Care
This morning at 8:25am the Moon was New. I honestly don’t know if I have ever posted this close to the moment. I wouldn’t call this the start of a trend, but maybe the reaffirmation of an intention.
For the past cycle I studied the property of Fortitude and examined how I bring it to my life. I spoke of it in terms of standing up and claiming what serves my greatest good. I also spoke about how the resolute advocacy brought by Fortitude can be disconcerting to those who might not be expecting it from me, or may not be manifesting it in themselves.
My journey with Fortitude began as I was moving through the gallbladder surgery and healing. While I noted in the last post that it began with my sister calling me “brave”, I’ve found that it started earlier than that. While I was in the hospital I was a collaborator in my Care plan. Every day during rounds I had questions for my doctors and they either had answers, or quickly provided them. I was part of my Care team.
But it was more than that.
When I was young, I was certainly ‘provided for’. I was sustained. And I can look back on times when I knew that I was loved. But being Cared for felt alien to me. When I was in the hospital, I felt a deep level of Care. Yes – much of it was professionally driven, but spend 21 days and nights with the same team of people, and the bonds transcended professionalism. Maybe not friends, but there was a level of Care that was more than casual.
This has been evident with every interaction I have had with my Care team since my discharge on July 29. My video calls with my infectious diseases doctor, my MyChart notes with my nurses, and my in-person follow-up with my primary surgeon in August. I was more than ‘a slab of meat for the hospital and staff to coalesce back into a whole’ – I was Sean. To call forward Rev. Jesse Jackson, I was “somebody”.
I was back in the hospital yesterday for an outpatient procedure to remove the stent in my bile duct. When my doctor came to see me, she remembered my face from our last procedure in July, and commented on how much better I looked. It was good to see a friendly face.
But the real moment came in the recovery room after the procedure. As I was floating back to consciousness, I saw a familiar face move through the door and over to my bed. It was my assisting surgeon – the one who came to my hospital room every weekday for three weeks, the one who knew first hand (especially since his hand held what was left of my gallbladder) the road I’d been on.
The road he and I had both been on.
It was the look on his face, the joy at seeing how far healing had brought me, that showed me just how bad things were in July. There was a sense of victory shared between us in those few minutes – like we had won a war together. And as we parted, I knew that as much in that moment as in July, I was Cared for.
So the focus for this cycle is Care. I want to appreciate how much Care I receive from all corners of my life, but I also want to be mindful of moments where I can express Care without being asked. I also still want to understand that amidst all of this, it is important for me to Care for myself.
The title of the companion song says it all – but the first verse called me to it:
Been beat up and battered around\
Been sent up, and I’ve been shot down\
You’re the best thing that I’ve ever found\
Handle me with care\
May we all find the Care that we need – or recognize when we already have it.
Topics: New Moon | Comments Off on Care
Paths
At 1:47am this morning the moon was New. This is twice in a row that I’m posting on the actual day of the New Moon. Time may be a wibbly-wobbly artificial construct, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important.
Over the last cycle I focused on Care, and in the last post I talked about how, when I was in the hospital in July, I felt truly and deeply Cared for in a way that was unfamiliar to me.
I think one of the differences in that sensation might have been that I trusted the intention behind the Care in a way that I’d never let myself experience before. I know that people have Cared for me in fundamental ways, but my conditioning meant their Care always felt transactional. This led me to feeling as though I wasn’t intrinsically worthy of that Care; that I was going to have to be demonstrative in some way to pay for it.
When I was young I had an aunt that I would often visit after grade school, as she lived within easy walking distance. One afternoon, not long after my parents and I had spent the weekend in the mountain home of someone who had been my favorite uncle, the aunt I was visiting turned to me and asked, “Who’s your favorite aunt?” I was a child. I couldn’t see the trap – I never imagined one was being set. I didn’t know how to be deceptive, I didn’t know how to mask. I didn’t know how to do any of the things that adults did to cultivate and sustain relationships. So I told her the truth. My favorite aunt was the one I had just spent the weekend with, not her. It wasn’t that I perceived anything wrong with this one. This was just my truth.
