When reading Mae Neecha’s autobiography, I had been deeply struck by her description of a life as a swan in which she saw her swan lover die before her. I started crying when I read that short paragraph and I knew it had struck a chord.

Eric is my beloved swan mate. I love him so, I am so attached. I am a person who wants a swan mate, someone with whom I share every moment, side-by-side, always together. That love ideal is not the same for everyone. But it is overwhelmingly meaningful for me, and has been since I was a kid, that I reason it must be based on my past experiences, based on what has arbitrarily happened to me before, based on what I am used to. I came into this life with a swan shaped hole in my heart and my entire existence has largely centered upon filling it. Life without a swan love is a life that is empty and meaningless for me.

I chose Eric as my swan love. And when I did, I started grasping at him, clinging to him. I placed him in my story and started writing my story around him. Now I am stuck, attached, with all the dukkha that ensues. But when I consider the mechanics here, I realize it is pretty dumb to get so attached to Eric that I cry over random swan deaths, because I  can’t imagine a future without him, when it was me that made him some critical ingredient to my future in the first place.

It’s like painting a picture with a bowl of fruit in the center. Then stressing that the bowl of fruit may be cut out somehow. Worrying the picture will then be incomplete. But I am the painter, I put the fruit bowl in the picture to begin with. The object itself has no meaning, no significance. I just place it there, claim it as mine, and as a result I became attached. Then I suffer the idea that it could disappear. That the story, the image, will be incomplete. This is my situation: I wanted a swan partner, someone who I believed would care for me, keep me safe, affirm me. Eric fit the bill so I claimed him, I created a story –a future fantasy of our life together — and because of the story, not because of Eric, I am attached.

For the story I stress, I work, and most of all, I worry if the ingredients I believe I need for the future story are in jeopardy. I need this body, I need Eric, I need money. But the only reason I ‘need’ these things, is for the story I myself made-up. The story, that is self. ME. MY NARRATIVE. This is atta – I , others, belonging are something meaningful because they mean something in my narrative. I am the story I tell myself.

The thing is, that story is totally conditional. I ended-up with Eric because my ex had decided to go to Oxford and leave the country. Otherwise, I might well have married him. Eric’s ex had dumped him just before we started dating, if not, Eric would not have been available just as my prior swan flew the coop. Its circumstantial that Eric and I ended up together and what is circumstance can’t prove ME, it just proves the circumstances in which something arose.