When I read other writers exploring similar subjects, I sometimes wonder if I get overly personal (Too Much Information), or if I’m not “general” enough with my reflections and assessments. But honestly, most of the time I don’t feel qualified to make assertions about reality for other people (!), and marvel at the assurance with which others are able to make generalizations.
Then recently I read these words by Christopher Hyatt, a countercultural experimental psychologist who had clearly steeped himself in Nietzsche:
At a minimum there are two levels of experience which are confused by almost everyone: direct experience — like a brick falling on your head — and the interpretive conclusion of the event. The first experience is wholistic, the second is a combination of past models, attribution needs (?), and anxiety. The feeling components of these two experiences can become indistinguishable. Therefore, a model is difficult to remove because it has become associated with the feeling component.
By model he means a framework of so-called “knowledge” which his book maintains is built with the “building blocks” of parental and societal lies, and given to us when we’re too young to resist. So as soon as something occurs, like the brick falling, we have an ingrained and instantaneous explanation or interpretation of what happened and why it happened. (Criminal negligence! The wrath of God!) When we have models in common with other people, we have a consensus. What we don’t have, necessarily, is the truth. “A society,” Hyatt says, “is really a group of clichés based on selected fictions.”
Which sounds like an epigram written by Holden Caulfield. Then again, Salinger was probably onto something.
Hyatt delves into the “anxiety” component by talking about the ill effects of chronic overstimulation of the fight-or-flight response (which he says is rampant in our culture). It can lead to High Autonomic Reactivity (HAR), an over-readiness to react with unconscious and violent emotion, where “everything is highly charged with potential dangers and rewards” and is usually painful. That chapter of his book read like my unauthorized biography.
What I guess I’m trying to say is that the only truth I believe I can really know is the truth I can get at by unraveling the knotted frameworks that keep me captive within my own fictions, becoming conscious of my unconscious reactivity, and learning to experience directly again. Things that happened thirty-five years ago — my feeling-interpretation of what happened — affect the way I react to what happens today, sometimes to an overwhelming degree. When that brick may just be a brick, after all. Nothing personal.
I can’t say definitively what the truth is for you, but if you find what I say helpful — and I know a few of my visitors have — I’m glad. My ruminations may look hopelessly “self-indulgent” to some, but I think of them as an attempt to treat the macroscopic madness of the world on the most local level. In other words, insanity starts at home!
***
Anyway…
It seems like every time I get a little too self-satisfied, every time I think I’ve finally arrived somewhere where I can rest in anything resembling assurance, something gives me a good swift kick. Maybe it’s the universe just keeping me humble, or maybe that New Age refrain I’m always hearing, that whatever’s left of the old familiar unhappiness fights your transformation, is true. Hell if I know! Two steps forward, one step back…
Only days after writing my last post, I found out that I might be in danger of losing my slender but rewarding livelihood, an occupation far more sustaining to me than a mere “job.” Without going into too much detail, what seemed suddenly imminent was reminiscent of my traumatic and violent separation from what had been my Place of Belonging for the first fifteen years of my life — my church, my community, my home. I went spinning, overcome with vertigo as the ground underneath my feet seemed to buckle.
Later that same day I got the wind knocked out of me by a situation that could be called, in its original (and projected) version, Caitlin Doesn’t Want to Play With You Any More, and She Likes Her New Friend Better. Have you ever gone from being the greatest thing since sliced bread to being the turd in the punch bowl? It happens a lot during that cruel period of childhood they call the “sorting years.” (I’d be disingenous to claim innocence; I was friends with Tracy Johnson until some of my other friends decided to persecute her for being “gay.” And none of us even knew what the damn word meant.)
As if to ice the crapcake, I got a parking ticket for getting back to my meter just two minutes late. Three hours of work down the toilet. Half a week’s groceries on my tight budget. It was like getting the finger from on high. Ha-ha, loser!
Unfortunately, the aftershock didn’t just fade away. I had taken body blows from two different directions, and the soreness lingered in my chest all week, only to be further exacerbated by more happenings. Probably because it wasn’t a new pain at all, but one so seemingly ancient it could make me believe in past lives. It had been pinpointed by an astute friend (and counselor by trade) as a feeling that would overwhelm a child told by an authority figure: You don’t matter.
