By Renee Shay, Harvesting Thought
–explore–
During my school age years there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that I was a hot mess. I had a teacher once tell me who had been trying her best to help me that it appeared to her that other people loved me more than I loved myself. How many things we hear, how many things we forget over a lifetime and that is one impression of me from someone else that has stuck with me thirty-seven years later? She had told me that if I do not reconcile that then, it will not go away, and it may prevent me from achieving fulfillment in life. You could say that low self-worth has been my constant companion, and she could very well have been right but not in the way one might think.
It does seem strange to me that for someone who sees value in everything, for someone that feels bad for killing a spider, that I would struggle to love myself. I can cry at the drop of a hat during some sappy movie, upon hearing the star-spangled banner or witnessing the fallibility of an elderly person. I had once given a gray-haired, small in stature, elderly woman who had been sitting in a doctor’s office waiting area, minding her own business, forty dollars and told her to have a nice Thanksgiving. She replied, “thank you.” Probably had more money than I at the time but was so generous to just accept it, she was beautiful. She did not push it away and say she was not deserving of the kind gesture. That was the same year my mother had passed so it would have been the first holiday season without her.
In that moment, as another example of too many to tell right now, I had been called to act and the only thing I could give, was the cash from my pocket as an exchange for a stranger touching my heart because she reminded me of my mother. I am sure she went back home and had a good laugh with her family about this stranger that handed her some money for no good reason. I can demonstrate a deep and sincere compassion for others, even an elderly stranger who just happened to look like my mother, but what about myself? Why has it been so hard for me to do, to be kind to me? I have improved my self-worth over time, but have I done it with the grace and dignity I can show a stranger?
Could the answer to those questions lay on the other side of me, the paradox within me? The critical side who is always striving for perfection though knows perfection is an illusion. The judging side that can easily see the wrong in others therefore must feel herself to be wrong too. The harsh and mean side of me that ridicules others, which puts others down to build herself up, that side?
The bullied who becomes the bully, everything is a paradox. The tough side in me that must stand up to every bully whether it is for self or fighting for somebody else? The self, contradicting itself or is it a natural state of being, the yin-yang of our existence? While I know having two sides seems simple, it is not. While night and day, black and white, life and death, seem like simplistic and natural opposing forces, they are not. It is all the gray that exists between any two states of being within anything, even the paradox from within, which can be complicated and destructive.
–challenge–
The challenge then becomes to better understand oneself and reconcile the price to be paid for having extreme “gray” between all the good and bad that can hurt self, hurt family, hurt friendships, and even hurt strangers just as much as it can love all these things? How does one continue to develop the better side, the loving side, the non-destructive and compassionate side of their self? When does the need to win subside and become the need to win for more than just yourself? How do you decide when to risk, whether it be reaching back to reconcile or reaching forward to something unknown and new?
Another question might be, do I need to? Having left a trail of broken friendships, a trail of broken trust, a tsunami of things that went wrong still haunting me in a shadowy corner of my mind from all that is past. What a weight to carry all this time. What a burden to think you alone, you alone, were responsible for it all. What if you did not carry the hurt and only decided to carry the good? Of course, there was a lot of good. You do not get to friendship with someone without some good times, it was not all bad. Of course, most friendships do not end because it is all good, something goes wrong, but that does not mean you cast aside all that was good. It is natural for someone who hates oneself to carry the bad, to internalize the bad and to think they are unworthy, unlovable? How arrogant to think that we alone are the only creatures with regret. Ego, so powerful, so destructive.
Do we as humans withhold love from others out of fear of rejection? What if that stranger sitting in the doctor’s office rejected my offer of the forty dollars? How would I have felt as in that moment I attached deep emotion that welled up inside of me, the love of my mother, enough of it to take a risk, reach out to a stranger and give her something? In the moment, I was thinking past the forty dollars, thinking that one could buy a nice Thanksgiving dinner for that amount, that one could enjoy a nice meal for that amount. I was projecting beyond the eyes of a stranger and into her world, her needs, as if she were my own mother who would be alone for the holiday. There was a human-to-human connection in that moment that if the woman responded in any other way like, “get the f out of here, I don’t need your money,” rather than, “thank you,” wow, how would that have felt?
-expand–
Risk. Stepping out of oneself, one’s comfort zone. Even when we can create a cloak of protection over oneself for an entire lifetime, shielding ourselves from hurt and loss, even then not wanting to risk. Or just could it be the exact opposite of what you think it is. Could it be that you are such a perfectionist, think so highly of yourself that your Ego tells you if you are not perfect, you should avoid a situation for fear of being seen as imperfect? That it does not come down to not giving yourself enough worth but that you give yourself too much. That you take on too much of the responsibility to either be perfect, to be the best at something or be nothing at all. That you believe you alone are the one that is responsible for how a friendship goes or does not go. While yes, you are responsible for your behavior, your actions that can led to someone’s trust or distrust, you own that, but you alone are not responsible for everything, the other person and their behaviors, their actions.
Full circle, the yin-yang of it all. A spider, a movie, the star-spangled banner song, an elderly woman, what do all these things have in common? Things I mentioned in my second paragraph of this blog as samples of things that can draw emotional reactions from me, eliciting empathy for things outside of myself. Why? My ego does not have any direct relationship to any of these things. Why would emotion factor into killing a spider, watching a sappy movie, hearing the star-spangled banner, or observing an elderly woman sit on a bench in a doctor’s office? The spider was deadly, and I was protecting myself, the movie was made to illicit my emotion, the song sung to dig into my patriotic bones, the old lady wasn’t even sick, wasn’t even lonely, she could have been waiting for her son, the doctor? I project things onto all these things though I do not truly know any of them. How much could I project my self-worth onto things throughout my own life that have nothing to do with me?
How could it be that others love me more than I love myself? Could it be for the very reason I feel empathy toward a stranger? Are they reacting to me for some reason that does not technically have anything to do with me? Isn’t that what I do? It says more about the one who loves than the one who is loved. That is, it. We are all on this bazaar journey through life for over a couple million years and still do not understand the essence of ourselves, of our ego. Others do not really love something outside their selves any more than they love themselves. They are projecting their love for other things to unconsciously fill a need that exists within them just as I have been doing all my life. Even those who we believe to be the truest of the altruists in life are not necessarily sacrificing for others, they are sacrificing for themselves. The paradox from within in its purest sense is altruism.
Harvesting Thought 