I was reflecting the other day on Dr. Brene Brown’s statement that there are books that she reads and feels like throwing across the room in rage and that those are usually the books that strike a chord and make a difference for her and within her. I was reading a book by a Romanian author (“Privind Inauntru” – Looking Inside – by Petronela Rotar) and, maybe given the tender mental state I am in these days, I did not feel like throwing this book across the room. I felt like stepping on it multiple times and then burning it. Page by page. I even told my better half that I think Dr. Brown was wrong, that some books just need to be thrown.
Aside from writing about the healing of our inner child, family systems, psychodrama, hypnosis and other scary and seemingly impossible things like these, Petronela talks about how what frustrates us in others, what we most often criticize in the ones around us, are things that we ourselves embody. She describes her encounter with a psychologist, the bearer of “strange ideas,” as she calls them, in which the latter tells her: “Everything you reject, you hate, detest, everything you harshly judge in others, everything that upsets you, annoys and irritates you, everything that strikes you negatively in others, well, all of that is contained within you, it is part of you.” (personal translation from Romanian from Privind Inauntru)
I have to say that I accepted the fact that I was a racist easier than I am accepting this about myself. The fact that it is bothering me so much, the fire that it gives rise to within me, the many arguments I am gathering in my head to prove the contrary, they all actually come to show that, yes, I am all I despise in others, I recognize judgment, being dismissed, lack of attention, not being seen, corner cutting and so many other things so intimately because I do these things, because they are of me. When we get honest enough with ourselves (honest, not facetious or fishing for compliments from others), painfully honest, we recognize all of it in us. There is so much satisfaction that I gather from the moments I tell myself “I am not that way or the other, I am better than,” that I don’t even see the fact that in that same moment I behaved in a way that I found so irritating and condescending in others. I turn to avoidance and silence myself, because most probably they are great petri dishes for all that judgment about people who are so slient and never reach out. I raise an eyebrow when I hear people gossip, comfortably forgetting my inner chatter that disects everything and everyone at all moments of my day (and sometimes even in dreams, at night). I judge people who drink too much, forgetting that the content of an addiction does not less of an addiction make. And the list can go on.
I guess growth occurs in cycles: just like water polishing stone, knowledge and realization keeps coming over you until it manages to create a dent. It is not the first time I think about these things, this occured to me before. But one of my greatest shortcomings and benefits, in life and in mental health is that I forget. And I have to work hard to remember. The catch is to find beauty in the process and not the end result: who knows how many more times I will forget. The important thing is that I continue to work with myself into remembering.
“Pain dissipates when you understand that knowing yourself gives you the power to tame. You cannot tame the evil you deny, that you are not conscious of. If you cannot see it, it does not mean that it is not bearing its glaring teeth, that it is not visible to others. Everything that we do not want to know about ourselves, is usually pretty familiar to the ones who are close to us and stand us. Accepting these parts of myself is the first step towards smoothing them out. I now know that the bad wolf is there, just like the good wolf. And that, just like in the parable, I choose which one to feed. With my back turned to it, pretending that it did not exist, the bad wolf kept growing and growing because I was not aware of its existence and I was feeding it daily with my behaviors, labels, insults, judgments, thoughts and actions I only half taken responsibility for. It swallowed these and kept growing, on and on. It was threatening to swallow me whole. Now, that I have turned my face toward it, I can supervise it, I am careful about the types of things I am feeding it, that I am not taking my eye off it, it is a skeleton of the past, skinny and hungry. I am no longer afraid of it because I am not longer in its power, but it is in mine.” (Privind Inauntru, Petronela Rotar, pg. 243 – personal translation)
Photo by Nigel Tadyanehondo on Unsplash
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