It’s been an insightful but intense several weeks for me.  It began with my post about Anger’s Many Faces, which was followed by the compassionate shock of putting together the spreadsheet of my psyche’s inner ‘parts’ in the post My Internal Family.  I’m still reeling from that, as it was a huge paradigm shift in how I perceive myself, and therefore in how I treat myself.  I’m much kinder to myself and far less judgmental.

It was in this spirit of compassionate acceptance that I entertained a very old friend as a guest recently.  It was someone I met when I was 16 and had not seen in over 20 years.  I was a little anxious prior to his arrival, seeing as how it had been so long since our last visit, but I needn’t have worried.  He was the same easy-going, accepting, non-judgmental person I remembered from the past, and we fell easily into conversation about mutual friends and our lives since we had last seen each other.

Some of these conversations took dark turns into unpleasant stories for both of us.  I cannot speak for my friend, but I found myself thinking and speaking of things I hadn’t mentioned or even thought of in decades.  Every time I related another unpleasant tale, I heard a whisper in the back of my mind “you shouldn’t have said that”.  And yet he had his own tales to tell and I never wished he hadn’t, as I worried he was wishing with mine.

Overall I was very happy he came to visit.  I got to show him the mountain behind my house and a not-on-a-map patch of old growth forest not far away.  We talked about happy things too, and it was good to reconnect with a person I have always held in high esteem.

It was after he left that I began to be filled with doubt.  While we were visiting, I was fine and comfortable.  Within 24 hours of his departure, though, the whispers of “you shouldn’t have said that” turned to shouting, and I felt as exposed as if I had walked naked down Main Street at rush hour.  I found my deeply insecure inner self wondering how he felt about my present self, especially after some of my life stories and opinions about different things.  I began to remember why I don’t tell people about my life or myself.

A big part of why I’m feeling so insecure is because I talked about my mental health experiences in terms of “awakening”, as I often do, and I’m not sure how he took that.  Our culture has absolutely zero context in which to place a personal event such as a spiritual awakening, to the extent that its validity is disbelieved and pathologized.  I am constantly torn by a incessant desire to be honest about my experience, and to never again have to see “The Look” on someone’s face when I tell them about something they don’t believe in.

I don’t know why I can experience confidence in the moment of something, and be crushed by doubtful anxiety and rampant second-guessing about a day later.  Was I too open?  Did I overshare?  Was I annoying or offensive?  Did I make any social gaffes?  My enjoyment at seeing a dear friend has been replaced by emotional paralysis.

I do know I stuck a very long stick very far back into my deeply troubled past and stirred up the muck, and part of me feels like I shouldn’t have.  Maybe these feelings are merely artifacts of having an element of my Old Self’s life become present in my New Self’s life.  I did carry some elements of that life forward with me, and that group of friends was one of them.  I just didn’t expect it to be so jarring when I made a connection between my Old Self and my New Self.  I also have the same feeling I get when I write a very revealing blog post, one I second-guess and take down a day or two later.

Only this isn’t a blog post I can take down, so my anxiety and obsessions are killing me.  I can’t stop thinking about how others perceive me and whether or not I appear “insane”, and I am filled with a (likely irrational) desire to hide and never reveal myself again.  My once-solid confidence in my intuitive experiences lays shattered yet again.

This is the pendulum upon which my life swings.  Back and forth between perceiving myself first as utterly broken yet acceptable to society, and then building myself back up into what feels to me like wholeness, until something from the world comes along and breaks me again in the name of conformity, whether that was the intention or not.

It’s just extremely difficult living in a world where people have been taught that someone denying they are insane is itself justification for thinking that they are insane.  We have been taught that there is only one reality, and if someone says that they are experiencing a different reality, that they must be “insane”.  In truth, from mystical, spiritual, philosophical, and psychological perspectives, there are multiple realities, and most if not all of our conflicts as a species stem from irreconcilable differences between these realities.  Does that make us all “insane”?

Not that I think I necessarily left my friend with the impression that I’m insane, but we talked about sensitive issues, issues that I always find triggering, especially when I have doubts and am in confusion.  That’s the trouble with having had a very positive spiritually-based experience and a very negative psychosis-based experience: all anyone (including myself sometimes) thinks about is the latter and so won’t take the former seriously, eroding my faith in myself.

That’s the real problem.  I have a lot of faith in my experience and feel a desire to share it, but that faith gets shaken when I don’t get the response I want.  I think I just need to accept that the vast majority of people just aren’t going to understand my perspective, and that isn’t their fault.  They’ve been conditioned to pathologize certain modes of thought, such as mystical thinking, and I think I just need to accept that there isn’t anything I can do about that.  I cannot prove my experience, all I can do is tell my story.  People will either believe me or they won’t.

I recognize that all of these feelings are entirely internally generated and don’t have any basis in actual responses from my friend.  It’s just my own fears about how I’m perceived, particularly by people I like and have known for a long time.  It’s also loneliness and sadness at feeling like I have to keep my Personal Truth to myself because it won’t be understood by others, although I also have no reason to believe that’s the case with my friend.  The fact is that I don’t know for sure either way, and maybe that’s what bothers me the most, and I know it wouldn’t if I had more confidence in myself.  If I did, I wouldn’t care what others thought about me.

As it is, if I were to come up with a metaphor to describe my present situation, I would have to describe myself as a young sapling, one that is the direct result of the ‘seeds’ released from the proverbial forest fire of my former life.  One that is healthy but still vulnerable to the elements and the environment.  One that will someday be tall and strong, but that for now still quivers in a stiff breeze and would be easily trampled by a passing bear or nibbled by a hungry deer.  One that still has a lot of growing to do, but that once established, will shoot into the sky at an amazing rate.

What I cannot allow myself to do is hide and isolate myself.  I don’t necessarily have to share every detail of my life, but hiding in isolation would be the equivalent of putting that sapling in the shade where it will never grow.  I’m of the opinion that every person has a Purpose they’re supposed to fulfill in life, and becoming one’s True Self in the fulfillment of that Purpose is the goal of Life.  Furthermore, in becoming one’s True Self, others that are compatible with your energy will inevitably be attracted to you, enabling you to slowly form your Tribe, for lack of a better term.

It is this desire to find my Tribe that ultimately prevents me from isolating myself and keeps me progressing on the Path.  A deep need to “find the others”, in the words of Timothy Leary.  It’s just that the longer I walk my Path alone, the more often I despair at ever finding those others, wonder if they even exist, and if I really am just crazy, even though I keep finding myself in the pages of things like The Upanishads and Meister Eckhart.

where are the prophets?
where are the visionaries?
where are the poets
to preach the dawn
of the sentimental mercenary

Marillion – Fugazi