A perfectly communicable little vision of truth (parking-lot division)

A couple of weeks ago, I drove to the airport to pick up a friend who was flying in from Toronto for a visit. And since I was going there anyway, I offered to transport one of my favourite ride share pals from the south shore to catch an earlier flight out. A much, much earlier flight.

That was no big deal. I'm often awake by 4am anyway, so deciding to get up just a little earlier to help a friend catch a flight (and save some carbon) was a no brainer. What it did mean, though, was that I had a lot of time to kill in the city between the early flight and the later one. It was a good opportunity to do my once-yearly Halifax errands, but because the first flight was so early, there were several hours when nothing was open yet.

I decided I would find a quiet parking lot and settle down and try to recoup a few zzzzs. I had a pillow and a blanket, so I tipped the passenger seat all the way back, got as comfy as I could and tried to snooze.

I was tired, but I couldn't fall asleep. Instead, I sat there, thinking.

What I thought about was vulnerability.

I've been thinking about vulnerability a lot lately – in the context of privilege and racialization (inspired by articles like this one), in the context of global peace and conflict, in the context of interpersonal relationships.

But I have been avoiding thinking about vulnerability in terms of me. I have a life-long habit of trying to keep my vulnerability at arms-length by looking at it through a telescope, at the safe distance of theory.

Sitting in that parking lot, I found myself suddenly and unexpectedly sinking deep, deep, deep into my own vulnerability – acknowledging how easily hurt I am, and how frightened I feel of intimacy and rejection, of humiliation and shame, of saying or doing the "wrong" thing and getting laughed at or called out.

You call that a spiritual epiphany?

I posted on social media (the best way to share how you're feeling at 5am without disturbing anyone who isn't already awake) that I thought I had had a spiritual epiphany.

That might seem like a pretty grand way to describe getting weepy in a parking lot, but that's how it felt.

It's not that I'd never felt vulnerable before, it's that I'd never felt open to feeling vulnerable before.

Always before, feeling vulnerable has felt like I'm about to fly into a million pieces, like my very survival is hanging in the balance. And that feeling is often followed by me lashing out against the person, thought or event that has stirred up my vulnerability, whether internal or external, by saying or thinking something really intolerant. 

But in that parking lot, I sat and felt vulnerable, and I found that I could tolerate it. I felt relaxed and open in a way I haven't ever felt before. I felt sad, sure. And scared. And sad. (Like, really, really, really sad.)

As Franny Glass says in Franny and Zooey (my favourite book and the one from which I stole the title of this blog post*), "I just never felt so fantastically rocky in my entire life." The fantastic part was that I didn't feel like I was going to disintegrate and I didn't flip the channel to anger or donuts or something else, anything else, to try to escape feeling vulnerable.

Micro/Macro

That felt monumental to me. My difficulties with bearing vulnerability have been the source of a lot of unhappiness in my life. My fear of vulnerability has often kept my heart closed. And while I've gotten pretty good at keeping my vulnerability shut down, when the pressure becomes too much to bear, I have at times been prompted me to say terrible things or hold hateful attitudes toward other people, things or experiences, as a way of comforting myself and giving myself some relief from my terror of my own vulnerability.

This has had the unfortunate result of increasing the level of disconnection in my life. Which in turn makes me feel more afraid of being vulnerable.

I think I can see that same dynamic playing out in our culture at large. We have vilified vulnerability. We have made it shameful to need help, to struggle, to show weakness or even tenderness. We have divided ourselves from one another in little silos of apparent strength.

Disconnection flourishes and the solutions presented are: more stuff, more entertainment, more distractions.

It seems to me that all that buried vulnerability is pressure cooking away at both a personal and cultural level, bubbling up as selfishness, narcissism, racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, rape, violence, class conflict, ethnic conflict, war, genocide, etc.

No one wants to blink first.

We're scared of what might happen if we do.

We have been taught to expect that other people will reject, judge and/or exploit our vulnerability. We have been taught that help will not be available. Sometimes that is the way it is. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Hope

For a couple of weeks now, I've been grappling with all of this. Accessing my vulnerability in that parking lot felt liberating. Trying to maintain access to it has been uncomfortable, to say the least. And not very successful, either. I've shut myself down more times than a hospital ward with chronic C. difficile. Then this weekend, I was at the West Dublin Market, hanging out with many friends and loved ones.

A dear friend I hadn't seen in a few weeks gave me a hug and suggested we hang on for a few extra breaths in each others arms.

