(*note: the intro is not included in the voiceover)
Good morning y’all,
I’m excited to begin year two of WCC’s substack, after celebrating this tender ecosystem’s first birthday on the solstice with a thresholds meditation, by sharing the first of two pieces on one core theme that lives at the heart of my work in the world. I didn’t explore the details of my/ancestral trauma in this piece. There are some stories that aren’t yet ready to tell, and many that have already found their way here in other posts if you’d like to check the archives. But I share one manifestation of that trauma here today. I wonder if you resonate? I wonder what patterns became suffocatingly linked to your self concept? I wonder how we might cultivate liberation in ourselves and together.
Part two will come next week, and some ideas I’m sitting with may float your way mid-week. Stay tuned. And read to the bottom for additional resources.
Big love to you,
Rachel
I anxiously dribbled my rubber soled sneaker on the linoleum floor. My eyes darted back and forth: scanning my responses, then searching his uninterpretable gaze, back to my words, then to his eyes. Every smooth swish of his pen was a zing of endorphins – a gateway drug into hyper-achievement.
Swish, swish, swish. Now the bonus questions. +4. +3. +2. +8. He flipped the stapled stack and scrawled "117" on the front page, then sealed my fate with his signature smiley face. I beamed. I would have been crushed by a 105. Devastated by anything under 100.
This was my weekly ritual for three years in my tiny middle school, where the same teacher presided over 6th, 7th, and 8th grade science. While every other kid stampeded out to lunch as the bell blared overhead, I hung back, packed my bag slowly, shuffled over to his desk, and watched as he graded the weekly quiz in front of me so I could alleviate my anxiety as quickly as possible. I was relentless.
My earliest memories of this pattern were seeded in me at six years old, when my school encouraged me to skip to second grade after just a few months in first. I was terrified and exhilarated. I remember exactly where I was, near the chalkboard of my first grade classroom, when my mom and my principal posed the question. Somehow I already knew not to risk being the runt of a new litter, when I was the alpha of my current one. In my already heavily programmed mind, I'd learned to feel better being on top. Looking back I regret not taking the leap. I regret not being checked, humbled, redirected. Instead, I only clung tighter to the insanity of perfectionistic achievement. Extra credit on top of extra credit. From then on I strained in every context, from coursework to extracurriculars to my career, to prove myself to the insatiable governing forces inside and beyond me that kept my breath shallow, my mind racing, my shoulders clenched. I was desperate to be enough, somehow, finally.
For nearly three decades of my life "never enough" was an identity – densely internalized, totally indistinguishable from "me". My self concept was organized around inadequacy. The behaviors reinforced that entrenched belief, and so I obsessed over achievement. Friends, partners, institutions, jobs, all mirrored back to me the same story. Every relationship, every classroom, every office sang the same song. Everything was built around insufficiency, always needing more, and everyone around me was running from their own hungry ghosts. This pattern seeped into every aspect of my life. At the end of a night out, my internal monologue was a record skipping on the worst track: "did I say the wrong thing? Did I embarrass myself? Was I funny? Will they invite me back?"
Years of world-building around this belief --> a thousand behaviors to reinforce it --> a pattern of being = somehow my safe place, even if it was a jail cell. Familiar becomes comfortable, desirable, even if it's shackling you to the smallest idea of yourself. I was trapped between two fears: fear of not being enough and fear of realizing I'd built my whole life on a lie (or many).
It would take deep healing to develop the courage, the strength, and the internal and external resourcing to face the latter fear, the liberating fear. As I stepped toward that fear, I watched my world fall apart so that I could emerge. I had to exit workplaces, leave friendships, move states, and last year I even changed my name... all part of re-imagining my self concept, composting this cruel mythology of intrinsic failure and digging my way back to a fertile garden long-buried, eager to bloom with unyielding wholeness. The paradox of chasing perfection instead of realizing it's already always here.
