The Normalcy Bind

Jun 19, 2024
3 min read

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❣️ Are you a current client? First time here?

I'm self conscious

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtLlgJgx2aE

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?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLQ3T3HKvQw

I'm self conscious

I'm beginning to think that I might actually be just like everybody else. No better. No worse.

And that, in theory... ...is a good thing.

Right?

I mean given that the amount of time I have devoted throughout my life to the asymptotic dream of reaching the ever elusive mirage of normalcy is second only to the amount of time I've devoted to trying to be exceptional, unique, and peerless... this revelation should come with some degree of relief!

...Right?

But therein, I suppose, lies the perennial problem. Do I get to be Normal?

See: not-weird, one-of-the-group, an insider.
Also, see: ordinary, average, mediocre, insignificant.

Or do I get to be Exceptional?

See: noteworthy, extraordinary, outstanding.
See, also: abnormal, odd, atypical.

You see my conundrum here?

So really, I guess I should say that I'm beginning to believe that I might actually be just like everybody else...

No worse. But no better. Either.

And that, embarrassingly enough, is terrifying to me.

I mean, as I sit with it, I'd almost prefer to be worse... rather than just unnotable...

Worse is at least worth noting. Abhorrent at least gets a footnote. What's that phrase?

There's no such thing as bad press.

What is that?

I mean, without getting too Freudian here, I suppose it really all does seem to come back to two competing human needs within me:

The need to belong. To fit in. To be accepted. To feel affirmed and welcomed by those around me.

And the drive to be seen as something Someone Remarkable

Which, through the principle of philosophical mathematical reduction, might just as easily become the need to be memorable. Remembered

Which, reduced down one more eye-rolling ideological integer, might become, quite simply, the fear of death. Of not being. Of not existing.

Of never having existed if, in fact, the present moment is all we have.

So then back to this realization that perhaps I am just like everybody else.

No better or worse. Nor worse. Nor better.

I mean, it's certainly in alignment with my values, at least as I understand them and profess them to the world... a lot:

The power inherent in the framework of heterarchical paradigms focused on the adaptive nature of diversity in all its myriad forms is that it helps us all to feel our inherent value. Our inherent uniqueness within the context of us all being just... People. Being. Each of us has something to offer that no one else could possibly offer because no one else embodies the absolutely unlikely and completely unrepeatable combination of quintillions of factors that have resulted in this divinely negentropic manifestation of being that each of us, ultimately, is.

No better. No worse. No more nor less miraculous.

My first thought at this point, tangled up as I find myself deep within the morass of all this philosophical pilpul, is that none of this really much matters at the proverbial end of the day, because ultimately, from the Taoist as well as my own experiential point of view... I simply seem to be who and what I am.

With room for growth and change and healing and hurting, but nevertheless... in undeniable, ever constant adherence to my own true, deep, unique, Inner Nature.

Which I seem to discover the exact nature of, more and more, the longer I play this wild, ever inventively, unexpectedly dynamic Game of Life.

And whether that results in a life remembered by millions... or simply by those around me whose lives I impact in positive negative and every spectral way in between.

I'm pretty sure it's safe to say that, if only in the rippling effects of my impact, if not necessarily by name... I will be here even when I'm gone: in the grand cascade of the ever unfolding moment.

Each of us, it seems to me, is a mosaic made up of the millions of interactions that have shaped us, each of which were influenced by the millions of interactions preceding them, resulting in a sort of tapestry of personhood stitched together by the impact of each of us on eachother, sewn up one micro relational experience at a time.

So, From that perspective... I suppose the best thing I can do is to simply be me. As well as I can. Every day. In all my many ordinary, extraordinary, weird, banal, bizarre, predictable, shlubbish ways...

Just like everyone else.