Over the past few years I have somewhat regularly been asked for help or guidance from someone struggling through divorce, depression, or loss of some kind. This is an uncomfortable proposition for anyone but especially for someone like me who, quite candidly, is wholly unqualified for the role. What I can offer is the following which, ironically (and appropriately) enough, puts the whole thing back on your shoulders. If there is any solace, however, I believe that the journey described in the following posts is not only worth it, it’s really the only journey that matters. The rest is just dream stuff.
During my sophomore year of college I attended a dinner party hosted by some older, well-to-do friends at their lavishly appointed home. I brought along my girlfriend, and was astonished to watch her morph into someone utterly unrecognizable to me. She employed a vernacular and a variety of physical affectations that had virtually no resemblance to the far less polished 19-year-old I was dating. Clearly, she was putting on a show inspired by the wealth and good graces of our hosts. The moment we left the ‘old’ girlfriend magically returned.
It’s something we all do, isn’t it? We don masks based on circumstance and audience. If we are summoned to the office of the CEO or (name your figurehead), we take on one guise; if we are with friends at the pub quite another. We are on our best behavior during courtship, then relax into our ‘real’ selves once the relationship is established (helping to explain a common refrain of the freshly divorced, “I thought I knew him/her”). We practice one reality to our children, parents, or neighbors, practice quite another when the doors are closed to that world.
The 13th-century mystic, Meister Eckhart, noted that “a human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don’t know ourselves! Why, 30 or 40 skins or hides as thick as an ox’s or bear’s cover the soul.” He admonished each of us: “Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there!”
The great challenge lies in recognizing that we wear these masks at all. If you’ve been staring through the eye holes of a false persona for as long as ‘you’ can remember, how would you even know it?
Gazing out through those same eye holes onto the world around us, we observe a human smorgasbord of thin-skinned, argumentative, anxious, nurturing, unhappy, elitist, fake, loving, pretentious, condescending, well-intentioned, coddling, sanctimonious, egotistical people. Rarely does it occur to us to ask how it is we are even able to recognize such behaviors if they did not have a home in our own hearts as well. (Notice, for example, how a man reformed of an unwelcome behavior so easily identifies – and quite often sits in judgment of – that behavior in others.)
In early 2006 when I simply could not abide the idea of finding yet another mate, yet another job, when the notion of dancing to the same tired routines left me feeling dead, the thought occurred that the common denominator in that whole, dreary equation was me. Who was this character? Why did he keep living out the same rollercoaster existence? Why had anxiety become a constant companion? Why couldn’t I find a comfortable home in my own skin?
Unfortunately, I’d been lying to myself and the world for so long that I was clueless where to start. So I solicited ‘painfully honest’ feedback from a variety of friends, family, and colleagues – people who could be depended on to give me honest responses to what they thought of me. “Tell me in writing your impressions of me,” I asked, “the good, the bad, the ugly. Hold nothing back. I will not be offended. Please.”
The resulting verdict from this jury of my peers was not pretty.
But it also was incredibly liberating. Because when the portrait of an untrustworthy, hypercritical, controlling, self-destructive, deeply insecure me was confirmed (yes, there was some good stuff too), I was, in a sense, set free.
The truth is, being someone is exhausting. And now that my little world had confirmed for me that all my bullshit had been seen through, I at last could begin the process of setting aside the lies, false personae, and endless personalities that I trotted out for each day’s performance. I could chuck the script(s) and start the process of figuring out who or what lay behind all those masks. I had at last found the trailhead to this journey within, a starting point for going “into my own ground” and locating the seed from which all this madness had sprung.
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