I posted this years ago, and I’ve decided to trot the post out again since I am once again receiving these emails.

It must be near Valentine’s Day because everyone and their mother (by which I mean every infertility organization and clinic … since it would be odd if everyone’s mother started writing me emails) are sending me tips on how to not allow infertility to decimate my sex life.

But I’m not really sure how you don’t have infertility decimate your sex life — at least for a short time.  I mean, it’s sort of like an anorexic’s relationship to food — you need food to live, but your relationship with food is killing you.  And you need intimacy in a relationship, but, come on, the sex-not-equaling-baby thing is soul killing.

It is really hard to want to have sex for fun after you’ve been having sex for days in a timed-manner or want to have sex when you’re bloated to hell from drugs.  Or when your heart hurts.  It is really hard to have sex when your heart feels like a shriveled raisin-of-a-thing barely beating under your ribs.  How are you supposed to become stimulated when you are just so fucking sad?

So if you are having mind-blowing sex this week, rock on.  But if you are not; if your body is so traumatized from transvaginal ultrasounds or you feel like sex is just a reminder of what is not working in your body or you are so sad that you can’t get intimate, then stop beating yourself up and stop reading those articles and stop putting MORE pressure on yourself.

You will get back to a happy sex life if you two are both going to work to get back to that place of intimacy.  But all problems don’t have to be solved at the same time.  Sometimes, solving one solves some of the other ones too.  So if not-letting-infertility-destroy-your-sex-life feels like too big a task right now, take the night to eat through a box of chocolates in bed.  And cuddle.  And tell each other what you love about each other.  And promise each other that this is a moment in time and the future won’t look like now.

I feel like instead of “Spice Up Your Sex Life During Infertility!” articles, there should be a simple Michael Pollan-like mantra:

Have sex. If you can. And if not, don’t stress and have it later.

14 words.  That’s the advice I wish I had read back then rather than the articles I did read that just made me feel guilty.  And I was reminded of that this week when I read my 3000th email on sex and infertility.

The same advice applies to anyone not having sex who is parenting after infertility and feels guilty about it.  Or anyone who reads a stupid Cafemom article* that tells them that if they’re not submitting to their sex-craving partner they’re dooooooooooooooooooomed and is now worried.  And frankly, anyone who is not having sex for any reason and they’re feeling stressed not about the not having sex part but how the not having sex is being perceived.  I can’t think of anything less sexy than sex because you feel pressured to have sex. 

You don’t need to solve every problem all at the same time. So have sex.  If you can.  And if not, don’t stress and have it later.

* And seriously, that New York Times article is from 2009.  Surely someone has done sexual research since 2009.

I asked the ChickieNob if she wanted to be my Valentine the other day.  She smiled sweetly and kissed my cheek, telling me that she’d love to be my Valentine.

“Okay,” I said cheerfully, starting to do her hair.  “You know what being my Valentine means, right?”

“You get me chocolate?”

“Nope,” I told her.  “Being my Valentine means that I now get all of your stuffed animals, and I’m not going to treat them very well.  I’ll also be taking any Valentine’s Day candy that you get and choosing all of your meals for the rest of the year.  But thanks for being my Valentine!”

“I don’t want any of that.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but once you agree to be someone’s Valentine, you can’t now say that you’re not their Valentine.  You’re my Valentine.  Your stuffed animals are mine.”

A moment or two of doubtful silence followed.  “You’re kidding, right?”

“Not kidding!  You’re my Valentine!”

The ChickieNob left the room muttering to herself, “I think she’s kidding.”

I want to balance out any mushy feelings about the holiday.  Keep the kid on her toes.

*******

Josh and I don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day.  We never really talked about it.  We just sort of didn’t celebrate it the first year we were together, and the tradition continues to this day.  It’s not that I dislike the holiday; I’d be hard-pressed to write a manifesto against it.  But I’m going to be honest: I don’t really understand the point of it.  I love Josh every day of the year, and I hope I show that to him in romantic gestures as well as good old-fashioned cleaning his toilets and folding his laundry for him.  A lot of the gestures associated with Valentine’s Days are things that wouldn’t say “love” in my world.  Though if the man wants to give me a massage next Thursday night, I’ll take it without complaint.