But that truth brought a dissatisfaction into the room I still remember like it was yesterday.
Care always felt transactional, so I think that it’s funny that the time that Care was absolutely, positively transactional, lying in a hospital bed, it felt more like I was being acted on by a duty of Care, not an obligation of Care. I think that was new in my perception.
As I continue to recover and to evaluate what it’s like to be Cared for, as well as what it’s like to Care for other people, I’ve been looking at the trajectory my life is taking.
Sometimes we do things in our life out of obligation, sometimes out of necessity, and sometimes out of desire. But how many of those are truly out of choice?
This brings us to this cycle’s focus on Paths.
I had a situation recently where I was called upon to make a difficult choice.
I have been affiliated with a group that had certain expectations around the amount of time devoted to them, and the overall priority they had in the lives and schedules of their members. I had not been able, or willing, to meet those expectations – not due to any lack of respect or even lack of desire, but it simply didn’t float high enough on my list of choices that were good and healthy for me.
So I made the decision that separating from this affiliation was in my practical best interests, and in their best interests as well. It’s unfair to welcome someone dedicating their energies to you if you’re not in a position to reciprocate. While I had always appreciated those energies, and I did participate when I was able, sometimes it just turns out that the Path has run its course.
Paths are interesting things. I’ve been surrounded by people who, in the past few months, have had their Paths change outside of their control. I’d been a spectator in that paradigm for a while, until this week, when the reality of it hit me.
The IT director that I’ve worked with for the past three years announced on Monday that she’s decided to take a position with a different company. Professionally, this is signaling that I’ll be given greater responsibilities as we diversify the workload that her position had held. This isn’t a Path that I chose to take, but I am at choice for how long, and in what manner, I choose to take it.
Shortly after this news broke I went out for a walk to clear my head. While meandering, I crossed Paths with a friend from the neighborhood. I had wanted to reach out to this friend while I was in the hospital, just to offer a reason why she might not have seen me out walking, but I never initiated contact. While we were chatting during my walk, I came to find out that her 2025 was tumultuous as well. During this talk, another friend of hers walked by with his dog – a big beautiful dog whose name was Zeus. If you’ve been following these posts for a while, Zeus’s significance was noted in November of 2023. The appearance of Zeus during this conversation with my friend, where I was offering Care to her in her struggles, and our overall arc of conversation, felt like confirmation that this was one of the Paths I belong on.
This coincides with the fact that as I was walking around the bar at the band’s last gig, I found a dime on the floor. Dimes from my father are always clear indications that I’m where I’m supposed to be and on the right Path.
The Paths may be right – but that doesn’t mean I know where they lead. I’m reminded of a lyric from Whitesnake “I don’t know where I’m goin’, but I sure know where I’ve been”.
I don’t know what this Path will look like and I don’t know if it will be persistent for me, but I know that it all starts with acknowledging the fact that I need a direction.
The companion song for this cycle is an old favorite, and it ties back to my mentioning of Hills almost a year ago – how I want to be the person who stands on the top of the hill and sees where the next thing is.
So to quote from this cycle’s song: “When you get to the top of the hill, gonna be there, yes, I will.”
May all of our Paths be what we need them to be.
Topics: New Moon | Comments Off on Paths
Presentation
On December 19th at 8:43pm, the Moon was New for the last time in 2025 – just before the Solstice and the other winter holidays, so there hadn’t been a lot of time for introspection. In fact, it felt like life had been supplanted by the struggle to keep up the pace.
January has brought physical and emotional quiet though – and a gentle re-centering. The last New Moon post was on November 20th, and dealt with the theme of Paths. During that time I was experiencing changes in both my Spiritual and Professional Paths – these were unavoidable, and I don’t hold any grief or remorse – but they are still changes to fundamental aspects of my journey. In the post I recounted how noticing a dime or encountering a dog named Zeus actually helped to ground me through these transitions.
