A few months ago, I started crying while chopping vegetables. There were no onions involved. Instead, my ears were ringing from a podcast I'd been listening to that struck a deep chord.
I smeared foodstuff on my keyboard but didn't mind-- I had to write down what this voice was saying, verbatim.
I survived that childhood through a mix of avoidance and endurance. What I didn't know then, and do know now, is that avoidance and endurance can be the entryway to forging meaning. After you've forged meaning, you need to incorporate that meaning into a new identity. You need to take the traumas and make them part of who you've come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph, evincing a better self in response to things that hurt.
I smeared foodstuff on my keyboard but didn't mind-- I had to write down what this voice was saying, verbatim.
I survived that childhood through a mix of avoidance and endurance. What I didn't know then, and do know now, is that avoidance and endurance can be the entryway to forging meaning. After you've forged meaning, you need to incorporate that meaning into a new identity. You need to take the traumas and make them part of who you've come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph, evincing a better self in response to things that hurt.
When we're ashamed, we can't
tell our stories, and stories are the foundation of identity. Forge meaning,
build identity, forge meaning and build identity. That became my mantra.
Forging meaning is about changing yourself. Building identity is about changing
the world. All of us with stigmatized identities face this question daily: how
much to accommodate society by constraining ourselves, and how much to break
the limits of what constitutes a valid life? Forging meaning and building
identity does not make what was wrong right. It only makes what was wrong
precious.
--Andrew Solomon's TED podcast
My story is different from Andrew's. I wasn't stigmatized, I placed the burden of outcast upon myself. Yet I feel my breath catching with his. I want to believe that adversity shapes identity. Otherwise, I find myself grinding teeth over the meaninglessness of grief.
"We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences. We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful. Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle. We could have been ourselves without our delights, but not without the misfortunes that drive our search for meaning. --Andrew
"We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences. We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful. Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle. We could have been ourselves without our delights, but not without the misfortunes that drive our search for meaning. --Andrew
I'm again reminded of Kate Braestrup in Here if You Need Me:
...light your candles to the living. Say your prayers for the living. Leave the stones where they are, but take your heart with you. Your heart is not a stone. True love demands that, like a bride with her bouquet, you toss your fragile glass heart into the waiting crowd of living hands and trust that they will catch it.
Your heart. Is not a stone.
This is unfinished, in terms of a blog post but also a theory. There is more I could write now, and there will certainly be more to add in the future. But for now, it's enough to remind myself of the ability to forge new identities. A phoenix rising.
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