paradox

I’ll let this place be a tender landing strip. There has been a lot of learning the past seven days, a lot of aching. Mostly, a lot of naming. Consciousness heals. Pain is transformed when I call it by its exact name. It is why naming is an important thing; it is what I’m hunting for when I write. Healing is not only to find all the doors inside the palace of self. It is not only to open them or create the conditions for their opening. It is not only to face the open door. It is then to know the nature of what it is inside. 

I used to think there were two kinds of power: the ability to exercise agency in the world and the ability to know what one knows. Lately, I’ve been thinking differently. I do not know if there are two kinds of power. I think power might be in the united both. Being able to be in one’s own, know what one wants, know what one needs, and then being able to act on it. The power I called masculine, the ability to exercise agency in the world, protects the one I called feminine, the ability to be in one’s own. My masculinity encircles the softness of self like a protective shell. The self that sits in the tender center, the one that is and knows love, gives instruction, and I must be able to respond. Without protective action, without agency, without being able to honor what the self is telling us to do, it becomes harder and harder to hear those instructions. Without those instructions as guide, without the ability to be in one’s own, actions become misguided. They can become polluted with harm. They can become abusive.

Power is the united both. Do and Be are the left and right sides of a single thought, as Clarissa Pinkola Estés might say it (thank you, teacher). I claimed my both; the choice was easy once I saw it. I cannot stop thinking about the conditions that made it feel impossible for me to do so until this point, until I was three thousand miles and many years away from abusive power dynamics that I needed protection from. I cannot stop thinking about the power abuses I’ve witnessed across these three thousand miles. I have many wells of rage in this palace of self.

A paradox: People’s power must be protected from transgressors, and power is irreversibly woven into our existence. It does not need protection. It cannot be touched. It remains always at our center, eternally unscathed. 

Then, I learned about control and my particular brand of it, by which I mean the particular narrative of the world that I’ve been determined to orient around. I’ve been attempting to filter my conception of reality by holding tight to narratives about who the fuck I am and who others are and how the world works. In order to hold tight to these narratives, I had to assume that they are inexorably true. I had to assume that I could know who I am and that there is a narrative that could possibly exist that can archive it.

Controlling the narrative also means that I’ve had to remain unconscious to any information that might disprove it. It means I had to filter reality to create an identity. It means I could not allow myself to look at every side of something. I let go of my need for narrative on the new moon. The choice was not easy even though I saw it. It was terrifying to admit that I can always be wrong, to admit that I don’t know who I am or what I’m doing and that I may never know. I felt like I’d lost everything. All the beliefs and stories I’d been telling about myself were gone. Everything I thought I knew about my identity was gone. I felt like I’d been plopped somewhere in space and was told to figure out where to go and how to get there with no further instruction. Without gravity, I had to orient to a new concept of ground. What felt terrifying began to feel liberating.

Without the narratives, which are dense and static, I needed something else from which to navigate. I needed something so fluid that it could be dynamic, something so dynamic that it could let go when necessary, something so unattached to the narrative of identity that it could look at all sides of reality and integrate accordingly. I found new ground in my center, that part of self that has no singular identity, that has no name. It is so dynamic that the heart of it is actually unchanging. Like water. It is that part of self that is so inexplicably itself that it does not need a narrative in order to feel that its existence is secure.

A paradox: I am most in control when I relinquish it. In navigating life, I must orient to the question who am I? and accept that I can cling to no answer. Naming points towards something that can have no name. 

Control brought me to the door of my shame. There is a shame so deep in my belly that it has become an ocean floor for many things else. It says: There is something inherently wrong with me, and other people will find out. Controlling the narrative is the way my body protects me from feeling my shame. Control is what makes sure that nobody does find out. It has become exhausting to keep up the charade, and in that exhaustion, I see the games I’ve been playing at. I’ve tried to feign good. I’ve tried to be better. Better is a word that exists in relation. How can I not strive for betterness without also holding the concept of worse?

I tucked my shame deep into my belly and played pretend. I’ve watched many men wear their shame on their fists, brand it on their chests. But on some level of my being, I always knew that, at least in this way, we were the same. The shame is the same. I am no better. I have done many things I am not proud of. I’ve caused harm, too. I’ve also had feelings of shame so big that I had no idea what to do with them. It has been my karma to spend so much of my life trying to convince those men that they are worthy of being loved as complete human beings, shame and all. They did not believe me because they could smell my lie, that I did not believe it myself.

I wanted to love them like that to prove that I could be loved like that, too. I was asking them to do what I could not. I claimed to give unconditional love in a desperate attempt to receive it. It was an impossible ask. We can only give what we ourselves have. I release that karma. I am no better, but I am also no worse. There is no ladder. We sit together at the table, eye-to-eye, face-to-face. I am the only one who can grant myself love without conditions. I am the only one who can accept the harm I’ve done to myself and others, respond, account, and orient accordingly, while simultaneously allowing for there to be nothing wrong with my existence. I am no imposter. There is no secret that needs protecting, no narrative that needs to be controlled. There is nothing for others to find out. I am perfect. I am whole.

A paradox: there is forgiveness, and there is nothing in my being to forgive.

One last thing. Pleasure was my constant companion through the learnings. A note on bodies: Access to pleasure is needed in order to release identifications with pain. Relation with pleasure is what creates the environment of heal.