It still left me with a wonderful sense of “what could happen next?” There wasn’t fear or anxiety. Sure, there was uncertainty, but not knowing isn’t bad. Not knowing that you don’t know? Yeah – that’s not good.
For a long time I didn’t know that I did not know who I was. I was moving through the world in the microcosm of my own consciousness, largely unaware of the fact that the Sean I was Presenting was a construct designed to adapt to the world he was living in. In these posts we’ve talked at length about my being who I thought others expected me to be. Yes, a lot of that was reaction to external stimuli – someone’s body language (or energy) shifts, so I would adapt to realign. This got to the point where it was rarely even conscious. Much like swerving to avoid something in the road, the reaction happens as a conditioned response.
I’ve been noticing things about myself since I’ve been out of the hospital which have shown that this kind of behavior was far more pervasive than I recognized. It wasn’t always reactive – there have been times when I have been aware of people and their patterns or perception, where I have tried to tune myself to their filters. Person A likes this, and has experienced that; so if I present myself as this other thing, I will be more readily accepted. I can almost grant that as part of normal human adaptation. But I took it much further.
My grade school had a very small library – I think it was the size of one or two classrooms. There were a variety of books – not all “children’s books” either. There was a section on aerospace science and rocketry that seriously appealed to me when I was 9-10 years old. I wanted to be an astronaut, but I knew I had to be something that I wasn’t. That “something” wasn’t special training or education – to my mind, it first had to be about Presentation. Before I could be seen as knowledgeable or even interested, I had to rise above and be “seen”.
So I checked out those books. Repeatedly. I don’t know that I ever read them – I don’t know that I could have; they were at least at a college reading level. But my name was in the check-out card in the back. So someone would know that Sean was very into this thing.
As I look back at patterns of my life – this was persistent. I subscribed to magazines, I created accounts on websites; I left breadcrumbs and footprints everywhere to lead to a very curated version of me. To the point where, looking back now, I wonder if anything I’ve done hasn’t been part of that paradigm. That is a disturbing lens through which to view your life.
So the theme for this cycle is Presentation. Who is Sean versus who is this created public-facing version of Sean? No wonder “peopling” wears me out – I am (still) constantly on stage. How can I be more aware of this drive toward Presentation and how can that awareness nudge me closer to a life rooted in authenticity. There was a book I read years ago called “Choosing Truth: Living an Authentic Life”, by Harriette Cole. I read it, and I tried to live closer to it – but I don’t know how much of it I ever really embodied. I was always on the Path of curating a Presentation – reading the book, or being known to have read the book, was part of that.
Presentation, as opposed to being present.
This is another lesson from the time in the hospital though. My very survival depended on me being completely authentic. Sure – there was no way for me to reframe CT scans or bloodwork – but I had to be nakedly honest whenever anyone spoke to me. I had to be vulnerable, and scared, and trusting, and brave – all at once. I had to “be”.
There was a song that was stuck in my fever-addled brain for weeks – and it is now the companion song for this cycle – “Swimmers” by Zero 7. It’s a song that has gathered more meaning for me as my recovery has progressed. As a musical brother described it at the time, it represented “Being pulled where the current takes you.” It also speaks to me about existing inside uncertainty without trying to escape from it. Being. Digging deeper into the lyric, there’s a sense of living before fully arriving, or, to paraphrase the lyric, living as ghosts as our stories unfold in reverse. Not being afraid of the passage of time, but using it to give the courage to live authentically the time to develop. All of this represents who I was in the hospital – but in the macro view, it’s who I am discovering today.
So for this cycle I have been focused on how and when I create a Presentation of myself, and the effort that goes into that. It’s a constant river of shadows and light – and in it, the striving to know the reality behind the Presentation.
