Unscripted: Unleashing Inner Freedom.

“Why does the night have to be so beautiful?  As I walk through the night, I remember what Mitsutsuka said to me. “Because at night, only half the world remains.”

-       Mieko Kawakami, All the Lovers in the Night (2014)

There is something about the hours deep into the night. 

While I strive to become a member of the 5am club, there is something about the night that keeps me from going to bed early enough.

When I read these exquisite first lines of a novel I recently picked up, I connected at once, and the mystery of why I love the night unveiled itself to me.

It is because, “only half the world remains.”

When I am up alone at night, it actually feels as if the entire rest of the world is asleep and only I remain.  When the world sleeps, I can feel my body sink into relaxation, I can breathe deeper, my heart opens and my belly fills with an excitement at a sense of freedom.  I feel free and at peace when I am alone, because when I am alone, there are no expectations.  There is no one around to expect anything of me, no one I must prove myself to or be something for, no one I can disappoint.

I am alone in my relationship to the universe and to myself.  I can just be. 

This might seem dark, the idea that I feel most free when I am alone, but I am learning this can be a very natural reaction to an earlier life that for some, may not have felt stable or safe and required a level of vigilance to navigate.  I haven’t delved into actual data, but my guess is, on a subconscious level, some who did not experience safety and security around others in their childhood, may in adulthood feel most safe, secure, and free when they are alone.

While this connection between solitude and a sense of peaceful freedom may be heightened for some, I imagine most people feel it at some small level: It is why sitting alone at the edge of the ocean on a beach, a solitary hike in a vast landscape, reading a book, or dancing around your room whilst closing your eyes and listening to music turned up high on your headphones, can all feel like freedom.  Human relationships will always have “rules” for belonging, so connection often comes with a demand of some kind, i.e. expectations.

Whether we are aware of it or not, we are constantly bombarded with expectations; beyond the specific expectations of our day-to-day relationships, there are cultural belief systems and societal attitudes, all the should that surround us, the value judgements of our communities, and the ever-shifting standards set by social and other forms of media.  While we sometimes reject some of these expectations, we also consciously or unconsciously internalize others, creating cognitive scripts which influence us in terms of how we go about our lives. 

A script is a person's knowledge about the sequence of events expected in a specific setting (Schank & Abelson, 1977).

The danger of expectations and societal scripts are their potential to limit us from seeing our own capacity as well as distance us from true happiness. 

Our own expectations can make us unhappy.  I had an epiphany while writing this blog.  So, I didn’t get to have the wedding I wanted.  Given a host of circumstances, I never really got to choose, to design my wedding in my own vision, and even 30 years later, every time I am at a wedding which uniquely reflects the sensibilities of the bride and groom, I get a little sad.  As I was thinking about this blog, however, I realized the idea that a bride gets to pick everything for her wedding is just a modern cultural script – and, who decided that was the way it should be?  Which means, over the years, I have wasted energy thinking about the loss of something that felt like a deprivation only because it was an “expectation” I had internalized.  My expectations bred that sense of lack.

It also occurred to me that while I didn’t get the wedding I wanted, I got an amazing life I never expected. And so, I don’t believe weddings will make me sad at all anymore.

Scripts can also be detrimental when they do not align with what we deeply want and need at our core. They can become mental prisons we create for ourselves. For example, a person with a harsh, punitive upbringing, may internalize a “not good enough” script, which can prevent them from seeing their successes in life.  Marginalized groups who experience oppression and receive cultural messaging that they don’t matter may see themselves as powerless and develop self-scripts that lack a sense of agency. Young women are “scripted” to connect sexuality and attractiveness with worth.  We wear heels that kill our feet to satisfy fashion scripts.  We work endlessly in the pursuit of power and money because the world tells us it is the gateway to happiness, yet all research shows that beyond a basic level of income there is no such connection.

The mental prison of expectation can be insidious and far more damaging sometimes than a physical prison.  I once talked to someone who had spent some time in prison for reasons I won’t go into here but had everything to do with mental health issues.  There was a period during his incarceration that he was held in solitary confinement.  While solitary can emotionally destroy someone, for this particular individual it had the reverse effect.  Although he had been suicidal most of his life, during solitary it seemed as if he started to live again; he was resourceful, he wrote a novel, he wrote thoughtful reflective letters, he read the Bible and the Quran (the only books he was allowed) cover the cover, and he fought for life.  When I asked him about this shift in mindset, he said that in solitary there was no past and no future, so there were no expectations.  It was almost as if solitary allowed him a buffer from the expectations he found to be so crippling in his day to day life.  

We cannot change the fact that connection and community come with rules for belonging, and that some of these rules/expectations will naturally get internalized.  What we can change, however, is our relationship to those expectations. 

Here is the thing I have come to realize over time: it is all made up.  Every “should”, every cultural norm, every societal expectation, every social value, was made up by some other person, or group of people, trying to figure life out.  No human really knows what is right and true for another. 

So, question it all.

Question everything; every expectation, every assumption, every drive, every goal, every desire, every limit, everything you think you know, until you reach your own inner knowing. You’ll have to fight past fear, defensiveness, self-protection, pride, bias, emotional reactivity, and sometimes people you care about, to get there. 

How do you know when you’re there?  My favorite answer comes from Martha Beck, was says in her book The Way of Integrity, “It will feel like peace.”

Mieko Kawakami continues in her description of the beauty of night:

“The light at night is special because the overwhelming light of day has left us, and the remaining half draws on everything it has to keep the world around us bright.”

When we decide not rely on other people’s scripts to illuminate our movements and choices in life, we are left to illuminate from within.

REFERENCES:

Beck, M. N. (2021). The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to you True Self. New York, Penguin Life.

Schank, R. C., & Abelson, R. P. (1977). Scripts, plans, goals and understanding: An inquiry into human knowledge structures. Lawrence Erlbaum.