I don’t know if I’ve ever said this here, but I’m against cutting flowers.  I’ll get them for other people if I know they make them happy, but I don’t want people to give them to me.  I’m also not a huge fan of bringing any foliage inside my home (even in a pot), nor do I have any desire to take care of it outside my home.  So… please don’t get me flowers.  There actually is a reason.  I think of cut flowers in the same vein as hunting for sport or catch-and-release fishing; it’s harming something living solely for your pleasure and its loss.  I can totally get behind hunting for food, fishing for keeps, or harvesting plants to consume.  Pictures of flowers = great gift!  Actual flowers = makes me sad.

But I’m a total nut job on the ethics front; I’ll admit that wholeheartedly.

*******

I asked the Wolvog to be my Valentine in front of his sister.  She either did not remember our earlier conversation, or she decided to spread the joy as evidence by her silence.  “Do you want to be my Valentine?”

He snuggled close to me, “I would love to be your Valentine!”

“Fabulous!  That means I get to harvest all your organs!  Your kidneys are mine.”

“No, they’re not.”

“Yes, they are!  Because you’re my Valentine!  I’m going to take your corneas next.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Don’t forget to harvest his heart,” the ChickieNob said, throwing her brother under the bus.  “You know, since it’s Valentine’s Day.”

“That’s a great idea!  Thank you for all your organs and for being my Valentine.”

A period of silence followed.

“Mommy gets all of my stuffed animals,” the ChickieNob offered, as if plush toys are the equivalent of major organs.

“This is so not going to happen.”

*******

Gah!  Fine.  I bought the kids chocolate hearts.  I’m not a total beast.

*******

And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “Murder and Mayhem” (The Hitt List)
  
• “Seven” (Life from Here)
• “Walking with You” (The Empty Cookie)
• “Waves” (Stumbling Gracefully)
• “Call and Response” (The Moon on a Stick)
• “State of the State” (Yo-Yo Mama)
• ‘The Pain Olympics” (Too Many Fish to Fry)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Yo-Yo Mama has an incredibly moving post this week about finding peace and an answer in a quiet drive into the city for a monitoring appointment.  I sort of don’t want to describe it too much because I want you to have the moment I had when she received her answer.  Gorgeous post.

Still Life with Circles has a post marking her blogoversary.  It is somewhat about how she writes and somewhat about why she writes, and in between are all the reasons she needs her space, why she holds tight to it and all the people who radiate out from that space.

Lastly, The Empty Cookie has a very important public service announcement that everyone who has anything they’ve ever preserved should read (are you listening!).  The hospital made her husband a Father’s Day card with their child’s handprint, and after her daughter died, she had the card framed.  Two years later, she realized the card looked faded, but until she took it down to investigate, she didn’t realize how much it faded due to the type of glass in the frame.  She explains what type of glass you need to use in order to ensure that light doesn’t fade your images.  Please read this if you also have irreplaceable images or keepsakes.

The roundup to the Roundup: So what are you doing for Valentine’s Day since we obviously aren’t celebrating it beyond the kids collecting chocolate.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between February 1st and 8th) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

Wrapping up the discussion of the Pain Olympics, Stumbling Gracefully has a very interesting post on belonging in this community and how we judge who is fit to be in it — again, an off-shoot of the whole Pain Olympics idea. More than one commenter on my posts mentioned they either felt as if they didn’t belong sometimes because they “didn’t have it bad enough” and even one person had it said to them in their own space — that they weren’t infertile enough to call themselves infertile.  Even though in all these cases, the person fit the definition for infertility or pregnancy loss.

Esperanza mentioned the Redbook blogger brouhaha (it came about three years after those original Pain Olympic posts) and points out the judgment inherent in the complaints.  Julia and Lili were still infertile — parenthood hadn’t gotten rid of the underlying problem nor had it erased their memories of all that came before.  To claim they were no longer infertile or couldn’t write about infertility was small-minded.  Or maybe I just think that because I’m someone who is parenting after infertility who often writes about infertility.  I’m assuming my thoughts are still relevant.

Some of it may have come from how it was billed.  The Infertility Diaries makes me think I’m going to hear about the process of confronting the diagnosis and building a family.  Diaries are real time.  Life unfolds and we record it.  As long as they kept infertility in the forefront, I don’t think there would be a problem because plenty still unfolds in real time in regards to infertility (especially the underlying causes that don’t magically go away with parenthood) and thinking about infertility even after one is parenting or has resolved by actively living child-free.  I only think the title of the section would become problematic if infertility went into the background.

