Seeing Beyond
Pretty much since I started this blog I’ve had an empty draft post titled “Yearning” waiting to be written. I’ve never been quite sure what I wanted to say in that post, but I knew it was meant to capture a certain familiar feeling. That feeling is a combination of nostalgia, loss, exclusion, and aspiration I’ve felt over and over in my life. It’s a feeling I associate with adolescent crushes, with the idea of people I’ve admired and felt unworthy of, with entire lives I wished I could inhabit that were out of reach, impossible, and yet visibly present before me.
A couple of months ago I started therapy with someone new. I’d been struggling on and off with a lot of sadness, self-loathing, and anger—feelings that I’d found ways to explore indirectly in my posts here. One of the things my therapist has helped me realize is the extent to which those feelings of yearning have become attached in my mind to little totems of rejection and abuse from my past. I tend to return over and over to certain moments, certain painful memories of wanting and rejection, somehow savoring in the midst of the pain that sense of possibility, the closeness of the desired thing, but also retaining it as a reminder of my own inadequacy and unworthiness.
One of the strangest things for me has been realizing that these memories of judgment and rejection are part of me. That in my subconscious rehearsal of the pain of the past, it is me accusing myself, me telling myself I am not good enough, not lovable, incapable of belonging. The original figures of these memories are so long gone and so far removed by now from my recollections of them that what lives on in me is simply myself.
But more than this, what was shocking to me was to realize how much of the character of these figures I have taken on in my own life, how much I am in my own life and personality the things they represented to me—things I fear and resent and feel inadequate before. Not only am I the judging figure telling myself that I’m not good enough, I am in certain ways the realization of the fantasy self I have projected on to that person. I am the terrifying judge, not only in that I am accusing myself, but also in that I possess the very things the perceived absence of which in myself I fear and resent.
This is all very abstract; perhaps no one but me will understand it. But there has been a further realization to go along with that one. Ever since I was a small child one of my chief coping mechanisms was to withdraw into fantasies. Early on this was through Tolkien and Lewis and their novels; later it was through philosophy and theology and religious practice. These fantasy worlds crystallized the nature of things into systems and struggles that made sense to me, that allowed my mind to abstract from the present experience and its shames and ambiguities into a tidy drama of cosmic opposites in which everything made sense, or was capable of making sense. If physically my chief coping instinct was to withdraw and hide, curl up in a corner and bury myself, intellectually I found ways to do the same thing. I hid from myself and my world in ideas. I hid from experiences in principles and absolutes.
None of this is meant to deny the value of principles, or absolutes, or intellectualism. Rather, what I’m getting at here is a tendency I’ve had to live outside myself in a sort of unreal realm of abstractions or possibilities. For a long time this served me well, and kept me safe. But what was set aside in all that was the ability to experience the radical now-ness, the bodily presence, of me.
The truth is I don’t really know how to describe the experience I’m trying to capture here. It is, if anything, the very opposite of the yearning I so wanted to write about. It’s not a matter of self-actualization, or eros, or learning to express my feelings; it’s simply about learning to experience myself as myself, where I am now, with the feelings I’m having now, instead of constantly fleeing into fantasies and fears and hopes conjured by my intellect and imagination.
Why am I even talking about this? What’s the point? Why is this post called “Seeing Beyond”? I guess what I wanted to get at here is something about that experience of self-presence. When I stop and return to that place of being physically me, I find that many of the worries and ideas I’m often fixated on fade away. And instead I experience something quite different from all that. Not a zen-like peace or a blankness of mind, but a sense of possibility and freedom quite different from the calculating strategery conjured by my worrying intellect. I feel capable of being me, radically me, and I feel strangely brave in this ability, able to act calmly and boldly. In fact the causes of my yearning tend to fade away. My inner judge is quiet. I am full of possibility.
I wrote this all out not particularly because I imagine anyone else will find it interesting or useful, but because I think this experience forms an important counterpoint to a lot of the morose reflections I’ve shared here. Which is to say, in the midst of so much pain, anger, and regret, I’m finding that there is a lot within me that I have never yet made the acquaintance of, and that in many ways my impulse toward dejected, despairing yearning is misplaced.