*Originally posted on my Wordpress blog 11.27.2021
So you want to meet me? Good luck with that. I hide well. I am a bundle of contradictions , a collection of dualities:
Big yet small
Bold yet reserved
Quiet yet loud
Brave yet scared
Student yet teacher
Gregarious yet solitary
Rational yet irrational
Easy yet hard
Confident yet doubtful
Trusting yet skeptical
Strong yet vulnerable
Alive yet dead
I have a hard time accepting and embracing this reality. Dualities are everywhere in the world so why wouldn’t they exist in me? Because they are messy. And, yes, another duality: messy yet orderly.
This takes me to Jung’s notion regarding the tension of opposites. The dualities that live inside my mind stretch me in both directions, creating tension. My job is to balance the tension so that I can exist with those internal opposites.
I am a crowd of dualities. However, I am also a stumbling human being, floundering among all those opposites. My eyes are wide open but I‘m not sure that I am seeing the whole picture. I must not be seeing it all because I am stumbling. I stumble so much. I stumble over words, over dreams, over the past, over the future. Nothing makes sense and then it all makes sense and I fall over in my own confusion. Next step? I throw my hands up into the air, and declare, “Being a human being is hard.”
Which beings me to another description of me: I am a work in progress. Lordy, is that ever true! But, aren’t we all? I can see it. I can see the ongoing destruction of self, followed by the construction of self. Or maybe it goes the other way? Or maybe it is simultaneous. The whole idea is somewhat new to me. I used to think that the goal was to be “done”. I could say to myself, “This is it, kid. You are who you are.” But lately I’ve had the words plasticity and fluidity floating around in my head. The idea now that you are ever “done” seems outmoded. Maybe it was a touchstone, once upon a time. Maybe, once upon a time, I needed to think I was done or that, at some point, I would be done, in order to feel okay with myself. I needed to know, “Oh, that’s who I am. See? That person right there. That rock. That completed being. That is me.”
Now I am falling in love with fluidity. It’s akin to plasticity, in my book. Be in this space one day, be in that space the next. Be an adventurer on Sunday, a hibernator on Monday, a productive citizen on Tuesday, a traveler on Wednesday, a student on Thursday, a wretched soul on Friday, a wild woman on Saturday. Try them all out for a day, for an hour, for a minute. You have permission to do that. You are not created and done, standing like a marble statue, mute and immutable.
So: collection of dualities, stumbling human being, work in progress. Would a stranger actually SEE any of those? Maybe not. What I would show the stranger depends on my mood and my first impression of the stranger. They would see whichever of me I was choosing to present that day. I do think that my soul, (aka my core values) stays the same no matter how I am presenting to the world. I can’t disconnect from that. Not ever. But I can disconnect from ribbons and bows, from costumes and masks. My job is to show up for life wrapped in whatever I need that day. The stranger can decide who I am based on their own perceptions and what they need me to be. How’s that?
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