Being real
I write a lot about authenticity and being real. I do this because.... well, because it's my thing. I didn't understand this being human - I didn't get it. It was as if there was this flow of pulses and then... a skipped blip, and a tripping and a falling and the sense that, somehow, I was 'wrong' - I didn't fit.I didn't understand how to be, what to do. I didn't like my face, my body, my hair, the way it tangled and cowlicked. I didn't like my voice, the way it sounded on the tape that time when I first heard it - high-pitched, vulnerable. Not at all the confident sound that I heard inside my own head.I didn't like not liking myself and I didn't understand why I didn't - or what I thought I should be instead.As I began to study myself (the most fascinating subject on earth - at least to me) I uncovered lots of things that looked like reasons, and looked like places to place blame.- A lack of mirroring in early childhood (because my parents hadn't been mirrored well either and didn't yet know what to do. because, like all parents, they were young and inexperienced. because... this happens.)- An overly regimented, artless and insensitive school system, which wasn't always kind. I am thinking of a particular incident with a forgotten pencil in grade 4.- A chain of bumps and bruises to my sense of myself; a series of breaks in connection, continuity and coherence.And all of that coupled with acute sensitivity, hyper vigilance and an overwhelming sense that I was here to connect connect connect and finding ... well,' less' connection available than I needed.And yet all of these things were not the reason...
The reason, if there was one, was more primal, more visceral, more... human. Something like this:I am here to move toward the things that feel interesting to me and to engage with the world out of my own curiosity - my own nature.Which seems, at the same time, so liberating and far too simple.But there it was -I am here to notice the things that have to do with my 'thing' - and what I am going to notice will look like emptiness. It will feel like lack and void space where the thing that I'm looking for ought to be but isn't. It feels like blips in a steady flow of pulses.And that's how you find your way to the empty spots and the empty spots lead you home.Which is how you find your thing.We search for the things that we need to understand; and we teach because we are fascinated with something in a particularly personal way. A fascination which arises out of having needed something, gone out looking for it, finding it - even a little thread of it - and being so excited by that, that we HAD TO share it.Which is the way that we find our own true medicine: feeling into the blips and uncomfortable places in ourselves and in the world, moving toward them with curiosity and willingness as they teach us, by their nature, what it means (and how it feels) to be real.
The reason, if there was one, was more primal, more visceral, more... human. Something like this:I am here to move toward the things that feel interesting to me and to engage with the world out of my own curiosity - my own nature.Which seems, at the same time, so liberating and far too simple.But there it was -I am here to notice the things that have to do with my 'thing' - and what I am going to notice will look like emptiness. It will feel like lack and void space where the thing that I'm looking for ought to be but isn't. It feels like blips in a steady flow of pulses.And that's how you find your way to the empty spots and the empty spots lead you home.Which is how you find your thing.We search for the things that we need to understand; and we teach because we are fascinated with something in a particularly personal way. A fascination which arises out of having needed something, gone out looking for it, finding it - even a little thread of it - and being so excited by that, that we HAD TO share it.Which is the way that we find our own true medicine: feeling into the blips and uncomfortable places in ourselves and in the world, moving toward them with curiosity and willingness as they teach us, by their nature, what it means (and how it feels) to be real.