Believing is Seeing

I’ve been thinking a lot about these two of late, resting here in the stillness in the spaces between, and this morning I got a reminder, at once painful and joyful, of how much of my life is made of the one and impacted by the other.

Since Labor Day this fall I’ve gotten into the habit of writing every morning between the hours of 7 and 9:00, rain or shine, sick or well, tired or not. It doesn’t go well every morning ~ yesterday, I only got through about 3 pages and they weren’t that satisfying, but I finally have established a writing habit and that’s joyful, even when it isn’t. The reward for days like that, when the writing doesn’t go well and you feel like maybe you’ve wasted your time and what makes you think you can be successful at this anyway and by the way don’t you have projects to grade and class prep to do? are days like today, mornings when the writing flows and you are actually with the character in his or her world as well as his or her head.

And then the battery on your laptop goes dead and the laptop itself suddenly shuts down. And you close it up and take it downstairs and plug it back in . . . only it doesn’t come back on, because it has well and truly shut down . . . so you hit the on button and go and make yourself a second cup of coffee and pack yourself a lunch . . . only to come back to find blank screen, battery charging, your word processing program and all the other applications waiting to be opened . . . and all the words you wrote and thoughts you created gone, as if the past two hours had never happened at all . . . and it’s time for you to go to campus to do some more of that project grading and class prep before your first class of the day.

There was a time when my head would have exploded and I would have been hard pressed not to throw something. Believe me, that was the default screen that was loading in my mind when I first felt that chill breeze of all-gone-hollow feeling (a singularly appropriate feeling, now that I think of it) that comes of realizing that all the words you just wrote, all the time and world you just created, are gone. None of it saved, auto or otherwise. Just gone, as if you had skipped over that two hours and gone from sleepy wake up and wash your face to dressed and picking up your sweater, backpack, and lunch bag to go out the door.

So why am I not splattered all over the walls around my desk in frustration? I don’t know. Maybe it’s because my 9:00 alert on my phone went off while I was making that cup of coffee; the 9:00 alert I set on  my phone to remind me to intercede for Mama when she was sick, and now reminds me to say good morning, Mama, I love you, and sometimes “I miss you” because sometimes I do, even though I know she’s not really gone, know it so deeply that sometimes I can feel her, hear her laughter, even catch the scent of her.

Maybe that’s why.

Or maybe I’m just too old to indulge in that kind of self flagellation anymore ~ or finally old enough to know that if I wrote those words that well once, I can do it again, and maybe even better. Old enough, finally, to know that I can choose to go with the explosion that will color the whole rest of my day with negative energy . . . or understand that losing half a dozen double spaced pages of the story is a loss that can be recouped with a couple more hours work. My choice.

And the reward for choosing the latter? The local high school radio station, playing songs that spoke to me on the radio as I was driving to campus ~ I got you, babe “so let them say your hair’s too long/I don’t care, with you I can’t do wrong” that brings my James immediately to my mind, and just as I was finding a space in the parking garage, Steve Winwood singing Back in the High Life, Again ~ “and all the doors I closed one time/will open up again.” You betcha. They’ve already begun.

I think it was Mama . . . but Jeff 92 helped . . .

When you’re a kid, you believe what you’re told. What you’re told, what you see, what you hear or overhear. Everything is just input, because you’re not born with any context in which to place your experiences. But that input includes emotional and value system content as well as simple information  ~ which is why children will often exhibit the same likes and dislikes as their parents, the same preferences and prejudices. (Explaining why the old “do as I say, not as I do” admonition never works for long.)

From a very early age, we start assembling the stories of our lives with these bits and pieces of so-called reality. We don’t really even question our perceptions of reality and truth until we reach that magical age (which is different for everyone) during which we suddenly begin testing the boundaries and doing “stupid” stuff that drives our parents mad, just to see what will happen.

But the “truths” we test during this time are often surface truths (Will mom really ground me for life if I ditch school after lunch?) while the core beliefs that are at the center of our reality ~ our perceptions of who we are and whether or not we’re worthy or good or attractive or intelligent ~ are hardly ever tested in this way. Particularly if they are  “bad things” beliefs.

For whatever reason, believing what you absorbed when you were an experience sponge doesn’t stop when you grow up. If anything, the belief gets stronger, because we take over the retelling of the story ~ and we’re better at it than anyone outside our heads. We know where the weak spots are, where to set the drip feed, and how to program a continuous loop ~ we can almost literally set it and forget it. In fact, it works better that way.

