Oh shit, what am I gonna say today?
You know, I am always as surprised as you are...
What is coming up for me today is that I have habitually and extensively used escape and avoidance to manage my life and emotions. I have frequently been absolutely terrified, not by yours, but my own. So afraid of all the many things I feel. So escape and avoidance has been been the way I managed these intense, overwhelming feelings, historically.
And I am grateful. I might not still be here if I didn’t have those tools. But if you are successful in growing up as much as aging, you find out that they only get you so far in this life...
What I have been really working on lately is presence and bravery...which is difficult because escape kills presence and avoidance kills bravery...
But I am learning that the opposite is also true: presence kills escape and bravery kills avoidance. Which is kind of rad. There is a spiritual counterbalance to hard wired coping strategies that perhaps once saved you, but now are just stalling you out.
It is not possible to have an intimate relationship without presence and bravery. And historically, I did not think either thing was particularly valuable...which would explain my relational wasteland. I could not remain so neither could the relationship. A lifetime of leaving left me, well, escaped, yes, but from what exactly?
I mean I do want to fall in love and have that be tolerable. I do want to get to know someone intimately over time. I do want to learn new skills and habits and facts about someone else that can only come with the intimacy time and attention provides. And you can’t be a runner and avoider and get there. You just can’t, I have tried.
Intimacy requires both presence and bravery. You have to remain when you want to leave and doing that is perhaps the bravest act of all. Leaving is easy. Which is why I have deployed that so often in my life. I leave and then the problem is handled...until I have to do it all over again the next time.
To some degree, I feel at 55, like some sort of weirdo at the park who has this nasty habit of spinning the merry-go-round to top speeds and then jumping off shortly thereafter. All that work to get it going and get on, only to launch myself off moments later. And then just to repeat the cycle again once my self inflicted wounds have somewhat healed. Sometimes I do not wait for healing at all...
I know this analogy has some of you puzzled since the powers that be decided about 30 years ago that merry-go-rounds were too dangerous and had them removed from all playgrounds everywhere. I think this is where society went wrong. We started making decisions for others about the amount of risk they should be able to take in the name of fun and funning. Why? Do we really need to be protected from ourselves? And wasn’t childhood better when the dangers we were allowed to engage in were of this sort rather than having to survive all the really fucked up shit that happened behind closed doors in places we were supposed to be safe? Just wondering if our insistence that things like the merry-go-round was really where our focus should have been placed...
So as a lifelong supporter of spinny things that momentarily defy gravity, I can see how my own love for the thrill of the momentary high has set me up for the inevitable fall later on. But it has taken me a long time to decide that the high I get from the thrill that only lasts until I break an arm or fuck up my knee, is worth it. For a long time now, the thrill was always worth it.
Perhaps I am just getting old, perhaps I am fearing death, perhaps I am just finally growing up. But I have begun to change up the escape/avoidance system for the presence/bravery paradigm.
My inner critic is still largely unconvinced...but she is remaining at the conference to learn more...and only spends a little time out roaming the halls instead of listening and learning.
It is hard to change hard wired stuff that feels true and real and vital. But sometimes, in your evaluation of you, you just continue to come up short in the same ways repeatedly and that is just a major downer resulting in me feeling like, “come on sister, you can do better...”
And maybe I can or maybe I can’t. I think the value really is in the trying. Pushing the bounds of my comfort zone...not so much that I just shut the whole thing down and give up. But enough so that I can be proud of myself for the effort expended.
I am avoidant. I am not sure that will ever completely change. But I can accept it and then begin to take some contrary action that causes me to challenge myself in ways that feel hard, scary and full of “I DO NOT WANT TO DO THIS!” But I can then just do it anyway. Fuck it. At least it isn’t boring. It is something new.
Turns out I kind of like foundational shifts. Movements from the habitual and ordinary towards the unfamiliar and extraordinary. The willingness to go there seems to be the key that unlocks the next level of me, and in turn, you. At least as far as you relate to me and me to you.
I love my life. If it never got any better than it is right now, I would die happy and blessed and lucky. But if I refused to do work that was blatantly mine to do...that seems like some sort of massive life shrinking shirking of responsibility we all have to be evolving humans.
The magic is in the embrace of willingness to do the work you are avoiding. Most especially when it scares the living shit out of you.
Again...still.
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