A really hard thing that happened last summer

And what it taught me about mynworth

Oof.

Today is a new kind of challenge.

When I tell you that this feels like it’s been the longest 12 days of my entire life…

I’m not sure what I was expecting to feel as I went forward with what seems to me to be a reasonable—even kind of easy—goal of posting every day for a month, but I can say that the level of difficulty has been really stunning to me.

At first the main challenge was all the limbic stuff: the undercurrent of fear trying again and again to steal my attention and take me out of conscious awareness. I can’t be sure because I was able to prevent this from happening, but it seems clear to me that the intent was to get me to stop doing this. I think by about the end of last weekend that near-constant throbbing towards distraction, towards dissociation, towards “losing track of what I’m doing” finally let up a bit so that the last few days of posting felt a lot freer, a lot flowier, a lot easier. And that was nice.

But today, the saboteur has taken on a new identity, and as I think about what it is, and the context of its origin, it makes me chuckle.

I’m feeling like a failure.

Why, you ask?

Well, yesterday, I ended up publishing something I really loved. Writing it expanded my own mind, the way that writing interesting things sometimes does, and I just really liked what I wrote. So this morning, I decided (even though I haven’t been sharing most days) that I would share that one.

I posted it to my regular social media haunts, and even shared it in a couple of less common places (for me), then went about my day.

And then… crickets.

My normal publicity tactics? Did not really hit.

As this sinks in, I hear off in the distance the baying hounds self doubt…

The hounds of self doubt are coming…

Translated into language, these doubts sound something like this:

Perhaps the post itself didn’t really hit? Like, I liked it, but maybe it was just kinda… meh?

Or maybe it was significant to me, but I didn’t manage to really make the ideas translatable?

Maybe I am losing my ability to translate thoughts into language effectively?

Or maybe I have lost complete touch with my audience?

Or maybe I have lost complete touch with myself? Or my art? Or what makes anything good?

Maybe posting every day for 30 days has made people really bored, and perhaps it has made quotidian that which before was more rare, thus lessening the scarcity of the “commodity”?

Maybe phrases like “has made quotidian that which...” and “lessening the scarcity of the commodity” are too fucking flowery sounding?

And maybe I was stupid to be excited about yesterday’s post at all? and maybe…

Well, maybe I suck.

AND MAYBE… maybe this was ALL A BIG FUCKING MISTAKE!!!! (Cue: the ominous laughter of my limbic system saying “we told you so!! We told you all along this would happen!!!”)

The irony of all of this is that the post in question was a big, huge, long treatise on how things, in any fragment of time, get to be enough.

It was a treatise, basically, on why we shouldn’t do exactly what my brain has started doing: looking at any moment in any process as a reflection of that process and deeming it lacking.

Enough.

My post was enough.

And enough people saw and read and liked it.

And guess how many shares it got on social media?

Enough.

And guess what is true about my efforts, feeble as they may be, to consistently post here in this space as a beautiful gift to myself in my newfound era of creative outflow, and to do so with high quality material?

My efforts are perfectly, beautifully, genuinely enough.

And I’m not just saying that. As I am allowing myself to sit and reflect, I can feel the truth of it.

Let me tell you more about how I have gone from merely understanding this concept to actually feeling it.

* * *

This last summer, there was something that happened to me that was really, really difficult. I can’t talk about it in total detail, but I will just say that there were people close to me—people I trusted deeply, whose opinions I valued with near-perfect confidence—who ended up saying some really, really awful things about me—about who I am deep down. I caught wind of what they’d been saying, and thought “oh, absolutely not—there has to have been some mistake here. This person would never say something like that about me. We have too much love for each other! There’s just no way…” So I got in touch with them and they let me know, to my utter horror and devastation, that there had been no mistake.

They actually said those things.

And they said those things because they actually thought those things.

And they had been sharing these thoughts with others, including my kids.

There is something extreme that happens when someone I trust questions who I am as a person on a fundamental level. This is kind of a neruodivergent thing, I think—the reaction of needing to do a full self-evaluation to make sure something hasn’t been missed. The sudden need to examine every single fucking aspect of self, to put each component of history, of personality, of being-ness, under a devastatingly potent microscope, cross-checking continually with outside others, trying to find the truth of what the person is saying. Trying to see clearly any darker chambers of self that have been obscured.

