I’ve been trying to find my inner mentor for weeks now. I’ve been reading Playing Big by Tara Mohr (as recommended by She Leads Change), one of the most important books I’ve ever read in helping me feel like I’m not alone in the ways I freeze around leadership as someone female-identifying. In the book, there’s a meditation for people seeking to find leadership from within. Tara describes the first meeting being one where she meets a decrepit old woman, the vision feeling all wrong, the woman overworked and undernourished. The second time, she meets her future self: radiant, living by the beach, a writer or something.
Every time I go through the inner mentor exercise as described by the guided meditation I fall straight to sleep, a total shut down. The very first time I did it my “mon(k)ey” brain kept pushing me around in all these different directions, my inner mentor a very disfigured face, always giant geometric shapes, like it’s some kind of glitching holographic thing. One part of me felt like I was rushing it, the other part felt aggravated that I haven’t gotten there yet: tension.
In the tension of self-trust, trusting others, trusting period, the hardest part has been trusting myself through fear. Also, as I detach from that emotion and attempt to lead from a place of neutral “insanity” I get confusion, smoke and mirrors, and conflicting experiences surrounding my different coaching and therapy groups: overwhelm as I try to keep blending them together in a way that threads coherently so I can feel that things make sense to my brain and my loneliness, a feeling that no matter where I go I’m always at least partially disengaged or pissed. I’m tired of feeling in between scared and angry.
The irony there is that my psychosis was all around fear. The only way I could “move through” the psychosis was by facing fear. After being hospitalized I feel like I have a weird relationship with this fear and the experience that I had overall. It builds into questions that I have around quality of care surrounding our mental health systems in the U.S. and ways we navigate mental illness in general as a society — my experience surrounding social isolation, abdication, and the current culturally mainstream model for leadership that we have being “dominance,” “owning it,” a “rah, rah” invasion forward rather than exercising our ability to stand face-to-face and see one another as equals — in our brilliance in a capacity to problem solve or express ourselves in a certain character energy with play and nonviolence.
|| As an aside, it’s important to note that although I, in general, disagreed with the structure of my experience the practitioners themselves were pretty fantastic. My doctor was a little high-strung but he tried to help. I got the sense that he was more anxious about “figuring it out” or seeming competent than listening to me, which is fair considering the ways we approach the mentally ill and frankly, not effective enough at this point. My nurses were fantastic, the highlights of my stay were the art classes and my little self-led meditation circle. ||
One of my best coaches has told me: “a good coach always leads you back to yourself.”
I feel she’s been one of the best coaches I’ve ever had because up to this point she’s allowed me to explore my inner depths with clarity and an encouragement that I’m “just where I need to be.” I don’t need to move faster, slower, like my life is some kind of rushed sexual act to get someone else to ecstacy or a competition to “be like them.”
I’m fine, I’m figuring it out, I’m addressing feelings that have been entrenched for a long ass time, I’m coming out to my family, I’m coming out to myself. I’m seducing myself. As someone who’s struggled with suicidal ideation, I’m selling my life to myself and learning to accept and feel my feelings around the parts of the world that are totally out of my control. As I figure that out, I’m creating ways to add value to the world around me from a place of authenticity so (and this is my greatest attempt, as I work through my shit) I don’t come to a place of rock bottom and get lost in service again.
Most recently, I did my inner mentor exercise and saw myself in Europe. That’s the theme that keeps coming up, France being the visual word that comes up and the apartment that I stayed in in Barcelona the other visual that’s paired with it. I have a weird relationship with France but I keep thinking about Barcelona and Erika Lust, a huge inspiration as I dove into the world of the erotic with another project of mine and my business partner’s.