Your subconscious mind never works better than when your conscious mind isn’t paying attention.

The flip side of that, and how you can turn it to your advantage, lies in knowing that we believe what we are told over and over again ~ especially if we’re the ones who are doing the telling. Knowing gives us the option of changing the story we tell ourselves, thereby changing our lives. And all it takes is a small change.

For instance, when I was a kid, I used to tell my little sister, Cherie, that she was adopted. (Who knows why?) At first she would get upset and go howling off to our mama to be reassured, while I practiced my innocent face. I don’t remember how mama reacted, and I don’t know if she thought it up herself or if someone suggested it to her, but I do remember when Cherie took the teeth out of my teasing. One day, her response to my taunt changed.

“Yeah? If I’m adopted that means they chose me,” she’d said, her mouth savoring the words. “They’re stuck with you!”

And as easily as that, she turned the story around, reversed its polarity, so to speak, from negative to positive, and, by changing the outcome of that story, changed her reality. That particular taunt had no more power over her, because she chose to rewrite that particular line.  It’s an anecdote that she still recounts, to our mutual amusement, to this day.

We were very young at the time ~ maybe 8 and 5 ~ and it was a very vocal, very external exchange; perhaps that’s why it was so easy for her to turn the tables on that particular story. I made it up and told it to her. There wasn’t even a crumb of potential truth for it to feed on, and it wasn’t a story she ever internalized (at least not until after she’d turned it to her advantage).

Unfortunately, you can’t say that about most of the stories we tell ourselves as adults. Well before we’re grown, we’ve gotten really good at the set it and forget it programming, whether what’s on the air is good for us or not.

Until next time ~

Rebecca

next time: That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it . . .

 

In Maine, where they are (for lack of a better term) place-proud, I went to graduate school with a young woman who was constantly remarking that her family had lived in the Brunswick/Freeport area for 13 generations ~ as if she’d lived them all herself.

There’s something about Mainers that makes longevity in Maine not only a point of pride but of identity, and perhaps even self worth. I’m not sure where the cut off is, but if you’ve only moved to Maine, or if you’re only a 1st or 2nd generation (or, one assumes, somewhat less than a 13th generation) resident, then you’re “from away,” maybe even a “flatlander.” After all, just because kittens are born in an oven doesn’t make them biscuits, right? (Another Maine-ism; I’ve collected several over the years ~ they tickle me, regional expressions ~ like Texans, upon hearing an unlikely but amusing tale, remarking: “he’s pissin’ on my boot, but I like it!”)

Question is: where do people pick these things up ~ and why? The young woman I mentioned clearly had an emotional investment in being a “true” Mainer ~ someone of influence and trustworthiness in her life had indoctrinated her in the belief that at least part of her value and identity were predicated on her 13-generations-here ancestry.

But what if she had been adopted? would that negate her 13-generations cred? would that make her a different person or any less valuable? would it have changed the story those influential people told her about herself?

Because that’s where the stories we tell ourselves originate ~ with our parents and family and others whose good opinions we value ~ or whose censure we fear. It doesn’t matter if, later, we come to realize that these people really don’t walk on water or shoot fire out of their eyes ~ it was what we believed when it mattered, and what we internalized along with the stories. Parents are especially influential, whether they mean to be or not ~

In the movie Pretty Woman (which is just a contemporary retelling of the Cinderella story, by the way ~ see what I mean about stories?), there is a scene during which Edward (is that a handsome prince’s name or what?) and Vivian are talking about how she ended up there, and she says: “The first guy I’ve ever loved was a total nothing. The second was worse. My mom called me a bum magnet. If there was a bum in a fifty mile radius, I was completely attracted to him.”

Edward tells her that she has a number of special gifts, that she could be so much more ~ and Vivian’s reply is a truism: “The bad things are easier to believe.”

Why is that? What is it in us that won’t believe a miracle we see with our own eyes, that won’t take stock of all the good and wonderful things we create and accomplish, but will believe ~ and even dismantle ourselves with ~ every “bad thing” we are told about ourselves?

We weren’t born dissing ourselves, surely. So when and how did that change? and how can we change it back?

Until next time ~

Rebecca

next time: oh yeah? well . . .