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I'm self conscious
I wonder if everyone else is staring at me from behind their dark sunglasses as they walk by.
Because I definitely am... Staring at them, I mean. From behind my dark sunglasses.
I'm sitting here at this cafe and I'm trying to concentrate on my work, but like some sort of squirrel-mad K9, I keep glancing up and around every few seconds trying not to start and stare every time someone new walks in, or walks past, or walks out.
But I want to stare: I find myself so curious about who these people are!
What their stories might be...
Who loves them...
Who they love..... and how...
And I also find myself... well, self conscious.
Comparing them to me and me to them in every possible way in the initial split-second scan of the eyes and energy, and finding myself feeling badly, whatever the outcome.
If the comparison comes out in my favor, I feel guilty for whatever it is that's allowed that to be the case: whatever societal messaging floods in to rank them as somehow lower than I.
If the comparison comes out in their favor, however, I immediately feel less-than: lacking in whatever specific or generalized ways— an itemized list or an overall Zeitgeist of Insufficiency.
I wonder what would happen if the weighing in the balance ever came out even?
Seems noteworthy that that particular eventuality has literally never occurred. This is, after all, a zero-sum game: this wholesale compulsive comparative sizing up... and down.
It would seem that despite all of my anti-hierarchical ideals, somewhere along the way, I absorbed on a pretty deep level that reality is inherently, undeniably, inescapably gradated. We're all somewhere on the proverbial pecking order. And that it's crucial to know where one is located on said scale at any given moment in any given group.
How can it be that so much energy is given over in my head to a snap-judgment processional based around criteria I don't even condone? And in fact, which I devote so much of my life to attempting to work against?
Why do I care about my ranking on the score board of a game I have no interest in playing and, furthermore, deem to be extremely harmful to... you know... everyone!
This Comparative Worth Olympics seems to be so deeply baked into the waters in which we're swimming —
(wait... Baked into the cake upon which we feed? Laced into the tea we've all been given to drink? Dumped like so much toxic waste into the waters in which we are, all of us, immersed?)
— that it seems nearly impossible not to play the game! Even if you like me, definitely didn't sign up for — nor would ever even wish to watch — the game, were you given the choice!
It's like that Jungian saying that what we resist persists, and often grows greater.
If so much of the focus of my day-to-day life is fighting against this indoctrinated ranking of others, I suppose it makes pretty good sense that inside my own head, the battle wrathfully rages.
So, then, perhaps it would help to turn to another famous phrase for ideological support:
Be the change you wish to see*.
❔
What would happen, I wonder... if instead of playing this hateful game, or fighting so vociferously against the playing of it...
I simply attempt to play a different game altogether?
As the next person walks through my field of awareness — drawing my attention away from my work at hand to gaze at them from behind my dark glasses — and as the shame-based, nonconsensual, no-one-wins ranking process begins to kick into gear in that vastly unnameable space between my ears...
I try to return myself to that initial curiosity. That part of me beneath the fear and the ranking and the fear of the ranking that simply notices Some Other One.
Another Human Being... being.
Navigating life as best they can with all the gifts and all the challenges they've been given.
And I wonder, if I could look out from behind their dark sunglasses and overhear the thoughts in their head, how much would be familiar and how much would be novel? How much strange and how much alike?
What would I understand and what would feel so different as to be perhaps wholly unintelligible without the filtration of verbal articulation so many of us rely on in the repeated endeavor of jumping the synaptic cleft left between your being and mine?
As I watch the person pass, I allow my imagination to nurture those small seedling curiosities that tend to so quickly get trampled beneath the feet of the initial ranking and subsequent battle against the ranking process.
And as I return to them — Who, What, Where, How — a small series of stories about this person emerges...
Some Not-So-Tall-Tales of what their day might be like... Who it is who might love them... And what it is they might yearn for.... How it is they might be feeling in this precise moment, anticipating perhaps coffee or company or both.
And for just a moment, I feel inexplicably close to them.
On an impulse, I take off my sunglasses — blinking in the flash of bright sunlight — and at the same moment, this Suddenly-Not-So-Stranger glances over.
As our eyes meet, I smile.
Not the tight lipped, obsequious, I-mean-you-no-harm mouth movement I so often employ when awkwardly half-meeting the eye of some passer-by.
But a true, simple, open acknowledgement of someone somehow now so much more familiar, though I know nothing of them beyond the fictitious musings of my own minds meanderings.
And as I feel the smile on my own face — and as the other person, determining in a glance that I was not in fact the person they arrived to meet, moves on — I feel my body exhale: the battle for and against hierarchical supremacy at least temporarily set aside.
And, without a word exchanged...
I feel just that much less alone.
I don't know...
What do you think?
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