There, there it was. That little catch and shudder through my chest, back and shoulders, the release of feeling safe in the arms of someone who loves me and is not afraid to hold me and all of my fault lines.

It's in moments like that one that I think there's hope that more of us, more of the time, can learn to celebrate our own and others' vulnerability and hold ourselves and each other in it. These are the moments that liberate us. I encourage you to seek them out and to help create them for others.

*The original line I adapted for my title is "...a perfectly communicable little vision of truth (lamb-chop division)"

Body Wisdom #6: Hot flashes, shame and sugar

I've been having a hot-flashy bunch of mornings, waking up at 3 or 4 or 5 because I'm TOO HOT.

I'm discovering for myself an interesting correlation between the hormones that make me flushed and feelings of shame.

Shame is a hot emotion for me. It starts with a funny feeling in the pit of my stomach: an uncomfortable, unsettled, roiling feeling that spreads up my chest, arms and face in a blush of heat and colour. Shame-faced, as they say.

For me, hot flashes feel a lot like shame. The only difference is that hot flashes don't start with that feeling in the pit of my stomach.

What's particularly interesting to me is that days when I'm having a lot of hot flashes also seem to be days when I am more likely to do or say something that causes me to feel shame. I've been wondering about how the mechanics of that work. Do the hormones make me more likely to say or do things I could feel ashamed of, or do they make me more likely to feel shame about something that I have said or done?

After much consideration, I think that what's going on here is that my discomfort is acting as a catalyst for my behaviour and the ensuing shame. Hot flashes are uncomfortable. So are many other peri-menopausal symptoms, like depression, down-spiralling self-regard, lack of sleep/fatigue or feeling like you're about to burst into tears for no reason. I also believe that a heightened sense of "not belonging" might be a peri-menopausal symptom, in the same way that it is often an adolescent one.

I think it is a pretty basic instinct to discharge discomfort by pushing it away: sending a harsh email or flippant text, making a mean joke, gossiping – essentially making one's own discomfort be about someone else.

Last week, for instance, I told a joke that seemed funny in my head, but landed with a THUD. And then the other day, I found something slipping out of my mouth that – well, if someone had said something like that to me, I would have felt so angry and judgmental. I realize now that both instances were knee-jerk reactions to feeling like I didn't belong. Both times I felt very ashamed afterward – afraid that I had been insensitive or inappropriate and either hurt somebody's feelings or ticked them off or just simply acted like a real jerk – like someone I don't want to be.

Both times I went and ate a large amount of chocolate afterwards.

And then I felt better. Well, I felt less ashamed. I did feel physically queasy, so it's probably more accurate to say that I felt both better and worse at the same time.

Making the connection between sugar and shame felt enlightening. I suppose since shame is the fear of not belonging/being loved and eating sugar simulates feeling loved and comforted for me, it makes sense that eating sugar would soothe my feelings of shame.

Sugar is a bandaid.

Sometimes, bandaids come in handy. They are great at temporarily protecting an open wound. But what I've been thinking more and more is that the hope of healing those wounds lies in leaning in to my discomfort and doing a better job of owning it.

This is a rocky time for me, and also a beautiful time – a beautiful, rocky time. I feel lucky to be where I am, to have the option of a lot of solitude and quiet and space to be where I'm at. And when I'm in a situation where I feel uncomfortable or like I don't belong, I am encouraging myself to lean into my discomfort, to breathe and to own that I feel how I feel and that that is okay, that I am still safe. And when I don't feel up to doing that, I am giving myself permission to step away – or to burst into tears – or more likely, to step away and then burst into tears.

This is going to be a struggle for me. It will require me to be much more vulnerable that I'm comfortable being. I hope I can accept myself where I'm at and feel compassionate for myself moment to moment. In all of these beautiful, rocky moments.

Sexism #5: Entitlement

I haven't added to my series on sexism in several months. It's not that I haven't been thinking about it, but there have been other things going on – summer, markets, festival, moving, house-sitting.


In some ways, I lead a life that is relatively sheltered from sexism: I don't consume a lot of advertising, many of my friends and neighbours are not sexist. But I still have encounters with sexist behaviour that are too frequent for my liking. This behaviour takes the form of jokes (about feminists or fat girls or sexy girls), discussions of who's hot and who's not, obsessions with weight loss, weight gain and relationships and occasional, casual, conversational references to women as floozies or sluts. (Yes, I live in rural Nova Scotia, and yes, it does still feel like 1956 here some of the time).

