How to Get Free
I stumbled across this wonderful Medium article a couple days back, and it was funny in a way, because it came (as things will, in this strange hectic universe) exactly when it was needed.
Like you know when you're asking a question (for hours for months for years) and you still struggle to answer, and then you look around, and someone's scribbled the answer on a napkin? Well, this was a bit like that in a way.
It wasn't the answer. There is no singular answer, but it was a start. And sometimes, the answer to "how do you get free?" can be you begin to get free when someone shows you you're not alone.
You don't really want someone to tell you the answer. All you want is to see someone else is also asking.
I got this wonderful feeling, reading the article, of being heard. In our lives, we make so much of being heard. It's everywhere, in our public discourse, in our internal dialogue... even the meditation challenge I'm doing (what a paradoxical combination of words) has been focusing on what makes us feel heard.
And reading that, I felt heard because of silly reasons, really, like the author dared to enunciate things I also clasped tightly inside my own soul. And they listened to "One" and felt heartbreak, just like I listen to it and feel heartache. Like so many of us, when all is said and over, do.
And then I got to thinking about the question itself. Because writers can be annoying and a little nerdy when they want to be.
We ask,what makes you feel heard?
And it struck me that the answer is the same as the answer to my earlier question -- How do you get free?
Speaking.
How to Speak
It seems almost futile to speak when you've gone over the same arguments in your head thousands of times. And across the years, I do mean thousands. You ask, what's the point? I know the argument by heart.
You do, but someone else doesn't.
And sometimes, in enunciating our arguments and sharing our perspective, we come to look at them (these facts we thought we knew by heart) in a different light. I thought, if I told myself enough times, then it wouldn't matter that there was no one else to say it with me, but I was wrong. Because the people who love us have superpowers. No, don't worry. I mean only for us. Through us. And when they say it, it's the equivalent of our internal voice saying the same thing a million times over.
Sometimes, you get free not by running the same incident through over and over, but by having someone run it with you only once, and say, in the end,
"That sounds so incredibly painful."
"Yeah, it was."
It sounds easy, particularly as many of us, with luck, master speaking within the first few years of life. Yet, how is it that saying things out loud can get so incredibly hard?
Well, truth is, it's not the speech itself we find difficult. The sentences alone, we can formulate easily enough. This happened. It wasn't fair. I felt hurt.
But between our formulating the words and speaking them to somebody else likes an ocean of resentment, fear, shame, embarrassment, and doubt. And in that ocean, like Poseidon saddled triumphantly over the waves, our worst inner enemy that argues incessantly that we'd best not speak at all.
When I forget how to speak, I take comfort in Odysseus's journey. From where he started, it looked like smooth sailing into Ithaca. Just like speaking the things that still hurt can look smooth to us.
Yet Odysseus doesn't make it home, in the end, because the journey was smooth and easy. He succeeds because he persevered, because although the syllables and ports were long drawn-out and far-between, stopping mid-sentence was never an option.
This reminds me of when I was once stalked and when I went to the police station, no matter how much I explained and gave evidence, it seemed as if no one listened to me. In a way I felt like I was being blamed for going through that martyrdom. Despite all that I was going through, from the beginning I documented myself and cut that (defensive) response link that we tend to give out of impulse. In these cases, the authoritative literature says that you should never respond. Stalkers thrive on it. And even more so if they are from this type of book, as I was able to see in my case.
You can imagine how ashamed I felt at the thought of telling anyone what I was going through.
It's hard to speak, yes.
But fortunately, someone was there for me. Someone with whom I could share this and the path was smoothed. Sometimes I don't even want to talk about it. In fact I wrote a story that I thought about even publishing, but just when I read it I feel so horrified, almost like I fade away and just close the document and send it to that drawer of demons that must not be awakened.
You can't see the picture when you're in the frame, or let me put it differently: you can't see your blind spots. We underestimate the power of the "observer" and yet, we need that outside perspective while we verbalize our thoughts.
Presentation of our thoughts via speaking rightly makes better life with friends and family.
It's more advantageous when we have the right people to speak with