Emotions Concealed

Where have I been? Traveling the small perimeter of my world between working at a midtown, small Catholic university, driving to the Western suburb which holds my new office, to the Eastern edges of Minneapolis where my older daughters live with their loved ones. I am traveling, traveling, traveling way too much. And now, now I am trying to slow down and hear my own heart beating, so I can follow the rhythm it is beating out. 

I have been immersed in education, completing two graduate degrees, and forcing myself to regurgitate knowledge I already have in a doctoral program, pretending to be learning, so as not to seem too proud. Hoping to retain a position in the precarious state that the university is in. For all of that, I’ve been told that I won’t be offered a contract after the end of May. Restructuring. 

Most of my friends and loved ones have seen that I’ve been way too busy, and have urged me to slow down. I’ve replied that I’m waiting on the universe to move me. And so now, it has. I have to trust that all that I’ve built has not been built on sand, or if it has, it is ok that the ocean will pull it back into the sea. 

I have to trust the sand, and the stars, and the wind, and the clouds, and find myself back a child of the universe who belongs, no matter my credentials or bank account. I have been chasing and chasing away the ideology of success and belonging, wanting to belong, not wanting to personify difference, wanting wisdom, not a degree. Wanting resources, not to build walls, but to feel safe and to create. To create a place where all of us belong. 

I am sitting with my own not belonging (shame) to creating my own belonging, and in this place of my own belonging, a space where all of us, and all of our emotions have enough space. We have a conundrum of having created shame around even having emotions at all. We are born with emotional competence, which our shame based culture devalues almost immediately after birth. 

Reading this this morning, (listening to Julie London sing Sway): 

The relation between social bonds and emotion was developed by Helen Lewis (1977). In her analysis of infant-caretaker relations and adult relations in modern societies, she made explicit what was implied by Cooley and Goffman; that shame and threats to the social bond are interdependent aspects of the same reality. Shame is the emotional aspect of disconnection between persons. 

Lewis proposed that there is a universal human nature, one that unites biology and culture. She suggested that studies in infant development have demonstrated a biological initiation of social competence. (From Scheff & Retzinger’s Emotions and Violence, 1991.) 

Love Arises

We fall in love with the stories we tell ourselves and fall in love with the parts we play. In this way, there is no chance, no risk, that we ourselves might love another, and so have our heart touched or broken. 

We move in and out of day and night, pushing loneliness aside, secretly feasting on pain, resentment, envy and fear, but move back to the story, in which we are always center stage. 

The story is about how we are more important that we are, or less important than we are and how we will never be like all the others. We look through the glass and it seems that others are more happy, more connected, more real, somehow, but we ourselves, we hold to a higher ideal. 

If we are lucky, the stories fall apart, and life tells us something different. If we are lucky, the stories tell us to choose one day, between the story or the reality, and if we are wise, we let the story fall behind, holding onto nothingness. And out of this nothingness, love arises. 

Buying Time

It is nearly the last day in February, and it is six degrees below zero, that is not counting the windchill. That, I don’t want to know. It has been the longest coldest winter that I can remember and we are driving ice packed tires over ice packed roads and daily see cars that went too fast, turned too close or just sadly hit that patch of ice and ended up in various conditions of crash. My nerves are fraught and I am tired. We are still expected to show up for work, to buy food and to go about our business. We don’t add up the time that we have lost to slow traffic, to needing more sleep, or to making ourselves another cup of tea to warm ourselves up. We are in this gogogo world and I’m just tired. We are not supposed to say we are tired, we are supposed to be happy and filled with passion for our work and our lives, and if we are not, well, just don’t bring it up. 

