Finding Ourselves in the Dark.

“I am out with lanterns looking for myself.”

- Emily Dickinson

We take it for granted that we know ourselves and what we want. Maybe that is true for some lucky few, but I think for the rest of us, we live at varying distances from ourselves. 

Before you buy into what I am saying, let me explain what I mean by “knowing ourselves” and why it might sometimes be hard to attain.

There is so much noise.

We are surrounded by noise from the moment we are born. 

Noise is the parent who responds or doesn’t respond when you cry as an infant.  Noise is the love and attention, the rewards or punishment, you did or did not receive.  It is the rules, values, and expectations of society and culture.  It is grown-ups who tell you what you are good at or not good at when you are trying on different things as you grow.  It is access, or impeded access, to opportunities in life. It is birth order and familial trauma.  It is peers or family that shame or encourage you.  It is people who push you to serve a role that fulfills their own needs.  It is trends and social media, celebrities, and influencers, role models, magazines, music, and television. It is those elements that separate the popular versus shunned in all social groups.  It is the pressures of work, and the influence of economics, money, and power.  It is race and gender.  It is the static noise of constant movement and striving that we call a “productive” life.

So much noise. 

Deafening.

Noise is everything that influences you, conscious or unconscious, felt or just unwittingly absorbed, each and every moment, of each and every day.

And if you never had the kind of nurturing in your life that told you, “You do not have to listen to the noise”, that supported the part of you that was independent, curious, and wild, that loved you anyway, the noise can rule you. 

You fall in line.  You let noise be your guide.  You chase it.  Desperately sometimes.

You conform, you please, you contort for acceptance, and for acceptance you betray yourself.

It becomes so hard to hear your own inner needs, your inner wants and truth, that you begin to believe the noise is truth. 

How then, do we find ourselves again?

Disentangling can be very difficult and slow.  Especially because the noise is a powerful force that will assert continuous tension to pull you back into its vortex. But the reward of disentanglement is wholeness, freedom, and true happiness.

Finding yourself is about living in alignment – what Shelley Cooney described in her recent blog as, when your actions correspond to your values.

To survive in whatever culture or society we live in, we are sometimes going to be doing things that do not fully match our values, but if you spend most of your time living out of alignment, if you spend your day predominantly doing things that do not match what you truly want, need, and value, there will be physical and mental costs.

Signs that you have abandoned yourself can include a buzz of anxiety in your gut, a general feeling of unease, irritation, insomnia, addiction, rumination, a need to constantly drive forward but alternatively also lack of motivation, disconnection, a felt sense of being out of your body, sadness, despair, feeling muted or numb, lethargy, burnout, overwhelm.  Signs also physical symptoms, particularly psycho-somatic symptoms like headaches, stomach aches, IBS, frequent minor illnesses, inflammation, pain, exhaustion. 

Not fun.   

While none of these signs are specifically diagnostic, it can be telling to listen to the messages your body is sending you.  Barring underlying biological or psychological explanations, these physical and mental symptoms could be your first indicators that you are living out of alignment. 

What is the connection? 

When you betray your values, your needs, your truth, there is essentially an internal battle that is being waged. Your true self is a fighter and as loud and strong as noise can be, your true self will not go down easily and will keep fighting to be heard.  Sometimes that voice can be terribly faint, but it is there, somewhere.  This internal struggle, whether you are conscious of it or not, turns your psyche, and your body, into a battleground. It creates a constant stress which triggers cortisol, the stress hormone, to be released into your bloodstream which then activates your fight, flight, freeze, or flop (think resignation) response. All the symptoms listed above are a form of fight, flight, freeze or flop.

So, once you listen to your body and suspect self-abandonment, what’s next?

Dig deep.

To hear, you need to quiet the noise, and the only way I have found to do that is through moments alone in contemplation: That can be meditation, a walk in nature, sitting outside with a cup of coffee early in the morning, a long bath or shower, a run (although I am not a runner so I am not sure that works but it feels like it would), or journaling.

In these moments we need to confront our beliefs about what we are told will make us happy, what we are told we should be doing, how we should be living, and who we need to be.  We need to challenge the validity of those beliefs and search for the fears that keep us bound to them.  Fears often in the form of shame, loss, abandonment, and aloneness. Ask yourself:

“Are these beliefs really true?”

“Is what I fear really true?” 

“Can I know for certain what I fear is true?”

“Is this truly what I want?”

Next, give yourself space to imagine a life where every choice is available to you.  Start from scratch and reimagine the world you would build if everything was acceptable. Our conditioning and need for belonging makes this a harder task than we think, but inch by inch we have to pull back the layers of conditioning, decibel by decibel we have to turn down the volume of the noise, and really try to access our deepest values, and truest longings, and from there imagine what our day will look like and more importantly, feel like, in this new formulation of existence.

How do you know when you are listening to your truest self and not the noise?

Feel into yourself.  Your body will relax and open.  Your mind will feel expansive, creative, and free.  You will feel excited and energized, the opposite of fight, flight, freeze. 

According to one of my favorite thinkers, Martha Beck, it will feel like peace.

Peace is our gauge of alignment. It has become my lantern.

What I have written here is what I am learning from my own search for myself.  It may or may not be true for you.  Only you can know that.