On passion vs. possession

My original Lego pirate (with a replacement hat)

There was a story that a friend told me once that I never managed to quite grasp the significance of until earlier this year. Lego helped me to understand it, as strange as that sounds. I’ll explain the Lego side of things before I tell you what it helped me understand. And yes I am well aware of how ridiculous and abstract this story will sound because I’m an adult going on about how a very specific niche like Lego affects my feelings.

See, what happened to me was that because I grew up poor, I didn’t have any Lego until I was about 10 and we moved to Australia. The Lego I did have then were the smallest sets then available, the only “luxury” toys mum could afford. I loved Lego as a concept, I loved the minifigures (that’s the little Lego people), I loved the stories I could make with them, the adventures the minifigures could go on, etc. I even held onto one of my original pirate minifigures until now, about 25 years on. As a kid I played with him and as an adult I carried this little guy around on a keyring for a long time – until I lost his hat, then I decided it was safer to put him on a shelf and get more Lego. But then as an adult I became hesitant to spend money on “toys”.

In about 2011, after I left my hospital job, I started to earn more reasonable money. Now, when you’ve been poor growing up you can then become a very frugal person. That’s what happened to me. One day I was in a store with a good friend and I was eyeing off some Lego. She said to me “why do you keep looking at it? If you can afford it, get it”. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was hesitant to "waste" money. Geez, there’s people even poorer than my family was and they can’t afford basic things, so how can I bring myself to splurge on something so non-essential to life, a luxury? But my friend supported me, she could see how badly I wanted the Lego (and yes I was at this stage nearly 30 years old) and yet how much it troubled me to spend money on myself for non-essential things. She convinced me that it’s OK to enjoy life and the things I like. And so I allowed myself permission to spend on Lego. And I developed a true love and passion for it! I mean greater enthusiasm than I had as a child; greater than I think children are actually capable of (if you meet any true adult Lego fan your first thought will be ‘what a weirdo, this is a kid’s toys’, but your second thought will be ‘wow, this guy really really LOVES Lego’). It's crazy but I felt so passionate for all things Lego, and I wanted to learn everything about them and just enjoy them as much as I could. If you know me, you probably have at some point received from me photos of a Lego set and saying something like "the guys who designed these sets are absolute geniuses!" Needless to say, I soon came to own a fair amount of Lego, though I only get the sets I feel something for.

Recently I met someone else who claimed to like Lego though didn’t own any as an adult. I did as my friend had done with me and normalized it for her, told her it’s OK to have Lego as an adult – just like I had. Well, what happened was that suddenly she started buying Lego, copious amounts of Lego. Making decisions to buy entire series of Lego without first even knowing what individual sets came within that series, what the cost was, without any care for individual sets or figures, just a determination that all must be owned. That’s when I started to become uneasy with her. Because to me Lego (at an adult fan level) is about passion, and she was treating it purely as a possession. The crux of my thought was that she was treating my passion without respect. And yet I remained fully aware of how petty my unease sounded if I ever voiced it to anyone, except maybe another adult fan of Lego.

My unease peaked when this woman started buying a Lego series known as Modular buildings, a series designed by the Lego group specifically in response to adult fans of Lego. See, the thing is that to me as an amateur adult fan of Lego owning any of the sets in the Modular series is the ultimate prize, the big reward. And she bought them the same as one buys a $2 piece of junk you just want to have in your house. And as pathetic as this sound, that kind of hurt me. It's weird, but it was like stepping on my toes! It hurt me that someone who’s new to this, who doesn't share the lifelong passion for Lego, just goes and basically buys my dreams! And with full awareness that this will make me sound even more pathetic, I mourned. I felt like I had to mourn my dreams. I can't own the modulars now. How can I "treat" myself to or call a prize something that to this woman was seen like just a simple "thing"? I had to mourn that I will now never own a modular set. I don't want to share with her something that to her means nothing.

Anyhow, so recently (actually not that recent, I have been sitting on this story a few months because I didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings), I told this story to the friend who originally convinced me to get into Lego again as an adult. She’s often my confidante and knows me more than most people. And I said to her, “I am being ridiculous, right? Tell me I am being silly feeling so hurt because this other woman didn’t respect my passion; tell me this isn’t as big as I’m making out to be”. And, yes, at first she laughed, but mostly because she said to me ‘so you now get why the story I told you about what happened to me and my job affected me so much?’ And, yes, I remembered; yes, I finally understood something about her I hadn’t fully understood until then. And, yes, it also eclipsed what I felt because her story actually involved people’s careers and overall life journey. I feel I have to tell you this story so you also understand why my Lego story affected me so (in case you still can’t get over the fact that I am talking about Lego, and, yes, Lego is marketed as a stupid children’s toy).

