Turning “No You Can’t”s — “No You Aren’t”s — “You Shouldn’t”s Into: “Yes I am”s — “Just Watch Me”s — and “I Can, And I Will”s
Who am I? Who are you? Who are we? What have you seen? Where are you going? Where do you want to go? What’s holding you back? And more importantly, what are you willing to give up in order to get what you want?
Why is this all valuable?
Yatha Bhuta Nana Dassana — the wisdom that comes from observing reality as it is. Knowledge and vision of things as they are. And with this wisdom, one can emerge from suffering. It’s the knowledge and vision according to reality.
Just newly turned 28, I’m just finally seeing my reality clearly for the first time in my life.
My mission is to democratize information. A big goal. So when I set off to chase a big and pulsing dream to better understand the complexities of high technologies and the intelligence agencies, I realized that I embodied a value set that was fundamentally not allowing me to communicate what it was that I wanted. Exactly the metaphor that I’ve since extended to the collection of information within protective/secretive systems
When I was in the 4th and 5th grade, two people mattered: Shakespeare and Dickinson. And in 4th or 5th grade, I used to recite, write down, then thrive by reading and knowing profound proclamation of individuality and non-conformity to the masses or allies by these two writers. And this rebellion, to the world around me that I felt didn’t get me, always erred on the side of language, romance, and daydream rather than process and act out as anger, angst, or resilience. Knowledge on things in their rare, raw, and real forms was my resilience, but it wasn’t of the interest of my peers or of the observation of my educators or parents to notice that this is where I thrived, instead of where they thought I was being held back.
“I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know.”
I’m totally guilty of reciting those lines by Emily Dickinson’s to someone a few months ago on our first date…I had never met anyone like them before — it was as if there movement across this planet and actions mirrored those of mine. And in that really new moment of accepting them for their shares, I too found similarities in how I too interacted with the world — or at least how my 15, 16, and 17 year old self thought that it expressed itself.
So there was a pair of us. And we never told (as the rest of the lines of the poem go) but we continued to try falling in love even though our individuality really WASN’T, in reality, all that accepting of the one another. Our communication of our drivers and needs were different. Off set. Out of balance. And those safe shares — those proclamations of our individuality — turned out to be our demise.
So in 6th, 7th, and 8th grades poets, cars, and composers became my more developed medium of expression to expose this real yearning to be aloud with the voice I had never known or felt good enough inside to I have.
“How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog. To tell your name the livelong day to an admiring bog!”
Wow. I can’t believe the 10 year old that I was! Living with such deep concern and proclamation of truly wanting to be heard — but also not — and be heard as the individual that I was — that I am — but knew somehow that proclamation was just speaking and not actually doing! Perhaps these cries to get noticed were cries for security — security in being influenced and learning in a healthy way so that with my gifts I could learn how to navigate the world.
My guiding path had somewhere gone off kilter. And dealing with the aversions, conflicts, and influences of my former self had been limiting my connection to myself and my potential.
That extension of my voice to the world that to gave meaning to the things or emotions that I so badly wanted to emote or to say out loud had real difficulty in getting out. And in being cast off, bullied, overlooked, ignored, turned away, I learned that I didn’t need them to learn and learn fully. I could do it on my own, without expressing all that I knew, because, of course, I learned that expression of my knowledge meant rejection.
But all we really want is be be and feel accepted by others. I wanted friends and community — maybe?
Event those closest to me. But just as with the naivete to emotion or social circumstance, this veil Maybe I knew what I read into these words, or maybe it was to understand in coming into knowing that I could see what my younger self was teaching/telling me know.
In thinking that I knew myself all this time and all the elements that made me — me — it seems that in the longing to find another different and interesting person that in reality I actually was refusing to join like mindeds of my contemporaries and constantly cast myself off into my own individuality, thus removing me from belonging in groups and systems and programming me that others were bad and couldn’t understand me.