I didn't realize that the world-building I was pouring myself into was an incredibly rigid, suffocating scaffolding, suppressing the wise, soft, divine truth of me. I see the mirroring in the literal architecture and infrastructure all around us. I was over-building my "self" like a heavy metropolis filled with stuff, sitting uneasily on the wise, soft, divine land beneath it. I was hammering layer upon layer onto myself, crafting a thick, machine-like armor, and squeezing the life force out of my Self.
What finally pushed me into the transformative, gutwrenching, under-worldy healing journey I've been on for the last several years was that my whole being gradually became uninhabitable. I felt exhausted being inside my own mind. Jackhammering voices repeating mean messages. Shadows creeping dark footsteps across so many life moments. The "safe" place I'd known for years revealed itself as the haunted prison. I truly felt I was losing my mind. In some essential ways, I was.
“Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life... Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim.”
- C.G. Jung
I had to understand where this entrenched idea of "never enough" started. I had to witness my own madness, admit it, take immense comfort in my ability to see it because only through awareness can we transform it, avoid becoming its victim, as Jung said. Actually seeing the madness as something separate, instead of being merged with it so profoundly I couldn't even perceive it... this gave me my life back. This gave me a life I never had before.
I had to know who I could be if I could soften the "self" I'd architected for decades to find the Self beneath it all.
"It can be dangerous to investigate what our lives depend on, to recognize that freedom requires a species-scale betrayal of our founding mythologies."
- Alexis Pauline Gumbs
In the course I facilitate, Cultivating Culture, we interrogate the founding mythologies APG speaks of, the ones that infiltrate our beings and shape our self-concept before we have the capacity, the autonomy to do so ourselves. "I'm not enough, I'm too much, I'm behind, I'm bad..." each of us has held (or still holds) a version of these ideas.
I ask the community to consider that these patterns are not personal, but ancestral and collective. I interpret APG's words to include the wider mythologies of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy.... To fear your own inadequacy, to blame yourself for systemic injustice, to allow over-responsibility (my preferred word for martyrdom) to numb the pain of burnout... all of this makes us easier to exploit, to serve the system dutifully.
We ask ourselves in the course: how did these beliefs get infused into our beings? How were these scripts carried in our genetic codes, embedded as cell memories, transported along the rivers of our bloodlines? When was there not enough food, enough safety, enough love? Did our ancestors run out of time? Were they behind? Too late? Are our living relatives facing these conditions? Are we, ourselves, now? Can we bring compassion for the patterns that emerge from a place of terror, from a fierce commitment to survival?
And how can we practice, here and now, healing those wounds, lightening those burdens, living into other ways? How can we cultivate softness, slowness, ease, breath, care, abundance - not as a self-care endeavor alone (which has its merits) but as a communal commitment?
We also ask: what else did our ancestors carry? What about their joys, their pleasures, their laughters, their prayers? What ideas did they give us for how to replace fear with love, even if they couldn't always get there?
"...you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as if I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less.
- James Baldwin
When I widen the frame, when I see how "not enough" is a force moving through the collective, it's not "me", it's one of the most popular ideas on the planet. A deep breath comes in, even in the grief of recognizing this proliferation. Maybe I can be one less person keeping this idea alive. And maybe you can too. Instead of becoming a less habitable place for me, I become a less habitable place for it.
This false self dies. The deeper, dormant, divine Self blooms.
…
And soon I realize this was just the next step on the journey, not the arrival.
The next calling comes in: now, soften that Self and get close to the soul.
Further Reading:
A post in which I explored broader dimensions of this theme:
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"Instead of becoming a less habitable place for me, I become a less habitable place for it." Bringing this energy into 2023. Your journey is such inspiration for my own. Beautiful articulation. Love the Baldwin quote.
It struck me the most, that what we are to do with the pain, the hurt, the lashing is to find a way to use it to connect. This is a daunting task, yet I see the truth of it. When so often I want to pull away from others because of the pain.