Topics: New Moon | Comments Off on Presentation
Fortitude
At 3:54pm on September 21st the Moon was New. I’m running behind schedule again this cycle, though I am still working through giving myself grace around things. As we said last cycle – “just be glad to be here.”
In the last post I talked about Priority, and how I was finally finding that I am worth being a Priority to myself, and “recognizing that the causes of anxiety that I had placed ahead of my well-being do not deserve the Priority I had unwillingly given them.” Saying this and owning it was huge for me – even more so is living that truth without fear. I had also said that “The people who love and care for you will understand or adapt, or not…”
That fear of abandonment is strong, but does being abandoned by people who can’t accept who you are, or where you are on your path, really count as abandonment?
As I have lived with the concept of being a Priority to myself, I have found that I have had to be stronger than I give myself credit for; or, really, ever had a desire to be. I never want to be forceful. I never want to rankle. I really just want to “be” – but it’s become obvious that is a thing we all still need to fight for.
This is where the focus for this cycle brings us: Fortitude, which can be defined as “courage in pain or adversity”. I think the first time I really started to explore this as a potential theme was in mid-August. I was out of the hospital about two weeks, and not quite back to work yet. I was on the phone with my sister and she was in awe of how I “handled” being in the hospital with all the tests and procedures. She called me brave.
I didn’t see that. I couldn’t. My humanity was on vacation while I was hospitalized – I was just one big science experiment. Keeping me alive was the successful result. I couldn’t attach an emotion to that – there was nothing I could do anyway. I had no control over the gallbladder and no control over the myriad infections my body was fighting. I wasn’t at war, I was simply the battlefield.
But looking back on it now, I didn’t lose it. I could have. I should have. But I held it together – I was involved and invested with my care team. I only got emotional a couple times, and only lost hope one day. So okay – maybe not bravery. But Fortitude? Yes.
Fortitude follows last cycle’s Priority well. It’s one thing to name myself and my needs as a Priority, it’s another to have the Fortitude to stand up for myself and claim it. There have been a number of tests over the past month – not intended as tests, not in any way malicious, but times when the “right choice for me” was not the choice someone else might have preferred. I find it’s tricky for people to get used to this change in me – times I would have caved and let my needs lapse in favor of keeping the peace. But someone else’s peace isn’t my battle to fight – particularly when I’m placed in the position of having to fight myself.
Fortitude was never a quality I would have ascribed to myself before – but I am working to develop it. To borrow a line from the companion song: “Think about direction; wonder why you haven’t before.”
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Priority
At 2:07am on August 23rd, the Moon was New again. I am admittedly still working on getting any kind of a rhythm back, but I’m getting better – in many ways.
In the last post, I recognized the sense of Dualism I was living through. I described how my mind and my body at first felt disjointed, but eventually began to walk together on the path toward healing. That healing is ongoing, but the Impatience and Dualism have given way to appreciation.
I am still in a frame of mind where I reflect on those weeks in the hospital. The moments of joy and the moments of despair turned into a soup of existence. Everything distilled over time into its essence. There was a weird kind of freedom in that soup. I began to look at life through a very different lens.
With very few exceptions, my life has been spent playing a role – most often that of mediator or peacekeeper — but regardless of the role, there was outsized responsibility that really didn’t belong with me. The effort to live up to those responsibilities drives most of my anxiety, which then exacerbates a lack of confidence. It’s an exhausting cycle.
But something remarkable happened in the hospital. I recognized that I was off-stage. There was no role to play. In my last post I said that I knew “I was a slab of meat and the hospital and staff were there to coalesce me back into a whole”. The only responsibility I had was to be there. This clarity was more than conceptual – it was physical.
I know what I want to hear when I play keyboards. I know that 90% of the time I can play parts exactly the way I want to. But that other 10% is when the pressure is on – and the yips happen. If I screw up, I’m going to let down people I care about. I will be bad, wrong, and ultimately unlovable.
