I Am Not Who I Imagine

Living and learning can be really painful. Acceptance is so humbling. Everything depends upon a human’s ability to learn from his/ or her mistakes. But when such learning reveals how off one’s self-image is, then another ice shelf breaks off, and the climate grows even more uncertain. Life is full of these kinds of de-stabilizing revelations. There is no movement toward the light, that isn’t presaged by another movement into the dark.

I’ve come to acknowledge the dark. I’m in it now, confronted by my own ignorance and arrogance. I played out a game, a narrative of specialness, that has turned out to be another indication that I don’t know myself. I’m not who I imagine myself to be. 

I once took pride in having learned a lot by surviving an unbelievable ordeal. But, now I see how inflated that is, the truth is that Life spared me, and I don’t know why. But, I didn’t let that bit of ignorance stop me. Instead I assumed I knew something. I separated myself, with that wrong-headed assumption. That is always a mistake. But, it was one I was eager to make, to try to offset the nakedness, the sheer vulnerable exposure of being human. So eager, so blind, so utterly lost. I now know something about how much hurt I inflicted. 

I am so deeply ashamed of myself. I have broken my own heart. I am not who I imagined. And yet, I’m still alive. Life is not done teaching me. Can I open this broken piece of heart tissue, and offer it up again, knowing I am not who I imagine? Can I risk creating so much heartache and pain, in myself and others, to become someone again? I don’t really know. All I know now, is that I am not who I imagined myself to be.

You Are Not Who I Imagine

Old age is full of life-long realizations, by that, I mean discoveries that lead one to a greater truth than one used to believe. One of those has come to me recently. I’m still integrating it. I’m feeling some mixture of shame and delighted satisfaction. You see, realizing my life-long insensitivity reduces me in my own eyes, but having this awareness at all, especially now, grows my sense that I am still learning, still using the tools Mystery granted me. Becoming more through becoming less is a rigorous path, reserved, I believe, for we who are aged. Chagrin is a badge of courage.

It is that way for me, as I begin to come to grips with seeing the extent to which I have made up some of the most important people in my life. I missed their essential uniqueness, in my hurry to know them. Unbeknownst to me, I was busy making them up for my sake. I let my childhood unfinished business, my adulthood power needs, my unconscious striving, my sense of the Mystery, create my perception. I only saw what I wanted to see. 

I don’t know about you, but when I look at my relationship patterns, I see a lot of mistaken identity. I did a weird kind of makeover on those I supposedly loved. I couldn’t help myself. I forgive my immature, desperate self. I just wish I had been a little more developed.

Theoretically, I am now. At least I can see that I loved so poorly, with such good but lame intentions. I have had the tendency to make up the ones I let get close to me. They all held something for me, something I think my well-being depended upon. I imagined them, missed their essential nature, and then got angry with them, when my projections and blind desire ultimately fell apart. Reality prevailed. I learned — and became more — through suffering with my own limitations, and through mistreating those closest to me.

All of that behavior is a source of grief, but it is good grief, because it pushes me towards seeing others, and myself, anew. Lately, I can see a new, I hope better, relationship awareness settling in. I find myself saying things like “You are not mine, and I am not yours,” indicating some awareness that others exist for their own purposes, and not for my sake. This seems like such a basic decency; a form of respect I wish I’d always been capable of. 

It’s too bad I was never had the psychological distance (maturity) to perceive the other as “the other,” as someone having an existence, a fate, of their own. I might actually be capable of a relationship now.

This is all a result of a life-long inability — a stubbornness actually — an unwillingness to perceive, and accept, reality as it is. I had a host of preferences that got in the way. Life isn’t what I have imagined either. 

Thank goodness, I got to this realization. It has been one of the favors of growing old. I’ve gotten to see, what my responsibility has been, for my many deluded failures. I still have a chance of loving better. 

Now I have a hunger for life, and I won’t accept all the pseudo-realities I once did. This is such an improvement. I chuckle wearily at the lifetime of painful mistakes it has taken for me to become wise to my own folly. I’ve come the bitter way to a better life, one I have more reason to believe I’m not just imagining. For all of that I’m thankful.