Secret Surf Society held a conference the other day and before we went out, we saw this washed up on the beach.
Looking at the bite marks, I asked Surf Sensei, "Shark or Orca?" He said, "Mako, I think." I then asked, "Does this make us not want to go out in the water today?" He replied, "Nah. We'll be fine." And then we went out, which makes me a Certified Badass, 'cuz I wasn't nervous about it at all. Got in the water with blissful amnesia, forgetting all about the disemboweled dolphin I just saw.
I now know that Mako sharks attack prey by biting off their tails, which is why Sensei guessed Mako. I know this because one of the Newport whale watching tours posted about seeing a Mako attacking a swordfish and explained how it happened. This confirmed Surf Sensei's assessment, and then I felt some whisper of apprehension. It's one thing to know there are sharks in the water, theoretically. It's entirely another thing to know there is a very specific Mako Shark in our neighborhood that bites off the tails of its prey. Perhaps I'll be putting my Sharkbanz on with more regularity going forward.
I also spent a long 30 minutes googling to understand the difference between how dolphins and sharks appear in the water, figuring this information will be useful when sitting atop a surfboard at water level, legs hanging down. For your edification, should you ever need it, dolphins have that playful hop in and out of the water; they go up and down, because that's the shape of their (intact) tail fins (flat, horizontal to the water line). They pop up to breathe and then go back under. So if I see a rounded dorsal fin and it disappears quickly after an arched grey back surfaces, then it's a dolphin. Sharks linger on the surface, their tail fins move side to side, perpendicular to the water line, propelling them forward. So if I see a pointy dorsal fin gliding toward me, staying above water, I'll be paddling back to shore and into a coffee shop for the day.
Good to know.
Many other things washed up on the shore of my consciousness this week. I can't say my patience paid off, because I've been kicking and screaming my way through therapy and the waiting the past few weeks -- patience does not describe my process. Perhaps my perseverance and awareness has paid off. That sitting, however begrudgingly, "choiceless as a beach waiting for a gift from the sea" has finally yielded some treasures. Not shiny beautiful treasures, but those more like the gutted, dead dolphin, entrails floating in the surf kind of treasures. I finally got my insight, and it ain't pretty. I've been swimming in treacherous waters and can finally identify the fins.
First, I left my therapy session last time just irritated. I always know to stick with strong emotions, because the friction there can lead to a pearl of wisdom. So, I muttered my way around the house for several days while it all came together.
I saw my ego struggling in that session -- fighting for its life. All of my tools of defense came out to play: misplaced attempts at humor and lots of sarcasm, bragging and conceit, appeals to my invisible gods, crying, arguing, and carrying on. I was a mess for much of it, all in my head. What the hell? BTG stuck with me, kept asking questions, and eventually, perfectionism came up. He reminded me that perfectionism is a shame avoidance strategy. I hung up the zoom call and wondered, "What the hell do I have to be ashamed of? I don't have anything to be ashamed of. What am I trying to hide?" This spiral went round and round for A WHILE.
I must be close, I thought. Close to something or my ego wouldn't be fighting so hard. Like I imagine that dolphin was doing in the grip of the shark, my ego was fighting for it's life. Ego defenses develop to protect us. The problem is that they stick around for much longer than necessary. Brene Brown compares it to armor, "Armor makes us feel stronger even when we grow weary from dragging the extra weight around." In her wonderful book, Daring Greatly, she counsels, “…believing that we’re enough is the way out of the armor – it gives us permission to take off the mask."
Then, I got a text from a former student of mine, now friend, who is struggling with issues of her own. She said a something during our conversation which really gave me an AHA moment. She said, "Now my parents aren't emotionally neglecting and abusing me, I constantly feel the need to abuse myself, causing physical and emotional pain to myself." In groundbreaking books like It Didn't Start With You and The Body Keeps the Score, researchers discuss the long term effects of trauma. My friend's comment made me remember a Brene Brown quote about shame starting as a two-person experience, but then she got good at it all by herself. I wondered what I had picked up as a kid that I was still enacting. The shame could be so old, it is actually pre-verbal. I was still puzzling and muttering.
The last thing to wash up: I watched the series Apples Never Fall on Peacock. In it, the mom character had a long soliloquy (spoiler alert). Allow me to quote it in full.