But in the hospital I could feel what it was like to live without the yips. I felt what it was like to trust myself. More than that, to believe in myself. I looked around at all of those people who were taking care of me, who were healing me, and who were simply caring for me – and I felt like I had an intrinsic value all my own. I was worthy of being a Priority.
In those moments, all of the other fabricated Priorities began to melt away. Not that things outside myself became unimportant, but their position was usurped by something inherently present – my self. I could be a Priority without guilt or shame. I still need to uphold my obligations and be impeccable with my word, but I should never fear taking my own needs and wants into consideration. I used to feel I had to negotiate (or brute force) what I felt was best for me. No, just make the decision. It can be that simple. The people who love and care for you will understand or adapt, or not – in which case, where is their level of capacity for understanding? This does not take negotiation off the table, but it does remove fear and anxiety from the equation.
So the focus for this cycle is Priority. Recognizing that I am worth being a Priority to myself, and recognizing that the causes of anxiety that I had placed ahead of my well-being do not deserve the Priority I had unwillingly given them. The lyric from the companion song says it all, wrapped in the reality of my summer: “Don’t think about all those things you fear, just be glad to be here.”
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Dualism
At 12:11pm on July 24th, the Moon was New again. While I realize this is probably the latest in a cycle I’ve posted an intention, I have lived with this since before the Moon was New.
In the last cycle I had been focused on Waiting, realizing that I had a propensity to wait for some kind of inspired alignment before taking action on things; I acknowledged that it’s always time and I’m always here, and in doing so I realized that sometimes we can just act out of instinct rather than “waiting for a moment that just don’t come”.
The song from last cycle, “It’s All I Can Do” by The Cars, contains the chorus “It’s all I can do, to keep waiting for you.” That became the mantra for the cycle. It became less philosophical and much more practical, and in those moments, the concept of Dualism for this cycle was born.
I have always tried to keep these posts universal – referring to events or people in my life in the abstract, because it was thoughts and feelings I’d been trying to comment on and learn from. But I cannot ignore the fact that I spent most of July in a hospital bed recovering from complications from gallbladder surgery.
Until July 8, the most complicated medical procedures I’d had were dental implants. I’d never spent a night in a hospital, never had an IV drip, never had surgery – none of it. But when they put me on the bed in the emergency room, I knew this was a different game – one I had no control over. I realized then that I was a slab of meat and the hospital and staff were there to coalesce me back into a whole – but I wasn’t there.
In the mid-1600s, René Descartes wrote Meditations on First Philosophy where he described one aspect of Dualism as the mind being distinct from the body. I felt this during those days in the hospital. I was conscious – though addled with fever – and aware of everything, but this was very separate from my physical self that I simply couldn’t relate to. It was going through things that my rational brain could understand, but not comprehend.
The line was decidedly clear one particularly hard day – I was kinda done. My body was tired, my mind was exhausted, I just didn’t know how much I had left in me. But I dug deep and gave my body a pep talk – I told it how proud I was of the way it was persevering, I told it that if we just kept going there really was an other side, and I told it I loved him. This was not dissimilar from comforting an inner child. My body stopped crying and grieving and began to calm, and we pushed on side by side. Not integrated, but together.
So the focus for the July new moon has been Dualism. By the time the New Moon arrived, I was already two thirds of the way through the hospital stay – I had been living through June’s cycle of impatience, but I had already recognized the Dualism I was living. Impatience was giving way to grace and cooperation – and that’s just a gentler way to move through life.
Lyrically, I can feel the shift too – this cycle’s song is again sung to myself, but instead of concentrating on the separation of mind and body, it celebrates their partnership.
“We’re on our way home.”
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Waiting
At 6:32am on June 25th, the Moon was New again. While I may be posting this a few days after the fact, the theme has been on my mind for well over a week now.
The focus for the last cycle was Joy—and in that post, I contrasted my desire for joy with my persistent sense of anxiety. Through the course of the month, I recognized that while my perception of this is uniquely my own, the conceptual challenges are not. If there was a plot to a movie contrasting Joy and anxiety, there must be a lot of people this touches.