Which seemed pretty accurate. Much of my inner turmoil at work stemmed from the feeling of not having a voice in the presence of at least one of my bosses, of not being respected despite my contributions and substantial experience. I didn’t know what to do to change that. To make matters worse, I built up enormous expectations for myself about speaking up at an organizational meeting later in the week, and when I failed to meet my own expectations, I wept with fury and told myself No wonder no one thinks you’re worth the air you breathe.
I was in full-on reactive mode, and probably no more than five years old.
***
Why five? There were so many messages at that time to support that damning hypothesis, but what stands out is my relationship with the kids in the neighborhood. My older brother fit in; I was the “useless” little sister. There really weren’t any kids my age on the block, so while he was invited out to play softball and other games, I had to amuse myself in the house, or else stay well out of their way. To them, I really didn’t matter. It was probably that early on that I learned to tell myself I didn’t care, even though I was horribly lonely and felt defective.
Until kindergarten, that is, and Caitlin O’Connor.
Caitlin O’Connor, a beautiful little Irish rose of a girl. Our first meeting, at my brother’s little league game, had been marred by a recurring bully who liked to torment me with impunity while the adults were otherwise occupied (probably just another contribution to that conviction of not mattering). Caitlin had laughed, “turning” on me the way I’d turn on Tracy later — probably to escape brutalization by Donna herself — but at that age all I knew was that I was on my own. So our initial contact was already colored with the stain of my debasement. (The playground: such a theater of sadism and betrayal and drama! I can only wonder now about what miseries Donna’s seven-year-old life might have contained.)
Finding Caitlin again in Mrs. Rossi’s kindergarten class, I promptly forgave all, and we promptly became inseparable. I went over to her house nearly every day after school for fluffernutter sandwiches or chicken noodle soup. Several times we made up our faces like clowns by raiding her very patient mother’s lipstick stash. (In my house, that would have merited an ass-whuppin’; her mother simply wiped our faces gently with a washcloth.) We played “statues” in the back yard, and bounced merrily down the driveway on her hippity-hop. I adored Caitlin, with a passionate intensity beside which my crushes on boys paled in comparison. You could say I was in love with her, in a way Updike seemed to capture in his masterful (if arguably sexist) short story “Lifeguard” when he wrote “It is not true that our biological impulses are tricked out with ribands of chivalry; rather, our chivalric impulses go clanking in encumbering biological armor. Eunuchs love. Children love. I would love.” I knew nothing about biology back then, but everything about devotion.
Still, there remained a fundamental inequity. I would engage in Three-Stooges-style pratfalls (that hurt) to make her laugh. Even then I was a budding masochist! And I was jealous. When Caitlin decided she wanted to play with Laura rather than with me, I was crushed. I had made Caitlin the measure of all things, including whether or not I mattered. This was understandable, of course, as life before her had been lonely, and my worth had already been in serious doubt. You can’t blame a child for finding her loving gods where she could. (My parents’ so-called “loving God” hadn’t been too much in evidence.)
***
It’s up to the adult, however, to debunk the imaginary authority of those childhood gods. Some of the most brilliant words I ever encountered to this effect, as an adult, were staggeringly simple. I found them in Don Miguel Ruiz’s second Agreement:
Don’t take anything personally...Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different world from the one we live in. When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world…
(If) you make a habit of not taking anything personally, you won’t need to place your trust in what others do or say. You will only need to trust yourself to make responsible choices. You are never responsible for the actions of others; you are only responsible for you. When you truly understand this, and refuse to take things personally, you can hardly be hurt by the careless comments or actions of others.
***
Looking through this corrective lens at everyone — the neighborhood kids, Caitlin, Donna, my boss, my diffident grownup friend — I find it easier to see how none of their behavior had much to do with me. At best, they reacted to an incomplete and projected idea of who I am, and I in turn reacted as if my incomplete and projected idea of their incomplete and projected idea were true! But in truth, none of us are gods or mind-readers. To borrow Ruiz’s metaphor, we assign characters in our own dream. The beginning of waking up is recognizing this.
To a small child, everyone is an authority, when in actuality no one is an authority.
And sometimes a brick is just a brick.
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