The Assessment Agenda

daniel jacob self
Jul 17, 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 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.