Agency is both the one thing I cherish and cling to and the thing that consistently escapes my grasp.
It’s as if the more I reach for it in the moments I need it, the more I skip that stage, lurching into reaction, overwhelm and burnout.
After years of learning the hard way, trial and error, meditation and mindfulness, I am sometimes able to catch the odd moment, when I get behind and around my reactivity, fuelled by the internal intensity that churns and crackles.
Given my tendency to catapult into hyperactivity, to stop and choose inaction seems like a Herculean effort.
However, when successful, without fail, I then have space to feel; to capture the intelligence contained in emotion; the layers that emerge when you are still; the emotions that time-travel from a past moment when we could not feel them - as adrienne marie brown beautifully puts in Emergent Strategy.
“it’s all waves though, moving towards and up, through and beyond. and once I’ve survived an emotion that has reached across time to demand my attention, i feel so resilient. that resilience makes me soft and wide enough to handle the complex mercurial existence of the present moment”
adrienne marie brown, Emergent Strategy, p.108
Moving past the point of cringing away from something I thought would make me pretentious, rather than a privileged cliché, meditation and mindfulness have been genuinely formative practices allowing the release of my buried self, to ride the waves of repressed emotions that threatened to engulf me in grief, rage and despair. More space to inhabit myself from. The emergence of a more expansive, whole me with which to interact with the world. An internal alignment that shunts better into the groove of lifelong inquiry - pulling me out and around, rather than in and down.
As someone who grew up knowing he is only valuable so long as he is doing something of service to someone else, this has been one of the most difficult challenges. I expect this has been especially so given my sensitivity and neurodivergence. Sensory needs not being met erode the ability to consciously choose how to respond. In a world that routinely assaults our nervous systems - training us to gaslight ourselves into productivity and functionality - calming down to see clearly and act more intentionally is not so straightforward.
Harder even than the work chicanery or toxic relationships I’ve disentangled myself from, where cortisol and dopamine would fuel me to ignore my inner world.
Building a new trust-based relationship with myself, I had to actively let the under-me know it's okay to feel. That it’s okay to release my grip. That no catastrophe will occur if I stop serving. It was partly this and the existential dread that something desperately needed to change within me, allowing me to finally say:
‘F**k what they think.
So what if they misunderstand you? You're different and that's actually fine.
You always connect better like that anyway.
Now you know what they meant when they said to you “Let It Be, Alex!”’.
Many years of unprocessed, repressed pain have come up, but I believe this is what recovery and healing look like.
You have to confront the darkest part and reconnect to it. Your ‘demons’ are actually schismatic parts of you the mind folded down to survive the adversity. The rendering asunder of the mind from the spirit and the body is indeed a deep wound.
Knowing the dark place I came from intimately, I also know the internal anguish that drives outward rage and hyperactivity.
The under-me crying out in pain, buried for so long, was trying to tell me something. Clawing up for recognition, support and acknowledgement. I had to stop, accept, and re-constitute.
I could not allow a shattered psyche to direct my behaviour and risk hurting those around me.
That was the line.
Agency and self-awareness are the difference between being feeling, learning, fallible, intact humans in a screwed-up world, and being lost forever to your worst impulses, battered around by whatever wind blows you strongest - risking the loss of the soul and the murky unconscionable things that come thereafter. The banality of evil begins inside.
I have known plenty whose life’s struggles eclipse my own, whose mastery of agency and equanimity (no other way when you have dependents who rely on you for love and stability) move me beyond inspiration. If they can find space to choose, then why can’t we?
To stop, choose to feel, and consciously respond to what moments - and your people in it - require.
To stop. To ask for help, to reveal your vulnerability, is to connect.
To resist being alone. To seek and provide support is the germination of community - the eco-social safety net growing from our outreach.
That is the real definition of strength.
Or better, a combination of adaptive capacity, vulnerability and resilience1: the remedy to the toxic masculine; brittle, atomised rage, indiscriminately exploding outwards. To be fought to the point of compassionate submission - a love of the boy those of us who identify as men were told to kill to simply be in the world. Although, I do not expect this experience to be as gendered as a lot of men think. That’s why I remain convinced the world of male rage and violence that we seek to transform can only be handled therapeutically. My personal journey has been a fractal microcosm attesting to that. No justice no peace indeed.
“The heart is the front line and the fight is to feel in a world of distraction”
adrienne marie brown, Emergent Strategy, p.110
Thank you for reading Alex’s Substack. This post is public so feel free to share it.
“vulnerability, resilience, and adaptive capacity, are relevant in the biophysical realm as well as in the social realm.” Gallopin, G. C. (2006). Linkages between vulnerability, resilience, and adaptive capacity. Global Environmental Change, 16, 293–303.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.