What is unique, though, are the circumstances that keep me sitting in this space.
This came into focus for me during last week’s heatwave. I was trying to balance humidity, temperature, and air pressure in an elegant dance of airflow to keep the space cool. I failed — miserably. I was so desperate for a solution that I began brute-forcing every metric: fans on high, cooling on maximum. But it was having the opposite effect. When I stepped back and really watched what I had wrought, I saw the problem. The heat was subtle and stealthy, but I was unleashing chaos to remediate it.
It wasn’t until I stopped that I noticed that one fan wasn’t doing what I needed at all. I moved it two feet, set the speed to low, and suddenly everything clicked.
Slow down. Don’t overthink the problem. Nudge the subtle changes first. Be patient.
Patience is a funny thing — like airflow, it’s subtle. Where are the timey-wimey lines between wasting time, lying in wait, patiently waiting, and evolving?
None of us want to waste time. Not many want to be Aaron Burr. And patience, unchecked, can drift into inertia. But waiting for the right moment and leaning into it — not with the reflexivity of lying in wait, but with the effortless flow of evolving — that’s where growth happens.
Over the past few months, I’ve increasingly realized that I have been Waiting for much of my life. That recognition brought the theme for this cycle.
I realized that I would save things, I would delay things, I would inhibit things because “it wasn’t time yet.” It was the pack-rat trap of saying “I may need this someday,” only to realize someday is today and I really don’t need that.
The same is true for meeting a moment. In the last post, I reflected on Australia six years ago, and right now I am eight years removed from the trip to Greece. Those moments arrived and I was ready for them. But have I always been ready for all the moments and never gave myself permission to see it?
There’s a line from Bruce Springsteen’s “Badlands” that’s always haunted me:
You spend your life waiting / for a moment that just don’t come
I always felt like I was waiting on the moment — as if it were the moment’s responsibility to come to me.
But I always glossed over the next line:
Well, don’t waste your time waiting.
A week or so ago, I was meditating, and a phrase came into my mind that struck like lightning: “Here is now”.
It reframed everything. I didn’t need to keep saving things for some future “someday.” It reframed the meeting of the moments of Greece and Sydney, my fraught relationship with time, and the tentative nature of my steps along the path of self-advocacy. It’s always been time. I have always been here.
So this cycle, I want to look closely at my relationship with Waiting. What moments have I delayed out of fear or anxiety? Which have I correctly deferred because I wasn’t quite evolved enough to make them successful? Some bits of evolution are too convoluted to just throw caution to the wind — but maybe I’m more ready for some things than I give myself credit for.
The companion song is again one I’m singing to myself — not in anger or regret, but in compassion. And maybe just a little impatience.
It’s all I can do, to keep waiting for you
Joy
At 11:02pm on May 26th, the Moon was New again. Leading up to that moon, I was convinced what the theme was going to be! I prepared for it; I researched it – but a moment from a few days before was stuck in my brain and wouldn’t dislodge.
In the last post on Apologies, I spoke about the origins of the word Sorry being from the base of the noun “sore.” Its synonyms in this case include ‘pained’ and ‘distressed.’ On reflection, this brought me back to a diagnosis from a psychologist 20 years ago – sure, I had generalized anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders – but I also had what amounted to dysphoria. This was explained as the antonym of euphoria; I am predisposed to see the glass as half-empty. Whether this is neurochemical or conditioned as a result of trauma, we don’t know – and honestly, I don’t know how much it matters.
I have done a lot of work in twenty years to see the brighter side, to not get mired in the everything – but sometimes that amounts to nothing more than masking, where I don’t believe it, but I am in “fake it ’til you make it” mode. This is especially true in times where I am particularly stressed – times when I need to be “on” and reliable. It’s times like this that the anxiety simply takes over.
The trigger question that flipped the script on the focus for this post was an honest query related to a potential birthday gift: “What would make you happy?”
