It’s ok if an exchange or experience with a teacher left a bad taste in your mouth. It’s ok if you didn’t like the dynamic. It’s ok if you’re disoriented by exposing your most vulnerable self and wanting to feel that personal connection with the teacher. Instead, feeling flattened by the impersonal dynamic of teacher-student.
You have to give yourself that freedom. That freedom to notice. Something in you felt questioned in that, like your experience isn’t valid. And it’s okay to acknowledge that.
Especially if you’ve had your experience extremely validated and honored and not over simplified in the past even if it was just once. That one time counts. And so noticing when there’s a qualitative difference there.
You’re not ungrateful for the exchange but it’s okay to discern that there’s a difference. Because when you don’t, you’re actually going against yourself.
But noticing your experience, validating your experience – even if it isn’t like everyone else’s – is important. And trusting yourself, your instincts and your ability to tune into nuances – not gaslighting yourself out of that.
What happens when you’ve been blindsided over and over again by those you love and who supposedly love you?
You live a life of constantly looking over your shoulder, never being able to trust believing the next blindside is just around the corner.
You live a life of theft, where you behave as though you are constantly “getting away with something” and that it’s only a matter of time before it gets taken away.
You rush and scurry in your thoughts and actions like you’re being chased by an invisible yet very real force “out to get you”, punish you or give you a “reality check”.
You can’t differentiate between being blindsided by your family and being blindsided by life. And you take them to be one and the same – never looking or questioning the validity of that out of fear and confusion. And never learning the possibility to separate or divorce one from the other.
You become suspect of anything good happening in your life out of fear of it being ripped away.
You become hyper-alert and hyper-vigilant to the cues you get from other people and your environment and you internalize these cues as potential danger. Another blindside.
You can’t trust and have no visceral understanding of boundaries because you believe yourself to be unworthy of it.
You’re careful not to shine too much or become vibrant with joy so as to not draw any unwanted negative attention to yourself.
You become small, hidden, walking on eggshells, trying not to make too much noise.
You fear being seen and heard, out of fear of rejection and envy from your ‘loved ones’.
You’re scared of living a happy life, full of joy contentment and of fulfilling your Heart’s longing.
You struggle to trust and you have a deep-seated fear of peace, well-being, safety, goodness, respect, dignity because when you experienced these things in the past you were punished for it. And so paradoxically feeling ‘unsafe’ was safer than feeling safe. Feeling unpeaceful was more peaceful than feeling peace. Because you weren’t challenging anyone when you were unsafe and unpeaceful. You weren’t reflecting back to them that basic spark of life that they had lost long ago and despised to see in you.
You have trouble taking ownership of things, voicing your likes and dislikes out of fear of that being used against you.
You feel as though your good qualities and gifts are something to hide, be ashamed of, or forcefully share with those who want to leech off you. Those who view your good fortune as an undeserving luxury bestowed upon you and see you unworthy of it.
You have trouble doing what’s best for you because it “seemingly” comes at odds with our own family.
Your honesty, directness, down-to-earth qualities and open heart were often and repeatedly used against you to manipulate you or gaslight you out of your own truth.
You take abusive behavior to be ‘normal’.
You have trouble standing up for yourself or calling out abuse with family and loved ones.
You question your feelings and gut instincts because you were conditioned to distrust your own intelligence.
You have a deep-seated belief that your longing to be loved and have simple direct communication is a tall order. Having been gaslit into believing that you are in fact the one who is ‘difficult’, lacking love and basic communication skills.
You were repeatedly and continuously put down by your family – never given credit or praise or being seen for your own individual beauty or genius unless it was to credit or complement them.
You were heavily conditioned that on a very basic level everything you did, said or wanted was wrong, bad or too much.
Your sense of agency and sovereignty were constantly challenged and instead of being nurtured it was never given a chance to sprout. And so your wherewith-all when it comes to trusting that Life is good, trust worthy and full of possibilities was intensely colored by a sense of doom and gloom.
Being celebrated is a trigger point for you because major events in your life like birthdays, graduations and milestones were completely sidestepped and overlooked. Birthdays, weddings etc. became painful for you to experience and your ability to genuinely be happy for others became tarnished.
Your presence was ignored, taken for granted or treated as an unnecessary burden.
You were taught to distrust your decisions and second-guess yourself by never getting any approval or emotional support.
No matter how loyal or loving you were to your loved ones, it was very easy for them to betray you, ignore you, gaslight you and blindside you and that became a very sore point of pain, shame and a belief in your inherent unworthiness.
So here’s to your amazing genius and beauty for being able to survive all that, thrive and be so strong.
You can get through anything. You can get through everything. You’re stronger than you know. Strength is not what you think it is.
What you long for is yourself. All the aspects of yourself that you’ve deemed unworthy, wrong, too much. All the things you’ve tweaked to feel safe, good, loyal, worthy, lovable. To fit in. To belong. All the things you’ve disowned, deemed bad. All that… is what you’re longing for.
