We've all been removed in one way or another.
We don't know our families, we don't need our brothers.
Pushing the needle too far
Pushing the needle too far
If you wake up in the morning, grey dawn,
with a prayer on your breath,
maybe you lost something precious,
god'll save you, from losing yourself.
--Indigo Girls
Do you ever feel like you're acting? Like your actions on the outside are just motions or puppets of an internal source, a genuine being that you know is you but other people probably wouldn't recognize? Like every thing you say, every facial expression you make, every note you write, everything...all of it is just a manufactured production of stuff? What does it mean? Do I mean it?
Know what I'm talking about? No. Okay cool, me neither.
But really. Seeing the Indigo Girls in concert last night helped me come to this realization -- it sounds silly, but being there, I realized that geeking out over my favorite band was the first time I've felt any bit of genuineness in a long while. When I saw Amy Ray walk out on stage, I felt like every part of my being was congruent.
I used to feel that way all the time. I used to feel like my outside matched my inside...a kind of wholeness. Lately, however, I've felt...hmm, what's the word?...slanted, not together, incongruent, like I have a shell that is slipping off and pulling me apart.
I think that over the course of the past three(ish) months, I've lost, as the song goes, something precious. This is definitely true in the "outside world"...and that might be the major reason for these weird feelings....but it freaks me out. The Indigo Girls sing that god'll save you from losing yourself, I hope that's true; but even more than that, I hope that I know what to do to hold on to myself.
I've always preached two philosophies: 1) what's meant to be will find its way 2) everything happens for a reason. I have faith in these words and I know that everything we experience shapes our character and makes us stronger; however, I am questioning whether or not I want to become the person that my experiences are shaping me into. I used to feel comfortable with myself. I felt like I knew where I was going and where I wanted to be. Now, I feel a deep-seated anxiety about these things, I feel like I've lost a piece of my self and I'm afraid that that piece was...an important one.
To conclude on a positive note: I guess it is important to recognize that, as my professor once said, we cannot play "the god trick" -- as humans, we cannot see everything from nowhere -- we are always stuck in our current situation and with such a limited perspective we are forced to take everything so seriously. I know that things change and I know that in a week I will feel differently. I have also been told to work on building something that could be called resilience; I interpret this to mean self-compassion. As hard as it is to comprehend sometimes, we're all just little membranes enclosing a bunch of molecules with a label that says "human." Who knows what they're doing? Anyone?