But I could also see people reading that and thinking they’d be seeing a day-in-the-life of someone actively family building.  And no, when you are parenting (unless you are trying again), you aren’t actively family building.  So if you were going to the Infertility Diaries to get information or ideas on how to treat infertility by reading how someone else is tackling their own diagnosis, you were shit out of luck.  But if you were going there to process the emotional aspects of infertility, you could have found a gold mine.  I want to point out the same is true for my blog: while there are posts in here (especially Operation Heads Up) which can be read as a concrete how-to that you can apply to your own diagnosis or family building path, the vast majority of my posts about infertility have to do with the emotional side.  The processing of the diagnosis.

You can want something else here, in the same way that I would love it if McDonald’s had a full vegetarian, low-fat menu made with local ingredients.  But I also know that if I were ever to step foot in McDonald’s that wouldn’t be what I’d be getting.  Parenting after infertility; that’s what I serve.

But diversity obviously matters.  I take care of diversity on a personal level by reading a wide variety of blogs.  Some are still family building, some have completed their families.  Some are straight, some are gay, some are married, some are single, some are Jewish, some are not Jewish, some are African-American, some are not African-American, some are American, some are not American, some are pursuing adoption, surrogacy, or living child-free… you get the point.  My Google Reader is like a salad.  It has a big base of a certain type of blogger — the lettuce — and then I’ve thrown in dozens of kinds of vegetables to make it interesting.  I read blogs both to have my thoughts confirmed or reflected back in a new way AND I read blogs to be challenged or to gain understanding of an experience very different from my own.

Esperanza points out why diversity matters when we leave the personal blog and we move to the group blogging project or even an organization: we all want our stories represented and heard.  If we can’t have our unique story that belongs only to us heard, we at least want some aspect of ourselves represented.  So Redbook changed and brought in what they thought people were asking to hear: people actively in treatment.  Again, with only two bloggers, it could only be so diverse.  As far as I remember, all the bloggers were doing treatments with their own gametes.  I don’t think there were any donor gamete, surrogacy, or adoption stories in there (again, I could be totally wrong — I can only remember four bloggers and there were definitely more).  All were married, straight women.  I believe all were also white.  But again, one or two slots — how diverse could they be?  We have 52 possible categories on the blogroll, and that doesn’t even take into account things such as religion or race.  There were certain limitations that people had to keep in perspective.  Plus, we were talking about infertility bloggers at a magazine, not cabinet positions.

Plus I really don’t like the message that is sent when we argue about the people who were chosen.  Because their stories were just as valid.  Even if they only speak for a certain subsection of the community, that subsection of the community is important too.  Nor do they speak for everyone: they speak for themselves.  They tell their own story, not our story.

But I am going to play Devil’s Advocate because I thought of an analogy that gave me a very different perspective on the need for diversity (and y’all know I love an analogy).

If I hear that “Ladies Who Lox”* is a Jewish women’s organization, I would feel a little off if all the members were former Jews who were now Catholics. They still obviously understand Judaism and know the culture as well as the religion. Once a Jew is always a Jew — I mean, you can’t just forget formative experiences. You can’t unlearn a chunk of your life, even if you believe something else now. But there is a difference between an entire organization run by Catholic former Jews and an organization that is run by a wide range of Jews (reform, conservative, orthodox) which also has a few Catholic former Jews thrown in here. In one case, they bring a new diverse, interesting perspective to the whole. And in the other, they guide the whole perspective.

And perhaps that is the problem when we try to have a limited number of people present a perspective on a very varied topic.  It is easy to turn it into the equivalent of an organization run by Catholic former Jews (or, in the case of IF, those parenting after infertility or loss), where the perspective doesn’t simply add to the whole; that sole perspective becomes the only perspective.  Even when an organization or a blogging project strives for diversity, there are still members of the community that slip through the cracks.  There have certainly been times, for instance, when we’ve needed to add a new category to the blogroll because a group wasn’t represented.  As long as the organization is willing to keep bringing people into their membership, I’m cool with the fact that there are cracks.  On the other hand, I’ve distanced myself from organizations or projects that don’t fill those cracks when they find them.  Who the hell wants to be part of an infertility organization or blog that looks at someone who clearly fits the definition, clearly has a need to belong, and shakes their head saying, “not infertile enough?”

I blog for myself here, even if others benefit from my words (I hope), so the only perspective you’ll get here is a Jewish woman parenting after infertility.  And that’s all any of us can do on a personal blog: present our personal point-of-view and not speak for others.