Some of this behaviour is engaged in by men I know, and some by women I know. And some of it is engaged in by me. I have my own internalized sexism, my own set of beliefs that I am trying to work with all the time, to revise and rethink and transform.

I try very hard to remember that sexism is bad behaviour and that people who indulge in it are not bad people. We are all products of our culture.

That doesn't mean it's not still frustrating and hurtful to encounter unexamined and unapologetic sexist behaviour. As I discussed in my post about sexism and protagonism back in April, there are some people who do not not seem to understand that people can be protagonists in their own lives even if those people are not men (or not white, or are living with a disability, mental illness, etc., etc.)

It's pretty easy to spot those people. When I'm having a conversation with another person, it's  clear to me when I'm being treated as an equal human being and when I'm being treated as an objectified "woman", an entity that is being assessed for its potential usefulness to the other person, a person who assumes they are the only protagonist in the conversation.

And that assumption about who counts and who does not, is closely related with today's topic: entitlement.

We're entitled to tell you who you are and what you want

Here's a recent example from my own life of being subjected to someone else's sense of entitlement.

Some friends who have headed out west for the winter hosted a farewell-for-now music show a couple of weeks ago at our local community hall. They invited a number of people, including me, to join them on stage to sing or play a song or two.

I was introduced along the lines of "Our friend, the lovely and talented Alex Hickey" or something like that. And as I got up on stage, I heard a male voice heckle from the audience, "and she's available."

"That's debatable," was the response that popped out of my mouth.

But what I wish I had had the presence of mind to say, was, "Why do you feel entitled to decide what my relationship status is – or should be – let alone shouting it at me in a room full of people?"

I'm pretty sure I recognized the voice of that heckler and I don't think he has any specific, hostile feelings toward me as a person. I don't think he was trying to be mean. Maybe he was even trying to be helpful, thinking he could help me to hook up with someone.

The problem is that his heckling didn't take me into account. I wasn't a protagonist in that moment; I was an object. A thing. An available thing.

That comment was based on that man's beliefs and ideas, projected onto me. I'm a single woman and a single woman is obviously "available", à la carte, for men to peruse and either accept or reject.

I have to admit that I have felt that way during a large portion of my life. And at various times, I have traded away some important parts of myself in return for feeling loved and/or sanctioned by the hetero-normative, pair-bonded system that dominates our culture.

I don't feel that way right now. I've learned the hard way that the cost of being in a relationship with someone can be much higher than the cost of not being in a relationship with someone. And that the rewards of loving someone else can be much slimmer than the rewards of loving and valuing oneself.

Who's Entitled?

I admit that I was furious for a couple of days after being heckled like that. My inner monologue ran along the lines of How dare he?, railing against his assumptions, sense of entitlement and down-right rudeness, hurling his assumptions at me while I was trying to do my job, for Pete's sake! Oh, I had my outrage worked up into a fine, self-righteous frenzy, I can tell you.

It took me a while to calm down about it.

It took me a while to calm down about it because I felt hurt and vulnerable. I felt humiliated by that comment. It took me right back to high school, back to the smart, geeky, emotionally-wounded girl I was in my teens, who didn't have a boyfriend, who felt rejected – and rejecting – and pretended not to care.

I felt entitled to judge and be angry at people back in those days. It was my survival. And being thrown back into those feelings threw me back into my judgment and outrage.

A humble and gentle heart is an antidote for entitlement

I went to a concert in Halifax last Friday, a benefit for Syrian Refugees that was put on by a number of my friends in the folk music community. There was some awesome, hard-core, traditional folk music, the kind of music I love: Vince Morash, Ann Fearon and James Crouse, Clary Croft and Dan McKinnon. And there was also a theatrical/musical piece about rights and responsibilities, performed by the youth theatre group, Project ARC. It was excellent: moving and fun and sincere and wholehearted.

Their piece held a big message for me – and for everyone – that none of us are entitled to anything, that our varied assignments in terms of class, gender, sexuality, ability, etc. don't make us more or less human than anyone else. The only things we're entitled to are our inalienable human rights – rights that are extended to every human equally, are ours from birth and cannot be taken away. Coupled with those rights, we each have responsibilities; we all make choices and take actions to either hurt and belittle other people or to respect them and treat them as equals. Or to do nothing.

Sometimes the world feels to me like a wilderness of assumptions and needs and compulsions and demands and expectations. I am trying to build a life that is centred in authenticity and peace, but I  often have experiences that pull me from the path – experiences that stir up anger and outrage, frustration and the risk of being totally overwhelmed by the hugeness of the task before me.

