I awoke this morning with a knot in my stomach. Once again, I dreamt of bears. For the third time in two weeks, my sleep was filled with the disparate images of a bear behaving as a human in our very anthropocentric world- a place clearly not created for a bear. The bears in my dreams lumber about, share conversations, order blueberry muffins in coffee shops, drink water from the public fountains, even masturbate in the middle of dinner parties. That was strange, admittedly. The point is, the bears are so outsize that they cannot possibly accomplish these tasks with grace or understatement, yet in my dreams they seem unaware of the unlikelihood, the absurdity of their presence there.
I discovered something last night, over a plastic cup of water in a basement club, staring into the blue, blue eyes of a boy who I think was trying to convince me that we have a mind connection. We might have a mind connection, but right now the gaze of my mind is always directed in: at myself. I am desperately trying to see my way to the core of my unhappiness.
This is what I discovered: self-love is also a balance. Learning to love yourself is a delicate balancing act between loving who you are right now, and striving to become something better, always. C stared at me with his ridiculously blue eyes and I stared into my own heart to find that I have been laboring under a misapprehension. I have been seeking to love myself, as I am in this moment, flaws and all. Yet, to internalize these flaws, to see them as a part of myself, to own them in the way Satir described, I would need to allow them to take residence in my identity permanently. I think this is a point of central conflict between psychology and spirituality. While psychology encourages us to identify and analyze the root of our socially problematic behaviors, spirituality pushes us to release these behaviors entirely. Even the most ghastly and destructive religions offer their followers the hope of penance, forgiveness, or repentance. You can come back to the neutral place, where your Tabula Rasa is once more wiped clean and you can set out with determination to muck it up all over again. Meditation, confession and prayer are the daily reset buttons in many spiritual lives plagued with the flaws and failures inherent to the human race.
After a brief period of renewed optimism and hope, I once again find myself in a state of despair. I want to believe in the anointed path of self-love and self-discovery, but I can’t seem to find the right vehicle to drive. C pushes me relentlessly toward his discoveries, but they are not my own. It is painful to me- his relentless conversions. He uses modal verbs and I use the passive voice. He says: “you must try!” I say: “this way is known to have worked in the past.” He sees everything as a personal process, while I can’t seem to shake the feeling that I’ve tried it all before, and failed. I know I can’t move on until I learn to be comfortable here. I must love myself, just as I am, before I can hope to become better. But there is no path that makes sense to me! Everything is familiar and everything is flawed.
This is the roadblock, and this is the place where the mind connection fails. My gaze is turned in, still straining to understand and appreciate this strange creature of self and finding it always, always impossible to choose a path that isn’t littered with ineptitude. This is also where the bears come in, I believe. Why have I been dreaming so consistently and disturbingly of bears? The bears do perfectly normal human things, but of course not in a perfectly normal human manner. They move about this world, encumbered by their tremendous size and weight, attempting to appear unobtrusive. They do not succeed.
For a long time now, I feel that I have been carrying a tremendous weight around with me. I go through long periods where I try to name this weight, to identify and categorize it- to break it into parts, to discard it. As in psychology, I analyze the weight, looking for sources and root causes. I want to set it down, but instead I keep adding to it, picking things up along my journey of self-discovery. As I push forward to become something more, I take on more and more, but I never set anything down. In this way, I am something of a hoarder. The weight, I believe, might be called identity, and the myriad objects contributing to the whole might be labeled personality. Like a strange gypsy queen, I collect objects of curiosity and stash them away- perhaps not seeing their use at the present time but hoping, hoping always that I might know what to do with it later. And now, like the bears, I am struggling to do typically normal human things in my huge, clumsy body.
I watched Howl’s Moving Castle again recently. I know C's blue eyes saw, but they didn’t necessarily understand. As usual, my own eyes saw only myself reflected in that moving monstrosity: the menagerie of self, cobbled into a castle impenetrable and obscene.
I want to simplify my life. I want to simplify myself. I want to set down some of this weight. I do not have to be all things to everyone in my life. I do not have to call on my various tricks of personality to charm and deflect. This is a truth I used to know intimately. I wasn’t necessarily happy when I was young, but I certainly wasn’t carrying all this weight around. So the task is this: discard what I don’t need. Let things go, and present myself honestly. The honest core of truth is of course the hardest to utter: I don’t know who I am, beneath all of these objects of interest. And so I can’t believe that anyone is truly interested in me. I can’t see myself, obscured as I am, and so how can I (or anyone else) truly love me?
So maybe I’m not ready for a new love, after all. Maybe the mind connection will always falter, because we are both really just trying to see past all the crap stacked around me to my true self. To charm is now so easy for me, I can even charm myself. But to love requires clarity, and this is not something I can’t find anywhere among my objects d’art with which I have attempted to cultivate my identity.
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