Hi y’all,
I’m grateful to be meeting you today with part two of this series. This may be 2/2, still not certain. This piece was challenging to conjure. Truthfully, I’ve been churning on these ideas for years and the nuance and possibilities for exploration are endless. To formulate the immensity into something distilled (even if it’s long!) is a blessing. Thank you for meeting me here.
Heart wide,
Rach
Huddled in my heavy winter coat, hood up, face low, I slid through the back door used only for fire drills, trusting in the cold, concrete stairwell's predictable emptiness. I slowly opened the third floor hallway door, hoping to sneak to my room unnoticed. In the thick blast of heat typical of Chicago winters – freezing outside, scorching inside – I yanked my hood down and began to untangle the scarf from my neck, sighing with relief at the miracle of a desolate hallway.
And then I saw her. Glossy raven hair shining, bright blue eyes beaming, bouncing up the stairs opposite me. "Rachel?! Hi!" She unlocked our dorm room door and waited for me to catch up.
"Hiiii......." I dragged out of myself, giving it my best. I was strangled between feeling so miserable in my skin I needed to climb out, and wanting nothing but to sink profoundly into the cocoon of my body. It was a terrifying mix I could barely comprehend, and I didn't want to be around anyone in that state. Sleep. Just sleep.
"You look beauuuutiful! Wow! Where have you been?!"
I was stunned. I felt like I was dragging my bones around on the verge of collapse. I felt angry. "Don't you know what I'm going through?!" I wanted to yell.
She insisted, "did you just get back from the gym or something? You're glowing!"
I followed her through the door as she waited for my response. "I've just been crying for four hours straight" I crawled right into bed, still draped in my coat. I never told her what was going on. I woke up the next morning, we greeted each other, and life continued. Neither of us had the tools to hold the unspoken. I barely understood it myself. I barely understood myself.
Those four hours of tears were spent on the floor of a woman's home that I didn't know and would never see again. I was clinging on and desperate, referred to her for help. After hovering her hands over my entire body for a few minutes, she told me the pain inside me needed to come out and that I had to scream. The idea immediately mortified me. My throat locked. Yet I couldn’t leave.
She guided me through a series of hums, louder and louder, until we were screaming together. Her voice companioning mine, holding my loneliness. Then mine grew louder and she left me to it. I scream-sobbed in a way that couldn't be stopped until I'd exhausted myself. At that point in my journey, the pain stored in me was buried so deep I had no cognitive understanding of what I was screaming about. If I had I would have collapsed.
And about a year later... I did. I fainted in my apartment bathroom, junior year of college, and fractured my skull. Weeks in the hospital, months of neuro-rehab, and even a near-death experience couldn't bring me to confront what I was carrying. I continued to run away from myself for another decade until the next collapse.
In part one of this post I wrote about this prolific feeling of "not enough-ness", which can grow into "self-loathing". Self-loathing is an imprint that is so under-discussed, shameful, taboo, and also common. In so many ways, this dominant culture is organized around it. In a Christian theocracy, original sin haunts you until your death... something seemingly personal has huge implications for society. If you hold any marginalized identity, that itself is a weapon against you instead of something to honor. In late-stage capitalism, self-loathing is a strategy: inadequacy can make us highly susceptible to excessive consumption -- always needing more to fill the void. And the internet as we know it, as monopolized by very few companies, has thrived in these conditions. We are all required to build "profiles" to enter, and the more we can dial in our aesthetic, our personal brand, our strategy -- we can win big. The main platforms for inter-netting ourselves have turned us into commodities: the "user" or the "product". To be completely in choice about this – to put yourself out there, master the game, and collect your earnings, knowing that everything you do is still owned by an amoral corporation – is valid. And of course there is more nuance. As just one example, the interconnectivity of our world is offering wider visibility and therefore greater accountability, and especially for some communities like those with disabilities, solidarity and support are abundant.
And this hyperfocus on a constructed "self", on persona and ego, on performance and presentation has bred a culture of disassociation and separation, of cheap substitutes for true connection and interbeing. (Imagining healthier technologies is something I do frequently.)