To return to your fullness, your wholeness. Yourself unabashed. Unfiltered. Raw. Clean. Messy. Vulnerable self. Other people can reflect that to you. Reflect the goodness you’ve learnt to turn away from, the lightness. Reflect aspects of yourself you’ve hidden away maybe out of fear for your own safety.
When you’ve been so conditioned to stay in fear of being yourself, it’s understandable that the ‘safer’ inner state would be the fearful state. Because it’s the most familiar. Something in you registered a long time ago, when I am in a fearful, tweaked state, I am more safe. Because it was probably true back then. You probably couldn’t be your full unabashed self back then, it wasn’t welcome.
Sometimes you can’t see yourself clearly. You can’t see what you’re missing. What a beauty you are. What a delight you are. And it’s nice to have that reflected back to you. But it doesn’t mean that the other person is the reason for that reflection. So you don’t need to feel bad about it. Or needy or wrong. You can be grateful the other was able to provide that for you. And remind you of your own beauty. Your own heart.
The realization that ‘falling in love’ is actually a choice of convenience is not something to be ashamed of. There’s shame there because we bought the fairytale. The movie idea of love. The romantic, steamy, everything you ever wanted kind of love. The kind of love that everyone pretends to have and shows off. That love is a dream, an idea. And it sets entire cultures of people up for disappointment. Because real life has nothing to do with these kinds of dreams. And these kinds of dreams can make real life feel like a total let down.
The idea and pressure that someone can fulfill you and love you for the rest of your life is a lie and a very tall order. A lie we tell ourselves to cover up our wounds. Our loneliness. Our mortality. Our fleetingness. Our fears and aches. This is not cynicism. This is an inevitability that comes from being unfulfilled by everything outside of you and from being fed lies.
‘Marriage’ has developed so many strategies (lies) to cover up, outrun, or deny the truth of this. It’s made relationship into a fantasy; an idealistic make-believe story that we are continuously fed through rom-com’s and fairytales. The flip side of that being a very dark underbelly – only discovered once you’re on the other side of the marriage door. That darkness is a pretense of realism (hard-earned “wisdom” from parents and married peers) emphasizing things like compromise, the importance of having kids and of tradition.
There’s nothing wrong with any of these things in and of themselves but when they’re used as strategies to avoid deeper truths – it’s hell in the making. Compromise in that context is not real compromise, it’s not the kind of compromise that keeps your sense of agency and integrity intact. It’s a bargain, a barter; leaving you robbed of your own life, your own sovereignty.
And in our innocence, we are trying to live up to these dreams, these ideals, these fantasies. And failing miserably. Putting an enormity of pressure on our partners and on ourselves and feeling enormously let down. Because we can’t make dreams and ideals into reality. We can’t translate the should’s and could’s and ‘this is what you do when this happens‘ into real time because it’s out of sync. So then we fantasize. We fantasize about the what if’s and what went wrong and how did I end up here. And we project that maybe out there somewhere is the perfect person, the perfect life just waiting for me.
We look upon our lives with contempt and disdain for it hasn’t lived up to the fantasy. And in our limbo, we look upon our partners to find fault and blame. To make it somehow tolerable and to justify our anger and rage at how could this be. Brought face-to-face with our gaping wounds and forsaken dreams. Made to question why and who and what we are and what on earth could make us happy. That’s if we haven’t bolted and moved onto the next thing already.
And so there is something to holding yourself to the limbo and not bolting. Holding yourself to the gaping wounds and to the forsaken dreams. If you can withstand the pain and the constant reflection from the world that your “holding” and not bolting is a thing of madness.
Because when you’re not adhering to the guidelines; not using strategies to cover up your unhappiness. Not having the kids, not bargaining and bartering, not doing the dance of a married couple – you stick out like a sore thumb. And you can start getting back this reflection from the ‘world’ or everyone doing the dance that there’s something seriously wrong with you.
That you’re settling for “less than you deserve”. That your ‘holding’ is living a life of misery. That it may be even an act of cowardice to hold. That ‘brave’ people, “bite the bullet”, end things and end up finding what or who they’re really looking for. That being unhappy is a sign ‘the relationship’ isn’t working. That something needs to be done about this.
But in the holding and not bolting, not doing, you’re actually learning. Learning to trust yourself. To trust that you have it in you to hold and be held. To have everything come to sway and entice you. To make you feel a failure, to shame you, to make you a travesty.
In that holding, you learn to discern. In that holding, you grow in patience. In that holding you go into yourself more and more and more and more. In that holding and in the frustration that inevitably arises and encircles you, you learn to let go of the answer coming from outside of you.
From the one who knows. The teacher, the parents, the culture, those who look like they got their shit together – all of it. You learn by way of being forced to let go. Let go of everyone else, everything else, the whole world and everything in it.
Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue, a wonderful living side by side can grow, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.
Rainer Maria Rilke
You are not ” a couple”.
You are two individuals living side by side.
Unearthing archaeological artifacts by virtue of who you are and where you are.
Unraveling, unwinding – being dismantled.
No need to run.
No need to hide.
No need to be “a couple”.
No need to feign attraction.
No need to “uncouple”.
This point of stalemate is inevitable.
Between any two people.
Everyone comes to this point.
