This morning I dreamt that I was waiting to be sworn in to my new job as a congressman and while trying to remember the oath, I was mildly embarrassed to realize that I wasn’t quite acquainted with a particular issue that I should have been speaking out on.
The feeling in the dream and when I woke? Fraudulent. I feel it often: I’m not supposed to be here, I don’t deserve it, I’ve wronged someone. Want me in your pocket? Want to poke me where it really hurts? Give me the message that I did you wrong, that I didn’t think of you, because true or not, I’m halfway to believing it myself. Any piece of good news comes with the conviction that there is another shoe about to drop: this time I’ll be exposed for the fraud (intellectual, emotional, professional) that I am, deep down. When I shut down, it’s in the face of feelings like that.
And the shutting down is a simple reversion to a very young me, a set of behaviors that I’ve carried on with for so much of my life that it seems wrong to name them immature. As a sum, they are behaviors that often serve to provoke the kind of frustration and anger that I perceive them as being a reaction to: behaviors of silence, isolation, panic. All on my own I’m tried and convicted, under house arrest, sent to my room to think about what I’ve done. Which from the outside looks like blithe indifference. You don’t have to punish smart kids: they figure out how to punish themselves. And the really smart ones know how to turn turn that self punishment into a weapon.
Never cross a narcissist: they don’t like to be interrupted.
So here I am at an “artist’s retreat”. I’ve been given time and space at a resort to “work”. A very good thing, one that would herald a very big other shoe suspended above my head. At least that’s my norm, to feed myself the delicious terror of that impending crash. But then there’s a sign by the side of the road. When you go somewhere else, you get to see your norm from another vantage point. And one thing I’ve been seeing is the way that my norm hasn’t been serving me. My 50th birthday is marching up the path to meet me, and I’ve been thinking of how it will find me; my hope is, shorn of emotional cowardice. Not in hiding from my life. Unapologetically alone when I need to be, and joyous with others when I am with companions.
And with my norm shucked like the tired husk it is.
Fraudulence is not my truth: the tools we need as children are not our friends for ever.
Tags: daily photo, emotion, self destruction, Sylt, work