Unlearning How to Be, Relearning How to Be

I am learning the ultimate life lesson. I wrote this to try and understand it. (Which is why it turned into a short novel. Sorry!)

[This essay turned into a short novel about my newest life lesson, which happens to be the ultimate life lesson. So get comfortable. You’re going to want to skip it and to stop midway through to watch some instagram reels. But I challenge you to inconvenience yourself a bit to read the whole thing. If anything, just to exercise your brain.]

I’m always on some journey to know myself, to understand myself and the world around me, always uncovering all the ways in which I don’t, all the ways in which I have more to learn—which excites me more than scares me, even though I understand that is not a sentiment I share with many people. It’s easier to try to never know, because then you won’t accidentally stumble upon the things you truly cannot know—which are things that are hard to accept. But I find a strange comfort in them—a comfort in my complete inability to know them. It’s like a mutual agreement with the universe, with God, that this is one thing I don’t have to worry about.

Maybe it’s one continuous journey, but I see it more as chapters or separate attempts. Each time I get a little closer, a little closer to… something. It’s funny because I’m always learning the same exact things, but I’m just experiencing them, feeling them in a different way. Usually, the first time I learn it with my body, physically, hearing it with my ears, reading it with my eyes, turning it around in my hands. Then I learn it again, sometimes even a few years down the line, with my mind. I think about it, it twists and turns in my thoughts, and I really think I am understanding it. Because it is inside of me, I think I’ve learned it, I think I’ve captured it. But then, later on, I learn it again, and I learn it with something completely outside of anatomy, of science. I feel it in my body, but not physically, I hold it in my thoughts, but not in my brain, I can feel it all around me, all within me, all over everything. This is when I truly learn it. To master it, to practice it, to become it, that’s still an entirely other journey, another chapter. But once the lesson enters this place that is no place and that is everything and nothing and entirely me and also entirely not me….. I have it.

It’s why I write the same things, the same essays over and over, because I’m trying to explain, this time I’ve got it! This time I understand! This time I really really get it! I’m trying to capture this feeling that I have inside me that can’t be captured. There are some thoughts, some feelings, some understandings that words and telling will never do justice—there are some things that everyone has to experience for themselves. I think these lessons I’m learning are those kind of understandings. It’s funny, how you can hear something you’ve heard a million times, something you know, but you hear it again and it just… finally makes sense. But no—it doesn’t make sense necessarily, it just finally clicks, within this part of you that can understand things your brain cannot.

This chapter, what I’m learning is that…. everything’s about me. (I’m kidding of course,) but it’s just a funny way to explain that, what I’m learning is: everything that I experience, that we experience in our lives, is our experience. Every emotion we feel isn’t coming from somewhere or someone. It’s coming from you. So in a simple example: your friend did something without you. But they didn’t make you feel excluded. You felt excluded. You felt lonely. You felt. That’s not to say that people don’t do things that hurt. That’s not to say you should allow anyone to treat you poorly. But what I’m trying to say is… you are feeling things like anger or hurt about situations, because one layer deeper, you were already feeling something… you were probably already hurting yourself. Using the same example: you’re friend didn’t make you feel excluded. They did something, which brought up a feeling that you were already telling yourself inside, which in this case probably is: no one likes me / loves me / wants to be around me. The scary truth is: no one can make you feel anything that you are not already feeling about yourself.

So we feel certain ways about ourselves. I feel certain ways about myself. And then, I am constantly looking for external validation of the way I feel. Example: I’ve always thought I liked myself, always thought I was confident. But really, in almost every situation, I am constantly on edge, because if I am not at my utmost perfect, as I have trained myself to be my entire life, then everything inside of me goes to panic, and I’m telling myself: you are [insert insulting word here]. I’m the first one to crack a joke about something stupid someone said, because it’s funny and because we’re humans and because we should laugh at ourselves. That’s what my brain says! It’s important we laugh at ourselves! But someone cracks a joke about me, and my body immediately goes into emergency mode. Literally, I can feel my body around me tense and my brain shuts off, and my mouth starts running to make up for it, and the moment is ruined. And I didn’t laugh. (I should have laughed.) Underneath it all, the little joke sets off a small voice, you’re so stupid, you’re so blah blah, and then I hate how I reacted so then it’s you’re so dramatic, you’re so etc etc etc. Unfortunately, I’ve learned that I’m constantly, subconsciously telling myself, you must be perfect, so one little slip up and I am immediately sent off into: you have revealed your imperfection and thus YOU ARE NOT SAFE mode. And I used this example to show you: it’s not just making a mistake at work, or trying to be smart in front of important people, or these big situations like that. It’s with my friends. Even with my friends, I am telling myself, if you are not perfect, they will not want you. No one made me feel that way. I made myself feel that way.

