I must've been between 5-8 years old at the time. All the children that I hung out with in my neighborhood, including my siblings, were all older than me, and I idolized them. I made every effort for them to see me, to let me play with them, to be seen as "part of the gang", and not just as the little annoying drag that I often felt I was treated like. I was smaller, but I was passionate about things.
(Deep cry and reparenting session just now)
That afternoon, we were around 6 people in the group. I don't remember what I felt passionate about, but it was in the realm of either religion, philosophy, or some similar abstract thought (in my own child words). I had realized something important, and I wanted to share it. I wanted to give to this group of people that I admired the best that I had to offer, while also thinking that if I told them this big thing that I had realized, then they would like me more.
So as we stood in a circle making conversation, I found an opening. I began speaking. My words flowed smooth and unimpeded, and I excitedly raised my voice so everyone could hear me clearly. I felt all their attention and eyes on me, it felt good, my energy kept rising and flowing, and I continued to explain this amazing thing I had realized. Then just as it felt like I was coming to the bombastic, magical conclusion, one neighbor kid whom I admired particularly cut me off. He retorted with bored dismissal: "Ahhh, that's too philosophical!", and turned to restart his conversation with the rest of the group, all of whom faced away from me and excluded me from their circle.
I didn't even really know what "philosophical" meant.
"¡Ahhh, eso es demasiado filosófico!"
I was stunned. Simultaneous waves of emotion crashed inside me. My words had been cut off at the peak of my expression, and the remnant energy had nowhere to go, blocked at my throat. The kid I liked the most did not want the best I had to give. The group I yearned to be a part of had ejected me, and I was alone again.
But most saliently, the world had rejected my truth, the best that I had to offer. I shone out the best that I had, and I was shut up and rejected as a result. And from having felt inclusion, truth, and free expression, in an instant I was cut down to feeling excluded, thwarted, and unworthy. I implicitly concluded that my person was not worthy of being in a group. That my expression was not worthy of being heard. That my truth was not good enough. Not good enough for the world.
The silent pain that followed I did not know how to share, nor with whom. I did not understand what had happened. There was no blatant physical or even emotional transgression I could point at, and I did not share enough emotional intimacy with anyone that could help me understand. But what I learned was that expressing my truth was dangerous. That others had the power to cut it down, to devalue it, and to prove to me that I'm unworthy. Unfit for life. Because if the absolute best that I feel I can give is not good enough for the world, then what the FUCK am I doing here?
Unworthiness stuck and festered. Resentment tried to defend my worth, and coated my core with aimless blame towards a world that did not listen, and did not want me.
(I'm just realizing... almost every interaction I've since had with the world has been filtered through this resentment.)
So I stopped sharing my truth. I filtered it every day. I reshaped it, I put it in other people's words, and I spoke only what was demanded of me, and even then with a venom that said "here's your fucking answer", which even I became unaware of after a while. All that remained was a constant, lingering frustration and resentment against the meaninglessness of my life, smeared on almost every interaction I've had since.
Maybe it was then that I took to preferring mathematics over humanities or arts. The answers required of me in math were succinct and precise, and their correctness was determined by sharp rules, which no resentment or frustration, no matter how potent, could color or invalidate. I could carry on my communion with my self-pity and self-recrimination, and all the while my mind could follow the strict rules to find the correct answer and have everyone continue to leave me alone. Humanities and arts required sugarcoating if I was to avoid unwanted attention, however, and to me that always felt disgusting. And Software Engineering, with its (once) deterministic link from code to behavior, felt like a good profession to follow in which I could continue to hide my truth behind sufficient and functional code.
And as time went on, my inner dynamics of expression and relating to others resulted in a sequence (which is not really a sequence) like the following:
1. In general, I felt the need to shut up. I felt that giving out my best was dangerous, for it could be used to devalue my truth. So I spoke with a mistrusting caution that had a hard time getting to the point, and which hardly ever inspired trust in others.
2. The impulse to share and relate never died, it was just suppressed. But somewhere in me I believed that for others to accept me I needed to PROVE myself to be worthy enough. So it induced a strategy in my mind. "Maybe if I can get something REALLY good to share, if I find something SUPER good and interesting, THEN they will like it and he/she/they will accept me."
3. So I went out and searched for lovely, amazing, extraordinary, and miraculous things. But my natural curiosity was tainted with the spirit of the bounty hunter. So when I did find amazing things, my reaction was not to fully enjoy them, nor to integrate them with my own life. I instead captured each pearl with my mind, and encapsulated it with words and models so I could market it as my own, yet removed enough from it that I could claim plausible deniability at any time. I would then seek out potential buyers, baiting them with a little bit when I sniffed out their peeking interest. And only once I knew that they would pay me with their full attention, I would share with them the precious pearl. Only then I could soothe my believed unworthiness a little, and tell myself "at least this thing that you share attracts a little interest. It has some value. You are still a little worthy".
4. And yet, none of those pearls was my truth. I knew it. I was merely regurgitating what other people said and wrote, clothed with my own words and interpretations so I could feel that they were mine. I was just trying to shine and be seen without the danger of exposing my own truth. But because it was not my real truth, it ultimately felt frustrating and unsatisfactory. My true self remained unseen, isolated behind its defensive barriers.
Yet there were times when I did feel my truth rising from within. Times when I felt and KNEW that what I had to say had value, and when I dared to timidly squeeze it into the group or the conversation. And/but/yet when I reached the moment of sharing myself fully, when I felt the excitement rising in me and my full truth was ready to come out again, I'd get nervous. My mind would get distracted. My eyes would dart and avoid direct focus. I would forget the words mid-sentence. I would jumble up the concepts, lose my train of thought. And what actually came out was mostly ever only an insecure, crumpled up, filtered, diluted shadow of my truth. Crumpled up by my mind who repeatedly said "that's not good enough yet" and threw the draft into the wastebasket, filtered by the fears of what might cause the others to reject it, and diluted because my system had learned that showing my truth in its full brilliance was dangerous, because it could be cut down and devalued again.
Even this my writing expression has grown through this pattern. Speaking does not lend itself to drawn-out essays that dance around the point for hours and revises its words again and again while trying to avoid all mistakes and warily cover all refutable points. So these days when something true rises in me and wants to bloom, it simmers for some hours/days/weeks in my subconscious, bits of it peeking out every now and then into my waking awareness. Then one day something is triggered, and it's as if all the words push out from within me, demanding to be born. And one more manufactured pearl comes out to market, asking to be seen. Waiting to be sold.
And today, the trigger were these phrases that showed up in my feed.
- "the peace in being able to admit when you are wrong"
- "the peace in not needing everyone to understand you"
- "the peace in changing your mind"
- "the peace in not proving your point"
Ahhhh... such peaces I long for. A release of my constant fear of judgement and mistrust, of constantly thirsting for external validation while pretending I do not. A release of a need to be right and correct from the beginning, and a release of my fear of being seen as indecisive and wishy-washy. Or of not proving my point with rich and sufficient evidence, ironclad logic, graceful eloquence, and solid proof.
Such states of peace my weary body longs for. weary of adjusting and double-guessing my every expression.
"My opinions always have room to change in the face of growth.
My peace is non negotiable."
peace > opinions. That's worth experimenting with. My mind protests already.
Anyway, reading these phrases today brought me to face the root of my long-lasting friction and frustration with my own expression, and to trace in detail for the first time the chain of events. From that first invisible yet deep fracture, through some of my life experiences, and up to the present day. I had a good conversation about it with my inner child, as well.
toodle-oo
Thank you, Tia Mason
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