Pocket Full of Kryptonite

I woke this morning at five a.m. from a dream that didn’t feel like a bad dream — I had been hanging out on the roof of a tall building with a man, just sort of exchanging polite chit-chat and he pointed out a truck leaping off another building, but he pointed out that it was driven by a woman in a mini-skirt — irrefutable dream evidence that it was a sort of performance, and, looking closer, I realized the truck was, indeed suspended from a helicopter. “Come on,” he called out, leaping off the building towards the truck, gesturing we should play too, and so I followed, and only in mid-air realized it was a mistake and that the ground was suddenly rushing up at me. Confronted with the end of my life, I squeezed my eyes closed and prayed, but it wasn’t a prayer of “Save me” so much as praise and gratitude and I wasn’t filled with fear, which actually I think was the thing that surprised me and woke me up. Unless it’s true that somewhere in the fine print you’re never allowed to dream your own death. I never have, anyhow. Or maybe there was fear but it just didn’t matter much, because feeling fear wasn’t going to save me from falling. A few hours can make me such a revisionist of my dreams! Anyway, I dare you to fact-check this one…

Maybe this is what I get for going to bed trying to figure out fear. I was reading Mark Epstein’s Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart and couldn’t decide which parts I most needed to underline because it all seemed so relevant to the conversation going on here and over at the Unreliable Narrator’s about self-improvement and suffering. Epstein is a Buddhist psychotherapist and he points out that the profession of western mental health has pathologized the feeling of emptiness that it turns out almost all human beings are prone to, and this has led to a tendency to try to analyze it and think it away, and, in fact our fear of this feeling of emptiness causes more suffering than the feeling of emptiness itself.

Does everyone periodically make a list of their fears?
I’ve got the obvious, loss of those I love, loss of health and/or faculties for myself/those I love. Loss that I am responsible for: failing to attend to some detail that turns out not to be inconsequential, mold and leaks and cars from nowhere and letters from insurance companies and lumps where lumps ought not to be.
Fear of being the bull in the china shop and helplessly trampling on feelings because of my own inability to do better.
Fear of getting so clench-jawed angry teeth start popping from my head and I scare my children.
Fear of love withdrawn.
Fear of being seen through, of being found out as a fraud.
Fear of being inconsequential.
Fear of being just like everyone else, nothing special.
Fear of being freakishly different from everybody else and never being understood.
Fear of deluding myself.

Is that a map of my vulnerabilities? I am not trying to play word games, but I don’t want to be ruled by fears, and yet acknowledging vulnerability, that feels ok.

I think I finally decided of everything I read last night that I most wanted to highlight the story of when Epstein’s teacher was doing a sesshin and struggling with dismissive responses from the master he was working with to his answers to the koans he was given, and finally he was given a relatively simple koan “How do you manifest the Buddha while chanting a sutra?” which boiled down to being asked to chant/sing a sutra. Only, Epstein’s teacher had spent a lifetime not singing after being told by a teacher in elementary school to just mouth the words, and so he struggled, was anxious, practiced nervously, went before the master and mangled the singing, got words wrong. And the master was delighted, he opened up, “to be: open and vulnerable and insecure, not confident, controlled and coherent.”

Confidence is so sexy. How much of my life have I spent thinking I would be happy if I were just more confident, if I could just speak up for myself. How many times have I been sure I was the only insecure person in the room, my insecurity blinding me to the possibility anyone else feeling insecure. I joke with Jenny that when I don’t call her it’s something wrong with me, and when she doesn’t call me it’s something wrong with me, and I love her because I know she is capable of thinking the same thing and so we’re both responsible for calling each other regularly. It just never occurs to me that other people should have gaping insecurities because I have this model in my head that accomplishment breeds confidence breeds further accomplishment, and it’s easy to see other people’s accomplishments. In fact, the only people who seem to advertise their insecurities are those who are unkind or arrogant — listen to a woman criticizing another woman’s body, particularly a celebrity’s body and I feel an achey compassion for her.

So, playing with the notion that insecurity is not something to be eliminated or covered up, but used as a channel to greater compassion or authenticity?

Maybe where I’ve ended up watching the progression of this discussion on self-improvement is agreeing that the myths of ‘I used to suck and now I’m great,’ of the self-made man, of Cinderella, of the all-better club are no more useful than the myth that everything used to be so great and now it’s all going to Hades in a handbasket. And still I am not going to deny the truths of growth, development and learning, or of recovery — and the profound gratitude I feel for getting to witness my best friend struggling up into sobriety and honesty with herself, how inspired I am by her courage and willingness to do stuff that is just hard. But being essential to her survival, it seems to belong to a category outside of self-improvement. But who among us still fits into a world-view we had ten years ago.

What reading Epstein has reminded me of is that attacking the problem of ‘how can I live my life better?’ from an analytical point of view alone can lead to being trapped into my own cleverness or devolution into blame and fault-finding. And sometimes I have used my morning pages as a tool to attack a problem and then I start to wonder why write? when I can’t identify a problem with myself, my life. I am actually embarrassed that maybe all the times I have asked myself “Am I happy?” if I wasn’t asking the wrong question… not that I have a definite pin on what the right question is, but sometimes it could be “Am I useful?” “Am I eliminating suffering?” or “Am I in harmony with the things going on around me?” Or maybe there is no question to answer?