My friend worked 10 years towards becoming an ambulance officer. It was her dream job. Every job she had before that was in preparation for it. In fact, by the time she started working this job she was possibly overqualified. Her partner knew very well that this ambulance job was the dream she had been working towards all along. Then one day, her partner realised that he was miserable in his own job, and came home and told my friend that he was going to join the ambulance service. Just like that. He never had a real interest in it. Then suddenly, my friend who is more giving than she is capable of self-preservation, realised that her partner had taken her goal and made it his. But not in the way couples do when a goal becomes a shared goal like keeping the relationship together or caring for children or growing a joint financial investment, etc. It was more like my friend’s dream was cast aside – and it quickly became, not her partner’s dream, but his “must-have”.

So, when I told my friend the Lego story between me and this other friend she said to me “I see how you feel like you were stepped on. I know what it feels like to have someone almost steal your passion from you. But not for the right reasons. Not because you actually share that passion. That's different. But when it's more of a 'Yeah, I can do that!’ Or ‘I can get that too!.. And I can do even better and go the whole way’” My friend eventually realised how her partner’s thought pattern and behaviour didn’t just apply to the jobs they did, but more generally. How other aspects of his personality and his willingness to “step on her toes”, his must-have nature, didn’t just extend to just work. And my friend became resentful of him without even realising it. She realised though that her partner did not understand her at all, and that this whole incident had caused her to lose part of herself when her partner became an ambulance officer. They’re not together anymore. So, she said, she gets how deeply hurtful my experience with my friend is because it is somewhat similar to what she went through. And they thing is she had told me her story before, but only now did I get it. Because I had now felt perhaps only a small proportion of what she felt for a long time.

There's passion. And then there's possession. And it’s hard to respect someone who will step over your passions to claim a possession for themselves.

On when it's enough

This year’s Australian of the Year award recipient was Rosie Batty, a woman who has helped raise the attention we give to domestic violence in our society. This got me thinking a lot about the issue, and in fact it drove me to watch a TED talk on domestic violence by Leslie Morgan Steiner, herself a domestic violence survivor. I strongly recommend you watch it if you haven’t already. What it did for me is it helped me answer - and ask - some questions I hadn't even thought about before. Leslie found herself in love with a man who was charming and wonderful and worshiped her. This was the same man who later beat her several times a week. The questions domestic violence pose to me are 1) how does it happen, how does an intimate relationship become abusive? And 2) why do people stay in those relationships?

You know, I realised something recently and that is that a lot of us don’t know much about domestic violence. In Leslie Morgan Steiner’s talk she pointed out that this was true of her situation – and she didn’t realise that there are warning signs and patterns to the abuse. She speaks of one of the things her ex-partner did from the start of the relationship, and that is to make her believe that she – not he – was the dominant partner in the relationship. You know the type, “he wouldn’t hurt a fly”. In fact, he’d been the victim of physical abuse as a child, he told her. He made it clear that she, not him, was the strong one. I think this is an interesting point for another reason too, and that’s because one thing I remember learning a little while ago is that victims of childhood abuse (be it sexual, psychological, or physical) are predisposed to becoming either abusers themselves or the victims of abuse again – and usually this will be with their intimate partner. 

The second step to coming to be in a domestically violent relationship is to “isolate the victim”. Now this is another interesting one because it can come in the shape of being so in love that you want to spend every minute of every day with your partner, of wanting them all to yourself; but then becomes obsessive in wanting to increasingly (it’s always in small increments) dictate exactly who you speak to, what you wear, who is allowed to be your friend, where and how you can work and live, etc. It’s easy to disguise a controlling nature in the guise of “it’s because I love you so much and I am trying to protect you” or “it’s for your own good”.

Then comes the part where they test you out. Subtle threats. Small violations. Then an apology, of course. There’s always a reason why it happened, and they love you, and they promise it won’t happen again… Then increasingly bigger violations. Most of us have seen the pictures of the “cycle of violence” that occurs in domestic violence situations: violent episode, followed by the remorse, pursuit, and honeymoon phases… until the tension builds up again and culminates in a another violent episode – and the cycle keeps repeating.

In case you haven't seen it. www.psychology.org.au/publications/inpsych/2011/feb/weiss/

One very powerful point that Leslie Morgan Steiner makes in her talk is this: “Why did I stay? The answer is easy. I didn't know he was abusing me”. But surely she must have known, right? Surely people know when they are being physically, emotionally, financially, or sexually abused by their intimate partner, right? Not necessarily, because of the often gradual nature of how abuse escalates. You know what this made me think of? The little cartoon in that Al Gore documentary where the frog who goes from room temperature into boiling water immediately realised the threat and jumps out of the pot, but the frog placed in water at room temperature and then the heat is gradually increased will stay calmly and passively until the water boils him to death.

