Age of Enlightenment

It is endlessly funny how when we are in a relationship, we expect the other person to know us fully. We expect them to anticipate our thoughts, our reactions, our wishes, our needs. We expect them to know when we would have wanted them to come home and when we were genuinely happy for them to go out so we can have time to ourselves. We expect them to know what to get for our birthday or Christmas since we had it in our cart or wish list for ages, even though our wishes and aspirations changed five hundred times that year. He should know me because we live together and we spend time together when in fact, we spend more time at work with wee Janet who thinks that if she leaves, a multibillion corporation will collapse. Ludicrous idea considering that parents made us, raised us, taught us to do most things and still don’t have a clue who we are but Barry whom we met in a bar, half cut and ready to sell his granny to touch a boob, is meant to be this great mind reader that just does everything right.

If we go a level deeper, why should Barry be “the one that knows me best”? How many times have people asked why we do certain things, and we just said that we had always been that way, or this is something that we just enjoyed? There is no “JUST” about it, by the way. There is a deliberate reason for everything that appeals in the way that it does. It turns out that my reaction to things and the way I experience the world is not because I am a Scorpio with the Sun in Scorpio and the Moon in Pisces and water signs are hella emotional, it is because I never felt safe, I have all of these warning bells to protect me, it is because I measure 10 times before I cut once and while others deserve love, empathy and compassion if they make a mistake, none for me, sister. The idea of somebody else knowing you so intimately becomes even more ludicrous still when we walk in this fog of not knowing what is wrong with us and why things don’t work out when everybody else could have a pretty accurate guess at what the problem is by what they saw and experience around you.

A quick Google search will tell you that self-awareness is your ability to perceive and understand the things that make you who you are as an individual, including your personality, actions, values, beliefs, emotions, and thoughts. If you watch any movie, you will learn this idea that you just need to have 2 cries, eat a bit of junk food, get drunk and face plant because you are so quirky, take a bubble bath or two, medicate under a tree, light two scented candles, maybe paint something or have a makeover and ta-da you have turned your life around. Good job, you! Now, that this is done, here is your perfect job, here is the man of your dreams and your perfect friends. Essentially, everything you have ever wanted and all you had to do was be embarrassed a few times. If art imitates life and this is the process of achieving self-awareness, it is so amazing that more people are not out there surrounded by everything they ever wanted.

My journey to a better sense of self-awareness began with admitting there was a problem. I have done things in the same manner for so long and nothing was changing, I wasn’t getting any closer to what I wanted in this life. I was so good at not feeling anything and pretending nothing bothered me that I didn’t even know I was doing it. I would just feel like I am gracefully getting over life’s hardships, and I am being resilient in the face of adversity. Smile even though your heart is breaking. Be gracious and forgiving with everybody who wronged you because nobody likes it when you are angry about it, you sound bitter. Talk about it but not too much, darling, you are bumming everybody out. I was told that I had to feel my feelings but, I didn’t have a clue how to do that.

The brain is all about getting pleasure and avoiding pain. The whole thing about numbing is that the mind can’t cope with the emotion so, to protect itself, it buries it. Once the brain has done that, it is not very keen to try and dig up old emotions and feel them. It is like when you make a comment to somebody and all of a sudden, they start to either attack you or put together a vague answer and then change the subject. The comment touched a vulnerable area, and they are trying to protect themselves from going there thus they would lead you down the path and change topics so many times, so you forget what was being discussed. Once you stumble upon something like this, internally, the brain sounds the alarm that opening this door will be painful and sounds all of the alarms to keep one away from pain and discomfort. The path to awareness for me is paved with the knowledge that pain and discomfort will come, that they indicate where the problems are and the only way to be freed from them and do better for myself in future is to go through it rather than try to run away from it or go around it.

Once something arises, the first phase of it is shock and denial. How can this have been there, and I didn’t see it? Surely, this isn’t really happening, I am just misunderstanding it because if the situation is not real then these feelings are not real, and I can just be fine. Everything tells me that I took a peek behind the door and now it is time to let it go. We tried. Stop. Walk away from it.

It was real, though. How can it not be when I have details of it, clear memories that frame it? Anger rises, mostly towards me for ignoring red flags, also anger for the event itself and any person that might have been involved. Anger steals clarity but it also propels me forward. Anger wants to know why me. Why always me? Anger gives answers and they are not always the kindest so, there is a sifting of what is self-hate and what is fact. Anger hides the fear that things will never be the same. Anger hides the fear that I might not be able to find a solution. Anger hides the fear that I might not be able to cope with what is happening. Anger hides the dear that if I was wrong about his, I might be wrong about so many other things that I have built my beliefs on.

Still, I stay in that space and my brain becomes obsessed with it. Always in the back of the mind, always a sense of discomfort, always trying to make a story that ties things together. Surely, I am missing something, and I am misconstruing. What happened? What did I do to make this happen? How did I react? What could I have done differently? What did I feel at the time? This is the bargaining. Maybe if I do this one thing, this could be resolved. Maybe if I had done these three magical steps and said this sequence of words, this would stop and still go in my favour. Again and again, thinking about how this was not what I thought it was and if the next day I wake up, I will discover that this was just a big misunderstanding. Hoping for a miracle. Hoping, wishing, praying but nothing changes.

