Coming Back to Yourself
How many times have I said this in the last month: I feel more like myself, these days. I’m coming back to myself. And then inevitably, someone will either say, Oh! I don’t feel like myself, or, How did you get there, because I’m not feeling like myself, etc, with various permutations of there or not there.
There has also been some pretty raw, poignant sharing, of “how low was your low.” And it’s been rough, right? It’s vulnerable to even say some things. I look back and am surprised at myself — that was not me! I also feel like I could easily drop back into that not-me pothole so I know I have to keep working with the things that have vibed for me.
The first thing that helped me in a very large way to get out of my high-grade funk (as opposed to what C.D. Wright named as Keats’s “low-grade funk” was to go to Rome for a month. (And even hung out in Keat’s rooms). As I joke, because it’s true, we had to eat a lot of Kraft Dinner so that we could go to Italy. So I know that’s not in the cards for everyone. But if you could just take yourself out of where you are physically for a small interval, I know that helps. I think it helps create a threshold of sorts. (Which is something I have talked about at my Beauty School Patreon). So if you can’t get away, I wonder if there is another mode of creating a threshold in your life? Take a single day and walk through the forest, or go to a museum by yourself, or to the symphony. Walk through the thresholds deliberately. Allow yourself to just be where you are without looking back.
For me, I decided to make a deal with the world. The deal is that I agree to believe everyone is trying their best, and I hope that they will believe I’m trying my best. No conditions. That’s the deal.
(Here I interject with the fact that I am pretty much always failing at most stuff, but I do keep trying. That’s the other part of the deal. Keep trying. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again, that song and dance).
Again, I try to steadily and constantly practice giving the benefit of the doubt.
I tell myself, and it’s weird how much this helps: It was ever thus.
I return to the James Crews lines about asking for the slightest shift in my thinking, and I keep trying to consider the opposite.
I continue to remember to read more poetry, try to find the comedic distance to whatever irks, to practice my practice, to remember that most of this is “practice” which we will never quite get perfect, or rarely so.
I remember that my sphere of influence will probably ever only be about 3 meters, but 3 meters is a LOT! You can accomplish quite a lot in your 3 meters.
I allow myself to be of two minds about things. This helps with the contradictions.
A book that I’ve mentioned here frequently but that has really been my touchstone for these times is A Healing Space by Matt Licata. Every time I return to certain passages, my understanding seems to deepen — well one can hope! He talks about us being the “alchemists of our own lives” “committed to the experiment itself.” This kind of language works for me. He says, too, that “we are never going to resolve the ongoing dialectic between acceptance and change, but that is okay, for resolution is not required but only our creative and conscious participation in the mystery as it appears.” So that’s helpful for me, as well. There’s what works when you’re at home alone, and then there’s what works when “responding live and on the ground.” And that’s humbling. Licata says, “This takes a lot of practice and the willingness to meet, tolerate, contain, and work through a variety of challenging, anxiety-based experiences.” That feels true, right? I think I’ve mentioned his advice a few times here, about how we can step off the battlefield and then turn around and assess from a safe distance. And that really has been a terrific way of imagining things for me. It helped.
We all know the pandemic is still raging, but at the same time I can’t live quite IN it all the time. So in one way, I’m ready to get back to the depths of living a life, we could call it the battlefield, but I just can’t hold all that other stuff at the same time. I want to be of use, I’m in a place where I very luckily get to be of some small use in my day job, and I feel strong enough to do that. And my secret is “pretend.” Don’t tell your therapist, haha. But this works. I know the news of the world is scary, it’s rubbish, it’s infuriating. But I’m just going to do what I can in my three meters, which is all we ever really could do anyway, and not dwell. I acknowledge it’s all there, I acknowledge it’s been a rough time, I acknowledge that you’ve possibly had a rougher time than I have, I acknowledge that nothing is perfect, politics suck, and things are hard, and maybe they’re going to be super tricky and complicated and difficult for a while to come.
But I also need to come back to my true self. I need to true myself. I need to perform this truing, in this crisis of our time, as a spiritual exercise. (A bit of a paraphrase from C.D. Wright). I allow myself. I allow it. And I allow it, so that you will allow it for yourself. At least I hope it works that way.
Lastly. (Which sounds final but is just the opening of a door….)
I’ve been listening to that cool old song “Things Happen” by Dawes. The lyrics:
Let's make a list of all the things the world has put you through
Let's raise a glass to all the people you're not speaking to
I don't know what else you wanted me to say to you
Things happen, that's all they ever do
In a different time, on a different floor
I might mourn the loss of who I'm not anymore
So maybe we’re not exactly who we were anymore. That’s fine, too. But let’s have a little ceremony for ourselves then, let’s raise a glass, yes? To the way things happen, that’s all they ever do. As in the video, let’s raise a glass to the ways we’re all pretending a bit but at least we can pretend together. And maybe that too is how we can come back to ourselves.