So much of what I feel keeps me inside myself is my relationship with “masculinity” and its darker aspects, some of which I really don’t know if should be included as a dimension of masculinity at all (creating a distinction between patriarchy and masculinity) and more classified under society’s behavior under the pressures of scarcity and “not enough-ness”. There’s a lot filed under society’s behavior under pressures of scarcity though, so the best thing I can do given my circumstances is turn inward into my individual self as I work through my place inside collective contribution from a place informed by social science, medical research, and doing what I want, contributing from me and my family’s thread within history.
A friend asked me if I wanted to help film a nude documentary, “Undressed,” all about stepping in front of the camera and speaking into film participants’ relationships with their body. We did our first round of filming in October and will be doing another round in November / December. As I filmed, a lot of questions came up for me around my own relationship with my body.
These are questions that I don’t feel like I have answers to — my body says one thing, the current experts say another, and my confusion is a key marker of psychosis according to current research. Hella hullabaloo and a very important part of why I’ve resisted leadership — I want to be sure I’m not leading others from a place of incompetence (although that, personally and I feel culturally, has really impeded on our ability to create and monetize around innovative solutions to problems).
Research has also had a long-standing history of having its own biases and culturally our obsession with measuring “intelligence” is isolating and can be extremely limiting creatively, as IQ isn’t the only measure of intelligence.
Sometimes I wonder if leadership as it currently exists would really be needed at all if we all had our basic needs met along with the abilities to self-regulate, lead from within, and manage ourselves with emotional intelligence.
I’m also tired of seeing people in my family not own their gifts, or even have the capacity to see them. I had a breakthrough call with another great coach and was crying hysterically, crying out to him, “What is the point of me?!”
— the point is that a society that creates 25-year-olds with persistent isolating and existential crises isn’t doing well at facilitating purpose and value within its people. In addition, a medical community that tells me that I am the problem as I’m coming in asking for help, a medical community that tells me there is no way out needs one thing: creativity.
Er go, the inner mentor.
As I traverse new limits within myself and continue to ask myself questions that feel both identity shattering and shattering within my sense of reality, my pseudo spirituality has been what’s kept me coming back home. Mindfulness basics like meditation but also, the spirituality of belief in change and very small moments during the day that keep me connected. The other thing that’s kept me from going completely unhinged has been community.
There is nothing more incredibly awful than feeling alone, completely alone, and incapable of communicating what is going on inside. Worse, like there is nobody at all on the other end of the phone. That is an aloneness that has the ability to bring us closer to ourselves and has the ability to create unseen violence within us.
It’s certainly built a resilience inside me but one that I wouldn’t necessarily like to pass on. I don’t feel like this trial period has made me “stronger, better, faster, wiser,” it’s just made me angry enough to sometimes incite action with resentment, conflict and spite that sputters out shortly after. It’s created resentment and it’s unsustainable.
Anger as leadership is unsustainable. Anger as “I am better than,” anger as “I am resentful” is unsustainable. And, ultimately, operating from a place of vengeance is unsustainable. Operating from a place of “shutting down, shutting out” has brought me to the bottom of my life. Those are the moments when I have violent thoughts that turn into a fear of myself and a self-sabotaging pattern, thinking that I should shrink my thoughts and my goals because I am a danger to myself and others.
That, and a million other things. A hatred of humanity, or myself, or a cycle of thoughts around our stupidity as a species in creating lasting connection. An anger that this is where we are and a disgust around interacting with people: all trauma responses as I remember that everything is play until we face our death.
Enter, again, the inner mentor. The one that lets it allllll out and goes on flights to Morocco without a care, makes movies that challenge the ways we depict and interact with things like social media within congruence with our real lives, our mental health, and fully speaks what’s on her heart and mind. In that, she faces her own death and hatred and makes the vision in her mind come to life. She facilitates the resurgence of others in their full spirits in a way that isn’t harsh, or isolating, or ghosty. She’s just there because pain is real and the way back to ourselves is figureout-able and doesn’t need to be filled with a shame that comes from living in comparison. It’s filled with a joy in discovering that we have a completely unique thing to contribute, solitary to our own experience.