Category: identity

Had it in the Fun House. Now Where’s the exit?

It’s Monday morning and my day has been well under way for hours.  I awake most days at around 6:00-6:30AM, no later.  My usual routine is to get myself together and go to the kitchen to get the coffee started.  Must have coffee.  In an old post I told you how I like to make coffee in my old fashioned Corning Ware stove-top percolator.  Old school style, I know, but drip just doesn’t offer the aroma of perked coffee.  Sorry, just doesn’t and what’s a morning without the coffee wafting through the house?

I get the coffee going and make lunches for the Mr. and Son #2.  Son #1 is married and out so I’m down to the three of us. I bring in the newspaper from the sidewalk and read it with my coffee.  It’s the perfect time of day.  If I’m lucky I write the Morning Pages while they’re still asleep.  Most days that doesn’t happen and I write after they leave for the day when my time is my own. I write every day.

The Morning Pages, from the book The Artist’s Way, have become a lifeline, as I’ve said before.  I write the date and time at the top of the page and then all this stuff starts pouring out of my head, through my arm, the pen, and to the page. Then the fun begins.  Good thoughts and ideas, stupid stuff and dopey people wind up in the pages.  Lately the focus has been on my own resistance, and the dopey people.  Every day another block.  Every day another thing from these dopey people.  The pages are supposed to help one see where one needs the most attention.  Okay, my resistance I’m working on, but how about the dopey people?

I’m being mild here when I say “dopey people.”  I’d like to call them something else, but I’m just not that way.  How long can you excuse their actions by calling it jealousy?  This is no longer 4th grade no-clue stupid stuff, but real life adult dopey people. What are you supposed to do, hide in a cave?  In a previous post I was talking about reading Walking in This World, how other people try to fit you into how they’re used to seeing you, but they can’t now that you’ve become who you’re meant to be.  Okay, find a better mirror, but how long does it take? When will it be over and how do you get out of the fun house?

Here’s a scenario.  Let’s say there’s a young person who loves doing a thing, and someone a little older loves doing the same thing, that’s nice.  Over time they grow older, learn more, become more talented, more interested, more adept, more out there with this thing they love, and do it better than the older person.  Suddenly, the older person is annoyed, upset, surprised, and combative.  Just because the younger person grew up and became more of who they really are, and is better at the thing than the older person will ever be, why is that a problem?  Why can’t the older person say, “Good for you!  Look at how you’ve grown and what you’ve become!”  No, this previous mentor becomes the aggressor, the enemy.  We’re talking about an adult with responsibilities, children, in an adult world having a tantrum, pouting, screaming, ignoring, sulking, pounding their chest like a big ape because they’re surprised this younger person showed them up by doing the thing they love to do differently, better, new.  “Since you’re doing it like that, now I’m not going to be your friend. He has a swelled head.” Give me a break.  Who really has the swelled head?

What keeps coming up in my pages is the question, “Why?”  I know I said in the other post that people are jealous when you grow.  But, how does the word jealous cover all this dopey person’s stuff?  I can’t figure it out.  I’m hoping that in writing about the negativity it will dissipate and the morning pages will give me an answer.  I need to know how to react when I see said dopey person. Soon.

Not Walking But Don’t Tell Me Who To Be

I read the second chapter in Walking in This World, by Julia Cameron of The Artist’s Way fame.  Just so you know, I still haven’t started the walking, but it’s been very interesting reading.  This chapter is about the personal identity of the artist.  As artists, we know we are creative and some of us get that mirroring to know how creative we are.  Most of us get that worried feeling from the people around us, that we better know what we’re doing so we’re not starving artists in the future.  Better to have something stable to fall back on just in case we fail.  Thanks alot.

As I read along, I came to a paragraph about friends helping to reinforce our mirror of who we are.  This resonated with me not only as an artist, but on a universal human level.  The thing about having the wrong people as our mirror is that sometimes those friends reinforce the person that they see, not who we see.  Those people want us to be something that isn’t “threatening to them, that gives them a sense of their own size and importance.”  They are “used to their relationship with you in a certain way.” When we grow larger into ourselves to who we really are, it’s scary for the other people to see it happening.  The book didn’t call this competition, but I would.

The concept just shows you how people around you can be jealous of your growth and they let you know it by their actions.  When I read this paragraph things clicked in my head.  I’ve had this happen to me and it’s happening to someone very close to me at this moment.  People are uncomfortable when you grow and change into something they didn’t think you could be.  It’s confusing and threatens their own existence.  Cameron writes that these friends, and they’re not friends if they do this stuff, want to downsize us to what we once were before.  If we’re intimidated by these “friends” we might shrink back down to a size suitable to them.  Problem is we aren’t small and compact anymore. It’s not going to happen and that causes friction.  Suddenly, they say we’ve got a swelled head.  We’re too big for our own self now, to them.  They are unable and unwilling to mirror back to us who we know we’ve become.

Have you ever done something or learned something you think is amazing and your friend, or a family member, or even a colleague, tells you, “What are you doing that for? That’s not how it is!”   How disheartening is that?  Brings you down to size, doesn’t it?  But that’s how people are, like a distorted fun house mirror.  You know who you are and when you face that mirror you don’t recognize yourself. 

Rather than allow that distorted mirror to shape our new size back down, we need to find new mirrors, new friends who can see and recognize, and support this new being. The question is how?  Can they be fixed?  If you can’t fix them, can’t avoid them, can’t change them, what do you do? Cut and run, or stand your ground?

All human beings are supposed to change and grow into who we are meant to be, regardless of what others want us to be.  Cameron writes that we can play small, humble and modest, but we will never be comfortable with “yesterday’s definition of ourselves.”  If the Universe wants us to expand and grow, why not cooperate?  Those people who resist that new identity can never stop it, and they know it.