And in that place of feeling overwhelmed and vulnerable, it is far too easy for me to resort to feeling entitled to judge others and to hold them in contempt.  

I was very grateful to receive a reminder last Friday night that I am no more entitled to my judgments than anyone else is to theirs. And that the task of living an authentic life is not overwhelmingly large, but simply the same size as I am. No bigger and no smaller.

It is my responsibility to keep a firm grip on my own sense of myself. No matter what forces push me in what directions, it is always my choice: whom I decide to spend time with and how I want to talk and think and behave toward myself and toward other people.

I believe the best road through the wilderness is not broad, straight and paved with outrage and hurt feelings, but is narrow, winding and organic, delicately picked out between trees, using empathy and compassion – toward others and toward ourselves.

Troubled Thoughts and Nightmares

Every couple of weeks, I do a gig typesetting several pages of an independent arts and culture newspaper. Timelines are tight and content often becomes available in the middle of the night and has to be ready for the early morning, which means getting up in the wee small hours and doing some work.

Tonight is one of those nights.

Mostly, I find this gig pretty fun – the typesetting is right up my alley: intricate and detail-oriented. Sometimes, it feels a bit strange to get up in the middle of the night to work. Today, I had a long and busy day, with over 10 hours of work on various projects. (I'm getting ready to go on holiday at the end of the week, so there is a lot that needs to get done.)

At 9:30 this evening, I had worked through all of the available content for the paper and decided that I would go to bed and have a nap. With the amount of work left to do, I knew I would need to get up around 1:30 am to make my 4:30 am deadline. I find I work better after some sleep than after none.

So I went to bed – I brushed my teeth and followed all of my evening routines. I put the mosquito net over me to protect myself from beautiful July's seedy underbelly and went to sleep.

I woke up at 11:30 pm from the worst nightmare I believe I have ever had in my entire life. I won't go into too many details, but it was set on a magic island and involved a loop of repeated murders, suicides and infanticides. For good measure, sabotaged computer hard drives and giant, dead birds were also prominently featured.

There is no way to combine those things pleasantly — and my nightmare didn't even try.

What's up with that?

I don't usually have nightmares. At all. My dreams are usually extremely lovely, actually: whimsical, weird, funny and definitely comfortable and friendly. I am a frequent dreamer. I usually wake up from my dreams feeling highly amused and/or intrigued by the wonders of my subconscious mind.

This sudden plunge into the horrors feels like a wake up call. It forces me to look at the fact that I've been focusing my mental energy in dark places over the past several months. I've been letting my mind wander a lot of the time and it's been journeying in mostly unhappy and mean territory: thinking about mistakes I've made, feeling resentful about some of my recent experiences, writing imaginary hate mail, listing grievances.

I had been making a good effort to be mindful about how I was thinking over the winter and especially in the first few months of the year. I knew I was struggling with depression and tried to be really conscious about not feeding the beast with malignant thinking. I read a wonderful book by Thich Nhat Hanh which a dear friend gave to me. I was meditating on kindness and forgiveness. I started to see improvements in my mood. But as summer came in, I fell off the mindfulness wagon, right back into my old habits of anger and resentment.

My nightmare tonight felt like a signpost that said: "The high road is over that away. The view is much better over there."

I get the message, loud and clear (it was a very emphatic dream!) I'm getting back on track.

I choose mindfulness and compassion

To adapt a meditation from Thich Nhat Hanh:

Breathing in, I am aware of the memory of my nightmare.
Breathing out, I smile at the memory of my nightmare.
Breathing in, I am aware of my angry feelings.
Breathing out, I smile at my angry feelings.
Breathing in, I am aware of my resentments.
Breathing out, I smile at my resentments.
Breathing in, I am aware of my hurts.
Breathing out, I smile at my hurts.

It's amazing the impact of those four mindful breaths.

This is where I want my brain to be: free to fully appreciate the night sky, the warm summer days, all of the glorious pleasures of being alive, of being present, of letting my heart accept, forgive and be kind.

In closing, I must say thank you to that horrible, horrible nightmare for telling me something very important. Anger and resentment are powerless to make anything better. Especially the past. And the only person I am punishing with my dark thoughts — is me.

Breathing in, I am aware of myself.
Breathing out, I smile at myself.
Breathing in, I am aware of my mind.
Breathing out, I smile at my mind.
Breathing in, I am aware of my heart.
Breathing out, I smile at my heart.

And now, time for another catnap before more content is ready and the typesetting resumes.

Fingers crossed for a dreamless sleep!