It's 6:20 a.m. I was rudely awoken by a scorpion that stung me in the foot
when I turned over in bed at 4 a.m., and although I am relieved to say a friend
of mine was right when he told me that scorpion stings don’t hurt that badly,
they certainly DO hurt for a long time.
It’s probably a good time to write you anyway, invisible audience. A lot has
happened in the last 10 days or so since my last blog post, but I’ve been
having problems trying to articulate it in a cohesive manner,
and that’s been enough to keep me from trying.
It’s a recurring theme, actually: if I don’t know that I’ll be able to do it
well, it’s scary to try. It’s that perfectionism thing – the thing that tells
me that it’s either perfect or nothing: that I must impress people with
whatever I’m trying to do or no one will love me.
It’s even worse than that, however. Underneath a bunch of other crap I have
cleared away, I have found a deep-seated fear of being alone, and a realization
that I have kept myself isolated because of this fear: because the feeling of
isolation is more acute after losing a connection than it is when I feel like
there’s nothing to lose, so why not just get used to feeling alone to avoid hurting
so much?
I did it by resisting all good things I knew about myself; all the
ways people showed me that they loved me; all proof that I am worth that love,
and dismissed it as luck, happenstance or a mistake. While I was ignoring all
the good, I was gathering all the bad – the criticism, the rejection, the
imperfect attempts at human connection, all the burned food, all the pain – into
a fortress that I could sit in and say, “See? It’s true. I’m not lovable and
here’s the proof.”
It’s still that black and white thing. I’ve written about this before, but
recently it’s become clear just how deeply I carry it. It's the idea that it’s
nothing or everything; if I can’t make sense of it in my head AND in my
heart together, it cannot possibly be true; if I do not have it all together
all the time, then I have nothing.
How exhausting, and limiting. I spend a lot of mental energy trying to
figure out how I can love someone deeply and yet hate them in certain
situations. I spend even more energy trying to align how I act to match this
idea: how to reconcile that I can have certain parts of my life dialed in and
yet beat myself up over and over again for the parts that aren’t yet working
the way I want them to.
Realizing that I’ve been such a monster to myself has been hard to process. At
the same time, realizing what I’ve been doing is actually leading to some
clarity, and an ability to recognize the thoughts and patterns when they emerge
and try to do something to change them.
For the last 6 months or so I’ve been taking a voice class. I had always
thought that I couldn’t sing, and yet recently and as a result of the class, I
have found that I can sing. In the
last couple weeks, more than one person has complimented me on my voice: its
range, its resonance, and its strength. The class has nothing to do with
learning scales or doing exercises and everything to do with finding one’s true
voice: finding the part of yourself that really has something to say, and
letting it say whatever it wants. It’s been a lesson in trusting the voice to speak
for itself and practicing over and over again until, suddenly, my real voice
emerged, and it’s more beautiful, real and ALIVE than I ever thought possible.
In the midst of letting my voice lead me through these classes, I’ve found
that I have a longing to make other sounds, but I don’t know how to make them
and I don’t even know what they are. The same idea that I’ve always had that I
couldn’t sing has kept me in the same box, and there are only certain sounds
available in that box. Outside of the box, where I find myself singing out loud
– and loudly – while walking down the street, in my house, or in the shower, I
find I want to come up with something else: something more original, less
scripted, and more ME than any other sound I’ve ever made before. I think it’s
similar to my discovery that the words were not enough: that there have been
some missing pieces that I have only recently become aware were missing, not
because I’ve found them, but because, suddenly, I can sense the space where
they should be.
This all seems to be related. I hear the sounds I’ve been making; I see thewords I’ve been writing; I recognize the scripts I’ve been using all these
years now. Even better, I am now seeing the holes in these sounds, these words,
these actions, and where the space is around them: where there’s room for
improvement, where there’s more space outside of them; where they don’t
actually have any legs to stand on. And even though I don’t yet know how to
fill these empty spaces or how to get from what I’ve been saying or writing to
whatever it is I can’t quite yet fathom are the words, sounds and actions that
will give me connection, at least now I’m willing to allow that the answer is
out there. With some trust in myself and a lot of practice, I now know I can
find it, simply by showing up and saying something different than what I’ve
always said, until I find the words that I didn’t know were there, backed by my
new voice that has gained its strength and resonance simply from being given
the freedom to say whatever it wants. That, and knowing that that kind of
sharing – the sharing that comes from an authentic me – is perfect, in all its
imperfect glory.
Love and {insert unknown word here} kisses,
Morgan
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