This isn’t easy for me to admit, but I have many faults. I’ve been told that worst among them is the fact that I hide what is best in me beneath a veneer of modesty. I go out of my way to blend in, to not be noticed, to make myself an everyman in every situation. My other faults would be easier to admit. I sometimes over drink, I chase women (but not when I’m in a relationship), I gamble from time to time, I”m irresponsible with money – those things are easy to admit. That other thing though, I find myself wanting to dance around it. Like Homer Simpson when he has to buy a box of tampons, he gets a case of beer, a box of condoms, some lube, a bunch of dirty magazines, and progressively worse and worse stuff just to hide that he is buying something that is actually pretty okay to be buying. I’m still doing it even by telling that story.
Here’s the thing. I’m magnetic and I try very hard not to be. It’s exhausting and sometimes leads to trouble. There is something unique and special about me (and about you – but I’m going to try to focus on myself here as hard as that is.) I can walk into a room and connect with just about anyone. People want to talk to me. if I walk in a room where everyone is equally dispersed, the weight soon shifts to where I’m at. I’ve tried to explain this away as I gravitate to where the action is, but that’s not really it. I’ve never really explored what to do with that – in fact, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to escape from it.
There are other things though – and putting my modesty aside, I’ll dive into a few. They are less problematic issues for me so I haven’t really repressed them – though I have not displayed them in their full capacity yet. Mainly because I don’t want more attention than I’ve already garnered.
You can drop me in the middle of a desert with no clothes or a big foreign city with no clothes and I’d be fine. Need a spaceship to escape a planet that will blow up, I’m your guy – I’ve never built one, but I could figure it out. I create worlds. I create characters that inhabit those worlds. I don’t know if it is any of those things or something else – but the thing I simply don’t want to admit is that I’m blessed with some gifts that I’ve been doing my best to hide – even while they sort of bleed out and get used anyway. This hasn’t always been a healthy bleed out either.
I’ve been doing my best to repress these gifts for most of my life. Honestly, maybe it’s because of my personality type (INFJ) but while the magnetic part of me has brought so much that is good into my life, it has often felt like it was a curse. I have to actively build space for myself to escape from it. Perhaps that is the reason for my purchase of a house on the side of a mountain in a small city with one of the harshest climates in the world. Satoshi Manor does give me a solid dose of solitary time and it’s enough that I’m left with the energy to actually embrace the magnetism.
I think an answer as to why comes pretty clearly from Abraham Maslow, the father of the hierarchy of needs. He explored a lot more than that which he is most famous for:
“…lack of curiosity can be an active or a passive expression of anxiety and fear…That is,
we can seek knowledge in order to reduce anxiety and we can also avoid knowing in
order to reduce anxiety. To use Freudian language, incuriosity, learning difficulties,
pseudo-stupidity can be a defense. Knowledge and action are very closely bound
together, all agree. I go much further, and am convinced that knowledge and action are
frequently synonymous, even identical in the Socratic fashion. Where we know fully and
completely; suitable action follows automatically and reflexively. Choices are then made
without conflict and with full spontaneity…this close relation between knowing and
doing can help us to interpret one cause of the fear of knowing as deeply a fear of doing,
a fear of the consequences that flow from knowing, a fear of its dangerous
responsibilities. Often it is better not to know, because if you did know, then you would
have to act and stick your neck out.”
I went through a life coaching session a few years ago and the coach introduced me to some pretty world changing concepts. The gist of this particular philosophy is something called synthesis of the personality, that is, looking at the many different facets of an individual persona and allowing them to differentiate themselves as unique before finding a way to bring them together and unify the totality of the person. There are a large number of excercises and ideas within this – if you’d like to explore them – I encourage that . While I am not conversant enough to enndorse the entire process of Psychosynthesis – what I have seen so far is good and worthy. As with all things, I encourage you to have a critical mind and not to blindly believe or follow – but if it counts for something, I feel like I’ve vetted this organization pretty well and there was nothing malignant that I could find. Here is the heart of these ideas
Among them was this, repression of the sublime. I’m not unique in doing it. Repression of the sublime is common, especially among artists, creatives, and spiritual types of people. The sublime is that which is subliminated. Liminal being the state between and subliminal being below perception.
The whole point of this post, which feels impossibly egotistical – (I mean where can I buy some hemorroid cream to hide my shame in writing this? Haha) – is actually a part of all of that, it’s a part of trying to break free of this repression of the sublime, of trying to stop living in this enforced fake reality of being a modest mouse when in true reality, I am not.
And I don’t have any clue where that leads. It definitely leads somewhere. Maybe I have some clues. My books contain the clues, my writing, my art, the things I’ve created – they’ve all leaked out while I was still enforcing this austere reality.
The biggest question is whether or not I can even break out of it. Half-a-century of habit instilled is a long time of habitual repression to overcome.
Stay tuned – and in the meantime – perhaps delve into these concepts yourself because the truth is – you might be much more than you have ever allowed yourself to dream that you are.