Albeit in a place of individuality, I always struggled with acceptance and happiness — dealing with psychological traumas of being seen and heard as I was and as I am. And it felt like it was everywhere — home, other home, school, “friends”, classmates, teachers…etc. I do not think that I ever really have been joyful — which is ironic since my mother gave me the middle name, Joie, which means “joy” in French. I believe that my experiences have shown me happiness and that I could be happy, but there were always catalysts to disaster or impermanence of those happy times. And just as I had started feeling safe in my skin and in with those around me, ruin or ending due to non-acceptance on one side or both would creep in and demolish potentially good things.
That place is dark and lonely and doesn’t really show much of “To thy own self be true” — another de jure by which I had always lived — now does it?
The transition to adulthood is a pretty cool thing to realize. We have the control to really define our reality, our present, ourselves. Childhood is controlled by the family by whom you are raised, the school, the town, the city, the places, the things that you doSo I cast off. Far and wide and saw that in this need to go toward all that I had always wanted that I also was in a truer and more present shift of self into awareness and truth. And by tapping into my curiosities and into my past experiences, I was able to connect some dots to my past, present, future and dreams. And in those parts of me — and my behaviors — motivations — wants — desires — fears — I know longer feared dreariness of being somebody as Emily had encouraged my pre-conditioned and angry self to be.
In my effort to get employed, I
In learning languages, and hyper connecting, and
In pulling back my layers I did a few approaches. And they were — are — constantly challenges.
There were several mantras that I started bringing into my mind to give order and solace to learning systems and baby steps. The first was diving back to 3 steps of life that I had learned in high school but didn’t have the clarity to their power or knowledge. And I spoke of them incorrectly for years without going back into the trenches of correcting my incorrect dogma, and really learning.
I constantly went into environments with ego and curiosity, instead of curiosity and will through an informed passion. And maybe that’s where I stood — alone — in the silent shadows of extreme exposure without doing anything to stand by what it was that I was learning. I was telling my name like the frog thinking that I was in the nobody state. And this telling of my name was for years expending so much energy connecting and connecting and going toward many things that all really dealt with translating other people’s essence and mastery.
So I went to an oracle. I went to the Union Square Oracle after a girlfriend of mine shared her profound readings with this individual.
Sila Panna Samedi.
Shu-Har-Ri
In a history of abuse surrounding lack of trust, broken self love, no safe space, and confidence within mastery
There was an uncomfortable pattern forming, I was moving from one place to another which seemed like every year to year and a half. Always leaning in with wants and not learning from those experiences really along the way. Instead of seeing that what it was that was needed really was to lean in with patience AND learn along the way.
Where I would arrive somewhere with excitement, curiosity, and what I had been trained to understand as
But I never learned how to acknowledge or recognize a measurement for success. Since early childhood, possibly earlier in baby-toddler stage, I suffered from major neglect and rejection. This rejection — later interpreted as a a silencing of who I am — was — are
The thing with looking into your suffering and acknowledging it, seeing into your experience,
In these many years of exploration and searching there was a funny revelation that came to me recently. In that the transition to adulthood, at least for me, is removing the framework of fear of a safety or comfort of acceptance that I believe that I really truly never had. And that in the relationships that I had formed over the years dipped in and out of my true self and true self love where I found myself even unable to answer the question: “where are you from?” or “what do you do?” or “where do you live?” or “where did you go to school?” “what did you study?”
But I could never just answer. My responses had to always include every other which way thing that brought my individuality into the institutions, or towns, or programs, or major, or jobs that I had done. There had to ALWAYS be more behind EVERYTHING. Why?
When people asked me any of these
I became resilient by having tremendous compassion. But this compassion came at a price. It was learned by being and feeling socially and emotionally outcast. And by shutting people out and by learning as many outlets into culture and the world as I could. Language, literature, alt culture.
In not understanding how I felt and received love, I constantly attracted abusers (mental). Friends, lovers, bosses. Didn’t matter the sex or age. I kept recreating abuse patterns in the environments that I was entering because of the influences that I had and the things that I was learning — hard fact and cultural stuff — didn’t pass down mores or ethics. I learned abuse from other abuse fiends, my parents. Instead of merit, and skills, and planning, and forming goals and seeing them through, I became an addict. I was addicted unknowingly to putting myself in abusive scenarios and relationships.