The next stage for me is acceptance. Admitting that this is happening, admitting that I had a hand in the way things progressed and turned out, admitting that I will have to let go of familiar things despite wanting to hang on to them, admitting that I am hurt, admitting that I am scared, admitting that I am overwhelmed, admitting that this can’t be ignored any longer. Once this happens though, the last stage kicks in and that is depression. After all of the pain and anger has kept me tense and awake, the body now needs to release it all and my mind needs to rest. I cry to let it all out. Sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours, sometimes again and again for days and weeks. I might stop eating, drinking, sleeping. I forget that I am a human being and not just the vessel for this pain. Through depression, I keep working with acceptance to adjust the reality to what it is rather than a delusional version of it and I allow myself to grieve for what was and what could have been. It seems endless but all of a sudden, it starts to ease. It stops being all-encompassing and the body starts to remember its needs. I get hungry again, I get thirsty again. I start to feel more comfortable being me overall.

From this process, a revelation is born. It is an understanding of what happened, what got me there and what I should do in the future to not end up in the same place. It has been a tough process, it feels like a victory, and it feels like this has been resolved, I figure that this door has been closed. It has not been meditating under a tree, it was ugly crying with snot while curled up on the couch, or walking aimlessly and feeling there is no place to rest because it is the reality in your mind that no longer feels like home.

I go on for a while, and then the same thing turns up again in a different form. I look at it in shock again and I think to myself that this can’t be because I already resolved it but, it is happening, and the process starts again. All the steps and then I uncover more and more, get more pieces of the puzzle and I figure out that I never had the full picture. I realize that this comes in layers and as I level up in terms of acceptance and more importantly the curiosity that I approach the entire process with.

I have accepted that I do not know much and that I should strive to understand who I am and how I got here. I made it my goal to know myself fully. Once you look and want to see, it becomes easier for my therapist to gently push me in the right direction. Just a crumb, just a hint can push me on the right path. I become a sleuth on my own figuring out who has done it and every time the answer is me. That can be so incredibly hurtful that one wants to stop looking. It was so much easier to lay the blame on everybody else and have it stay outside of me. It feels disheartening but also it gives hope. If you got yourself into this, you could get yourself out of this. You have no power in this world greater than the power to control your reactions, your perspective, your timing. This inkling of awareness starts to make you mindful of your potential. Change has started to grow within you.

Another thing that people might not realise is that challenges might not come in a sequence, there might be two or three issues you are trying to release at the same time, each with their own intensity. It feels that once the lid has been taken off, it cannot be put back on the box. Again, and again attacked by emotions and things that have laid dormant for tens of years and now they all feel it is their time to come to light. You go for so long that you start to wonder why everybody has it together and why you keep getting lessons. It feels like you are getting your head just above the water and as soon as you take a breath, something else pulls you back under. All of this is on top of going to work, doing your job, paying your bills, keeping good relationships with people, keeping active, doing your housework, and trying not to let things slip behind. It feels like hell on earth but what is happening is that you are feeling all of your feelings. No longer numbing, no longer disassociating, no longer denying. You are slowly seeing your patterns and you are unlearning everything that does not serve, and you are slowly shedding the person that you used to be. I start to know who I am; I start to understand what I want; I start to understand how I react, and I start to see the change. My internal monologue changes from “This is happening, and I can’t handle it” to “This is happening, you are now triggered, look at the situation and understand what the trigger is and what wound has been activated. Listen to your body and see where the sensation resides.” Small steps, most hopefully, in the right direction.

Knowing who you are also comes with the awareness of the effect you have on others. For example, if I feel lonely and a man comes along and talks to me and gives me attention, validates me and I reply, I have to think am I talking to this person because I am bored or am I truly interested? I am a strong believer that one should treat people the way that they want to be treated. It is better to let someone know that I have no interest in them, with the risk of hurting their feelings in the short run, rather than using them to meet my needs and hurting them worse in the long run. I know we all had that conversation about how we don’t like a person, and we are just having a bit of fun but, it is not taken as lightly when it happens to us. We tell ourselves that they knew what they were doing, and they did it anyway, but we knew what we were doing, and we did it anyway.

With awareness of self and the effect on others, also comes empathy. The peace in your mind on some situations and things being released completely makes one not react to situations at an impulse but decide what path to take in each case. I can think if their words or actions are about me, I can consider their purpose, I can allow for space to develop and I can ask questions to clarify rather than react, stop things in their track and then try to fill in the blanks myself. I can make better decisions if they are worth keeping in my life or if they should be cut. Peace over popularity all day every day.

I have been told in a conversation that I seem so self-aware that the person didn’t think they could tell me anything new about myself. It sounded nice, and I wish it were true, but I know that I still have blind spots, I still have things I am ignoring and that there are high chances I still have issues that I have not even touched and that are going to come up during the course of my life. I figure that since I spent so much of my life people-pleasing and trying to make other people happy, it is a worthwhile endeavour to make myself happy and put in the effort to get to know myself. It’s not always easy, it’s not always fun but what an adventure to share with the only person that I will have for life. Myself 😊