Every breakthrough I have ever made in teaching has come from a life-shifting chapter in my own experience.  To be honest, these chapters might be better described as ‘ordeals’ — something long and hard and painful.  Joy never quite registers as an impetus to grow the way hurt does.  Hurt I hold on to and scrutinize and try to figure out.  Happy I barely acknowledge and even try to minimize in most cases.  It’s never given me an effectual outcome.

In trying to stretch myself away from a future-secure, protective existence, I have been learning the abysmally named and hugely commodified notion of ‘being present’.  It is to sit with myself, in all states and stimulations, and see and accept instead of avoid and pretend.  For someone who lives in the utopia of their head, this has been a reality check and change of enormous proportions.  Piercing your  perceptive bubble feels like death in a lot of ways, except you survive it.  You learn to exist in a more truthful reality, one whose honesty you learn to see and be shared with.

One of the allowances of my watchful brain is a keen ledgering of what I call “tumult tracking”: I can map out and remember my path from where I don’t want to be to a place of better with great detail.  Even if it takes years.  As I do, I start to look for things I had missed, in both self and others.  It’s the others — in trying to make their life less hard — that give me a useful purpose for my travels.  Helping gives the hurt meaning, and people most seek out/ need help when they’re hurt.  I value pain more than delight, simply because it makes me more necessary.

What I did not calculate nor account for is that some people live in a world of wants instead of needs.

The only relevance I can fathom in such a place is to use my resources to provide for their communicated desires, both direct and indirect.  The process is simple and strategic — it keeps me at a safe distance while also being their champion.  I have aligned so long with being good that I did not recognize that other actualities could be at play.  Since I only existed in the world as ‘one thing’, I sought to be exceptional at it.  The single-minded fervor of “be better” meant that I could do things quicker and with more ease, and that I could endure ungodly amounts of slights and swipes and still show up with hope and sincerity that maybe it was enough and now you might want to take a turn.  But I don’t stay long enough for the game to continue.  It’s too easy to walk away when you’re the one who doesn’t need and has a lifetime of practice of soothing yourself.

As an escape artist, I have the utmost confidence in telling someone, “I can get you out of here.”  It’s because I’ve said it to myself and succeeded a thousand times.  It worked, and it still works, but as I’ve learned to perceive a more truthful reality the last few years, what I lacked was a full continuum of experience.  I holed myself up a fortress with very narrow windows that looked at very specific things to try and prove myself right and noble.  I made a God out of my father because he was the epitome of sacrifice.  It was only in hindsight that I allowed myself to see and feel how tragic it was.  I had to understand the grief of not only losing him but his identity I embodied.

The weight of the sham seemed to drown me.  I only knew how to swim one way, with double-down viciousness of a desperate being trying to stay alive; who deserved to stay alive and reap something from this world for her efforts.  Strangely enough, the answer was to stop and slow down and simple concede.  The options weren’t to thrash or perish.  One could simply float and let all one’s fabricated notions drift away.

To be buoyant is to be exposed, and there is a very real chance you may end up in a place you don’t desire to be.  But this is based on a preconceived notion of where you’ve learned to be comfortable.   There, not here.  Here, if it doesn’t tick the boxes of “like this”, can feel cold and dark and triggering of the automated response of the escape mechanism.  When you are used to doing, not-doing seems like succumbing to failure (and failing isn’t good).  Sitting motionless for a long time can be interpreted as being stuck.  But the feeling of being trapped only surfaces if your instinct to leave is panicked and habitual.  Staying can have a positive outcome, too.  You just have to stick with it long enough that it opens you up, and expands what you’re willing to be vulnerable to.