Light example to start, but as you can imagine, this affects more than just little moments with friends. It affects who I am at work, who I am around strangers, every relationship, and every moment.

Not that I want to talk about this, because in fact, every time I write about it I immediately go into panic mode and delete delete delete, but of course it has affected me romantically too. Even though I act confident, and thought / think I am confident, the idea of being in a romantic relationship has never felt realistic to me, and I have always thought, someone just wouldn’t feel that way about me. Maybe they’d feel that way for a moment, while I have my manic pixie dream girl character on—the one that I perfected when I was young and was watching too many movies—but it always fizzles out eventually, and every single time it does, I am never surprised. Because I “knew it would.” Because no one would want to be with who I actually I am: a normal, awkward, imperfect human being. No one wants that. Or at least, that’s what I have always told myself. And I bet you every situation I went through, every formulaic, you’re so special into IMMEDIATE GHOST, was me just looking for proof that it was true. I show someone what they want, I can’t take the mask off and open up out of fear, obviously there is no connection because who can connect with a masked face, and then it’s over. And I think to myself, of course it is, just like I knew it would be. Alone again, just like I knew I would be.

Maybe that if I had told myself instead, Vivian, you are really lovable, just as you are, in all your imperfections, in all your weirdness, then things would have been different. I wouldn’t have been so afraid. I think the vibrational power of fear is stronger than any of us understand, and I think my fear was really repulsive to a lot of experiences I could have had. But also, that’s okay, and I don’t blame myself for that. I forgive myself for that because I was just trying to keep myself safe, like we all do in our own ways. I thought I was safer alone, because if I was alone, no one could reject me or hurt me or make me feel unlovable. But really, I was the one hurting myself the whole time. It’s not something to be ashamed of, but it is something to unlearn.

It’s funny how true the saying is: what you focus on grows. You could apply this to the whole situation of course: I was focused on fear, insecurity, my loneliness, and it grew. It grew out of my own thoughts and into my lived experience. But also now, now that I’m focusing on love, acceptance, freedom, faith… it’s growing, and it’s showing up in unexpected places. I was reading an Anaïs Nin book, A Spy in the House of Love. I found it interesting throughout, but I couldn’t really connect to the character. She has the opposite problem that I do: she has too many men in her life, she can’t stop chasing these multiple affairs with different people. But in the end, I was shocked by how she is learning almost identical lessons to the ones I am learning.

In the end, this figure, which to me seems a figure of her own subconscious, or even a spiritual figure outside of herself like a God or a guide, is telling her, “The enemy of a love is never outside, it’s not a man or a woman, it’s what we lack in ourselves.” In this same way, the enemy of any love I could have experienced is really inside of me—it’s my own insecurity, my own perspective of lack, of scarcity, of unlovability.

Sabina talks of a random man she thinks is following her, tracking her, hoping to arrest her, and the figure / guide / God says, “No, Sabina, that is what you imagine. It is your own guilt which you have endowed this man with. You probably see this guilt mirrored in every policeman, every judge… You see it with other’s eyes. It is a reflection of what you feel. It’s your interpretation: the eyes of the world on your acts.” I’ve probably endowed every man I’ve been with with my own sense of unworthiness. I thought they found me unworthy. Maybe I just found myself unworthy, and they mirrored that back to me.

Sabina says, “Free me. Set me free. I’ve said that to so many men.” The figure says, “You have to set yourself free. That will come with love…” Sabina says, “Oh, I’ve loved enough… I’ve loved plenty.” They respond, “You haven’t loved yet. You’ve only been trying to love, beginning to love.” They go on to explain how Sabina loved in pieces: one man to trust, one man to desire, one man is illusion, one man is like dreaming. But in the same way she could never accept all of her many faces, many angles, many multitudes, she could accept all the many faces and parts of one partner. She picked one side of them to love, so she sought and found multiple lovers. She made love to a myth, and turned away when it didn’t look like the myth she believed in anymore. All of this to say, the way she loved outwardly mirrored how she felt about herself inside. There’s one million ways I could apply this to myself.

The figure says to her, “And do you know Sabina, if you had been caught and tried, you would have been meted out a less severe punishment than you mete out to yourself. We are much more severe judges of our own acts… our thoughts, our secret intents, our dreams even… You never considered the mitigating circumstances. Some shock shattered you and made you distrustful of a single love. [She grew up with a father who had many affairs.] You divided them as a measure of safety. [Meaning she sought multiple different lovers to try to make herself safe.] There is nothing shameful in seeking safety measures. Your fear was very great.”