The opposite is true for organizations and group projects: to try to present something panoramic and more-encompassing (since I think “all-encompassing” is usually an impossibility).  It’s a big responsibility.

So… playing Devil’s Advocate since I’ve already stated where I stand on these thoughts: could Ladies Who Lox, run entirely by Catholic former Jews present information and programming for Jewish women just as well (though obviously different since each person always brings in a new way of doing things) as an organization of actively-practicing Jewish women?

Some of you who are in the Jewish world can probably see the larger scope of this question: can you still be considered Jewish if you aren’t actively practicing (I say yes, I know others who say no).  What about if you’re Catholic and you’re converting to Judaism — can you program and teach in the same way as someone who grew up with the religion?  Apply these types of questions to the infertility community and you can see why I think that it’s more important to focus on the quality of the perspective than the static logistics of the perspective.  I think it’s more important to have a good writer who can help the reader understand than I think it’s important to hear from someone with X diagnosis treating it with Y solution.  Though in an ideal world, you’d have good writers who represent a wide-range of experiences and situations.

* While this is a fictional organization, can we talk for a second about how the smell of lox makes me throw up in my mouth, and just writing the word makes me do the same?  Why did I choose it?

A year ago yesterday, Susan Niebur, a blogger and scientist died after a long battle with inflammatory breast cancer. This weekend, I’ll get together with other bloggers to remember her life and the big way she lived it. Right now, I want to share with you one of the most important posts you will ever read. I know I have shared this before, but unless you have read it in the last week, you should read it again. There has never been a better post to help me reframe the idea of “why me” or “why not me,” which feels awfully timely this week as we discuss this idea of judging others. After all, what is the question “why me” except a noticing of what others have or don’t have in reference to your haves or have nots?

Her post, “It’s Not Fair” is about everything from the enormity of her breast cancer diagnosis to coveting the Jones’ vacation opportunities. She tells a story and then applies it to life in general:

Life is given to each of us. We each get one shot at this sucker, and we are never really told that it will be fair. We each get one life, one daily wage, and that’s it. The guy next door gets one life to live. The mom down the street gets one too. No one ever promised us the same life, the same opportunities, the same blessings, or the same time to live. No one ever promised that. We are promised one opportunity, one life, and how we live it is between us and our Creator (I believe). There is no comparing.

…

Now I need to take the passage to heart, and to stop raging on days when I don’t leave the bed (like yesterday, because of pain and great fatigue), “It’s not fair!” Because it’s not. That’s true. I can’t imagine a scenario where anyone would be happy to get cancer at 35, and think oh, yeah, well, that’s fair. That’s ridiculous! But I am coming to terms with it, and it’s easier when I stop comparing my life to others. I wasn’t promised the same life as my neighbors. I was promised a life.

Life is not fair. There is no shame in pointing out the ways our experiences differ because in doing so, we can sometimes help to even things out for each other.  There is no shame in thinking those words or saying them aloud as a therapeutic exercise, to excise sadness and frustration from your heart, if it helps you. There is no shame in asking the question, “why me,” but Susan also gives us the answer to that question.

As humans, we need to ask it. To get through whatever struggle we’re facing or thing we’re coveting, we need to remember her answer or drown in the unfairness.

I think this week what we’ve really been talking about is that human obsession with perceived fairness.  We have an obsession with comparing ourselves to others and counting up what each of us have, to see if we come out with what we perceive to be the share we deserve.  That comparison manifests in good ways such as motivation to work hard.  And it comes out in bad ways such as poisoning a relationship with another person because of jealousy.  It is so hard to stop counting, to stop listing, to stop noting all the ways we differ and covet what others have (or don’t have).  I love Susan’s post because I feel that it nudges us to use those noticing skills for good: for better ourselves or our communities.  Rather than getting stuck in that pit of jealousy.  Because it is so easy to do so.

It would be wonderful if life were like eggs nestled in an egg carton.  You open up that cardboard carton and every slot is filled the same way, with the same soft support around it, the egg receiving exactly what it needs — the same as its neighbours — so it reaches your kitchen unscathed in an ideal world.  It would be wonderfully boring if we each had the same house, the same identical schools, the same food, the same health, and a universe-issued baby dropped into our homes (as well as the same impulse to parent, since you’d need that too).  Most of the time, I think I’d take the predictable lack of struggle that comes with that scenario.  And sometimes I think that what I’ve earned, what I’ve accomplished, means so much to me.  Because it was a struggle.  Because it didn’t come easy.

