What is standing in your way right now? (1/12/2022)
My intention in this life is to flow. I once wrote in my college personal essay that “I can be the rock; I can be the water; I can be both.” The key is to go with what Life serves me, and since Life is filled to the brim with change, sometimes a flowing nature is the best adaptation.
In my daily journey to remain open – open hands, open heart, open mind – I find that Fear and Numbness often stand in my way. They work hand in hand, though I feel that I do not often encounter Fear because my Numbness Part, which I have named Whitewall, protects me from Him (and other feelings as well).
Whitewall is an incredibly powerful Protector. I respect Her, and I am in awe of Her beauty, old age, and majesty. She has been with me since almost the beginning of my life, and so She feels incomprehensibly ancient to me. She is also unbelievably strong and overwhelming. I have spent decades of my life having one-half of me filled with Her, and so it becomes very difficult to sense when She is blended with me. She feels like a natural Part of me, my oldest Self. At the same time, I have shamed Her, tried to oust Her, and rejected Her for simply doing what She has done Her whole life: take care of me. Only in the past three months have I begun saying hi to Her, touching Her, speaking with Her, and creating an intentional bond together.
Because of Whitewall – and I am thoroughly grateful to Her still – I do not have a secure, nor mature, nor consistent relationship with Fear. Fear and I are currently like strangers going out for a handful of first dates, having our first few months of emotional outbreaks and difficult conversations. We do not yet know how we fit into each other’s lives, or how we can move forward healthily together. Fear feels unfamiliar and completely new to me, and yet He carries a resemblance of previous reiterations of Him, of past bonds reframed in various unique memories. I still am unsure of what role He plays in my life. I still do not know what He wants of me, if anything at all. I am learning how to co-regulate my system alongside Him, recovering from the things He does to me, and it will take both consistency, time, and lots of effort for me to reach a sense of security with Him.
Supplementary members of this cast include Resentment and Grief. For a long part of my life, I had been unable to be friends with Resentment, to hear Her concerns about me or even make eye contact with Her. This was because for decades She did not exist as a separate entity from me that I could see and connect with outside myself. In fact, She lived inside me, within me, as if She were etched on the inside of my skin as my little sister once described: In that conversation, we had delineated our childhood trauma as the burden we could never put down, for “the trauma I carry is inside my skin.” For the longest time, I was unable to separate myself from Resentment, because I was Her. Unyielding, raging, and blind to everything else outside of Her, I saw the world through Her eyes until July 2021. Through ego death and plant medicine, I was able to extract and excise Her from myself. Now She remains a close friend who knows me and my past selves so well, and She is treasured because of how eagerly She tells me where and when I have abandoned or am about to abandon myself.
Grief has become a new close friend only recently as well. Having not experienced deep loss of any loved one growing up, Grief entered my life once I was able to witness me outside myself through plant medicine. Grief held my hand when I relived and comprehended how I had abandoned and trespassed against myself in all previous phases of my life (my formative years, piano-playing, pharmacy school). Grief embraced me when I hugged my younger selves during my “reparenting” acid trips and sobbed with the greatest pain I have ever felt. Grief is there for me as I continue to reclaim parts of myself by letting other parts of my Self die.
Whitewall, Fear, Resentment, and Grief make up my strong cohort of partners that ask me “Are you sure?” every time I try to take a step onto my Future path. I recognize that they have no intention to hold me back but only to make sure, make certain, that I recognize my worth, that I never abandon myself again, and that I am ready to both fight off and reinforce myself against those forces that aim to minimize, abuse, or misuse me and my gifts.
As I spend more time with them in the hopes of fostering healthy relationships with each of them, I recognize that in the meantime I have not only been accumulating but accidentally intensifying some “bad” habits…. I do not like to label anything bad because I would rather believe that every thing is served to us by the Universe, but I recognize some things in me could be tweaked for better progress forward. I had long abandoned my desire to be the best at anything, to compete with others, or to spend the time and energy and sacrifice to master anything; this comes not from “laziness” but from a deep feeling of exhaustion that I have acquired during the decades I had lived and worked for achievements I never wanted for myself and so could never feel proud of. Accompanying this is a lack of the skillset and processes needed to mold true self-discipline. An additional result of this is an ignorance of what true pride in myself feels like and therefore an inability to use that as a source of motivation. These tendencies of mine have amplified conditionings and voices within me that attempt to say that I am not enough, or that I am not inherently worthy. I fight a workaholic past and a capitalistic present that eggs me on to ride my workhorse into the ground again, but I remind myself to take breaths, to take pleasure, to take rest, in order not to give in to those sirens that run our society.
Currently, I still believe that any surplus or lack thereof within me exists for the good of my highest Self at this point in time. I do not intend to battle these forces or view them as in opposition to me but instead aim to declare them as my chosen family and use them as signals for when my system may be ready to move forward. I continue to hope that if and when we all move forward together, then we will be advancing in true harmony.