"Here's the thing no one tells you about marriage, about family: how much you can resent the people you love, for everything you had to give up for them and there's never even a thank you. You just give it all up because that's what having a family demands of a woman. And then you wake up one day, you realize the person that you were meant to be is gone. You gave her up for people who don't even see you. And there's no time to grieve her because there's too much damn laundry. You just wake up one day and you realize that the half of you, the part that may be the best part of you, is dead."
I saw my mom in that character, though I wonder if my mom would see herself in that character. Glennon Doyle wrote in Untamed, “Mothers have martyred themselves in their children’s names since the beginning of time. We have lived as if she who disappears the most, loves the most. We have been conditioned to prove our love by slowly ceasing to exist.”
I am here because my mom got knocked up in 1967. Before that, she was valedictorian of her high school and her college accounting class. When she went to paramedic school in her 40s, my mom graduated top of that class, too. My mom was smart. She had a good government job with lots of room to advance. Until. Me.
I can't imagine that news went down well in a household that was used to a valedictorian.
So I was raised in the household of a stay at home mom who could have been much more if her family, society, if the patriarchy, hadn't bit her tail off and gutted her prospects. My dad was involved with this pregnancy, obviously, but somehow men do not bear the brunt of accidental pregnancies, do they? Mom and Dad got married six months before I was born. I have always assumed I was the child that caused the shotgun wedding. I have been swimming in a soup of shame since before I was born.
My sister and I did the math as soon as we learned the timeline of pregnancy. Kris was going to stay with Grandma for the summer and promised to ask her about it. We both somehow knew not to bring it up with our parents, so something had been in the atmosphere of our home well before that summer. When Kris got home, she dutifully reported the conversation with Grandma.
Kris said, "So Grandma, Amy and I were thinking. Mom and Dad got married in September. Amy was born in March. That's not nine months."
Grandma replied, "Don't think so much."
And that was it. "We don't talk about this" was the official statement. I already knew this, because there were no stories about how my parents met, about the wedding or honeymoon, about their young life together. There were no stories at all.
Without support, I think my hyper achieving, valedictorian momma didn't deal well with this mistake. I know society (still) looks down on women for getting pregnant out of wedlock, I can't imagine what it felt like 56 years ago. I can't imagine the shame of falling that far from grace in the eyes of your family; though I think I was raised with that shame in the ether. For me, I think it wormed its way into my psyche in several ways.
First, I was the cause of the shame. I wonder if I internalized that my existence was a burden. Being the bastard, the illegitimate child, I imagine being unseen was the best possible remedy. I will cause no problems. I don't need anything. I will be a completely self-sufficient child.
A mistake led to this shame, so I better never make a mistake. Never caused a moment's worry. Never got in trouble. Got straight A's, played sports, had lovely friends. I was as perfect as perfect could be.
My perfection formed a shield my mom could hide behind. It protected me from this big scary blob I knew only as MISTAKE, and it helped protect my momma from the family bullies that made her and my dad feel bad about what they had done. Only my perfection could give mom relief from her shame. She could say, "See what a beautiful and perfect daughter I have? She was worth it."
Finally, my life had better be worth all of this. If I'm the baby that caused my mom to lose herself, then I better be perfect and charming and do something amazing. My life better be outstanding to make up for this. An ordinary life isn't good enough to make up for my mom losing her life, so I'm going to continue to achieve to make my life worthy of hers. Mediocrity provides no protection, so I'd better be GREAT.
Doyle again writes, “What a terrible burden for children to bear—to know that they are the reason their mother stopped living. What a terrible burden for our daughters to bear—to know that if they choose to become mothers, this will be their fate, too. Because if we show them that being a martyr is the highest form of love, that is what they will become. They will feel obligated to love as well as their mothers loved, after all. They will believe they have permission to live only as fully as their mothers allowed themselves to live.”