Back in November, I wrote a post on Definition, wondering how I define myself. In that post I spoke about the movie “Inside Out 2” and how the primary conflict in the movie was between Joy and Anxiety. As I had been recounting the movie at the time, a most trusted soul asked where my brain escaped to during the moments where Anxiety is in control, and I related that it was in Sydney. In that post in November, I said, “There was a completeness in Sydney where there were no contingencies or expectations – I was free to walk the streets with no agenda at all – as myself, not a customized version of me created for someone else.” It is in these moments that I find Joy.
I went through a period of time in my life where I would not use the word Happy when referencing myself. I believed it was bad luck – or some twisted kind of nirvana – where the moment you say you’re there, you get kicked out. Happy was anathema to me. I’m working on softening that stance – but for the sake of honoring that discomfort, the theme for this cycle is Joy.
This past weekend I watched the season finale of Doctor Who. While the Doctor was expressing fear about an upcoming event, one of their prior incarnations advised: “Don’t go in fear, go with that lovely smile”. This preceded the Doctor being comforted by a character from the last Christmas special – Joy.
We change, we grow, and we become. Through all of the lives we live and faces we put on, we are still and always us. But those subsequent iterations are informed by the spirit with which we enter them. The day is just the day – it can be anything. But if we can find a way, any way, to approach it with Joy instead of with anxiety, it simply makes for a better day for everyone!
I should have been riddled with anxiety when I went to Sydney – but I wasn’t, at all. I embraced it and lived it, and found great Joy in all of it. I know that feeling, I am capable of that feeling, and I believe that I don’t have to fly halfway around the world to recapture it.
There was a song that was the impetus for that trip, “The Door Into Summer” by the Monkees. On that trip I actually had a chance to tell Mike Nesmith (who sang it) that the second verse is what brought me all that way to meet him. Today, as we are looking at the threshold of another summer in a few weeks, I want to reflect on the Joy found in that trip, and do my best to greet each day welcoming whatever Joys, large or small, can be presented. Anxiety can rest, Joy can breathe in the day.
Goodbye
At 3:11pm on Sunday, April 27th, the Moon was new again. I’ve been ready for this one — the idea for the focus came right on the heels of the last cycle’s post. In that last post, I focused on Apologies, and drawing on lessons garnered from an earlier post on Mattering, I came to the realization that at least part of my reflexive need to apologize was rooted in a deep absence of self-worth.
That feeling is pervasive throughout my life. There are many times when I just don’t feel deserving to be in any particular situation. It seems that regardless of how much verbal affirmation I may get, part of me still thinks that people feel some sense of obligation to make me feel accepted, welcomed, or valued. It isn’t genuine — it’s what they’re “supposed to” do. If I trace that back, I can see that is how I felt growing up as well. When I was young, I always felt that I was in the way, that I was an inconvenience. The certainty I felt in my perceptions meant that any affirmations to the contrary appeared more an act of service or social correctness than genuine sincerity.
Because of this, I’ve never done a very good job of advocating for myself. If you inherently feel you don’t matter, there’s nothing to advocate for. Instead, I took the position that I was lucky to have anything, and that asking for more was either greedy or simply inappropriate.
There have been a few times that I’ve deviated from that. There was a time I petitioned to rejoin a band, which led to another 10 years of making great music together. When I experienced an abrupt and unscheduled career change and was asked what my new salary requirements were, I did my best to state my worth. Both of these times, self-advocacy did indeed get me closer to where I wanted to be, but these are exceptions to the rule. Far too often, I’ve muddled through circumstances or stayed in situations long after they had lost their ability to serve me.
But I was lucky to have anything. So just because something didn’t make me happy didn’t feel like reason enough to leave.
Combining a diminished sense of self-worth with a paralyzing fear of abandonment is never good.