We are all seeking safety measures in life. She was scared that if she had just one love that she could never trust them, that she would lose them, have to share them. So she convinced herself that she would find safety in multiple, that all of them could accept different sides of her and she could perform for each of them and never be alone. Maybe I fear that if someone sees my imperfection they will leave me, or they will make me constantly live in performance and in fear of the imperfection that I (of course) have. I feel safer on my own, where I can compartmentalize, I can perform the perfect part outwardly to others during the day, then at night I can go back into my room alone, and feel whatever I want to feel, be imperfect. I’ve been seeking safety by constantly living with boundaries around who I am. I’ve learned to be someone I am not, I’ve learned to be different versions of an acceptable person depending on the situation.

Like Sabina, I was always looking to other people to save me from these emotions. I was waiting for some guy to come to me and love me and prove to me that I could be lovable, prove to me that I could be with someone, that I could be safe even when I’m not alone, that I didn’t have to be perfect. I was waiting for them to save me from my own internal feelings. But how could they do that? When they don’t even know them? When they don’t even feel them? The only person who can save me from these feelings is me. But a specific me, the me that I was created to be, the me that is connected to the one who created me, the me that is connected to all the love in the universe-that-is-so-much-more-than-this-physical-world).

I am not all powerful. I cannot save myself alone. This is not some new-age, self-help, you-are-your-only-savior bullshit. Because I think that is where we get the story wrong so many times. Yes: no one else can change your experience, no one else can change your reality, no one else can change the way you feel. But: you, this human form you, are not capable of doing it alone. You, this human form you, are a product of your environment, of this world (that as we all know can be pretty f*cked up), and of the thoughts you’ve been telling yourself your whole life. This you, this human form you, this ego-you will always be working both for and against yourself. Telling yourself lies about yourself and seeking out experiences to try to prove them wrong, experiences that usually just make you feel worse about yourself and perpetuate the lies. Example: we tell ourselves, I am ugly. We seek out experiences to try and prove ourselves wrong: we go to the gym, we buy $100 protein powder, we follow ‘Kaia Gerber diet’, we check ourselves in the mirror everyday, we try to make ourselves attractive to people, we sleep with them, we lose weight, we post thirst traps, we stop meeting friends for ice cream, we’re getting thinner, we do everything right, we look at ourselves in mirror again, we look different, we don’t feel prettier, we eat a box of cookies, we hate ourselves for it, we tell ourselves, I am ugly. Again.

Example: we tell ourselves, I am not worthy. We seek out experiences to try and prove ourselves wrong: we work hard in school, we become a star athlete, we get into the best college, we study business, we work our asses off, we try to be the most popular, we post on instagram, we post on linkedin, we run a marathon, we get a high paying job, we stay at work until its dark outside, we haven’t checked in on our friends, we have big fun nights out, we’re exhausted, we’re successful, we’re rich, we’re lonely, we’re stressed, we are worthy in all the ways everyone tells us to be, we stay on the hamster wheel, if we don’t will we still be worthy? We think we’re worthy now, but then again, why can’t we relax?

Our ego-us will continue to go through these cycles because it is all we know how to do. But I believe, (and you may think I am crazy, and you may not believe me, and that is okay, because I am learning to be open and feel-y and bold again), that there is a you that is more than this body. There is a you that was created by God. Someone created the cells that make up your organs, the freckles on your face, the way your laugh sounds, and the rhythym of your breathing. If you think nothing created you…… then maybe ‘nothing’ is your word for God…. Or if you don’t believe in God, I hope you believe in Love, and Love is exactly what I’m talking about. But I also think you don’t have to believe me at all to understand what I am saying, so just keep reading regardless. I think there is a you that is in its purest form. It is vibrations and energy and soul and love. It is perfect in its imperfection and no part of it is an accident. I think there is a part of all of our selves that is this self—this pure, unaffected self. And I think this self lives in connection to something huge. Something indescribable, and incomprehensible to our human brains. I think this self lives in connection to all of each other’s pure selves, and I think they are all connected to a huge source of love and connection and peace and soul: which to me is God, God’s realm, God’s kingdom, heaven, whatever you want to call it. (Some people would argue all of these words, and tell me that I’m wrong even if we believe in the exact same thing, but I just want to clarify that I think word choice is irrelevant in conversations around God because there is no way our little human brains speak the same language as this big and beautiful thing anyways).