I think this is my original wound. I think I have found it. This is the Mako that has bitten off my tail. I think this is why I'm constantly striving, never satisfied, and never feel quite good enough. I am constantly validating my life. Whether they meant to express it this way or not, my conclusions from my childhood mind meant that, in my home, love was always conditional. Love was contingent on getting the A. On the not getting in trouble. On doing everything right. So it's hard for me to relax and trust a universe built on love. What do I owe you for safety? What do I have to pay for peace? I want to make you proud and make you feel less bad for this mistake. I need to earn it. Constantly looking for perfect, constantly on alert to fend off the glancing blows of shame, not really understanding it, but living through it, perhaps this is why I'm constantly tense. This unnamed thing swimming just beyond my awareness has been threatening my peace of mind since before I was born.
There is now no longer a shadowy mass swimming around me. I have identified the fin.
Good to know.
It occurs to me that I have some brilliant present-day models to look to for seeing into darkness and finding light. I recently watched the movie Origin, which is based on Isabel Wilkerson's life while she was writing her book, Caste. I think Wilkerson could write that book because she met real darkness in her grief, her own shadow. She had an ability to clearly see the darkness in our history, because she met her own and persevered. She was able to make art out of ugliness, out of the worst of humanity, because she walked through her abyss and made it to the light.
And I've been up since the wee hours today listening to Taylor Swift's new opus, The Tortured Poets Department. And like a tortured poet, the deeper you go, the more intense the feeling, the greater the freedom and release. I can change what I become aware of. Re-membering is an act of putting things back together. And so I dive in to treacherous waters to look those shame sharks in the eye.
And like Chairman Swift sang in an earlier era, I’m now looking for daylight. I only see daylight.
Part of this moment is realizing that the shame was not mine. I have no burden; it was someone else's. BTG shared a song with me at the end of our session: Going Home by Leonard Cohen. BTG emphasized these verses.
He wants to write a love song
An anthem of forgiving
A manual for living with defeat
A cry above the suffering
A sacrifice recovering
But that isn’t what I need him to complete
I want to make him certain
That he doesn’t have a burden
That he doesn’t need a vision
That he only has permission
To do my instant bidding
Which is to say what I have told him to repeat....
(It must be hard to be a therapist waiting for your clients to realize what you already know.)
This song is so beautiful and perfect. The first part from the song, the what he wants lines, are what I've been doing. Striving. Working hard. Achieving. Perfecting. Generally, working for peace. The three italicized lines show me what peace actually is. I don't have a burden. I can set this down now. There are no sharks after me anymore. Nothing is wrong with me or my life. No more striving. I can rest, enjoy, let go. Peace is already available to me. It has always been there, right under the stormy seas.
Instead of seeing the sacrifice as a burden, something dark and heavy, threatening, I can see it as something beautiful, light-filled, and loving. Like Lily Potter sacrificing herself to protect her son, I can see my little self trying to protect my mom with my sacrifice, or her making a sacrifice because she loved and wanted me. A willing sacrifice is magical protection in treacherous waters.
Reframing is wonderful when you can believe it.
Having a mindfulness practice -- daily meditation -- has supported me in having these realizations. I am aware of my mind, my thoughts, my emotions. The Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training just happens to be discussing "Working with Limiting Beliefs" this month. LOL. Questions they ask to get us to bite the tails off our crappy thoughts and beliefs once we realize them are:
Is this belief really true?
What is it like to live with this belief?
What does the hurt or fear underlying this belief need?
What stops me from letting go of this belief?
What would my life be like without this belief?
What would my life be like without this belief? I'm now imagining a new way to be.
It begins with speaking truth, with naming it, with identifying the fins. Chairman Swift in her Instagram post from today's album release wrote, "An anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time - one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure. This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed. And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted. This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it."
It begins with letting go. I've been working with Buddhist Therapist Guy on relaxing when triggered. Whatever stresses caused this tensing up, they are no longer here, yet I remain clenched. Like after a rock is thrown into the water, the rock disappears but the ripples remain. I am working on my body, because it's still reacting when the causes of the reacting are long gone. Mindfulness of the body is a new area for me to explore in therapy and it's largely working. Becoming aware of the places in my body that are tense and actively seeking to relax them. Guided body scan meditations. Laying my head down at night and allowing my body to sink into the bed, feeling heavy, feeling supported and comforted by my soft, cozy bed. Not Down Bad, but Down Good. Rest.
Seeking reassurance, not that I will be OK, because I have always made myself OK. Soothing myself with OK is OK. With a more genuine peace, OK is just perfect.
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