Thursday, September 19, 2024
I throw my paranoid imaginings about being judged away. Fear to reveal here pervades my past reluctance to do more than tiptoe around people, hide in the shadows, and avoid interaction with others. Things changed when I became aware of this, seeing my automatic self attempting to step softly so I didn't annoy the other occupant in the house who is hard of hearing. I saw myself stepping quietly throughout childhood: decades on automatic cruise control being a tentative tiptoe. A misophonic mother and 18-year-older sister. Can't query the 8B humans on this planet with diverse world views and histories whether this is normal behavior. I felt like I shouldn't exist, due to my interpreting myself as 'less than' others. I thought that it happened before I was capable of thought, in infancy, that interpretation cemented later by trying to make myself invisible to the bullies in my life, and my mother, who loved me but just didn't have a clue. . .an internal family of selves, watching myself in this automaticity operate and a conscious perplexed, seeking and then enlightened, to understand why.
No one to blame, for gaining some toxic lightning-fast impression as an infant or young child. I'm now an elderly person just saying eureka about seemingly solving the mystery that created that weltanschauung that has lived in me until now.
Belief I am unworthy and less than.
I know how ridiculous it sounds that it should be a huge eureka moment for me. Even apologizing to myself for my mistakes of being unable to see what little self, what mini-me directed my problems: that I've been living it, unconsciously enslaving myself in it! Not believing myself capable of more, being my own worst critic, and even preventing me from writing here because after all it's all hubris and how dare I actually think I can write something that can be misinterpreted, and that others won't think the worst about me.
I'm a normal human being with all the flavors and flaws common to most of us who have relatively limited encounters with diversity though more than many. It slept in me for decades, this understanding that the many parts, the many selves, that don't speak with a voice but with a feeling-- an impression-- a bias to travel one path or another. Frost took the path 'less traveled by, and that has made all the difference'.
Virginia Satir, Claude Steiner, even Jung glimpsed and explored the path I'm treading, hoping for surcease from the mostly bourgeois suffering. I hesitate to label my little mini-me's because that too judges them, instead of being self-compassionate, accepting if not in actual agreement.
I'm buried in distractions and read a lot, write a lot, and never share it.
I've chosen distractions all my life. Reading, both fiction and non. Loving the worlds created by the writers in the adventures of the Hyperion and Uplift series, other worlds, and fiction containing what I like the most: questions about the deepest interests in our lives: ethics, behavior, evolution of the primate into humanity, changing contexts , defining confusing abstractions which define and divide a person.
Never feeling competent for challenging tasks, i asked for advice that was not helpful, and identified with my mistakes, labeling myself. I've been a victim of myself! All installed from infancy and based on chance sensory impressions.
Examine and know thyself! Let the little judgmental minister within shut its eyes and let me speak, even if what I have to say is hubris, and even if it is not worth hearing. I have to risk speech to consolidate a new paradigm, a compassionate awareness of my automated infant self's awakening to my and others' programs, none meant to be toxic but the result has been. It's held me with my amygdala spewing fear, from going forwards, shouting that I have little to say of worth, because after all, this mini-me that says so is still unsure it is safe, having warred with its companion parts over consensus that others can hold the microphone and have a say in my life.
I'm allowed, finally to speak/write in a forum anybody can see, anybody can judge, anybody can hurt me.
Interactions revealing what we think, share and reality-test interpretations of a complicated world filled with change. There has never been a golden age except this moment, with the opportunity to feel and think and choose directions, opinions, actions, agency, more.
Echo tunnel came from not sharing and reality-testing that thinking, like my poor sister did, refusing medical help, believing and relying completely on her own opinions, thinking she was living well independently when she was not. She knew on some level unconsciously, and kept people away so they would not see how far gone her situation was.
I was invited to help and wound up there for two years, watching it happen and unable to do anything about it, stymied by being seen as the bratty little sister who was clueless. And I was clueless but it's easy to see in another person what you can't see in yourself. A scary thought, that without testing it in the arena of other people, we can continue, unopposed, in thinking we alone know what's real and what's false.
It happened when I visited my sister after her stroke when she fell on May 16 2020. I wound up staying for two years, to care for her and attempt to alleviate her major disabilities, as well as attempt to help her choose to see that she wasn't living well alone. I did what I could for her and it ended predictably because she was the older sister and knew better than a bratty kid sister what was best for herself.
