The Ardency Sluice

daniel jacob self
Aug 14, 2023
4 min read

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❣️ Are you a current client? First time here?

I'm self conscious

I want to take a moment to talk about what you're going to hear here.

This is a place where, through the medium of heightened, poetic prose music, and sometimes even dance, everything from the minutia of day to day neuroses — so often written off as petty or melodramatic — to the depths of isolation and despair — so often obfuscated, lest it show us to be weak or sick or incapable — can be given voice without judgment.

Many of us silence these parts of ourselves, but especially, ironically, those of us who facilitate healing for others.

All of the philosophies and practices I share in my writing and my facilitation are the fruits of my own lifelong healing journey. The wisdom that I've been gifted by mentors and family and friends. The community around me and the community within me. All the parts of me: the angry, the hurt, the joyful, the resilient, the despairing.

So much of what I'm able to offer to those I work with comes from some initial moment of pain or discomfort in me that has led me to seek out greater wholeness. Which I'm then able to share with you: my community and my clients.

So often we see the fruits of a healing journey, but don't get any insights into the labor: the twists and turns along the way.

We see the shiny outcomes, but not the pain that often motivated us to seek the healing out in the first place, or keeps us committed to the work of collective healing.

So Self Conscious is, in essence, the place where I honor my 'uglier' sides. The parts of me, that in my journey of learning to care for them, have proven that old Leonard Cohen quote so very true.

"Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."

Self Conscious is also the place where I honor my inner angsty teen and, let's be real, my inner angsty adult! I hope it might speak to yours as well.

However, please know that the monologues in Self Conscious, while based on my own experiences, are works of artistic expression.

Some of them come from different parts of my life. Some of them were written when I was much younger or are about experiences when I was much younger. Some of them are amalgamations of different moments in time, sometimes told with different details for the sake of the heart of the artistic expression of each piece.

As Pablo Picasso once said,

"We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie. That makes us realize the truth. At least the truth that is given to us to understand."

So my only request in breaking with the norms that would encourage me to keep this form of artistic expression very separate from the rest of my work in this world is this:

If you are someone I work with in a coaching, therapeutic, or facilitating capacity, please take a moment to discern for yourself if you would like to hear these more vulnerable parts of my journey.

For some, it can be radically humanizing and affirming to hear being able to see the humanity and vulnerability of someone who holds space for us and offers guidance. For some, it can feel off putting or distracting: taking away from our experience of having a place we're able to go that can be wholly and fully about our experience without the complexities that can come from the awareness of another person's struggles, feelings, differences, and similarities.

So I ask you to give yourself the gift of discerning for yourself.

What would be most in alignment with your own healing journey right now?

And to remember that what you do here will not necessarily be current time, literal truth, but artistic expression: drawn from experiences across my lifetime— some of it expanded or shifted for artistic purposes.

All that being said... if you decide, you'd like to listen. I hope you enjoy.

I encourage you to listen with the parts of yourself that perhaps have always felt too melodramatic, or too much, too sensitive, or all alone in parts of your pain.

I hope you can laugh with me at the neuroses and perhaps cry with me at the moments of hopelessness. Some perhaps relatable and some perhaps very different to your unique travels through this sometimes beautiful, sometimes painful journey of life.

If you do proceed, thank you for receiving these vulnerable parts of me.

If you decide not to proceed, thank you for honoring what feels right to you right now.

If you do proceed, I hope if nothing else, these pieces resonate with and help certain vulnerable parts of you feel they deserve expression. No matter how small or how large.

And as always, please join in by commenting below.

I'd love to hear what you connect to, what you feel moved by, and what comes up for you as you listen.

Because ultimately...

I don't know.

What do you think?

I'm self conscious

I feel like I have so much love to give. Which means... what?

I'm sitting here in a bar alone while Led Zeppelin blaringly declares they've got a whole lot of love... And now I'm on the curb outside and I'm cold and in pain, feeling as though I'm holding a bottomless basket with gifts desperate to be given: love dying to be shared.

Yet grappling with the nagging realization that somewhere inside me I know... Whatever this emptiness is — this endless hole of love to give — it's not... quite... right.

So what is it?

Maybe...

Maybe it's something to do with the love I learned I needed to give — needed to give or else I'd be worthless: unlovable, in turn... a failure at my one job in this world.

As this thought occurs, I can hear the words of that very young, deeply pained part of me intoning its foundational belief:

"If I'm not here to find worth through the giving of love, then what's the point? ...Why do I even exist?"

All this while another voice protests with such earnestly vehement certitude that,

"No! If only I could give enough of this whole lot of love away — all of it! all the way! — then, then I would feel whole, complete. Full, somehow, in the wake of the emptiness of all I've poured out of me and into another."

I'm humbled and grateful to be able to say at this point that I've lived through enough life to know how woefully inaccurate these perniciously persistent voices are.

And furthermore, how ultimately damaging these prescriptions for me turn out to be when I let those parts steer the ship, as it were.

"So then, perhaps,"

A wiser inner voice chimes in,

" It's actually merely a matter of redirection..."

Rather than sending out never ending love from this bottomless inner pit in the hopes it will reach some impossible to find bottom — an ending point of satiation — acceptance of my inherent worthiness: like the Cowardly Lion's Badge of Courage received at the end of the Yellow Brick Road, externally affirming what's been internally true all along... Perhaps, instead, I might try to see what happens were I to try channeling some of that love to those dark gnarled up places inside of me... The unlovable ones lurking just out of awareness until they spring up to bring shame and disgust in the ugly face of their garish presence.

What if the love I'm seeking so desperately to give is the love these parts of me are seeking so desperately to feel?

I find myself struck... Both by a wave of intrapsychic nausea at such a trite Lifetime-movie-worthy platitude, and simultaneously by a visceral, embodied experience of the truth of it.

The simplest of realizations felt through me rather than simply thought of as though it's a brand new, never before conceived of revelation.

Maybe that's it.

Because I've experienced loving the, well, lovable parts of myself — at least from time to time — the proud parts, the parts worthy of a line upon my resume of qualifications for the job of Good and Decent Human Being...

But what about the parts I secretly fear might lose me that job?

The parts so riddled with shame that they cause pieces of my being to become so brittle as to threaten to break upon exposure when fully seen.

The parts that send a shockwave of adrenaline through my system upon the remembrance of their very existence within me, as though I've been caught — exposed — by and to myself.

What if...

This endless cyclical outpouring of love-for-worth could be interrupted by the intentional and repeated channeling of just some of that love toward those dark, shadowy inner places, carrying the burden of the weight of the shame of all the actions, thoughts, and feelings I have disowned. Torn my shirt in the face of. Cast out of the Club of Me, yet, which still lurk in the corners: unalienable yet unclaimed?

It feels desperately hard, to be clear...

There are some parts in there I really do not like. Do not approve of.

Yet when I think about it, it certainly does seem as though the whole, "that's not me" approach has led to much healing... or change.

So I suppose I might as well try sending a whole lot of love way, way down inside...

As these waves of realization dawn... I feel, out here in the cold, the tiniest ray of warmth piercing through the overwhelming pain and longing... coming back up from way, way down inside...

A little spark that feels like sunlight when it peaks through the clouds and you feel it on your face.

I think I'll keep trying to practice learning, imperfectly, how to love these disowned parts of myself.

Not approving of how they might act, what they might say. Not letting them steer the ship. But loving them nonetheless. Claiming them as best as I'm able.

And seeing if that ray of sunlight grows and who knows what else might happen.