"Not my type"

 December 26. The hour is that indeterminate stretch between twilight and total darkness, when the light in the room acquires the color of old amber, and the shadows on the corners begin to breathe to the rhythm of my own thoughts. Today someone closes a door that I didn't even know I'd leaned in hope. The words were uttered with that polite, almost surgical precision that leaves no room for hemorrhage but causes a deep, thumping dull pain: "I will never fall in love with you, you're not my type."

When you hear this, the first thing that leaves you is not the belief in the other, but the sense of your own wholeness. In the space of psychoanalytic experience, this "type" that is spoken of is actually a complex amalgam of unconscious projections, children's deficits and archetypal shadows that the other carries within it. When someone tells me I'm not his type, they actually say, "You don't fit my inner myth. Your face does not coincide with the mask of the savior or the tormentor that my psyche is programmed to look for.” And there is something strange liberating about it, even though it may seem like a verdict at first. I'm not part of the foreign theatre of replays. I'm superfluous about their script. But this "excess" is exactly where my true freedom begins, my spiritual journey to the center of an "I" that does not need other people's recognition to exist.

I sit in the silence and try to feel the weight of this "never." It is long, infinite, like the horizon above the sea in winter – gray, equal and absolute. In a spiritual sense, “never” is a word of the ego trying to control the future, while the soul knows only “now.” When they tell me they won't fall in love with me, they actually put a limit on their own ability to see beyond form. They see the "type," see the packaging, see the social construct or psychological compliance, but they don't see the entity that pulses under the skin that breathes in the silence between my words. Love, in its highest, divine form, knows no types. It is an outpoure of grace, it is the recognition of light in light. If love is conditioned by whether someone fits into a pre-drafted template, then it is not freedom, but just another form of prison in which we look for a reflection of our own lacks.

I inhale the cool air of the evening and ask myself: why does this rejection hurt so intimately? Perhaps because in the early stages of our development, we learn to look into the eyes of the mother, the "Other" to find out who we are. When the Other says to us "I don't choose you," our inner child hears "you don't exist." This is the initial fear of disappearing in the void. But here comes the moment of transformation. Here is the point where psychological pain must be turned into spiritual humility. I am not an object that should be “liked” or “used.” I am the subject of my own life, a child of an infinite universe that does not operate the categories of human preference. God has no “type.” The sun doesn't just rise for those that match its aesthetic. Rain does not fall selectively. Then why do I, in my little human vanity, require another person to recognize me as the only and destiny?

Perhaps this “my type” is the biggest gift I have ever received. It takes me back to my own garden, forces me to stop watering the artificial flowers of someone else's approval. There is a raw purity in this rejection. It clears the space of illusions. When someone rejects you so definitively, they unwittingly give you back the power you've invested in them. He says to you, “Here you have no place, go away,” and you go, first with your head bowed, but then, step by step, you feel the weight fall off your shoulders. You don't have to try hard anymore, you don't have to bend, you don't have to become something you're not, just to fit into the narrow frames of someone else's fantasy.

The silence in the room becomes denser, almost palpable, like velvet. I think about the memory of the body, about how each “no” leaves its mark, but also how each trait is part of our personal geography of holiness. The wound is the place through which the light enters you, Rumi says. And this "not my type" is just such a wound - a cut in the ego through which a deeper understanding of the essence of the relationship can penetrate. If I am looking for someone who loves me only because I am his “type”, I am actually looking for someone to fall in love with their own projection, in their own comfort. True love is uncomfortable. It is a meeting with the unknown, with the radically different. It is a willingness to be changed by the Other, and not just to consume it as a suitable accessory to your own life.

Psychoanalytically, we are often attracted to what we know, even if it is destructive. Our “types” are often the repetition of old pains, attempts to repair the past through new actors. When someone tells me I'm not his type, they may unconsciously protect me from the role of an extra in their personal tragedy. He frees me from the need to be a tool for his healing or his punishment. It's an act of unconscious mercy. I can see it now, in the twilight of tonight, as an invisible thread of providence that pulls me out of the way of the train that I thought was my only transport to happiness.

Faith is not about getting everything you want, but trusting the silence that follows after prayer. Sometimes divine silence is the most eloquent answer. It says, "You're too big for that little box you're trying to get into." When someone says 'I'll never fall in love with you,' they actually admit their own boundary. He says, "My heart doesn't have the capacity to fit your rhythm." And that's fair. That's fair. There is beauty in this honesty, however painful it may be. It allows me to stop waiting on the platform of a station from which the train has already left – or better yet, the train is not intended for me at all.

I look at my hands in the twilight and see in them not emptiness, but an opportunity for prayer. A prayer of gratitude for rejection. Because it is only through rejection that we can experience true humility. Humility is not a sense of inferiority, but the awareness of our own inextricable relationship with the Whole, which is not dependent on human validation. I'm here. I'm here. I'm breathing. I'm feeling. My longing is a proof of my existence, not a deficit that should be filled by another. In this state of inner silence, I begin to understand that the “type” is simply a social mask, a label on a bottle that contains an infinite ocean. Who can tell the ocean that it is not its “type”? Just someone who's afraid to sink.

The transformation of sadness into grace is a slow process, similar to the way water sculpts the stone – not by force, but by perseverance. Every time we accept a “no” with dignity and inner peace, we build a temple of sustainability. We are learning to be our own refuge. Psychoanalysis teaches us to integrate our shadow, and spirituality teaches us to sanctify it. In this space between the two, I find that my dignity is not hurt by not being chosen. On the contrary, it is purified. Only the essence remains – the part of me that is eternal, which does not grow old, that is not “type” and which has always been and will be loved by the source of all life.

Maybe years from now, when I look back at tonight, I'll see in those words not a wall, but a bridge. A bridge to a deeper intimacy with yourself. To a love that is not a market deal, is not a demand for compatibility, but a quiet presence in the sacred space of the other, without requirements and without conditions. But until then, I will let this “never” rain down in me like a bitter wine, which in time will become a cure. I will allow tears, if they come, to wash the dust of my eyesight, so that I can see the world not through the prism of lack, but through the prism of abundance. Because if a person can’t love me, it only means that the whole universe is waiting for me to love it – without conditions, without categories, without “types”.

The world out there has subsided. The wind barely touches the glass, as if apologizing for its insistence. I close this diary with the feeling that something in me has rearranged. The geometry of pain has transformed into an architecture of peace. It doesn’t matter if I’m “familiar type.” It is important that I am true to my own rhythm, to my own truth. That I can stand in the silence and not feel lonely. That I could be rejected by a person and still feel accepted by God. And in this silent acceptance, I find everything I have ever sought in other people's eyes. It's all right here. In the breath. In the silence. In the grace of being just yourself – immeasurable, unique and completely free from other people’s definitions.

Sometimes the greatest love is the one that leaves us alone to find that we have never been separated from the Source. And when they say to me, “You’re not my type,” I’m just going to smile in my heart because I already know: I’m the Type of Life. I am the form that Love has chosen to accept at this moment, and that is more than enough.

I will fall asleep in this silence, enveloped by the soft radiance of a new understanding. Tomorrow the world will be the same, but I will look at it with different eyes. Eyes that no longer seek confirmation, but see beauty in existence itself. Thank you for this “no”. It was the key to my deepest yes.