"It's not because I always give up / It might be I always give out"
- Sharon Van Etten, Give Out
It's been a ponderous process to begin embracing myself as a person with a fundamental identity crisis. To begin envisioning myself as a WHOLE person, replete with considerable failings of character and motive and yet also substantial skills and passion. To turn back onto myself the piercing luminosity of critical reflection without forsaking the necessary companion of deep self-compassion.
The vast majority of my adult life has been spent managing a ludicrously confident yet false self propped up by the entrenched, load-bearing veins of my insecurity. There were always enormous, unmanageable cracks in this facade. And I always knew on some level what was going on - but my acute inability to confront my insecurities made reflection, realization and confrontation untenable.
And so my false self survived. Because it had to. Because without it the "I" that I was trying to make into me would wither and die and be replaced by ?. And that ? was too unknowable and frightening to even consider as a viable alternative.
And on and on.
Until the harsh storms of life unexpectedly battered my already ruptured pretense.
I didn't give up on my false self. But it did give out. And horribly, painfully so.
And now what is the ? I've been discovering in the disastrous remains of the well-managed "I"?
It's precarious. It's fragile. It's unnamable.
It's beauty from ashes. A secret. A treasure buried deep within wounds and pain.
An insubstantial green shoot in a hostile wasteland. A whisper, unheard. Vulnerable tears, silent.
I am known. I am loved. I am whole.
And, yet. Will I linger in my beloved wasteland?
- Sharon Van Etten, Give Out
It's been a ponderous process to begin embracing myself as a person with a fundamental identity crisis. To begin envisioning myself as a WHOLE person, replete with considerable failings of character and motive and yet also substantial skills and passion. To turn back onto myself the piercing luminosity of critical reflection without forsaking the necessary companion of deep self-compassion.
The vast majority of my adult life has been spent managing a ludicrously confident yet false self propped up by the entrenched, load-bearing veins of my insecurity. There were always enormous, unmanageable cracks in this facade. And I always knew on some level what was going on - but my acute inability to confront my insecurities made reflection, realization and confrontation untenable.
And so my false self survived. Because it had to. Because without it the "I" that I was trying to make into me would wither and die and be replaced by ?. And that ? was too unknowable and frightening to even consider as a viable alternative.
And on and on.
Until the harsh storms of life unexpectedly battered my already ruptured pretense.
I didn't give up on my false self. But it did give out. And horribly, painfully so.
And now what is the ? I've been discovering in the disastrous remains of the well-managed "I"?
It's precarious. It's fragile. It's unnamable.
It's beauty from ashes. A secret. A treasure buried deep within wounds and pain.
An insubstantial green shoot in a hostile wasteland. A whisper, unheard. Vulnerable tears, silent.
I am known. I am loved. I am whole.
And, yet. Will I linger in my beloved wasteland?