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I'm self conscious
Let's talk about family... for a minute.
Have you ever felt as though you both love your family with all your heart — feel the depths of your connection to the people whose very existence helped shape and form your very being and presence in this world — and at the same time, felt like every time they say anything, however innocuous — actually, often especially when it's of a particularly innocuous nature — it feels as though someone's scraping nails down a very personalized chalkboard pressed closely up to your highly sensitive ears?
... Just me?
What is that? How can I love people so much and simultaneously feel... allergic to them?
Why does it often seem to feel easier for me to feel the depths of my love for them when they're... somewhere else? As opposed to when they're nearby: and I feel the metaphorical angry hives begin to rapidly welt across my intrapsychic skin.
I think at least one piece of the puzzle might be that particular blend of distinctiveness and reminiscence that family seem to specialize in.
I can't help but notice that, as a broadly generalized theme, the people who tend to drive me the most proverbially bonkers as I move through life, attempting to be a loving and caring person along the way, are the ones that in some way or another remind me of some aspect of myself... in a few notably consistent ways:
Either, they seem to be struggling with something — some way of feeling or acting or speaking, some way of handling a certain timorousness or other — in a manner which I feel I've worked hard to work through so as not to do any longer...
Or, they seem to embody with loud, carefree abandon a particular trait or way of being that I feel ashamed of or particularly dislike in myself and am currently working on healing or changing, yet which this Brash Hypothetical seems to see no problem with whatsoever — even as I sit here working so earnestly to shift it in myself!
Or else...There's something about them — some element to how they show up — that touches in me a reminder of a great fear I carry:
There seems to be this not-fully-conscious list living inside of me, bobbing around somewhere, just on the threshold of my awareness...
A list containing a series of behaviors — ways of speaking or acting — that, were I to discover I unconsciously embodied, would cause me to feel such deep embarrassment and anger — red hot shame and dislike for myself — that I might melt into a molten puddle of make-me-disappear right where I stood!
And so....
When some theoretical hapless human happens to show up in my particular sphere of hyper-awareness exhibiting a trait which pings any of these three inner alarm bells, I have to work quite diligently to find my way back from my most disdainful cigarette-smoking, leather-jacket-wearing cool kid into the state of open, empathetically contextualizing kindness and connectivity from within which I attempt to meet the vast majority of fellow beings whose path I happen to cross in this life.
If this recognition of seemingly shameful sameness seems to be a relatively reliable rubric for my transformation from Easeful Caring Communicator to Eyeball-Rolling Dismisser of my Fellow Travelers, with how much more marked rapidity would these same mechanisms of self-discernment be likely to spring into action when I am around my family? The very Collective Theme from which I am an Epigenetic Variation. The very Chord of Sameness from which my whole life can be seen as one big Ancestral Riff.
Okay, so that seems to make pretty good sense.
But so then what?
Because at the heart of me, beneath the gnarled up ball of Insecurity-Inducing Reminders from which I seek to differentiate myself when brought face to face with my Manifest Origins, I feel immense gratitude for all of the trials and tribulations that my forebears have gone through to get me to the very place where I can find myself growing and changing and differentiating enough to feel annoyance at certain aspects of how I might no longer wish to choose to be, to begin with!
And yet, the chalk board nail-scraping experience persists.
Perhaps, in part, to remind me of why my particular little microscopic allotment of this Intergenerational Relay Race is so very important...
Because for everything they've been able to give me, there are things they simply haven't. Because they didn't have it to give. Because it hadn't been given to them.
And for all the things they managed to discover and gather and offer to me that they were never offered by those who came before them, there's yet more I wish to give to those who come after me.
And that's all, I suppose, exactly as it should be.
So... gratitude, then, and diligence in my own journey of growth and healing.
Because pretty soon — if not already — despite my very best efforts... I have no doubt I will be providing the nails-on-chalkboard experience for those whose relay race has yet to come — who can see just that little bit further than I can.
And I hope that, when that time comes, I'll be able to listen and show as much care to learn from their experiences as those who have come before me show toward learning from mine.
Whether I'm showing up with all the earnest, caring, connective empathy in my deepest truest of hearts...
Or rocking my Eye-rolling, Cigarette-smoking, Leather-jacket-wearing, Disdainful Angst-ridden Teen that I fear may never fully desert me.
I don't know...
What do you think?
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