I've been thinking a lot about my time spent living in California, trying to make sense of the various suspected factors in my not getting along well there. So many seem relevant that it's been hard to organize them into a story. Many just seem like poor match or bad luck taking place, but I've retained a bitter taste about some of them. Resentment is always a pointer towards work I have to do. So I've been asking myself questions around it. The questions led down a path like this:
What I'm so defensive of? Because I wasn't treated how I felt entitled.
Why do people owe you that? Because I need that treatment from people.
What would happen if you didn't get it? My fear would come true.
What are you really afraid of?
It was at this point that I recently finished rereading Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, in which I've felt echoes throughout my life. Especially:
Aloud and clearly, breaking that old silence, Ged spoke the shadow's name and in the same moment the shadow spoke without lips or tongue, saying the same word: "Ged." And the two voices were one voice.
Ged reached out his hands, dropping his staff, and took hold of his shadow, of the black self that reached out to him. Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one.
[...]
Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life's sake and never in service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.
About an hour later, a moment of sudden stillness came over me, and I found myself face to face with my own shadow. So I named it, moving my lips silently:
I've been owned by my fear of what other people think of me.
The instant the confession was complete, a compact but definite wave of sensation swept out through my nerves. Something felt different.
I looked back and already knew why I had been this way. I was so sensitive to others' needs. I was dependent on others for survival and connection. And, growing up I didn't learn well to provide connection for myself.
I looked back on so many more things, which now had a different light on them. It turns out that living your life at the behest of your deepest fears performs poorly as a substitute for addressing and healing them. I've been manipulated, leaving me drained and damaged. I've invested tremendous chess-game forethought into any actions having a possible outcome of my feeling shame. I've taken it so hard when I failed to control the world and people judged me, fairly or not. The thing that really brought me down was thinking that I could show up in a community and keep working harder until some fantastical hump was cleared and everything would become happily ever after.
Surely I've been circling around this knowledge in my journey, and some prior writings have brushed beside it. But this feels closer to the kernel of insight that is my goal, like another layer of the onion around it was sloughed off. Things feel lighter, simpler.
Insights can be fleeting, especially if we don't sieze the chance to integrate them. I'm intending to observe my ongoing experiences in terms of this knowledge so that I may notice and change, notice and change, and forge a new habitual self. The behavior will attempt to seep back in the long term, and the clearer sense I develop to name it, the better defended I will be. Writing this down and sharing it sets me up for that through accountability.
Sharing this is also intended as a kind of direct medicine: shame itself is the enemy, and its cure is to make a full commitment to standing by myself, a commitment which I first test by standing here naked in your gaze.