So, I’m adding another layer to my life in trying to keep it together, when I don’t feel very together. Who to tell the truth to? When to smile, and when not to? Why care about my hair when I’m just going to wear a hat that smooshes it? Why care about my clothes, when I’m wearing long-underwear, yet again? I want to just carry a blanket around, really, and have a hot toddy instead of a hot tea. I am waiting, waiting, waiting for spring.  I am angry when a co-worker tells me well, we are not out of this yet. I want to scream, let me have my fantasy that it will warm up in a couple of days, and what are you now, a meteorologist? But I don’t, I smile, she has more power than me, sits higher up in the hierarchy, and my place is precarious enough. Smile, smile, smile; tiredness and anger have no place in the workplace. They are not just buying our time. 

Keeping Faith

I’ve been wondering lately what is faith? What is it and how does it function in people’s lives? As a word, it has been mostly used in religious context, but I think it needs to be explored more broadly. Perhaps faith is just believing in what comes next, and we don’t know what comes next, do we? "Faith is believing what you know ain't so," so said Mark Twain. I want my faith to be in that what I know is so.

It has become my belief that as we connect with others, that it is in this connection and in our relationships that we allow others to know what is possible, and for me, this is becoming my faith. That that which we don’t know, gets made explicit in and by other people. If we don’t know love, we learn that through others. If we haven’t traveled to someplace, we can go there through the stories of those who have been. If we’ve never felt safe, we may find ourselves in a place of safety, if we allow it, amidst those who welcome and celebrate us. 

What we want can be evident in our longings, and even in our envy of what others have or have accomplished. And as we find more and more of how amazing life can be, along with it comes this sense of abundance, so much abundance that we can only want to share it. This then becomes love. Love that doesn’t differentiate between who is worthy and who is not, love that doesn’t differentiate between what I may or may not get back in return. We live and love to show ourselves and each other what is possible, and if you think of all the people, all the stories that live through history, that is a lot of possibility. 

As we travel through our lives, creating the path in front of us, we call into our lives the people and experiences we desire to expand the view of what can be. I wait in wonderment then, each moment, each day. And I look back in gratitude for all the possibilities that each person in my life has made me aware of. 

First Kiss

Throughout our lives, for many of us, we wonder, am I lovable? Under the word lovable, we can have whole list of what this means. It can mean popular, pretty, even being acknowledged (or accoladed) for our achievements. Sometimes, it just means being seen. Research on relationships are now showing that love in all it’s incarnations pretty much shows up the same, it is being loved and accepted just as we are, it is being heard when we have something to say, it is having our feelings acknowledged and accepted, not swept aside either by words or by the pained look on someone else’s face that might say, “Your emotions are too much for me.” 

This being said, I know now, that for much of my really young life, I didn’t feel loved, and I never felt accepted at the Catholic grade school I attended. At school, I felt generally safe, much safer than I did at home, but I did not feel accepted. I was jealous of the popular girls and boys, too, the ones who talked about having cabins to go to on the weekends, who took family vacations, and who seemed to have an easy confidence that I lacked. It pains me a little now, to remember the small child I was, trying to navigate the world with only my mother’s voice in my head, telling me how she was not accepted in the neighborhood we lived in; and how we were not rich like all the other people in all the social circles we traveled in. Always on the peripheral. 

And so, when in about 7th grade, a boy told me he liked me, I thought he was joking and laughed at him. I didn’t try to make him feel bad, by laughing and joking it off, I seriously could not believe that he could like me. I didn’t know how to like myself, and so I wasn’t able to imagine anyone else liking me. When I found out from my best friend’s brother, who was in the same grade as us, that I’d hurt this kid’s feelings, I felt bad and confused. But wasn’t he trying to make fun of me? I guess not. 

Then the next year in 8th grade, still hanging out with my best friend, and having access to boys because of her brother, one night, I actually kissed and made out with a popular boy, actually, probably the most popular boy in the school. Blond, athletic, sweet and from a good, well-off family. I was surprised by this, but again, confused. Did he really like me? How could he possibly? I was not “one of them.” I was the outsider, if only in my own head, carefully kept within these boundaries, still, by my mother’s voice. If she didn’t know how to belong, how could I? This was not my first kiss, but one of them. I never expected that we would ‘go’ with each other, or that this meant anything more than goofing off and exploring as kids do. 