It’s not fair that this world doesn’t have Susan anymore.  It’s not fair that other women will be diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer today.  It’s not fair that others conceive easily and we struggle.  It is not fair that one blogger has more readers and support than another blogger who posts and comments just as often.  It’s not fair that I took the last of the sour cream last night, leaving Josh with none, nor is it fair that he had to wake up a half hour before me this morning and watch me sleep all toasty in the bed (nor was it really nice or fair when all three of us growled at him when he came to wake us up).  Life isn’t equal; it isn’t that egg carton world, for better or worse.

And that is why Susan’s post is so damn important to re-read from time to time.

Please join bloggers throughout the web in honoring Susan Niebur’s life and contributions with a post, and please add your link below.

So I love talking about the history of the community, mostly because writing posts like that means that I get to revisit old bloggers who have stopped writing as well as their posts so I can grab their url.  I have been reading blogs in the ALI community on a daily basis for 9 years, writing one for 7 years. (With 2213 published posts in a little over 2372 days… it means that for the last 7 years, I have written and posted on average one post per day.  There are also hundreds of posts that are still in the draft folder.  Whoa.)  My Reader has always been at a couple hundred blogs; people stop writing, I add new ones… it all evens out.  I also still like to read in the way I started, jumping from new blog to new blog by clicking through comments on someone’s post.

So I like to think that my view of the community comes from a long walk around the community vs. just dropping in on a few houses (and is therefore not unique; anyone who has been around a while has probably taken their own walk).  My feeling is that we are a very supportive community.  We tend to break down into smaller groups, sometimes by experience or situation (male factor groups or open adoption groups) but more often by how long you’ve been blogging or who your friends read.  Back when the community was smaller, we did a great job of circling the wagons when someone was going through a tough time.  It’s harder now that the community is so much larger, and people can’t possibly read every member anymore.  It used to be that you could say a blogger’s name — Jenny from the IF Block — and even if you didn’t read her and email with her, you knew who she was.

But think about it this way: for some people, this community is the only community that remembers their child existed.  That while they move through the face-to-face world without anyone suspecting what happened in the past, the people in this community not only know your child’s name (or the name you hoped to bestow), but they were the ones who were there in the middle of the night with a virtual hug when you were awake, crying at the computer after a loss.  And even if you never meet them, they are walking on their earth with that name tucked somewhere in their mind, helping you carry that burden.  For some people, this community is the only community that knows how far they’ve come.  Who knows how dark their life felt two years ago, and how different it is now (or, conversely, how light it felt two years ago, and how dark it feels now).  All those ALI kids that exist now — I remember back when their parents were starting to prep for an IVF cycle.  We’ve known each other’s kids in a sense from before they were conceived, back when they were constructed out of hope instead of cells.

I’ve seen members of this community donate gametes to one another (and have children born from each other’s donor eggs, sperm, or embryos).  I’ve seen members fundraise for one another so they could afford to cycle, and yes, have seen children born because of those funds.  I’ve seen candy exchanges and card exchanges and get togethers and sleepover parties.  There have been a few who have died, there have been a few who have lost their partner.  There have been divorces and marriages.

And there have been some huge explosions that stretched across dozens of blogs.  There have been people who have fallen through the cracks.  There have been a handful of fake bloggers who created fake stories about fake infertility diagnoses or losses.  There have been trolls from outside the community who have left comments across the ALI blogosphere, and there have been trolls from inside the community that have done the same.

Once, when I was teaching middle school, some kids ran inside during recess to tell us that a kid got a piece of mulch in his eye.  The kid ended up having to go to the hospital, and the kids were upset over the thought of him hurt.  A bunch of them cried.  Josh couldn’t get over how the kids reacted to the other kid getting mulch in his eye.  Most bloodthirsty, cruel middle schoolers would welcome the distraction and subsequent opportunity for rumour-mongering that comes from a kid having to go to the hospital in the middle of the day.  They’d relish it like any good trainwreck, chatting by the lockers about how he would need to have his eye removed and wear a patch for the rest of his life.  But instead, our middle schoolers cried.  They were a good group of kids.  They saw Mulch Boy as an everykid — any of them could have ended up with mulch in their eye, on the way to the hospital with their mother an hour away.  They were worried about him.  And that was how they were in general.  That said, they also sometimes bullied each other and excluded each other and did the normal dickish things all middle schoolers do.  But overall, if I had to describe them, I’d say that the mulch incident summed up who they were for the most part, the part that spoke loudest.

