Humility

For starters, I want to apologize for my last post (and for the blank post which followed, which was my failed attempt to erase the original post).  The feelings I expressed were genuine at the moment I expressed them, but I had no right to post them publicly.  And now, given a recent personal change for me, I am afraid that those of you who know me may misunderstand my meaning and intention in creating and erasing that post.  Most significantly, however, posts like that undermine the foundation of this blog: an individual perspective which exists meaningfully within a larger discourse.  When I write, I want to write about things that speak to other people and to which they may also speak; with that post, I was merely recording an inner dialogue, feeding a personal fire.  I am aware that I have lit and stamped out many personal fires in life and in this blog and that I will probably continue to do so, but maybe the more I fess up, the less frequent this habit will become.

That's the thing about humility: it requires not only complete awareness of one's own fault/rejection, but also public acknowledgement.  I do not mean public on a large scale; I mean telling a close friend or family member that you've screwed up or that you've been rejected.  Both of these things hurt and are hard to admit, but something happens to us when we bring them to light.  In that moment, we exist completely in the exchange between ourselves and those in whom we confide.  We abandon pride, or ego, which houses our identity.  As the mediator between the id and super-ego, the ego is also responsible for defense mechanisms; the id reacts viscerally, the ego obeys the id and the super-ego punishes the ego with feelings of guilt or shame.  When we do wrong, we are aware at the level of our super-ego that we have done wrong (guilt), but our ego rationalizes.  Because the ego is the foundation of identity, we adhere to these rationalizations in order to maintain a sense of self.  On the other hand, when we are wronged, we are aware at the level of our super-ego that we have been wronged/rejected (shame), and our ego represses or denies the rejection.  When we are wronged, we don't try to maintain our identity - we try to abandon it because we cannot separate our identity from the rejection of our identity, and rejection is unacceptable.  As such, our identity becomes unacceptable.  In both instances, our egos prevent us from acknowledging the truth.  Here's my hypothesis: I believe it is impossible for us as individuals to remove ourselves from our own egos, recognize and disable our own defense mechanisms, and thus learn from our own mistakes/rejections.  We must expose our guilt and shame to someone or, better yet, someones, in order to grow in a positive direction.  Incidentally, I also believe that until we expose both guilt and shame, that growth is incomplete.

I am a different person than I was a week ago and than I have ever been because I have now admitted both guilt and shame to people I trust.  Some differences are routine and trivial: I am listening to albums I haven't listened to in a long time and avoiding others that had been in my car player for months.  Others are routine and significant: I no longer speak to a person I had spoken to daily for months.  But one is a veritable paradigm shift: I am aware, for maybe the first time in my life, of how damn lucky I am.  I reached out and found myself enclosed in arms, lifted until I felt I was flying but still grounded.  I reached out to several people I knew and trusted and was reached out to not only by them, but also by near and complete strangers who could not have possibly known that I needed their hands too.  I never understood before why people say they are "humbled" by their achievements, and maybe that is because all of my previous achievements have fed my pride.  I now realize that my greatest achievement is my humility.  It is a small and tarnished trophy that will shine more and more as I continue to trust myself and others to acknowledge and accept me as I am.  But no matter how brightly that trophy shines, it will remain small.  Like us, dear friends.  Like us.