Do Not Fret; I am for Me

I realise that last entry was probably a little dark for some of you. Rather raw and self-deprecatingly intrusive if you ask me, but vulnerability is what makes this world of electronic communication thrive, is it not? (There I go being cynical again…)

Let me put your mind to ease, though, because I’m sure some of you might be wondering if I am still currently hating myself as I so explicitly implied in my most recent blog post. No, I’m not. In fact, I do not think I ever did.

I wrote that little confession almost a year ago as an entry I timidly submitted to a website, but really I was cathartically writing my suppressed pains and struggles since discovering my liberating label as an infamous INFJ. It was 5-6 years of wrestling I was trying to summarise in 2000 words or less. Though, rereading it was like revisiting an old journal entry. The memories were effortlessly recollected, but the pain was gone, subsided, faded, like a scar barely visible upon my pale skin.

This time last year, the journey of my life had taken a rather significant turn for the better. (Shocking.) I went on a life changing trip to Israel. I was moving to live alone again for the first time in 5 years. I was becoming my own person, totally and completely self-sufficient and independent. Then something happened to challenge all that. In a moment of conflict, self-doubt attempted to cripple me and destroy what had been culminating for the past 5 years as my story was entering into a new chapter (or novel since it feels more like a series). Finally, I had enough of it. I was not going to let myself give into my former altruistic, self-denying patterns. In a moment of inspiration, I wrote out all that had been burning on my mind so vividly, so articulately for about 6 months prior to, and that is what came out.

A wise person once said once you accept your flaws, no one can ever use them against you again. I think that’s what was happening in that moment as my pain became the pen, pouring onto the paper in front of me, releasing the turmoil of my internal conflict with myself.

In retrospect, what I truly always hated was the struggle of trying to accept myself when it seemed I was the only one who seemed to enjoy who I am, when it seemed I alone was my only advocate. How could my voice be strong enough to stand up for myself when my personal history said otherwise? How could I be my own person when for so long the world told me I needed to change? How could I be for me?

There once lived a sagacious man named Hillel, better known as Hillel the Elder. While he is famous for many of his rabbinical teachings –– including emphasising the Golden Rule, which he paraphrased as, “What is hateful to thee, do not unto thy fellow man” (Shab. 31a) –– he is also remembered for another specific teaching: “If I am not for myself, who is for me? and if I am only for myself, what am I? and if not now, when?” (Ab. i. 14).

While I’m still stuck on the first part of that lesson, I think I’m slowly learning what he meant. If anything, this past year I’ve gotten just a tiny bit better at learning how to “be for me” because I think I’ve finally learned if I am not, no one else will.

Does this make me calloused? Selfish? Unkind? Cynical? Dull? Have my previous idealisms of the world, humanity, and even myself suddenly vanished in one moment of confession, of drawing my line in the sand, of declaring, “Here and no further”? Have I changed? Has my pain finally turned me into the bitter, skeptical monster I feared I would inevitably transform into if I accepted this arbitrary “reality”?

Perhaps. Perhaps not. But for now, as we say at Pesach, dayenu. It is enough.

And I think with this illumination there has come a new level of deeper self-acceptance. I know I’ve changed. (Heck, the syntax of that last post was somewhat dreadful.) However, I am not without hope.

Yes, I think my soul is a little harder to get at, my walls a little higher, but that does not mean there isn’t a gate or a door or some kind of portal through which others can enter into this realm of “me” to partake of whatever fruit I have to offer from the garden of my soul. And share, I do. Only I think I am wiser now to whom I give my love, my affection, my time, my soul. It is not as open as it once was; though, it is not entirely sealed up either, impenetrable and unmalleable. There is only one key I will give but to a select few. They are my trusted family and friends, and it is to them I owe my growing self-confidence because in learning to love myself, I’m learning to let them love me.

We humans are funny, odd creatures. But I think, regardless, we are beautiful.

~

“The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered…When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?” (C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces)