Liberation

Photo by Chris Buckwald on Unsplash

I recognize the twist in my guts as a self-soothing hunger. And with new diet restrictions, it feels like a call for self-punishment as well—a symptom of a bigger problem, which is constantly being willing to take the hit. If I were a member of an RPG party, I would be the tank or someone who assumes they’re the tank that can take hit after hit after hit. I don’t know if that’s true in any real sense beyond the story I’ve told myself about who I am and what my role in life is. Or perhaps I’ve been lucky that a long-running curse of low self-worth disguised in stoic confidence came with a lot of hit points.

I’ll admit that I’m tired of taking damage and saying I’m okay with it. I’m tired of patching myself up with addictions. Perhaps it’s a product of getting older, or clearing out the cobwebs of stories with yellowed pages. My value can’t be represented by the amount of hurt I can take anymore. I can’t be a safety net or insurance policy at the sacrifice of my well-being. The armor I have brandished carries a weight, and I’ve confused it for a boundary, assuming armor is all I need to feel secure.

I’ve always felt sovereign and independent, yet I now know that independence takes a lot of people supporting that possibility. It hit me as a personal shock that individuation didn’t mean individuality in the hypervigilant sense. I’ve spent a life building self-protective boundaries to reinforce stories that I deserve chronic aloneness or low worth due to adverse childhood experiences. But I’m over it now. I’m ready for new stories, which means examining why I care about what I care about, especially in direct relationships.

I’m feeling at a crossroads with questions about my most personal relationship. It seems personal work eventually lands on your doorstep, in your house, and in your bedroom. The questions that arise….do I trust myself in what I think I see? Or do I explain it away as a distortion in how I see things? Intentionally vague and cryptic. I don’t feel like the details are what I want to get into. But in the process, I find myself torn between self-preservation, old habits, and expanded awareness.

A zoom-out on what I’m seeing reflected in myself reveals collective moral panic. When I was a kid, I rebelled against religion because I saw the contradictions in collective morality being brought down like a swift hammer upon people who didn’t believe the same thing. I see this in microcosms of modern politics, nuances I’m seeing within certain people, not entire groups anymore. I used to blame religion, then I blamed Christianity, but now I see a distinction between fear-based values/morality and love-based values/morality. You could call it scarcity vs. abundance, but there’s always meritocracy undertones there. Limits versus expansiveness? That assumes limits are bad and expansiveness or openness is always good. Ironically, too rigid. I’ll stick with fear and love. But I mean truly love and trust because you can define something as love, especially other-based words or actions, when it’s still out of fear, disrespect, or dishonor. It’s pretty tricky when we can confuse ourselves into knots with all these labels, the words they bring, and the beliefs woven together to qualify any choice. It can quickly become superficial. We can define anything however we want, but the felt experience of love and the integrity of following through on that love are unmatched and near-impossible to describe.

It’s a bit funny: love is one of those non-dual, abstract words, kind of like ego. We have to double-click into it to check the code, so to speak, and see what’s really going on in there. We can say we’re doing anything out of love if we have enough room to talk ourselves into it or convince others because it sounds nice. But what does living from love and defining our values from love really look like versus performance? Those are bigger questions than what I plan to answer here. But it’s probably in questioning nice things that feel good just as much as the gunk.

I started watching the show World of Bread, and I love seeing how people have used bread to connect, give, and express themselves. There’s a story of someone who learned to bake bread during the recent pandemic, turned it into a business, and was inspired by his life experience and personal values to name it and build it. He’s doing so in a way that feeds people, gives back, expresses himself, is creative, and clearly comes from a place of love, both personally and in the big picture. Nothing feels forced or superficial about it.

Conversely, I see people yelling, screaming, preaching, enforcing, and needing the world around them to conform to a way of thinking or living that lacks contribution and reeks of prejudice. There’s a superficial display of love that collapses once met with anything triggering or uncomfortable. I hate that, yet I see it in myself when I want someone to let go of a value I deem dangerous. Moral righteousness lives within me as much as it does within anyone. But why? How does that get there? I think it’s because values are adopted in a fear-based way, out of avoidance, rather than bringing love and personal experience forward into life.

I used to think particular values, religions, or groupthink were the problem. However, I’m starting to see that the emergent value, what people ultimately care about, isn’t the problem, but why it’s there, the motivation, is key. I don’t think any one person’s values are necessarily wrong; they’re all valid, I get that now. I really do. How that translates into a culture, a law, and a people is always up for debate. But where it comes from and why the value is being pushed the way it is is questionable. Is it coming from a fear-and-avoidance place? Or love, experience, and service? Is it a church that demonizes or one that feeds the community?

I’m asking myself questions about fear/avoidance/love/experience in my personal relationships. In what ways am I holding a boundary, an expectation, and a way I’d prefer to be in a relationship, out of fear and avoidance or rejection, abandonment, etc., and how do self-love, honor, and respect hold that same value in a felt way? Because my instinct is usually to wiggle myself into self-blame disguised as independence, sovereignty, and responsibility. It’s always me, in my mind, who’s being too rigid or unreasonable, or my own feelings aren’t valid in favor of what the other person needs, or that submitting myself to someone is the key to gaining love, as if I’m susceptible to mini cults of codependence.

I am constantly rewriting and crossing my own boundaries, putting myself in the line of fire, effectively morally policing myself to change long before I enforce a boundary of respect, love, and honor, because enforcing that boundary may mean going towards what I’m avoiding, which is abandonment or rejection. Let’s face it, anyone putting self-led love out there risks being swatted down by those hell-bent on holding onto their fear. I’ve felt this tug-of-war internally, and it's time for a change. It’s time for some bravery towards a larger calling of self-respect. The risk of swapping out that fear part feels intense, yet it’s a call for transformation: from fear into courage. And who knows where that will lead, which, at this point, is ultimately more exciting than scary. What’s scary is spending the rest of my life repeating the same patterns and accepting any measure of being taken for granted.

So, what I want, what I value in a relationship, may not change, but why it’s there will likely shift away from being fear-based. I don’t want to take hits I don’t deserve anymore. I’m done.