What is so striking is that at forty-five years of age, I think there is a part that is still growing up, I wish to emphasize the "a part". This part feels the pressure to give out of it's non-existent resources. It got stuck in a time loop.
The source of my anxiety has to do with parent/child role reversal. Parentification is the technical term. This part had to give to my mother, when it was actually my mother's responsibility and duty to give to me.
It was an impossible task for such a small boy. I had no life experience, and I tried so hard, and everything I tried seemed to fail except playing smaller and smaller, and not being a pain to mother and trying to guess how to make her happy, and then I was so unhappy, because I could not brighten her up at all.
And yesterday, after all these years, I finally realized the primary source of my anxiety....this terrible darkness that tries to press in has nothing to do with me. I've out-grown the biological drive to please my mother in order to stay alive. I now am an adult. I have tools and resources that I've gathered over the years, from all kinds of sources, independent of my mother and father, and the Bibble (as my son is so found of chirping). Today I am not anchored in the past, and so it is soooooo understandable that I would still have a small part of me housed in this forty-five year old body that still tries to think like a three year-old, a six, eight, and on and on. It was partly how I survived and got to today!
It's super-power of creative energy and trying, and fortitude and self-negating, looking to see what another might need or want...was really coming from a knowledge of what he deeply wanted and needed, and now...I can give this small part all it needs. The recognition that what it feels is actually real and that there is hope that things don't stay the same forever.
Now I shelter myself. I have the help of professionals, friends, and a small and growing tribe that validate that the man I am today is functional, growing, learning, and even pleasant to be around. I am encouraged to just be. Be me.
Be the man that has risen from the ashes of despair and celebrate the reality that there is nothing more needing fixing or modifying or changing in order to be whole. I am whole and have been whole and was more whole than I could have ever dreamed possible. I didn't need to validate this to make it true either, and it helps some part of me to type this all out, just as I have here. There is a record. A written record among all the billions of voices and trillions of data points, and it is enough that these sentences mean something to me.
It really sucked, that I did not have a caring adult to take care of my needs. Once again, that was then, actually a very long time ago. What sucks even more is that my mother mixed genuine caring with her selfish needs, so as to make it impossible to know what real love actually felt like. I got to yesterday, and today I wake up and care for me.
Perhaps you are caring for you. As I wrote to a musician friend this morning: "you are making more music and giving, and not knowing if you will get back what you need financially, and all the pre-recorded sound-tracks play all at once, sometimes; and then sometimes we tap our wise loving adult selves, and all is suddenly stillness and wholeness."
"The music that we knew we had in us just gently flows out, or bangs out, depending on so many factors. The screaming and hollering of some of those acid/heavy-metal lyrics just throb all the way into my bones and give voice to parts that need to say something sometimes. There are times when it's just wind-chimes tinkling in the breeze of thought too."
And now you know (some of) the rest of the story: one that is continually be written and edited, and re-written, because at the end of the day, there is only one individual quite like me. And there is you, dear reader.
Some things in life are free and should remain so. Perhaps you too, Titus (not real identity), like mother, brought all this struggling out. I am forever grateful that your woundedness touched something deeply wounded in me and I was lucky to catch a a glimpse of that part that sat in the pew Sunday after Sunday feeling terrible for not mearing up. It was all hopeless and a useless waste of emotional energy. Caring adults might have taken me elsewhere, but they were children too---nursing an incurable disease: rejecting ones own humanity. I am seeing now that just like then, even as I am now, there is nothing that I need to measure-up-to. Nothing.
Getting up and walking out? I finally did so on awaking from a very deep sleep. This I have done, and won't sit down in that despair ever again. Another precious human 10,000 miles away reminded me of this simple and startling true fact: I am enough. So are you.
Inner wisdom is within folks. (Please forgive a very different analogy.) If the Pied Pipers of Hamelin still exist today, well it's to remind us of the folly of looking without, and especially the folly of paying the Pied Piper. And no our most precious possessions won't be lost either. It's a myth folks. So is the piper that pipes. Rather we shall keep that which is most precious: our own dignity. If it smells of rat, it's likely a rat, and we might be able to expunge the plague ourselves, by our own means and on our own power. We are not helpless. Our adult self or our younger selves housed in these bodies are powerfully able.
The tinkling of the windchimes reminds me that some truths don't need to be blasted at a million watts of power either. The breeze is enough to stir the ringing eternal truths that are quite readily available in all places, in all times, in all cultures: because they reside in the hearts of humans, beautiful whole, prefect humans. Maybe we await a discovery that was already made: I am enough.
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