This self, this self that is loved, blameless, loving, and light, is the version we’ve been begging to become—the saved version of us. We all have access to this self, but it’s really easy for it to get covered up with layers of unfelt emotions, negative energy, and worldly stress. It is the self that doesn’t think we are ugly, hated, unlovable, unfunny, broken. It is the self that knows we are perfectly imperfect creations, creations that were created not to be perfect or the best or successful, but to be loving, bright expressions of this heaven-love-bright-light-universe-kingdom that exists outside of our perceptions. We are designed to be perceptible beings or expressions of what is imperceptible. (!!!) And when you realize that, when you take a deep breath and connect to that self that is ever-connected with everything around you, you experience a few things. 1) You experience complete peace. Peace that doesn’t make sense, peace that doesn’t listen to lies, peace that doesn’t fear what we usually fear. Peace that makes your body sink into the floor. My diaphragm has been sore because I’ve never breathed this deeply before. 2) You experience love. You realize that all the love in the world is always available to you—we experience expressions of love through other people, but we can experience love always, at any time, even in complete solitude. Regardless of your past, regardless of your deeds, regardless of your performance. It’s a Love that makes your brain feel weird and your heart feel physically swollen. 3) You experience complete trust. You don’t worry about what is ahead, and what is behind feels like merely fables you’ve read that taught you how to get here. There is no fear in trust. There is no worry in faith.

You will experience physical, mental, and soulful rest. Simultaneous rest and awakening. It’s like living in a different world. Because it is. And in this world, every feeling is a compass, a reminder to return to this connected self. Every feeling of insecurity is a compass towards this reminder: I was designed perfectly, and I love my design. Every feeling of fear is a compass towards this: I am completely held and embodied by love and light and nothing / no one can make me feel differently (even if they try). Every feeling of tension is a compass towards this: I am free to be the person I was designed to be. [A part of me keeps wanting to disclaimer, oh this may sound stupid but…, or I know this sounds woo-woo…, or you don’t have to believe me but…, but this is just that tension. And I don’t want to be afraid of being who I feel I was designed to be. Because what I feel is what I feel, and what I believe is what I believe, and if no one opens up like this, then no one can learn anything about one another. So I will try to put my fears and safety nets aside, and put my love out there (because this is what this is, this is what writing is: an expression of my love).]

I am not an expert on these things, and I am definitely no expert on humanity. When I write these things, I am weary of sounding like I know the way and this is it. Because that’s precisely what I’m unlearning. Everyone’s self / soul / spirit is different, and thus everyone will experience and learn and understand things in a different way. But I think writing, or being open in any way, about one’s experience is so beautiful and important and wonderful, and I think we’ve all become rather closed off. I’ve written this before, but I think social media was promised to us as the ultimate connector, a place to be open and vulnerable with one another, so that we can see and understand and connect with one another no matter where we are. But I think maybe it became just an extension of our performance, and so it makes us less and less (earnestly) vulnerable even though we look more and more vulnerable. Vulnerability is no performance: it is an honest exhibition.

So I am writing these things because I want to be open. I want to relearn how to feel free to be who I am deep down, to experience life in my way. I used to write so much, I used to be so vulnerable, I used to expose all of myself for the sake of art and connection and living to the fullest extent. At some point along the way, I learned that this was terrifying. That it was like standing naked in a public space and being open for critique. I learned that it made me “weird.” And so I learned to stop. But I think a part of this journey, of this return back to who I was designed to be, may be to put myself in that public space again, shine lights on both the darkest and the most beautiful parts of the life I know, and be susceptible to judgement because to be susceptible to judgement means to be susceptible to understanding and joy and life and connection. All I’m trying to do is be a perception, a vessel, a reflection, an expression of this secret loving peaceful world I’ve been visiting, and I hope that the more I do it, the more I will find myself living in that world full time.

In order to unlearn what I’ve learned in my life, specifically to unlearn what the physical world has taught me (all the insecurities, all the efforts of control), I think it’s important to uncover, to be honest, because otherwise we will go on thinking that these thoughts and feelings are okay. And it is okay in the sense that it is normal. It is expected—of course we feel this way… the world has taught us to… It is okay in the sense that all of these universal thoughts are just are way of seeking safety measures, of protecting ourselves from what we think can hurt us—rejection, hurt, sadness, loneliness. But it isn’t okay in the sense that it is good, and acceptable, and beautiful, and true. And I think we can all agree that what we’re seeking in life is the good and the acceptable and the beautiful and the true. We think we are protecting ourselves from bad things through having these thoughts. But if we are constantly in protection, constantly putting up walls to avoid the feelings we don’t want to feel, then we begin to block out the good and acceptable and beautiful too, along with the bad things. The only alternative I see, and the alternative I am going to try to live out and practice, is this: to live in complete love, trust, and freedom, and to believe that if we continue to be expressions of good and of love, then the power of that, the vibrational and energetic pulsation of that will become our new barrier from bad things.

This is what I believe and this is what I am practicing (imperfectly) and this is what I am putting out there. You have the ability to critique it, to judge it, to believe it or not to believe it, but now only I have the power to feel critiqued or judged, and I will try very hard to hold true to this feeling that I have and let it continue to produce love, trust, peace, and faith within me. Je vous aime, life is beautiful, take a deep breath, give yourself a hug.

:-)