meaning-making

I read somewhere that everyone you will ever meet in your lifetime is a “soulmate” of a sort1—an idea that is gaining traction in woo-woo circles on social media. I think this is a lovely way to reframe relational trauma if one is seeking to heal from it. If one is seeking to not heal from it, however, it’s probably the queasiest, most damaging idea they’ve ever heard2. That’s okay too. But the notion makes a certain strange sense to me, in an “editing” way. What we’ve chosen to remember about our lives and interactions is, ultimately, an edit. Why has my brain chosen to remember this person at all? What significance did they carry—a meaning that I’ve inadvertently assigned to them over the arc of my life? Once I understand this, the memory is likely to recede on its own, thank God. Susan Sontag warned against assigning symbolic meanings to happenstance. That’s fine—I think she was probably harmed by other people projecting narratives onto her body, and who among us has not been…