Whether they stay or not is a whole different story.
It’s the point of no return.
No options.
All the options feel old.
Not something to run away from.
But to sit in the discomfort of all the uncomfortable truths.
It often helps to look at your current set of circumstances with the eyes of your former self. Some years ago, you would have wished for the very things you don’t notice anymore. And this is not something to be shamed for or feel guilty about. It’s just amazing. It’s not your fault.
The whole world is trained this way. Trained not to notice. Trained to go to the next thing. Trained to veer towards what’s not available. What’s available is boring. Had. Done. What’s not available is a promise. Still to be. A dream.
And we love to dream. Dreaming’s all we got. Otherwise, it’s monotony. Being here. The ordinariness of what’s right in front of you. The lack of fulfillment of it and the discomfort of that.
The dream is so much more alluring than reality. It’s sexy, it’s yet to be, it’s anything you could want and more. The mystery. The fantasy. The yearning of it. It hasn’t solidified. It’s ethereal. And it’s a promise of fulfillment.
Everything in our world is about the dream. We can’t escape monotony fast enough. Monotony kills our illusions. Our fantasies. It kills the dream. The dream of fulfillment. The dream of yet to be.
On the other side of that dream is despair and this is why monotony kills us. Because monotony doesn’t distract from despair. In fact, it highlights it.
Despair . . . is the only cure for illusion. Without despair we cannot transfer our allegiance to reality—it’s a kind of mourning period for our fantasies. Some people do not survive this despair, but no major change within a person can occur without it.
People will rob you blind of your solitude if you let them. They will make what’s privately yours – theirs. And leave you wondering why you feel swindled. Dispossessed of yourself and of your own riches – not knowing and not being able to even name that dispossession. That disorientation.
Guard your solitude with fierceness. And don’t be surprised if this provokes others into strange behavior. Your solitude may be upsetting to them. Because in guarding your solitude you pull the rug from under their feet.
The rug of bullshit. The rug of convention, appearances, pretense, niceties. The rug of ‘normal’. The rug of suffocating conformity.
Your going “off-script” highlights their “on-script”. Your guarding of your solitude highlights their own desolateness. In their desolateness they are desperate to make you desolate with them.
But you can leave them be. Leave them reaching. Let their grasping arms fall on nothing. In your solitude you can be untouchable. Ungraspable. And in that, giving them back to themselves.
And, to speak again of solitude, it becomes increasingly clear that this is fundamentally not something that we can choose or reject. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about it, and pretend that it is not so. That is all. But how much better it is to realize that we are thus, to start directly from that very point. Then, to be sure, it will come about that we grow dizzy; for all the points upon which our eyes have been accustomed to rest will be taken away from us, there is no longer any nearness, and all distance is infinitely far.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Bring to the light your solitariness, your self without anybody else there to define you. Give it breathing room and respite. For it has been shoved in the dark since the title of ‘relationship’ has come into your world. For in essence, in truth, you don’t know what relationship is, you never have.
You have always taken it to be ‘something’ that is imposed on your freedom. So long as there is a wish to love another solely – which meant become another’s solely – and to share a life together – freedom was moot. For what place has freedom in relationship, in daily living? What place has solitariness?
To long for that part of you that remembers the air of that freedom was to betray the very verbing of that ‘relationship’. And so you could not long in the open, but only in secret and in hiding for your freedom and your love of it.
But what is that longing? Is it a longing for solitariness or is it a longing for freedom? And what is the difference between them, if there is any?
Your idea of ‘freedom’ has become a distant memory, something of the past that you recollect with nostalgia. Thinking that if ‘freedom’ was brought to the surface in the midst of relationship, it could not and would not bear the tight chains of that imprisonment.
The two could not go together and in that, making a choice: freedom or relationship?
The ‘freedom’ of the past was a feeling of being at liberty to be approached by others, by the world. Being a ‘free agent’. No ties, no chains. It meant a sense of autonomy to come and go as you please, it meant possibility – that the world is your oyster so to speak. You could be whoever you wanted to be with anybody you wanted to be with. And that could change from day to day, month to month or even hour to hour.
At large, this ‘freedom’ was an idea, it wasn’t a living truth but an image of what freedom meant from a conditioned rebelliousnessand an aversion to responsibility. Not the world’s version of responsibility, but responsibility in the sense of making a choice, committing, loving and what that really means without sugarcoating or denying.
That ‘freedom’ is a a freedom that cannot bear the confines of ‘relationship’. The responsibility of not betraying another’s trust, another’s heart. Of being confined to the monotony of daily living where that ‘responsibility’ becomes a burden. Growing heavier and heavier with time, and with it, the feeling of imprisonment. That ‘freedom’ makes an image of ‘relationship’; a snapshot of requirements moving through time with ‘freedom’ as the price tag.
How can you be in relationship and long for freedom when you don’t know the real meaning of either? All you have are ideas; a narrative of an old world – a world that is being completely dismantled.
Do not hurry to answer these questions for they are important questions to just ask without searching your mind for an answer. But in letting these questions work upon you and in your silence and willingness to explore, not knowing the answer.