It is a process racked with self-doubt, with agony, with a level of scrutiny and internally harsh criticism that I can’t really describe—just know it cuts very deep, and that being doubted so fundamentally by someone(s) I knew so intimately led to some of the most agonizing weeks and months of self-scrutiny I’ve ever undergone.

It was more intense than when I was trying to come out of the closet.

It was more intense than when I shed my entire multi-decade religious identity.

It was more intense than any other period of self-doubt I’ve ever experienced.

And it wouldn’t let up.

I would see my therapist and just bawl as she tried her best to help me hold on to the shreds of self-knowing I had left in my psyche. “You are a good person,” she would say. But my brain could simply not reconcile that idea with the fact that this trusted person(s)—who knew me very, very well—indicated they genuinely thought otherwise.

There is so much more to this story than I can comfortably share here, but I want to talk about the things that happened as a result of this dark night of the conscious self.

Stripped of its major ports, my egoic self was completely adrift, unanchored and very mad about it. It kept perseverating on “how to fix things.” It wanted to root itself somewhere, and there was simply nowhere safe to root. It wanted solutions when there simply was nothing that could be solved. I spent weeks energetically processing a lot of icky garbage out of my system, out of my aura, in meditation, and even as I walked the streets of Tacoma.

I did what I could in terms of action. I reflected on my closest relationships.

I took steps to improve myself relationally in any way I could fumble my way towards.

I opened up to my loved ones and to the Universe.

I played lots of music.

I cried often.

I went on lots and lots of walks with Princess, my dog.

In the end, two important things (well, perhaps many more, but two that I can isolate and describe) came of this terrible situation.

The first was that I noted that all the years of meditating and reading books on becoming more present and more mindful and more interpersonally healthy—complete with ever-growing access to my higher self and a new habit of putting my egoic self lovingly aside— truly paid off.

Instead of reacting to the really horrible shit that was said (and, sadly, there was kind of a lot of it, and I can see clearly now that most of it was just kind of random garbage meant to justify other actions that came later) I simply allowed it to be. I allowed it to exist on this planet, right alongside everything else. I kept my fucking mouth closed anytime my mind was running on autopilot and started arguing (in my head) or defending or explaining, or sometimes even turning the tables and getting mean and cruel and accusatory myself.

And whenever I noticed my fight/flught brain doing that, I consciously chose to pivot my mind forward to “what I wanted.” I soothed my system by reaching forward in time with my imagination—to a vision of me and this person(s) having found some magical, unknowable solution—a miracle, honestly, cuz I could see no solution and it was hard to imagine how to unbreak my heart about all of this (cue: Toni Braxton in the backround ;-) ).

Sometimes I could get my mind there, and sometimes I couldn’t. But when I did, I felt the shit out of that feeling of resolution, joy, relief, etc that I had somehow summoned. Because, as we know from neuroscience, the brain doesn’t know the difference between what is real and what is not-yet-real—and practicing outcomes in our minds increases the likelihood for those outcomes to come into being in reality. (Think sports psychology here, and someone mentally rehearsing free-throws, then relishing in the applause of the crowd in her mind when she makes it, and the way doing this helps to manifest that result into reality.). So I soothed my mind and heart as best I could anytime I could summon the energy to imagine this not-very-concrete but true-in-feeling outcome I still long for.

To this day, I spend time envisaging this outcome, and I allow myself to expand my mind into a Universe of billions of potential solutions—things I couldn’t possibly know with my limited, measly mind—and I choose to trust that someday, somehow, a resolution that is satisfactory to all involved will materialize—perhaps in some beautiful, powerful, and truly soothing way I simply cannot imagine at this point.

But yeah, as I interacted with this person, I was able to do this instead of what the me of yesteryear might have done (REACT!!!!). I was able to keep my impetuous, impulse-control-lacking mind from saying a bunch of shit I would later regret. I was able to communicate, in any communication I sparingly sent, in a way that was congruent with my intentions and desires, and in a way that was filled with the broader love I have towards all involved.

And that, my friends, was PROGRESS.

The second thing that happened occurred after a meeting I had with some other parents of trans youth in my son, Tison’s, school.

After the meeting, I was sitting alone in my office meditating, and I was given—in the way we are sometimes “given” words or images when we are when meditating—a phrase along with an image that somehow seared into me the truth of my own enoughness. (Indeed, I believe yesterday’s post was an indirect byproduct of the very moment I am describing.)