That was more than 40 years ago. This makes me feel ancient. More than 40 years ago. This past fall, I attended a service for my best friend’s brother. He died young after living a hard life. A lot of people showed up at his memorial, I showed up to be there for my friend. Surprisingly, a handful of people from our Catholic grade school showed up, and one of them, the popular boy that I had kissed in 8th grade. I felt that same sense of insecurity creeping up, but by now, I’d worked through some of it. I could shake hands, make conversation, and know, that I was not ‘less than’ any of these people. It was a nice feeling. What I didn’t expect was to hear him say, “Of course I remember you, you were my first kiss.” 

My reaction was surprise, I hadn’t thought about that ‘make out session’ in my best friend’s bedroom for many years. And so I said, “Oh yeah, that’s right, I forgot.” He was like, “How could you forget?” And so, while I so under valued myself, this guy had remembered, and carried with him, me, as his first kiss. So, you see, when we don’t value ourselves, it often stands in the way of believing that others value or love us. I think this is what happened with my mom. In many ways, she stayed the poor child with the immigrant dad, feeling under valued, not being able to see how valued she was , and still is. Still hoping to prove that she is lovable. I understand this too well, and so, only 40 years later, I am learning more each day to love myself, to value myself. To each day, give myself, my first kiss. 

House of Dreams

I had a really strange dream last night. It was a dream about the house that I grew up in. Place is something that is hard to put your finger on, because places change. The earth remains, but geography, too, changes. We actually have so many changes, micro-changes, if you will, going on all the time. Our hair grows and falls out, our skin ages, roads erode and are repaired. Yet sometimes, we find comfort in what remains the same. I’m not entirely sure what all this big house over on Sheridan Avenue represents to me, but it must be more than I realize, because this dream has shaken me a bit. 

Actually I have recurring dreams of walking the street of Sheridan Avenue between 40th and 42nd streets, and the way almost always leads up the sloping driveway to my childhood home. This is the way I walked to school, over and over and over. Starting in kindergarten, all the way up to high school, when I would walk (and not take the bus). So, for many years I walked those blocks. For many years, this home was the safest place I knew, and ironically, not always the most safe place, too. This was the home where I’d lay sleeping as a kid, and my older brother, locked out of the home late at night, would climb up to my second story window and knock on my window to go let him in. Scared the bejeezus out of me, to find my brother there, but I obediently got up and let him in. Strange things could happen in a house with 8 kids. 

This is the house where my younger brothers could behead my Barbies and get away with it. The house where I threw my Chatty Baby doll out my second story window because kids in the neighborhood said they’d catch her, and she’d be OK. They didn’t and she wasn’t, and when I held her smashed little body, crying on the staircase, my mom had no sympathy, just “What did you think would happen?” And yet those stairs held comfort for me in their solidness, the high ceilings in that home left me space to imagine. The very walls were the protection that I longed for. 

So last night, when I dreamt that this home had become a restaurant, and the whole end of the block a mini-mall, I was furious and bereft, crying out to no-one in particular, “But this was the home I grew up in.” There was nothing of a family home left, only a bar at the front end, where I could see in, and what I just imagined as little tables filling in all the spaces in the rest of the house. There was no more ownership, no connection left to who I once was. As I get older, instead of wanting to let go, I want to hold on. I want to hold onto all the places I’ve been, all the people I’ve known, I want to cherish and be grateful for all of my life. How do we gather up the “all of us” I wonder? How do we stay connected on this changing planet, in changing bodies, with changing relationships? I don’t know what the pull is, but I do know, that I need to drive over to Sheridan Avenue, and just sit and know that that big house is still there, and it is still a home. A place that was once, my home, full of dreams, full of wonder, full of fear, full of me, full of us. 

with

moving forward

not against

stepping into

not stepping back

gently untying the ties that bind

leaving politeness and 

entering kind

the rhythm that 

feeds me

is the rhythm

I crave

it cannot be contained

it does not behave

but carries us 

forward gently but sure

there is healing

there is no cure