A course in gentleness in 2017: A Course In Gentleness

It’s amazing what happens when you don’t force things. You find out. That’s what happens. When it’s time, you know. I’ve been wanting to come back and write here, but it wasn’t time. I didn’t feel ready. I wanted to follow up the last entry, which I don’t remember by now except that it was depressing, and write about the good things that happen in my days, of which there are many. But it wasn’t time.

Now it’s time to write. I’d like to say that I have dreams of living on an island. That I am moved when I hear flamenco, or the sound of a classical guitar. I dream of gentleness. I am most happy when I am alone and present with myself, when all my “oughts” and “ideals” have fallen away, and I am just me.

The image I have of myself in my mind is that of an artist. A free spirit. Freedom. I have always valued it the most. Freedom. To dance in it, to flow with it, to unfold, gently. But I have not always had this freedom to embrace freedom, and perhaps life is designed on purpose this way. To lose yourself, to come back. Maybe that is life’s natural rhythm, this ebb and flow, and you learn just as much in the leavings as in the returns.

Looking back, I feel like I have known everything I needed to know at 18/19/20/21. Those early years, when I was in college … that last summer most of all, that last year, when I dropped my art major and went fully into English, and discovered how much I loved reading and exploring my thoughts, and coming up with my own theories, and then music, how much I loved music, how much I loved freedom. How grateful I was for everything. How beautiful life can be in its fragility. After a difficult past, difficult childhood, all the insecurities that built, going through everything alone in those college years, John Mark, Wil, all those heart breaks … and being sensitive and shy naturally and those qualities making the future, lying in wait for me to face, still alone, in a few months after that summer, that much scarier … I think how beautiful it is that despite all of that, or rather during all of that, being steeped in all of that, I was still enlightened … I was grateful for everything … I would sit outside Park Hall after my English classes, and watch the students come and go and the light falling so gently on the pavement, and the leaves dancing slightly above, and I would feel so grateful … I would realize that people do bad things not because they are bad but because circumstances combine to lead them to make those choses and that if I or you or someone else had been in that person’s shoes, with that person’s past and that person’s traits, we would have made the same choices. When you see life this way, judgment dissolves. Everything is.

I met an artist on the bus the other day, a wonderful girl, bright and delightful. We spoke for the whole 4 hours it took to get to Boston for this conference I was going to. She showed me her artwork, beautiful fragile pieces of thin metal, torn, twisted, distorted, holding together in a beautiful mess. Because I study suicide at the lab, the piece reminded me of the concept of self-harm as a concept, without judgment. Because as an adolescent, I used to cut myself (for reasons that remain unknown to me but make the studying of self-harm, for me, all that much richer), the piece also reminded me of the sorrow, the wildness of those feelings, the surprise I would feel to see those marks on my own wrists, the surprise that this was part of me. And seeing this piece just made me think of the purity of seeing without judgment. I can see those torn fragile sheets of metal as a symbol of self-harm, and I can see them as the pain of self-harm. One is cold, one is warm. They both are. At the same time. Together. They both are truth. All of it is. That’s what those theories of mine were in college, the thoughts. That all of it is. All of life. It just is. Truth. That’s it. No judgment.

I hate being boxed into one identity. I hate it. I don’t know why quite clearly yet, but let me try to put those feelings into words. I still see myself as an artist deep down. Because I am. My spirit is playful, I see beauty everywhere, all the time, even if I don’t make it known, put it on paper or on canvas. And I am a scientist too now, because this is what I do – study how processes come to me, which factors lead to them, and which may offset the risk of those factors and lead to better outcomes. I had no idea I’d ever get here. When I am filled with self-doubt, I wonder if I did the right thing. When I am in flow as I read and write and think about these processes, the doubts aren’t present, and I am grateful for the turns life has offered me, the opportunity to explore this other side of myself that I never thought would have been possible because in my mind “PhD” was for other people, for men, for geniuses, for other people. But I am a person too, and I am wonderful and sensitive and I have often been told that I “think too much.” It is so delightful to find an endeavor in which this “think too much” is a plus and is very much wanted.

Even so, I hate being called a scientist. Because I am not just that. Science is also art. It is creativity. It is expression. It is done to understand, to get to the Truth, to touch people who are hurting. Just like art. They are both pathways to truth, to honesty, to healing.

The fact that it bothers me so much what people call me perhaps hints at the fragility of my own identity, the identity crisis you do go through when you “change careers” (another expression I am not comfortable with because I did not change anything, I added onto my previous career of writing and thinking rather than replacing it). Maybe it hints at my fears that I feel when I am in self-doubt mode, my parents’ voices of, “Focused people don’t make changes or drop their goals” or even my own voice of “Can I still be an artist? Could it be that I gave up on myself? Did I fail at art and then fail at writing/editing and then moved on to science because of it? Am I really just a commitment-phobe?”

Because I did not have a stable childhood, I did not develop a stable sense of self. I still feel, often, that I am water or I am wind. I fit in many places, and sometimes, I do it without noticing. Because of this quality, it has been easy in the past for me to allow people to place their expectations on me and their chains, without noticing until it had been too long, I had had enough, and by the time I stopped it, I was bent out of shape. Then the healing took place, and months or years went by, and finally, I found myself against at baseline, back on the shore. It made me fear taking trips, especially with other people.

But perhaps this is no hint of commitment problems or failures. It just is. It’s life. The comings and goings. I struggle sometimes because, from my parents, I also inherited a fixed mindset, rather than a growth mindset. For them, challenges were opportunities to prove yourself, and if you failed you were a failure. My mom’s thinking, in particular, has always been very black and white, and I, for too long, when I was young, believed she was always, mostly right, because I needed her to love me. It was easier to fix myself than consider she may need the fixing, because I can change and shift and persevere infinitely, to a level I don’t trust other people can. Plus I was young. I couldn’t put all of this into words.

But here I am. Back to now. Perhaps this is live. Everything I have lived, all the struggles, the changes, the milestones, are just as they are supposed to. I am enough. I am everything and nothing all at once. And this is beautiful. The future is open, and the future is limited. I am free, and I am not. I will still go, and I will come back.

Perhaps the lesson is to be gentle, through all of it. That is the constancy. To remain aware of our needs, to continue loving ourselves through the biggest leavings and the most heartbreaking returns. I don’t know why I am here on this Earth, or where I am going, whether I will make it, whatever there is to be made. I am not supposed to know. But in order to try, I would like to be gentle on myself. Because I’ve been through some hard stuff, and some days are still difficult, and I am beautiful and ever enough and worthy of love, especially my own.

And thus … I’ve given every year a name for the past few years, a theme. I couldn’t think of a name for this year, and I didn’t want to force it. So I let it be until it came to me, today, March 19, 2017: a course in gentleness. This is what this year will mean to me. The year I practiced, constantly, the art of being gentle to myself, all the time. Because I am worthy of love.

love,
me