I think we’re fairly mulchy too.  In both the mulch incident sense of the word, and the fact that we generally help each other grow and stay rooted in the chaos that is adoption, loss, and infertility (ALI).

That discussion on the history of thoughts about the Pain Olympics in the ALI community brought up the truth — most people engage in comparative pain or comparative grief at one point or another.  But what we didn’t distinguish between was whether the thoughts remained in the person’s head or whether they came out of their mouth or in a blog post or in a comment section.  On one hand, I sort of see a difference between thinking something and yet squelching those thoughts because you recognize that they’re hurtful (so you — in that case — are the only person who knows that you are playing the Pain Olympics).

On the other, we are (or become) what we think, right?

The truth is that unless the thoughts spill into actions or words, we have no idea what thoughts are tucked into someone’s mind, and frankly, I sort of like that bliss that comes with ignorance.  I wouldn’t want the power to know what you’re really thinking.  I assume that sometimes you think in your head, “what an idiot!” when you read something here, and then click away without leaving a comment.  And I thank you for that… the not leaving a comment part.  I don’t really need to know that you think I’m an idiot unless you can express that thought in a helpful manner.

So I do see a difference between thinking in your head “what an idiot!” and then squelching the desire to utter those words, and those who write blog posts or leave comments telling people they’re an idiot.  And therefore, I see a difference between playing the Pain Olympics in your head, but then squelching those thoughts in order to either click away or leave a comment of support, vs. those who write screeds on their blog telling others in the community that they don’t know real pain or belittling someone else’s grief in their comment section.

Ideally, we would never think, “what an idiot!” or “you don’t know pain” in your head at all, but we’re human.  And I think part of being human is not to deny our humanness but to work to balance our humanness (the desire to hoard, the every man for himself mentality, the mine mine mineness of being a person) with our need for community (it takes a village, we can’t do this alone, what’s going to work… teamwork!).

My only fear is that those thoughts — the ones we squelch — are a hidden gun.  Let’s say that you’ve decided that your child won’t go over to any house where the parents keep a gun.  Those who are open about having a gun are easy houses to avoid.  Those who are equally vocal about not owning a gun are easy to trust (in this analogy, everyone is telling the truth).  And then there are the houses you don’t know.  They are not clearly posting an NRA sign out front nor are they wearing a Million Mom March t-shirt.  These people may have a hidden gun in their house, even if they don’t participate within gun culture.  Most likely, your child will never see or know of that gun.  Which seems both safe and unsafe at the same time.  On one hand, if the hiding spot is really good and even their child doesn’t know it exists in the house, there is pretty much no chance you or your child will ever know of its existence.  It can’t do anything to directly hurt you if it never comes out of its hiding place, if that’s why you fear guns.  But on the other hand, a gun in a house is always a risk.  Always.  100% of the time.  In the same way that a knife is a risk, and a hammer is a risk, and all sorts of potentially lethal objects are risks.  We can’t pretend that a gun in a house doesn’t have the potential to be found and used.  So if your fear is sending your child into a house with any gun, then it doesn’t really matter if it’s an openly owned gun or a hidden gun, it’s still a gun; it still has the potential to hurt.

Is a squelched Pain Olympics thought just a hidden gun?  I don’t know.  All I know is that if those thoughts come out of their hiding place, they have the potential to hurt.  But if they remain in their hiding spot, they don’t really affect another person.

I’ll leave you with this thought.  I heard a great lecture on the Ten Commandments last weekend, specifically about the last commandment which is the only one that isn’t action-oriented.  It’s pretty apparent to the community if you steal, commit adultery, or murder if you’re caught in the act.  But only you know (unless you express it to others) that you covet while you’re coveting.  It’s all happening in your head.  You could stand in front of me and covet, and I would have no idea.  Unless I allow the thoughts to leave my mind or spill into my actions, I am the only person hurt by my coveting, as opposed to stealing, adultery, and murder which by definition involve hurting others.

I don’t know what to make of that, except to admit that I struggle with coveting and have always reassured myself that it doesn’t matter much because I don’t allow it to affect anyone else externally.  It’s that aspect of humanness that I struggle with the most in terms of working with it in order to be part of the community, to follow a religion.  The other 9 commandments are pretty much cake.  That last one is a killer.