Honesty

I am sitting here trying to process my 34th year after experiencing a great deal of difficulty sleeping tonight. The truth is that I am a huge verbal processor- all of my friends will tell you this. I have to get out all the feelings/words/experiences externally so that I can hear myself say them or read myself write them in order to make sense of it all.

As I was thinking of how to sufficiently write out my 34th year for me to review and reflect, I recognized that one of my greatest challenges at the moment is that I cannot be as honest as I once was. My professional life puts me at the front lines of people’s trauma- experiences that I am bound to keep, for a very large part, internally due to privacy laws. Their pain and sadness and desperation bounces off the insides of my soul and I feel people’s challenges intimately. I am going to find ways to have corners of my life that are not touched by external difficulties- by setting up better boundaries around my time and emotions. I wrote this and then came back to say that you do not get to section off corners of your heart with red roped partitions and keep out pain. The very nature of pain is that it is not well-controlled. So I will have to propose some counter measures to heal it instead. Writing has always been a help.

Personally, I used to be an open book around family life, spirituality, the inner workings of my soul in a way that felt really authentic publically. I still crave that transparency, but as I age, my story is too interconnected with the lives of others to be so free. I read authors who boldly tell stories with freedom, and I miss my ability to speak so easily. But I have so much to say left unspoken.

Maybe I’ll find an open mike night and crush the atmosphere with intensity. I need an artistic release of the experiences of this year, a way to hold 34 in a way that accurately summarizes the victories and the tragedies in the same sentence. I’ve always wanted life to be less messy. I’ve always wanted the answer to the question, “What did we learn here?” but more and more, I’m learning (and coming to accept) that the lessons are grey, the decisions are written in sand, the wind changes direction and the things you knew are no longer as clear. People and relationships and the world are very layered. The antagonist has admirable qualities and the hero struggles with crippling personal failings- it is all so inescapable.

Perhaps the most beautiful and difficult things I have learned this year have been the things I thought I knew about myself- my limits, my boundaries, my abilities that have been challenged. When you believe yourself to be a particular level of resiliency or strength and you find that you crack short of where you imagined yourself to push through, it makes you pause to re-evaluate if you ever knew yourself at all–and what other preconceived, untested premises I hold about myself. At the same time, without encountering adversity, how can I grow?

I had a surprising moment a few weeks ago. In order to reset a password, I had to select 4 personal questions out of 10 to cue myself a response and prove my identity to login to some entirely unimportant website. The personal tragedy came when I could only answer 1 of 10 questions confidently- I did not know my favorite city, restaurant, band, color, or other seemingly insignificant details that maybe people do and should know about themselves. I wonder casually, is this what the midlife crises feels like? Those details about our lives, are they really what define us? I think how important children’s favorite colors are to them- and wonder what happened to mine- What does it mean about me that I do not know these answers?

Writing in stream of consciousness here, I used to wonder if being monogamous marriage would be monotonous. I have discovered that I am constantly evolving and growing and changing alongside my spouse, and we can barely keep up with the pace of fresh ideas and new perspectives for ourselves, let alone one another. It has been a life long unfolding, so maybe I should care less about those questions. What things really remain the same?

The hard part of about being human is that I have demonstrated remarkable judgment, resiliency, wisdom and talent in ways that I do not know how to adequately recognize myself for- things that will never be on a resume, a birthday card or an obituary, but I have also had to stare at myself in a mirror for priorities and attitudes that I judge harshly in others and had no idea I possessed. That tension is the story of every human being, but I am awakening to it in myself a little bit more and dealing with that reality.

To summarize my year:

I am not perfect. . . even less perfect than I thought.

I am in control of very little . . . even less than what I imagined.

I am entirely inescapably interconnected to others,

and this makes me feel very vulnerable. I am more uncomfortable with vulnerability than I ever believed I was. I am more uncomfortable being out of control than I knew I was. I have a heightened awareness of how much humans possess undesirable qualities have devastating impact. I always knew about others propensity towards cruelty- but this year underlined it. And also, this year, I learned more intimately that my unique imperfections also contribute to the pile- as desperately as I would like to believe or act otherwise. I’m processing that. I do not like it. I know it is necessary for me to know to grow.