On boundaries & intimacy with self

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One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice ––

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles

"Mend my life!"

each voice cried.

But you didn't stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations ––

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice,

which you slowly recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do ––

determined to save

the only life you could save.

The Journey

By Mary Oliver

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While I don't have a screaming baby to attend to, or even a panting furry animal to walk or feed, Mary Oliver's poem hits. Besides, I think she's pointing to something more nuanced, something more akin to a persistent feeling or experience that extends beyond any specific visceral demand or domestic responsibility.

The experience, and the related feelings for me, are something I've been slowly waking up to for some time now, but remained unconscious to for much of my life. It's an experience for me of feeling so oriented towards another's well-being, so merged with their energy, that I feel lost, used, and sometimes, violated. This may sound like a noble or perhaps even loveable character flaw. Culturally, "you're too selfless" sounds more attractive than "you're too selfish." But in truth, the form of "selflessness" I experience is just as rooted in ego, just as ugly, and ultimately just as harmful as other unhealthy way of relating.

While I've come to understand that I was born with a nervous system that is perhaps more sensitive than others, I believe all youngsters, infants especially, are more sensitive, intuitive, and perceptive than we give them credit for. Saying things like "I could feel the pain my mother carried when I was in the womb with her" still sound pretty "woo-woo" in most circles. But if I stop doubting the knowing I receive from other intelligences, like my intuition, and felt-sense (the doubting of these intelligences, by the way, being very much connected to colonialism and white supremacy) I allow what has always felt true to be seen and acknowledged –– which for me meant coming into the world hyper-aware of the unintegrated suffering of my primary attachment figure.

As a being of love, and also a helpless and dependent little creature, I didn't want my mom to suffer. While this sentiment to me is beautiful and pure in its intention, what I'm coming to understand is how my young baby self confused pain for suffering. I confused "I don't want her to feel pain" with "I don't want her to suffer," not knowing at the time, that letting ourselves feel pain is often a pathway to reducing suffering. I believe I didn't want my mom to feel pain because 1) again, I didn't want her to suffer and confused her pain with suffering and 2) on some level, I felt afraid that if she felt her pain, it might kill the stability of our relationship, and therefore, might kill me. So what's an infant in search of love and safety to do? My brilliant little self employed a strategy so recursive that her adult self forgot it was a strategy to begin with. Here's how the strategy works.

1. Utilize natural aptitude for sensing other's feelings to track the other.

2. Orient self-behavior towards finding ways of mitigating or actively reducing pain in the other, which often includes compromising and abandoning self

3. Receive love and appreciation from the other for making them feel ok, or good, or better.

4. Internalize belief that I am worthy of love and appreciation because of the way I make them feel.

5. Cycle positively reinforces itself, at unconscious price of subtle and less-subtle self-abandonment until crisis.

Of course, no psychological pattern is as simple as this. Psychoanalyzing myself, or anybody, in this streamlined kind of way is at odds with the intersectional reality of our lives. And analysis, in my experience, is no ticket to freedom from an unhelpful pattern. Nevertheless, I find walking through these steps helps me see myself more clearly, makes meaning of the ways I've moved through relationships, and hopefully, supports rewriting my strategy for finding love and safety.

What can be tricky about shifting this strategy, is that I've come to believe that some people who love me, feel that way because of the way I seem to make them feel. Which often, unknowingly to them, comes at the cost of my own self-abandonment. While it may be impossible to tease apart why we love someone from how they make us feel, if our love for someone is based on their capacity to make us feel ok, that leaves that person in a constrained position. Not only does the person feel caught between a rock in a hard place –– between risking the withdrawal of love by someone dear to them, or continuing to engage in self-neglect –– the person, in my case, ends up feeling hollow and unseen. The question arises, "What do you love about me vs. what do you love about what I am for you?" As long as I am being loved for what I offer the other party, I won't feel truly loved, or free in that relationship.

I found relief from the vigilance constant tracking of other people's energy requires by spending time alone. In a family of six with a literal and symbolic culture of no locks on doors, this wasn't always easy to find, though my mother, to her credit, always impressed upon us the importance of "quiet time". While sometimes she would thrust this demand upon us in the middle of a riveting game on the trampoline with our neighbors, I am grateful to her for intentionally carving out time for us to be quiet. It was during "quiet time" where I had space away from the noise and chatter to feel myself more clearly.

A year or so ago in therapy (classic), my therapist and I were doing our thing, exploring feelings and what not, when an image of myself in the Arctic appeared. My therapist asked me to describe the scene more to him, asking me how close the nearest person was –– "half a mile away? 100,000 miles away?" I noticed feeling struck by his question. I never dreamed I could ask, even in this imaginary space, for people to be so far away from me. But I noticed my body take a deep exhale at the thought, and rather than getting stuck in my head about what that means like I regularly do, I decided to play with it. "There is nobody in sight for a million miles," I responded with some playful, yet cautious conviction, like a child testing her limits.

I described what I saw and felt in this place to him. As far as I could see, in all directions, lie flatlands of thin, white snow and blue ice. A flurry of tiny snowflakes kicked up from the ground with help from a gentle wind, forming a spacious, transparent dome around me. The snowflakes quietly danced and swirled around me, some of them landing on my cheek to greet me with their cool and delicate kiss. I noticed my body was naked, but I was not cold. Despite the gentle movement of the snowflakes around me, it is still. It is quiet. "It's just me here," I said. Despite redundancy, repeating that statement felt good.

I notice tears start to well in my real-life human eyes, as I let myself bathe in the silence of this place. "I can hear myself here."

Ultimately, it is that intimate contact with myself, with my own still and silent nature, that my heart longs for most deeply, and innocently seeks outwardly. It is why building a life that honors my love of silence feels increasingly important to me. And yet, I'm finding, as I begin to shift this pattern, that I can access that inner silence in the company of others. While I will always cherish my alone time (check out my friend Montana's newsletter this week for an ode to living alone and related themes) I'm interested in getting better at accessing inner quiet, and silence, without people needing to be one million miles away from me. Real intimacy, and real freedom from suffering, which I desire, and believe the people in relationship with me ultimately desire, requires that I, as Mary Oliver says, "save the only life I [can] save." That doesn't mean I've stopped caring, or stopped loving, or stopped wanting to be a safe harbor for a struggling friend. But it means finding a way that honors care and love for the other while also caring for and loving myself. A year or two ago I read this quote by writer and embodiment-centered activist, Prentis Hemphill, who states, "Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously." It landed for me then as a beautiful, albeit aspirational, prayer, calling me more fully towards embodying love. And for me, that's what this is all about.

#boundaries #silence