Since leaving my job I’ve felt shame and inadequacy that it’s been so difficult to organize my life. The experience of post-institutional life has felt disorienting, like I’m floating in space without any grounding.
In an institutional context definition is provided by the environment. External pressures and vacuums create tracks and containers to show up. This created the comfortable illusion of having a load-bearing personality and motivational structure. Within that context I could effect change and produce outcomes and have sustained focus and motivation. But my personality only filled the negative space of my environment. Personality is a matrix of contingent and co-dependent reflexes, and it emerged from external circumstances.
Now those external circumstances are gone. Rather than navigating through a maze of constraints, tracks, pushes, pulls, I’m met with space.
My reflexes remain. Some hold expectations and desire for external forcing functions to provide structure for my energies and interests. Others hold resistance to these same structures, an exhaustion to pushing all the time. It feels like this personality structure is beginning to crater, a shape that beginning to sag. On some level I think what’s keeping it going is a fear of falling apart, the fear of not knowing what will be on the other side of the process, a resistance to starting over. I think it goes much deeper than work, and I don’t know how deep it goes — what will I lose in my unraveling? What will be left of me?
In my home growing up, my experience revolved around my father and managing his volatility and anger. It secondarily revolved around my mother, hiding the parts of myself that I felt were unacceptable — my own mess, anger, sexuality. To this day, I compulsively track and survey when people are in my presence. As Irene walks behind me, I feel shame about writing this piece: will she judge me, does this topic show that I’m a mess, does it prove I’m inadequate, or maybe it proves I’m a hand-wavy bullshit artist? There’s so much shame, and I compulsively track and hide all the time. Masking is hiding. It hinges on my projections of what I think others perceive, and then provides a mask of what I think they want. As there are too many people to hinge on, it means I have a default masking behavior: external positive affect, internal repressed mess. Often this means signaling positivity, “I’m on your team”, “I’m not a threat”, “I’m not bad”. It also means there’s a constant probing energy or tension, people pick up that I am subtly and subconsciously agenda’ed, poking them to reveal their inner state, imposing an energetic micro-obligation to provide me some kind assurance.
Something happened recently which showed a glimpse of the other side of unraveling. A friend has been spiraling in a state of crisis and she told me that the way I could help would be to ground in my experience. In that moment, the way I could show up for her was by showing up for myself and easing into my own presence. Human being rather than human doing we joked. My personality structure is compulsively doing, it’s always tracking and adjusting. In that moment I was permissioned to be because it was what the external audience needed of me. I began crying, it felt like some kind of weight had disappeared. Behind all the doing was a subtle sense of something that’s been there all along. It felt warm and cozy and full. This was being. And it was so light and easy and alive. It felt so good. And seeing it once, I can’t unsee it, thank goodness.
Several days later I woke up and couldn’t fall back asleep. My doing-ness has always made meditation difficult. The doing-ness felt death in non-doing-ness of meditation. What if meditation was just sinking into the feeling of the goodness of presence? I began to ease into my being, it felt like peeling back layers of experiences, going to the core; it was a warm bath of coziness. The external layers were thought reflexes, little muscular tensions and aches, little discomforts, but beneath it was a warm bath.
Sinking into presence, goodness welled out of me. Gratitude naturally arose. This day is a gift, how will I make the most of it? Feelings of love towards so many people, towards my body, towards life. If this is meditation, I see how monks could do this all day. There was gentleness, gratitude, care. There is so much aliveness and heart. I love this being that’s always been here, behind all the layers of personality and masking. I had internalized the belief that my authentic self could not be held, that it would inevitably be misunderstood, it would trigger punishment or judgment. Tears well up. I feel sadness for the perfect little boy that couldn’t be held. Even now he’s trying so hard to be good. Maybe he doesn’t need to try. He can just be.
Maybe the other side of unraveling is just that, being. No more layers. No more indirection. Doing hinging on being, not on managing others.
I just realized that I wasn’t tracking. As I wrote I was lost in flow, and hadn’t even noticed Irene moving behind me. Is this what life could feel like? Just singular, continuous, intense being? Pure presence? It feels like I’m on a precipice, a leap of faith requiring embodied surrender. I don’t need to do anything, I am and always was and always will be enough. I can’t fully believe this yet, but I think one day I could.