Interim Report
Towards a life of self-compassion
I
I’ve been going through something. 139 days. I’ve been going through something. Being afraid.
II
The sun was bright. Blindingly so. I stared out the window anyway. I’m not sure what I was looking for. Nothing specific. But I found the swaying branches, the random bird or two, and the white-hot rays of the sun far more comforting than the beaming smile and soul-piercing eye contact of the strange lady sitting across from me.
I sat there, cradled by the view of an entirely indifferent landscape, and spilled my guts to this strange lady. Whatever came to my mind came out of my mouth, only partially filtered, like a French press or the air-recirculation setting in your car. I tried, desperately, to give the trees, I mean the lady in front of me, a polished answer to the question, something eloquent, to encapsulate the complexity of how I felt. But as each sentence fell out of my mouth, the bits of coffee, the smell of cow shit, seeped through.
“What is joy?”, our teacher had asked, with a masochistic chuckle.
I paused, like we were instructed to, took a breath, and let the answer bubble up:
Joy is the feeling I get walking my dog with my fiancee. It’s the presence I feel when I cook, when I run. It’s the feeling of writing a good sentence, a good poem. Not when I write something bad. That sucks. No, joy is the feeling of doing what I love, for someone I love, with no pressure.
“But…” the voice of god reverberated through my skull.
Joy is the thing that I constantly deny myself. I’ve got a fucked up brain. Whenever something good happens, I immediately find a way to just fuck it up. I write something and then shit all over it and complain about how bad it is. I run a half-marathon and complain about how slow I am or the girth of my love handles. Get into a relationship and I’ll be a co-dependent manipulative prick with anger issues.
I spent my whole life running from joy. Whenever I have something good, I do everything I can to ruin it. Joy is scary. I don’t trust it. I tear it all down and then I run. To porn, to drugs, alcohol, sex. I run to procrastinating. I take away all the actual good feelings and then run to anything that’ll replace them. Not consciously. It just happens.
When I was a kid, and joy was around, it didn’t take long for something to fuck it up. Someone would go on a drunken tirade, throw a fit, or tear you down with an endless stream of criticism and judgments. Joy was never joy. Joy was a precursor to pain.
So nowadays I don’t wait for the pain to come. I just invite it in, create it. It’s easier that way, less painful. Besides, the chaos is comfortable. I know what it’s like to live in chaos. But I don’t know what living in peace or joy is like. That shit scares me. I don’t trust it.
The singing bowl rang. I took a breath.
She sat there smiling. We weren’t supposed to smile. The instructions were to sit there reactionless, to be mindful of what it felt like to speak, what it felt like to listen.
I wasn’t complaining. And then came the next question.
III
I’ve been at a bottom. It’s been going on for a few months now. I’ve felt down in every way, isolated and alone. I’ve eaten too much and moved too little. I barely write, if at all. My confidence is shot. I’ve trampled all over and let others stampede across my loosely set boundaries. I’ve been living fully into my dysfunction. Sober, sure, but dysfunctional nonetheless.
I feel like all my character defects have been turned up to 11. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why. Things are going well. But recently I’ve spent all my time rotting on the couch, watching TV, and eating too much sugar. I doom scroll. A lot. I lost a lot of sleep. I get caught, with little to no resistance, in too many thirst traps.
It’s a perfect storm. I guess. I’m wandering aimlessly and independently through a minefield of uncomfortable feelings and the easiest thing for me to do is to slip into bad habits. My codependent ass has been left alone, to fend for myself and my dog for two months while my partner goes on an adventure. I’ve entered a phase of work all too similar to a previous job and the emotions and memories triggered are a lot to handle. I’ve accomplished a few goals, particularly with this newsletter, and found myself without any targets to aim at.
The worst part is I’m comfortable here. I’m ok with skipping workouts and looking in the mirror with growing disgust. I’m content with hating that I haven’t written anything meaningful in months. I don’t mind just wasting time until the next thing. I’ll bottle this all up, wallow in it, just sit here wishing I was anywhere else and anyone else anytime else.
IV
The singing bowl rang and I blinked my eyes open trying to focus on what she was saying. It was like in the movies when a grenade goes off and there’s that ringing while the screen gets all blurry.
It was my turn to listen, or, it was my turn to be mindful of my listening.
How did my body feel? Tight, breathless, a little fidgety. How strong is the urge to nod, smile, respond? Very strong, like an Olympic weightlifter. Where is my mind? Focused on how the fuck I was going to answer this question and also feeling kind dickish because I have no idea what she just said. I always considered myself a good listener, but this feels less like I’m listening and more like I’m waiting to talk.
I decided that if I just started listening with a slight smile, I wouldn’t have to fight my cheeks while she spoke. Once my mind stopped racing though, the urge to provide a nonverbal emotional crutch dissipated anyway. What took its place was genuine curiosity, an empathy and compassion not present in normal human conversation, a setting aside of my own wounded ego for the centering of her vulnerable presence.
“See I am a good listener,” I thought with only a little stroke of ego. Even better, however, was the feeling of anxiety melting away. I didn’t care about how I would sound, how eloquent or precise. I wasn’t thinking about how I had no profound ideas, how no one would want to listen or care about what I had to say. I wasn’t thinking about what she would think about me.