Leslie Morgan Steiner gave a second interesting reason of why she stayed in an abusive relationship: because she believed she could help her abuser. She loved him. She knew him. She understood him better than anyone else. She knew he was a good person who was just troubled. I mean, shouldn't good people who love each other be self-sacrificing and help each other out? Isn't this particularly more applicable if the abusive partner has a mental illness or a troubled past or is “going through a rough patch”? Shouldn't we stick by them at all costs? Shouldn't we keep giving them another chance? (to repeat the cycle?)...  However, there is a flaw in this logic because it puts a greater emphasis on one person’s satisfaction and happiness at the expense of the happiness and right to be free from abuse of the other partner.

Of course, the final reason people stay in abusive relationships is because they know how dangerous their abusive partner is. Indeed, another thing I learnt from the TED talk is that the period after a relationship has ended is when the threat is greatest for those who have left their abuser. The abuser now has nothing to lose, they are both enraged and empowered. And often they do act with disastrous consequences. This is when we as a society need to step up and stop asking questions like “why doesn't she leave?” in the tone of “well, it’s her fault for staying”, and instead make sure we are educating people to recognise and avoid these situations, and protect victims of abuse from further harm through adequate judicial systems.

Now, one last question I want to go back to is does the fact that the abuser was perhaps affected by mental illness, was “going through a rough patch”, or had a childhood that was prejudicial and unfair excuse the damage they inflict on their partner? Does it make the bruises any lighter? Does it make the torment any easier to bear? Does it make the children, like Rosie Batty's son, who get caught in the path of an abusive relationship any less dead? No. There has to come a time for a victim of domestic violence to realise and acknowledge that they have at least an equal worth to the person whose abuse they continue to tolerate. For some victims it is one final beating that nearly kills them that makes them ‘snap out of their denial’. Denial of the fact that no amount of love will make the relationship good again. That no amount of wishful thinking will make the other partner be nice to you again. That if nothing changes, nothing changes. That you, in fact, are worthy of better than to suffer or die (physically or emotionally) at the hands of someone who you have given your all to. We have to be careful that when we're looking for reasons for why domestic violence happens, that they don't become excuses. We have to focus on prevention before it happens; and support and adequate protection when it's already established.

On being selfish

I want to show this photo because this flower reminded me of something I realised a little while ago and then forgot again. This flower came from my garden. The rose bush this flower came from has been growing in my garden, blooming beautiful flowers like this one every now and again for a few years. I love it! I have never encountered a rose bush as “fertile” as this, giving rise to so many flowers and so often. Now, the romantic side of me believes this rose bush is so fertile because it came from a bouquet I was once given out of love. When the flowers died, instead of throwing them out (like normal people do), I cut the stems off, and I planted them in the ground. That was a few years ago. Of course, one of the stems became this most productive plant. So together with this romance theory, every time this plant flowers I believe it is giving me, me specifically, the gift of flowers. But I never cut them off the rose bush… until today.

I've never cut one of my own flowers because I know that the flower will most likely have a longer life without my interference. I water the plant, I prune it sometimes, I try to keep the bugs off it; I like to think that I’m giving it a good life. The truth is its roots are probably deep enough now that it could support itself without my input, but I don’t want to risk it withering from lack of water or something I could have possibly prevented. In the last few weeks its base has become infected with some thing I can’t quite keep off it. But also in the last few weeks she is flowering again. It amazes me how something so beautiful can come from something that is at the same time ill.

What drove me to cut a flower off my plant today? Selfishness. Plainly and simply, I decided today to be selfish. See, I saw how beautiful the flowers on the plant were, and I thought I want to enjoy this one more, more closely, for longer, and I want to do that now. Sunset was coming and I wanted to keep enjoying my flower. I thought, she will die one day, so will I, why not take this moment in our lives and share it together? And, yes, I do get this emotionally attached even to flowers; I’m not even being metaphorical! So today I decided to be selfish and brought my beautiful rose inside with me, to enjoy her beauty (purely for my own benefit, though caring for her – and yet not as best as she deserves).

And what did I remember? It was about selfishness. That in order to love, or at least act on love (and what is love without actions? Non-existent), you have to be selfish. At some point you have to decide and act on that inner impulse, to reach forward and both give and take. There’s no one-sided love; as much as we give, we always take. So you have to at least be self-confident that you are deserving of another’s love – and go about either accepting it or striving for it. Even if we do that thing where (because we “know” ourselves so well) we think others are better than us, that we’re not the best person in the universe for the object of our affection, you have to be selfish or else you can’t truly love. We would never act on love if we didn't decide at some point to be selfish. And, of course, this brings me to a second realisation: that it’s hard to love, because you lack confidence and an accurate sense of self-worth, when you are suffering with depression. It’s like my flower struggling to be beautiful, to blossom and radiate, in the face of whatever illness she is facing. How could I love her in a satisfying way without first deciding that I’m worthy of her beauty and she of my care?

And now is the point where I realise that perhaps, in a way, I can’t help but be metaphorical.