So this cycle, I want to focus on Goodbye. There’s a lot of melancholy around this — I’ve done a lot of work over the years to get closer to this point. Many of the truly expendable elements of my life have already been phased out. Everything that’s left is better than I have ever allowed myself — still, happiness is elusive. I want to be clear that just because I am focusing on Goodbye doesn’t automatically mean I intend to say it in any facet of my life. More so, I am allowing myself the freedom to examine my life’s interactions and circumstances and ask myself a basic question: Does this serve me? If it does, then let’s devote more energy to it. If it doesn’t, then I give myself permission to consider Goodbye.
It’s a tough pivot to make — to spend so much time meek and paralyzed, casting my fates to luck or whim instead of definitive direction — but it’s a change whose time has come.
“I was never much good at Goodbye” — but it’s time to embrace the possibilities.
Apologies
At 6:58am on Saturday morning, the Moon was New again. This may be one of the soonest times I’ve posted after a New Moon – but something occurred to me a few days ago that is creating a pretty deep dive.
The past couple of posts have been focused on community – both Fraternity and Support were outwardly focused. It was during the Crossroads post on November 14th that I had said, “I have the privilege of directing my energies outwards rather than just focusing on myself”. But this week, a long-standing bit of self-identification ran into an introspective moment of “but why”. I didn’t like the answer.
For as long as I can remember, the phrase “I’m sorry” has been reflexive. I guess I always knew why, but never bothered to really dig into it. It has gotten so prevalent that it’s even a nickname my sister has for me. One of the most profound moments that I can really remember saying I’m sorry” was in high school. I don’t remember the circumstance, but it was in the cafeteria and I was addressing a table of seniors when I was a sophomore.
I don’t know that I was apologizing for anything specifically though. I think it was one of those reflexive moments. But why? Yes – how many decades later am I stopping to ask that question?
A few nights ago, I was journaling and realized that I have two different circumstances when I say “I’m sorry“. The first is when it’s part of a conversation. Those times when I say that I’m sorry, it is accompanied by an explanation of the thing that I’m sorry for, and most often why I’m sorry for the incident. The other times, the reflexive times, are actually an emotional resignation. It is accompanied by my emotionally disengaging from the subject, and cocooning within myself. It is a flag of surrender. Something designed to stop the onslaught of trauma.
It is interesting that the word “sorry” has roots of West Germanic origin, from the base of the noun “sore”. Its synonyms in this case include ‘pained’ and ‘distressed’.
In September, I wrote about ‘Mattering’, and I said “…I haven’t felt like I Mattered. I existed, I was a resource, I was convenient, I was a distraction – but the concept of my essence actually Mattering was a rarity.” As I looked at the concept of emotional resignation and cocooning, this concept of not mattering became even more pronounced.
For years, I have tried to stay mindful of The Four Agreements (from the book of the same name by Don Miguel Ruiz and Janet Mills). The first agreement is to “Be Impeccable with Your Word”.
My reflexive Apologies are self-diminishing by design, but am I diluting the sincerity of actual Apology through overuse?
In his book The Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant wrote “A man who has committed an injustice owes a debt to the one he has wronged; the repayment of this debt consists not in a material indemnification but in a sincere confession of his injustice, and in the resolve not to repeat it.” My reflexive use of “I’m sorry” is self-serving, and never offered in service of someone who’s been injured. It’s a way for me to escape a situation part of me perceives as dangerous. This flies in the face of the second of the Four Agreements which states “Don’t Take Things Personally”. It is not wrong to be mindful of my feelings and reactions, but it is not correct to lessen the value of a genuine Apology by using the same language as a selfish escape hatch.
So the focus for this cycle is Apology. My goal is to be mindful of when and why I am moved to say “I’m sorry”, and reserve it for moments of atonement or sympathy. When I find I am moved to use it by reflex, I want to have the presence of mind to stop and examine what in that moment has caused me to feel threatened. And if there is some kind of limbic response, do I need to react to it out loud? Or, to reference a quote attributed to Craig Ferguson – “Does it need to be said? Does it need to be said by me? Does it need to be said by me now?”
