You are Joking, Right?
Inner work is an ongoing process, and there’s some shame involved. Still, the focus should be on awareness, acceptance, and improvement. There should be no shame involved, but it’s hard. Fucking up is hard when one has a conscience.
This writing is about my latest fuck-up, which leads to the possible discovery of a significant vulnerability or flaw in my character, which, if confirmed, means I have been fucking up so much in my entire life in so many ways and will require intense and immediate shadow work, patching, reparations, crying, and only the Universe knows what. I’m not worried about this; I’m just so blindsided. By my ego? I was blindsided — correction. Now, I’m grateful for the opportunity for growth.
Recently, I had a particular interaction where the person I was with told me, “I’m upset.” My preceding actions had been so inane, tiny, minuscule, nano, in my view and ideologies, “I just said two words in a purely casual context while watching a movie,” and “nothing happened,” I thought to myself, so I reacted almost immediately with a “You are joking, right?” and then proceeded to think I could keep interacting as if nothing had happened. But the truth is that, in hindsight, something had happened! This person was upset, and I had just dismissed them as casually as the action that had preceded the moment. Unacceptable!
I did not notice a thing at the moment. A bit later, this person had the grace to tell me about their frustration with me right there: vulnerable, visibly nervous, and clearly hurt. Something hit me like a meteorite in my brain and my heart. I’ve been doing things like this my entire life. What they were saying felt so familiar, so natural. The shame of understanding this, right there. Unbelievable. I’m learning this in real-time with a near stranger.
The Universe sent me this trial with potentially huge learnings and invaluable implications for my life, and I finally understood it. I’m so grateful and forgive myself for hurting others and myself. Let’s see where I go from here.
Many moments in my life come to mind where people around me told me things, insinuations, some direct, others indirect, felt, emotions, motions, messages, and communications that I dismissed, intentionally or unintentionally, some favorable, others not-favorable, who knows — holy shit, what a Pandora’s Box has opened in my brain. The realization, that *click*, that “A-ha!” moment. This is what my sister, stepson, friends sometimes, ex-wife, that gut in the stomach of, “shit, I am missing something for sure,” it hit me like a truck, that’s what that was, that’s what invalidating someone’s feeling looks like. It can happen in a matter of seconds, and I had been unaware and hurting or affecting people left and right unbeknownst to me, absolutely unacceptable and mind-blowing. It doesn’t matter how tiny, minuscule, ephemeral, superficial, pathetic, whatever, or whatever way I would describe it to dehumanize it and remove that a person gave this gift of communication to me. I chose to justify my acting willingly ignorant because you were joking, right? Fuck me; there’s so much more work I need to do.
Unbeknownst to them and independent of whatever happens to us, this person will go into my hall of fame for the people of my life as sent by the Universe to humble me. It cost them some upset, which is wild to me; how hurt and upset can happen, at a whim, over anything, and it’s up to us to act in kindness and communicate. This person communicated right there in a way I had never experienced before. My first thought was, “They felt safe, telling me what they needed to tell me,” or “Wow, nobody had talked to me like that; I like it,” but then if I dismissed or found myself dismissing, perhaps people around had been communicating with me. I had also been dismissing or outright ignoring or being unable to understand.
So many moments in my life come to mind where people around me told me things, insinuations, some direct, other indirect, felt, emotions, motions, messages, and communications that I dismissed, intentionally or unintentionally.
“You are joking, right?” The pattern, the shield, the blind spot. The path I must walk now to understand, accept, feel, learn, heal, practice, and stop doing this nonsense looks fun. More work. The work never ends. I’m going to stop here for now. Sharing is caring.
