Savannah

When I think of Savannah, I can’t help but smile. I actually don’t know her very well, but she has helped me see my relationships with younger women like her in a vastly different light. This change in perspective is very healing to me.

When I try to tell her what she means to me, I don’t have the words. There is too much to say. I can sometimes only convey wordless gratitude. Today I can take all the time and say all the words I need.

Here’s where I stood before I met Savannah.

My relationships with young women (girls, actually) started when I was a young man. As I’ve explained often on this blog, I was painfully shy and withdrawn as a boy. This posed a problem when I reached adolescence. I didn’t know how to carry on conversations with the girls I was attracted to.

Worse, my own self-worth was wrapped up in what these girls thought of me. And my assumption is that they found me disgusting. This was my distorted reality.

I didn’t attend school dances or my prom. I didn’t know any girls I would have the courage to ask, and the thought of having to hold up my end of an evening-long conversation terrified me.

I became infatuated with a girl my senior year in high school. She didn’t return my affections.

I became infatuated with a girl my sophomore year in college. She didn’t return my affections.

I took these failed relationships very personally. They left me devastated, lonely, and probably clinically depressed.

The story does have a happy ending: My senior year in college, I met my Jamie. She saw me, liked what she saw, and decided that she would be my exclusive girlfriend. Jamie showed me that my own opinion of myself was false. Jamie fills me with gratitude, even more so than does Savannah. But that’s a topic for a different letter.

Old wounds cut deep, and scars sometimes hurt. It took a lot of time to heal from the shame I felt as an adolescent. (Definition of shame: The intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are deeply flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.)

Savannah helped me heal from this shame. But before I get to that, there’s one more thing.

I’ve facilitated personal growth workshops for 15 years. In the early years, we would draw a lot of students from nearby colleges. I enjoyed working with these young adults, and I sometimes would be seen as a father figure by these young men and women.

There was one workshop in Portland where this was particularly true. On Saturday night the presenting team got together for a process called “Significant Moments.” Here’s how the process works: Every person on the team takes a turn and shares a moment during the workshop where we most significantly lived our purpose in life. It is not a time to be humble. It is a time to claim the impact we made in other peoples’ lives.

I shared my moment: I felt that this particular workshop, more than any other, I was seen as a father figure for a number of young people. No less than three young women actually approached me and told me this.

The next day, I was talking with the leader of the program, a person I looked up to and saw as my mentor. I shared again how special I felt to be seen in this light.

He replied that others had mentioned how I was relating in a “fatherly” way to young women. His demeanor was one of concern. His message was this: People are concerned about the way you’re relating to young women.

I was blindsided by his words. When I shared my significant moment, I felt no hint of impropriety or shame. His disapproval took something innocent and beautiful and turned it into something ugly and disgusting.

The insinuation was bullshit, pure and simple. Everything I did was completely appropriate. But the criticism touched that scar of shame and sent me spiraling into it. I bought into the bullshit.

For years afterward, I was oh-so-careful to never even have the appearance of any sort of inappropriate behavior with young women. I checked my motives with every interaction and usually pulled back from any sort of relationship intimacy with them.

Erring on the side of caution kept me from feeling shame. But it also kept me from giving to young women in a way that I was absolutely comfortable giving to other people. It did not heal my shame, it perpetuated it.

Now let’s talk about Savannah.

I met Savannah while facilitating the workshop in Chattanooga. She attended the workshop and then volunteered to be part of the presenting team. Savannah is outgoing and vivacious. Unlike me, she is unafraid to show open affection toward others. I admire her for this.

Savannah cares deeply about others. I see this in the workshop room. She is often moved to tears. This brings out the best in us old-timers who sometimes take the miracles we see for granted. It reminds us how we felt when we first had the privilege of doing this work.

I’ll need the rest of this letter to describe what is—to me—her greatest gift.

I was in another Significant Moments process with the team. I decided to open up a bit and be vulnerable. So I shared two feelings about myself. The first is that I felt comfortable in the fact that I was respected. The second was that I felt insecure about the fact that I was loved.

From that moment on, Savannah made it her mission to remind me that I was truly loved, by her and by the rest of the team. She didn’t hesitate to show her affection toward me.

Here’s an example. By the end of each workshop in Chattanooga, I was exhausted and just wanted to get on the road and be home with Jamie. After each workshop officially ended, we brought in pizza and everybody socialized. I had absolutely zero energy left for socialization, something I find challenging even in the best of situations.

So I usually gave hugs to several key people, grabbed a couple of slices of pizza to go, and kind of sneaked away. I never felt good about this. It felt like I “belonged” all weekend, and then suddenly the room turned into a place where I felt uncomfortable and awkward, where I perhaps didn’t even belong.

During one of those wistful departing moments, I paused for a second to survey the room before walking away. Suddenly I heard a voice from across the room call my name. It was Savannah.

And suddenly I was surrounded by a group of young women who enthusiastically wanted their hugs before I left. Savannah was the instigator. She had recruited them from the table where she was sitting.

I was loved. I belonged. I felt it strongly, in a way I never had before. Significantly, it came from the hugs of a group of young women. When it was Savannah’s turn, she said simply, “I love you.”

The words astonished me. I couldn’t have been so vulnerable as to say those words to her. My shame would have told me they might be seen as inappropriate. Yet here she was, showing me once again that my shame was bullshit. This simple act says more about Savannah’s qualities than anything I could describe about her.

Savannah taught me that I do have something to offer young women. I spent too many years pulling back, afraid of having any sort of relationship intimacy whatsoever with younger women. I was stuck in shame-based fear. Because I went overboard to make sure nobody could accuse me of being inappropriate, I made the opposite mistake of closing myself off. I cheated both others and myself out of my gift of vulnerability and connection.

I have something to offer everybody—young and old, male and female. A young woman’s sense of intimacy toward me will look different than a more mature woman or a man—as a type of father-daughter relationship (increasingly close to grandfather-granddaughter!) When I am emotionally clean, I can embrace this particular kind of intimacy. When I stand in my worthiness, I can accept the affection of young women and be affectionate in return.

Savannah, with your help I can finally embrace my worthiness. It’s taken merely 36 years for me to free myself from self-admonishment and shame.

Perhaps Savannah has even inspired me to be more openly affectionate with others, which is no mean feat for me! Recently I went to a week-long retreat in Tennessee. I hit it off with a guy in my small group. He was outgoing and friendly, and I didn’t have to try hard to be friends with him. Toward the end, we talked about how we appreciated each other’s friendship over the week. I suddenly blurted out “I love you.”

Now, I’ve said “I love you” to men in the past, but they were well-established relationships. I didn’t even mean to say it! I wouldn’t have said it if I had a split-second to think about it. It was an awkward moment for both of us, but it jump-started a relationship that continued after the retreat.

Savannah, was this your doing?