Reception and Transmission, and a July 24, 1987 greeting card

One of the many things I learned during my relationship with Tito was how reception of what you say shapes what you transmit. I wrote a lot of letters and made many tapes in which I poured my heart out to him. I was incredibly vulnerable and admitted things I would never have said to anyone else. With one sentence, he could have curtailed this tendency by making me understand in ways subtle or gross that such things were not welcome. But, he never did. He was so emotionally available that I could tell him my joys, my sadness, my fears, and my pains, and he'd take it all in.

This experience was enlightening in a way that I would never have imagined. The contrast between how I formed a friendship and later relationship with him was so stark that it made me reflect on my other relationships in ways I would never have done so otherwise. When everything works the same way, even if it works poorly for you, you think that is the way of things. When something comes along and works so much better, you start to question what is wrong with everything else. Over time, I also considered how my reactions were limiting how other people talked about their lives to me. It was transformative on both sides of my relationships.

My nosy mother may have wished for a more emotionally intimate relationship with me, but the way in which she reacted shaped the limits on our relationship. Every time I talked about a hardship in my youth and she said, "You think you have it hard, you have it easy compared to my problems," she let me know that she didn't want to hear about my pain. Every time she belittled my accomplishments by telling me that my grades meant I was "book smart, but lacked common sense," she let me know that she didn't want to hear about my success. One invalidating remark after another formed the boundaries of how intimately she could be involved in my life, and she didn't realize she was the one hammering in the posts in the fence I built  around myself.

As I post more of my written correspondence, there will be a lot of emotional revelation, because it was what I was experiencing and Tito welcomed it. It may seem a bit much for my readers as they may feel discomfort with so much emotion and self-analysis. For me, having one person in my life with whom I could tear down all of the walls was liberating and it made Tito and me closer than most people will ever be.