seeing hard things, feeling hard edges

I have been feeling really uninspired when it comes to blogging...haven't even read others' blogs lately. But then this post from Rachel (aka "The Village Knittiot," which—silly me—I hate to call her because I feel like I'm calling her an idiot) really got me thinking.

Rachel wrote that she and her sweetie had an incredible and wonderful time with the family after this:

We talked a lot about what we want our holidays to look like. In the end, we concluded that it is all about time spent, a willingness to connect (even with the most challenging family members) and it is about being open with family.

Open with family, willingness to connect even with the most challenging people.... hmmm.

Yikes.

Yikes is an understatement.

Loopy and I got into a huge fight on New Year's Eve because I was being so closed-off to my family and she felt that she had to over-compensate, be twice as open and available—be "the daughter they wanted" since I wasn't being it.

This hurt me a lot, but after some thought I realized that it hurt me because I had the (when I really thought about it, childish and unrealistic) idea that Loopy should always be "on my side" in some kind of imaginary epic battle of "me vs. my parents."

"I am on your side, Mr. Frodo."

And, I had this idea that this "being on my side" meant that she should never feel sorry for my parents, only feel sorry for me; she should never criticize how I am with them, always criticize how they are with me...basically it was this huge drama in my head where I am the lost and lonely victim and she is supposed to comfort and protect me from the evil dragons.

In this picture, of course, she has no thoughts or even personality of her own.

Did I mention, childish and unrealistic?

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So at first I felt totally betrayed and like she had abandoned me on the field of battle.... but some time (and meditation and reading and thinking) later.... I realized there was no field of battle, and she had never abandoned me.

It's uncomfortable to see that stuff, but once you see the man behind the curtain you can't go back to thinking there's a Wizard of Oz.

So, the field of battle, the betrayal and victimhood, the big dramatic story with me as the poor wronged heroine, it all melted away.

Leaving me with this discomfort, this fierce and fearful need to remain closed-off with my parents, and no excuse or rationale for it... just a lot of compressed & turbulent emotions.

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When we talked about this with "our little Italian friend" (couples' therapist) I said that "I just can't be open to my parents—being in the same apartment with them is the best I can do, you have to accept that." And OLIF said that it has to be okay for us to have separate relationships with my parents—we can't make the other person have the relationship we want them to have.

I don't think either of us were very happy with that, but at the time I really felt that "this is the best I can do," that it was a broken relationship and we all just had to live with it.

"They're used to me being like this," I said. And they are.

But they don't like it. They want more from me.

But the more they want more from me, the more invaded and overwhelmed I feel, the more I want to run away and hide.

They aren't the dragon.

This feeling—that they want more from me than I have to give them, that they want so much from me that, somehow, if they could, they would take everything and not leave me with anything of myself, that somehow I would be sucked dry and just disappear completely—this feeling is the dragon.

And of course that's impossible, even childish and unrealistic—nobody has ever died from their parents wanting their love.

And the more I describe it the more I see that I'm making up another story, and embroidering another elaborate epic drama in my own mind, when reality is something else, something more simple and clear.

But I'm not quite ready to let this drama go go...

...but somehow Rachel's post really got to me...

...and I find that maybe I'm ready to think about the idea of letting it go, maybe,
not now, not soon, but maybe sometime, though that's still a bit scary...

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Lately I have been reading The Wisdom of No Escape, by Pema Chodron. She has this great metaphor about armor.

She talks about how we all have all this armor on, and we can either spend our lives trying to make our armor more and more solid...

...trying to learn how to block every gap where any pain or sadness might enter...

...or we can spend our lives trying to take our armor off, trying to learn how to accept the pain or sadness, accept that all emotions are part of being human, and continuously open up to life with all its different sensations and feelings.

It's a great image, for me anyway, because it's so clear that armor is big and heavy and an obstacle rather than a support.

The whole "armor" idea helps me visualize how all that self-defense becomes a heavy weight, and how you get trapped inside it and suffocate and can't move, and yet it still doesn't protect you from sadness—because the sadness is inside the armor with you, and the armor just bottles you up with the sadness, without any light or air and you just rot in misery.

Isn't that what depression feels like? Like being trapped in a heavy, dark, suffocating place where you can't escape from all this suffocating misery?

Taking off the armor is about "letting go and opening," not protecting and defending, not buying into self-abuse or self-pity, just letting the world touch you and staying open to that.

The everyday practice is simply to develop a complete acceptance and openness to all situations and emotions and all people....experiencing everything totally without reservations...so that one never withdraws or centralizes into oneself.

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The wonderful thing about the way Chodron presents all this is that she doesn't say, "you should quit being such a baby and grow up," which is the way my brain talks to itself.

She says, find your "edges," find the places where you are afraid to take another step (for me, right now, I'm seeing an "edge" with regard to being more open to connection with my parents), and open to the experience that you are having of being at that edge, become curious about why it's so terrifying.

The instruction isn't then to 'smash ahead and karate-chop that whole thing;' the instruction is to soften, to connect with your heart and engender a basic attitude of generosity and compassion toward yourself, the archetypal coward.

Right now I don't want to take another step—and I don't want to want to. I'm convinced I would absolutely die. If I pushed myself forward I would just close up and hide.

But I can just stay here at the edge, seeing what it looks like, what the terrain is like, what is scary, what is hard, what hurts so much. And just staying awake in this place, and wanting to be as awake as possible and to open as much as possible, is enough for now.

What's next is some kind of shift, maybe one more step, maybe seeing things differently, maybe melting some hard frozenness, maybe something I can't imagine right now. If I just stay here, I will find out what's next.

It is painful, but this pain feels better than that dark suffocating misery—like a clear cold biting wind that replaces a dark hot heavy stuck weight. And the better it feels, the more courage I find, to my surprise.

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For future reference, for myself... something to consider... perhaps "I'm feeling uninspired when it comes to blogging" means, "I'm not feeling like being honest with anyone right now, especially not myself." All this stuff that came tumbling out, was what was behind that "I don't feel like blogging"—all of this was what I was afraid of looking at or thinking about.

Thanks to Rachel (and of course, Loopy and Miriam and Rie and OLIF and a lot of others) for waking me up.