The phrase was simple and obvious: You are enough; you need not defend yourself. You are enough.

This phrase repeated itself in my mind like a mantra over and over, and behind I was made to remember or imagine a set of different scenarios of life, both past and future, both real and imaginary, to which the words applied in slightly different ways, thus branding the truth of them into my pscyhe more and more deftly.

Along with the words, I was also given an image which has never fully left my mind since (or something like that? Not sure how to express it. It has just been “with me” ever since).

The image was more obscure to me than the words, and has taken me a bit of time to decipher. When I first saw it, all I could see was the top part of the image, and nothing more. It was like an upside down crescent moon. (Crescent moon has been. a very important symbol to me for some time now—keeps showing up for me). The image kind of reminded me of a lid covering a tunnel or spigot filled with orange light—but as I saw it image more and more I realized that it is an image of a celestial body being fully eclipsed by another celestial body—and I am mostly seeing the top ring of that interaction. I see the blackness of an eclipsing orb completely move to finish covering up the brilliant orange light of another celestial orb, and as it does so, the word enough reverberates throughout me.

It looks vaguely like this:

Photo by Warren Umoh on Unsplash

As in, the top orb was enough to cover over the other orb (if you can imagine my brain showing me as the circles fully come together.)

Enough.

Whenever I see it in my mind, I can feel my own complete enoughness in a way that is more real, more visceral, more true than I’ve ever been able to feel it before. (Enoughness—and the fact that “we are enough, yeah yeah yeah, blah blah blah, I’m late to a meeting…” is something many of us understand conceptually. This was one of the most notable shifts from conceptual understanding to visceral knowing I have ever experienced.)

There is not distance to be reached; there is nothing to be done; there is no action I can take to increase this enoughness. The enoughness just is.

And the enoughness is me. A complete, full, perfect part of a complex and impalpable set of larger systems (all processes in motion)

Enough.

I am very aware that this gift from the Universe came as a direct result of the helpless, roving terror the situation I described above led me to feel, almost continuously. I do not think I would have been given the one if I hadn’t been set into pursuit of soothing and understanding by the other.

I don’t think contrast always has to be the way we progress or are given gifts. But this Universe does seem to be a place where things of value are often squeezed out of apex points of pain and discomfort (the most notable of these things being human lives and labor/delivery.)

This imagery and knowing—this gift from Source/God/Uni/Higherself/whoever— is part of what has enabled the bounty of my current creative life—a complete and totally new unblockedness that began recently. And it is only now dawning on me that that unblocking is what I described in my earlier Argentina post as being a shift into ease of creative output that began, coincidentally, with the shifting of certain celestial bodies. Thanks celetial orbs! I heart you!

With regards to my creativity, it’s almost as if, as I allowed my idea of using writing or achievement or success to attempt to prove or earn enoughness to be blocked out by the dark celestial body of my own worth, that blockage allowed the unblocking of my creative flow. Like my insides wouldn’t let me really unleash my creativity while a part of me might still be trying to “earn” worth from my output instead of, as is the case now, it being an extension of my knowledge of worth/enoughness. It feels almost like an overflow now, or perhaps like in the picture above, it is not unlike the solar flares still extending out from behind the eclipsed celestial bodies.

So, yes, it strikes me how Silly McSillerton my limbic-based flailings at the beginning of this entry are: those old patterns of worry, of fear of lack, of insecurity still working themselves out of my psyche and out of my system.

They are understandable in the way that we are walking sets of repeated patterns—old programs firing in potentially new situations that, when observed, can be slowly but surely opted out of.

But in this moment it is as clear as ever:

*I* am enough.

I am complete. I’m perfect as I am. Right now. This instant. No matter what is true or not true about Substacks and about posts and about ideas and social media and about success or lack of success or anything else.

Those things aren’t the thing. They aren’t the celestial orb! They are the solar flares—the momentary blasts of light that evince the existence of a celestial body behind an eclipsing orb—but they cannot and will not every be the orb itself.

They can’t even touch it.

And I am learning more and more every day how to stop confusing solar flares—which shine brightly but for an instant only to fizzle almost immediately into the immutable blackness of space—for the beauty and majesty and of my celestial orb of self, which is, and always will be

E. N. O. U. G. H.

Photo by Daniel Castellón on Unsplash