The formation of the self is a massive undertaking, and broadly speaking we are not supported at scale to navigate this healthily and responsibly with this much trauma, with this much disconnection from the sacred that can weave us into a deeper story, a stronger village. Numerous mentors over the years have spoken to the pathological adolescence we see playing out all around us (if you'd like some references on this idea, let me know!). Adolescence is a phase of life where self-obsession is developmentally appropriate. It's a time when you begin to individuate from your parents or primary caregivers and your own child self, this self you're outgrowing. You begin to push the edges of your own being, crack open in new ways, meet your body completely anew, and feel these insatiable instincts of individuality and independence. It is an innately narcissistic time of life. And yet, this perpetual teenager energy can be seen everywhere we look while adult maturity is sorely lacking -- from politics to media to business -- exacerbated by the persona-addicted culture. It is very teenager-like to be supremely obsessed with your own gain. Parents who raise children from this perspective see their kids as primarily an extension and reflection of themselves, extending that self-obsession onto their children -- whether that's hovering over every detail of their lives or using their kids to meet their own needs for fulfillment, for achievement, for stability etc. When a kid struggles, the parent who can't distinguish themselves from their child takes their child's pain so personally, they become totally incapable of real support. There is actually no adult in the room. If you look at Congress right now, for example, you might ask, how many adults are actually present in that room? How many of those people (especially the dudes) are showing up to those roles as 14 or 17 or 22?
One of the most challenging aspects of my healing journey was confronting my developmental delays. We will always have our inner children, our inner teens, etc... but when core parts of our development are stunted, stalled or entirely neglected, the foundation is fragile. I built and built to keep up with the pace of the world, but the essential self remained unintegrated. And with complex trauma, my very self was fractured, scattered, lost. In a culture rife with developmental ruptures, so many are trapped in this unsteady, unstable self, literally insecure, and coping with narcissism or self-sacrifice/self-denial to manage. Further, as mentioned before, if your innate qualities are "othered", then self-formation is also impacted by a world that wants you silent, suppressed, assimilated, etc.
A large part of my recovery over the last few years has been to individuate, to differentiate myself, to cultivate myself as a unique, singular entity, because I have to combat this wounding of dissolving myself and being forced/pressured to do so on many levels. Healing has actually asked me to invest in building myself up, finding out who I truly am in this lifetime. This work is beautiful... and yet... one of the biggest breakthroughs for me has actually been able to intentionally disidentify: with personality, feelings, thoughts, story, idea, brand, concept, worldview. To see all of that as mutable and emergent, and to also see it all as just "stuff" that passes through -- not to cling to. To allow myself to change and be changed. To not be fixed and rigid, but to be seismic and unfolding. To not become an ideology I might orient around, for example, but to witness it as it moves through me and see how it impacts me and others. To be accountable to that, and willing to shift if something I once believed actually causes harm or doesn't evolve healthily for the benefit of all. This is one of the deepest crises: the willingness to relinquish integrity for an idea. It requires humility, maturity, and a degree of non-attachment to be adaptive to a world that's constantly and importantly shifting.
The deepest breath of release for me comes from remembering the Soul underneath it all that could never be labeled or conditioned, and remembering that individuation is a service to collective consciousness, not an end unto itself. A million individuated flowers means a million offerings to a million pollinators each drawn to an individual flower for something beyond reason – its subtle shift in coloration, its particular fragrance notes, its precise location on a flight path. We feel how beautiful that is when we bite into thirty peaches over the course of a summer... each so different if you're paying close attention. The individual is essential for mutuality to flourish. To individuate is sacred, but it is also a bridge concept into something far more expansive and liberating.
"As I witness my own life more and more as an offering, other things in my life have less of a pull on me. Doing it for me isn't nearly as interesting as surrendering it outward, upward, inward. ... The ultimate offering we make is the sacrifice of our own personal trips, of all the things we think we are: our bodies, our personalities, our senses, our feelings. And then, with the growing freedom that that brings, comes a deeper recognition of the Brahman, of that which lies behind, of that which is non-self, of that which is the source from which it all keeps feeding outward.
...It's as if we are pouring it all into the mouth of Brahman, into the fire that is Brahman. We're pouring it inward, and all of our efforts, every act of our lives, becomes that single offering. We are, in effect, turning ourselves inside out, until finally we are the atman, we are the light within, we are the consciousness, we are the spaciousness, we are the presence..."
-Ram Dass, teaching on the Bhagavad Gita
That moment in my college dorm hallway with my old roommate was a crack. If I'd slipped through it I may have found myself sooner, because my friend was on to something. In that moment, I was beautiful. I was cracked open, raw, real, in my uninhibited expression and touching into something so pure underneath everything I had piled onto myself. I was on the path to being me. I had no energy to expend on trying to be anything else, and for the first time she actually saw me. My "self" was so soft in that vulnerability and my buried soul was shining through. To soften the self and get close to the Soul has offered unbelievable freedom. Every step of coming back home to enduring wholeness, both within me and within the family of beings.
What could a society feel like with more healthy individuation and interdependence coexisting?
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