Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to name this place – this experience, this semester, this time in my life. Naming, or finding the right word for my experiences, has always been a really critical part of growth for me. For the past few weeks, I’ve begun to call this semester “a break.” I don’t really mean a vacation or a place to get away from traditional academics or anything like that. It’s been more of a break from me: a place where it’s okay to stray from the expectations I normally have of myself.
For as long as I can remember, I have always been pretty disciplined and responsible. Not responsible in the sense that I always did my homework perfectly or followed all the rules, but responsible in the sense that I have always been acutely aware of the ways in which my actions and the actions of others are beneficial and harmful. I almost always knew when a decision I was making was not the best one and I was easily able to see the array of possible consequences it could cause. I could almost feel the exact emotions that my words and actions provoked in others and I could identify why I responded in certain ways to the way others acted towards me. With an especially strong understanding of all of this, I have always felt obligated to discipline myself to make the “right” decisions all the time: the decisions that cared for people best – whether or not they knew they were being cared for – the decisions that suppressed desire that could be potentially harmful, the decisions that put me in places where I knew I would experience God most clearly.
Not too long ago, I started resenting this obligatory self-discipline. It felt like nothing was happening organically in my life anymore. I was so hypersensitive to what was best for me and for other people that I was always creating experiences and relationships – causing them, organizing them, forcing them into my life. It didn’t seem like they were happening naturally, and I grew bitter about that.
Tired of being Ellen, the disciplined and responsible one who counsels her friends and doesn’t really ever need a loving kick in the ass because she can give it to herself, I found myself at the OE, not wanting to be that anymore. I stopped listening to the voice on my shoulder that says “be disciplined. Be responsible. Make sure you’re making the right choice, now” and I started listening to the voice on the other shoulder that says “to hell with it. Do whatever you want. You’re being too uptight and missing out on what life has to offer. Live a little.” For awhile that felt good, but as I’ve been listening to that voice, it doesn’t seem to offer me as much liberation as I thought it might. Living that way is just as exhausting and not any more life-giving than the alternative. Both voices are two ends of a spectrum. Both have something really good to say to me, but neither voice is me. Neither voice is Ellen – my core, my deepest self.
I think there’s something really attractive about falling to one end of a spectrum because it gives you something to define yourself by, whereas being in the middle leaves you in a state of balance that doesn’t have a name. That is a point of struggle for me. As I said at the beginning of this, naming is a critical part of growth for me: it allows me to learn and understand things more fully.
I’m starting to see though, that what I really desire is to know who I am – what my Self is. I’ve learned that I know my true Self best, not by a list of character traits, but by knowing that I have worth. We find our truest worth in the depth of connection we have with people – the feeling that we have meaning to others. This depth of connection comes from the ability to be yourself rather than a thing or a list of attributes or traits.
I think that is what I am learning here: It’s in those kinds of deep connections – connections where you know that you can be your worst self and the other person’s love for you and opinion of you won’t change – that I find value in myself and in life. Those connections are what make me feel at peace with who I am and give me a reason to get up every morning.
