I Am Not Alone

Louisa May Alcott

L.M. Montgomery
 

I have a friend from my beloved country who is probably the cleverest woman I know. She once shared with me stories of her former relationships, one with a writer and radio announcer who often shared their personal dealings with his audience, which quite obviously upset her. But honestly, although I would never do that, I kind of understand it. I think about relationships more than anything else, the dynamics between people, their individual personalities and what makes people do and say certain things. I am fascinated by people who I just cannot quite figure out, and the more I cannot figure something out,  the more I think about it, analyze it, and try and try to reconcile it in my head. It’s like a puzzle that drives me crazy until all the pieces are in place. And part of the process for me includes writing about it, writings which I mostly keep to myself. But sometimes I feel like sharing.

Well, for a while now I’ve been thinking about some specific things, relational dealings I suppose you could call them, over and over and over again because they just have not made sense to me. Fortunately, I have some wise people in my life, one of whom introduced me to a different perspective of this situation that was constantly rolling around in my mind. I think this conversation was the key that unlocked the entire scenario to me, and I have so much more clarity on it now.

 

There’s a scene in one of my favorite movies, You’ve Got Mail, in which Meg Ryan is writing to her “friend” discussing how something that happened to her reminded her of something she read in a book, and she asks him, “shouldn’t it be the other way around?” Shouldn’t it be that something you read reminds you of something that happened to you? I don’t know the answer to that, but I have recently had the experience where something I read in a book reminded me of something that happened to me. Actually, there were two books that reminded me of this certain situation: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott and Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery. Since I’ve gotten clarity about this scenario, I have been better able to look at it, and I find, I am not alone! I have never been in this situation before, but it appears I am not the first to experience it! Of course I didn’t think I was, but when you’re in something you’ve never been in before and you don’t know what is going on or how to navigate the situation, you never think that maybe someone else has had an experience like this. But once you understand what is going on, you realize, this whole thing is as old as time. Ok, maybe not quite that old, but seriously, this is a classic scenario.

My situation, well, I’m not going to share it with you—it is far too personal—but it is similar to those faced by both Jo March and Anne Shirley. What strikes me though is that people wrote this, the situation I've been through and the emotions that followed. For days I have been comparing my situation to one of Jo's. I used to watch the movie and wonder why she was so upset at a certain point. Now I understand. L.M. Montgomery wrote, almost a century ago, exactly what I have experienced, what I thought, what I felt. And yes, it is in the form of fiction, but to write such truth, she must have experienced it. (In fact, looking at her biography, it seems she probably did.).

So I realize that there is nothing new under the sun! Thank you Solomon. Why should I ever think that I am in a situation completely new or foreign just because I have never experienced it before? No, there are people around me, older and wiser, who have experiences from which I can learn. And if not them, well, I can obviously find a book about it somewhere. And whether or not I can glean wisdom from people or books or anything else, I realize there is nothing I can experience that has not already been experienced, and it is simply comforting to realize that I am not alone in this.