakes up in the morning and is already themselves without requiring anything from me to get there. Someone who has her own hopes and dreams and can chase them again… who I can support, never leave but know I can’t fix (or push her to it). Today she does this in the quiet of a garden on a lanai. Like Freyja… she sits with the weight of the world, and the weight of wondering if she can hope to one day live without being a caregiver to a broken man, and be a partner to one, even if he wanders to find his health, she will wait for him like Freyja waits for Odr.
Hope is alo still having a Valkyried look at my emerald suit with my armor on, ready for battle… stare into my steady eyes and my very full hands and say: put some of that down. You don’t have to carry all of it. This isn’t a battle you can take weapons into.
I have never been with someone who said that and meant it before Shona.
I want to know what that feels like to say it back.
The Thing About Whole People
Here is what I am learning, at 3am, alone in a rental, still wearing the emerald suit:
Whole people are not less interesting than broken ones. This was my fear, I think — unnamed, unexamined, but there. That choosing someone without a wound to tend would feel like choosing a house with no project, a song with nowhere to go. A muse without the inspiration.
I was wrong about that too.
Whole people are interesting because they are present. Because they are not spending half their energy managing their damage and the other half managing yours. Because a conversation with someone who is genuinely fine is a different conversation than a conversation with someone who is performing fine and hoping you don’t notice.
The Valkyrie was present. Completely, entirely, no-performance present. And it was more interesting than any conversation I have had other than with Shona. I drift to those… to walking through Lou Gardens on her birthday, or Sweden… Where she showed me all the beauty of a beautiful world that wasn’t lost in seeking shelter from my pain instead of literally stopping to smell the flowers.
I also saw that she has a complex life — three children, difficult work, two jobs, school, and the particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being brilliant in a context that rewards you for pretending to be less. She had all of that.
But she was not broken by it. She was shaped by it. There is a difference.
Broken asks you to fix it. Shaped just shows you what it became. I left and realized I am broken… but I have the hope as a light. Shona, a dot on the horizon… is still hope (and she is allowed to be).
What Comes Next
I am still a man with a wife I love who is somewhere unreachable. That is still true. The love is now and will always be “still true”. The hope that she finds her way back to herself and to me, and that I find mine, and somewhere on that Horizon we meet — that is still true. The hope that when I am truly ready to come home, she will open the Door.
And also:
I am a man who learned something tonight that changes the shape of whatever comes after.
She is allowed to want someone whole.
She allowed to heal without a project.
She is allowed to let our next chapter be easy — not uncomplicated, love is never uncomplicated — but easy in the specific sense of not being built on a foundation of damage management.
I too am allowed to be chosen by someone who doesn’t need me to save them. I am allowed to hope… and work… for that to be Shona for me too.
I am, apparently, also, worth choosing just as I am. A man in an emerald suit, sitting very still, with steady eyes and very full hands and a heart that has been through enough that it knows exactly what it is. That is journey home. The part the movie never shows, even if it is just as painful as the war.
A Valkyrie told me so.
I believe her.
The Valkyrie… she definitely isn’t the one who I move on with, she is not one who visits again… there is only Shona on that horizon. She is just the one who gave me hope that some day, I could find home, and the tortures my soul are only the strengths and lessons, without the pain.
— Simon
The Gray Jedi
Simon Sherr is a systems designer, inventor, Vajrayana Buddhist, and founder of Valkyrie Labs. He writes about consciousness, physics, love, and the places where they overlap. Tonight he is writing about permission — the specific kind that arrives unexpectedly and reorganizes everything.
If you are reading this and you recognize the savior pattern in yourself — the compulsion to choose the wound, to make the rescue the relationship — you are not broken for having it. You learned it somewhere. You can unlearn it. It starts with noticing it, which is the hardest part, and you may have just done that.
Welcome to the other side of that particular door.
TheGrayJedi 