The judge, the critic, the verbally violent psychopath that lives in my head shut up. I was free to listen, to feel comfortable in the moment, and to be free of worry, doubt, and condemnation, safe in my own head. My mind was quiet and it felt good.
The bell rang and it was my turn to speak.
I took a deep breath and let the answer come to me.
The leading edge of my recovery is…
V
I’ve been going through something. A hell of a lot longer than 139 days. I’ve been going through something. I’ve been afraid.
Now I think I am most afraid of myself. More accurately, that voice in my head, constantly berating and belittling, strikes fear into my heart and plagues my mind. The last few months, the voice has been loud, like train-through-my-ear-holes loud. The deeper I sank, the louder it got. It’s been unbearable. The desire to do anything productive, let alone write something, was non-existent. I was bottomed out, in survival mode, and not handling anything well.
I got tired of it and like any good addict with control issues, I decided I could pull myself out of this hole with some restraints. I started small, waking up on time, washing my face, and sitting down to pray. I guess you can call it prayer. Asking for help is what my decidedly secular self likes to call it; I’m averse to anything too religious. When I mastered that, I added a morning workout and started reading, journaling, and meditating. 10 minutes a day of each. Just a little something to feel good about myself and feel some positive momentum.
It worked. I was feeling pretty good about myself. I built on it, got more consistent with exercise, kept the house clean, even wrote some poems. “I am so good at healing myself,” I thought, feeling like I’d conquered yet another bout with depression and anxiety.
Then I spent a week in silence, meditating eight hours a day, while on retreat in the mountains. With nothing to distract me from myself, something became painfully obvious in the endless hours of silence: I am a judgemental dick. Every moment of quiet was filled with this grating stream of criticism, judgment, and cruelty.
You’re not doing it right. You don’t belong here. Your stomach is poking out. You stank. I need to eat less. I need to stop thinking and just focus. I look silly. I really fucked up on packing. He probably is wondering what the fuck I’m doing here. What the fuck am I doing here? Why am I breathing so loud? She stinks. Like really badly. Like deodorant is not that expensive. Shut up, see you’re not doing it right. You don’t belong here. You suck at this. Just like everything else. Half-assed and overhyped. Grad school. Your ‘blog’. Music. You’re just lazy. Afraid to fail. Afraid to succeed. Undertalented and overpraised.
I kept thinking to myself, “Where was all of this coming from? I’ve been working on myself for so long. I’m being productive. I’ve built up discipline. I feel good about myself.” But the voice was unrelenting, unassailable. I realized it wasn’t coming out of nowhere, in this moment, after being dormant. It’s always been there. It’s just how I am inside. And no amount of disciplined self-help was going to stop it.
Something magical happened in all those hours of silence. Eventually, the voice stopped being mine, stopped being me. Instead, it felt across from me, apart from me, another entity entirely. With this distance between us, I was able to look at them more objectively and pick them apart.
When I swept the kitchen after my working meditation, I heard the voice as my dad’s in the same tone he would scold me with after he snatched the broom from my hand and told me I wouldn’t sweep the floor right. When I’d focus on my flaws and make fun of myself, I heard my sister, who used to bully me growing up. When I felt I didn’t belong, that I was failing, I heard my mom, who would question my commitment and my effort and who would often count herself out.
If I could sharpen my skills, I rationalized as a kid, I could be free from my dad’s criticism. If I changed how I looked, I’d be free from my sister’s jokes. I could count myself out until I was exactly where I belonged, never truly trying, never failing. When all that failed, I could judge someone else and prove that at least I wasn’t as bad off as them. This manifested in an overly critical and overly judgmental voice that sought perfection or destruction in every moment.
I don’t blame anyone. We were doing the best we could with the tools we had even if they were dysfunctional. Our anger, fear, anxiety, over-confidence and over-compensation, lack of self-belief and self-esteem, the self-deprecation, the self-sacrifice. I internalized it all. I thought that if I could be better, we could all be better.
Our dysfunctions were never my burden to bear, but healing from them is. I have new tools now and I don’t like this guy who lives in my head with his constant shit-talking. He sucks.
Now I know these voices are not me. I can separate myself from them, tune them out, tell them to pipe down. A consistent meditation practice helps. Journaling helps. Practicing kindness with myself helps. But discipline only goes so far. It’ll take time and it’ll take work. Self-compassion, self-love, and self-acceptance, these are processes, long and hard battles with deeply engrained programming from a lifetime of being. The first step, as always, is stepping out of denial, recognizing and accepting the problem, and asking for help. From there, it will require consistency. It will require learning what kind of love I even need. Most importantly, it will require grace.
“What is the leading edge of your recovery right now?”
At the time, I didn’t have an answer. I made some shit up. Now I know.
food for thought
I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.
- Anne Lamott
a question
What does self-compassion mean to you?
If you do write something and you would like to share it, I’d love to read it. You can send it to theguidelines@substack.com or leave a comment.
stuff to share
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. My favorite author with another excellent piece of literature. I’m still early on, but I am loving it.
My Name Is Earl. “Do good things and good things happen.” — a profoundly simplified view of karma that makes it so practical This show used to be mindlessly funny to me when I was younger. Nowadays I see Earl as a bit of a sage.
Alligator Bites Never Heal by Doechii.
Any recommendations?
It’s nice to be back.
Love.
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