(Excerpted from the essay, "Not Love").
My friend and colleague, the art historian Arlene Raven, once asked me, "Do you see yourself as more unloved or unloving?" She was upset with me at the time. I could tell she believed the answer was the latter, whereas my personal myth at that point in my life was all about the former.
It took some years for me to deeply understand her question: was I measuring love by what I received or by what I gave?
For most of my life, I'd been focused on what I had not received—from my family, from my friends, from the ones I'd claimed to love. I could recite by heart every detail of this deprivation.
But had I ever considered love in terms of what I'd been withholding?