gloves

I have such a mental image of this quote.

“We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time.

When we hesitate in being direct, we unknowingly slip something on, some added layer of protection that keeps us from feeling the world, and often that thin covering is the beginning of a loneliness which, if not put down, diminishes our chances of joy.

It’s like wearing gloves every time we touch something, and then, forgetting we chose to put them on, we complain that nothing feels quite real. Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world but to unglove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold and the car handle feels wet and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being, soft and unrepeatable.”

 Mark Nepo

It reminds me a bit of wearing gloves while carving and how, if you’re not careful, you can carve too much wood away because you can’t truly feel how the wood feels. It turns into a constant game at the end of putting on and taking off the gloves to ensure the thickness is right. That’s how life has felt in the last 18 months. A putting on and taking off of gloves, back and forth. In trying to be truly present with what is, I inevitably end up feeling like I can’t quite hold it and shut down, numb out, etc. This is such a change from what I remember growing up where I had such a large capacity to sit in those feelings. To nearly meditate in them. I can feel the ways I cut myself short of that fullness and I can also understand why.

Much of my current state of back and forth can likely be traced back to the punch combo of the deep pandemic isolation followed by the emotional drowning of meeting for the first time my broader set of half siblings and extended family at my half sister’s wedding. I went from an intense amount of self imposed isolation for a year to one of the top emotionally loaded days of my life. My nervous system was so amped in preparation for the event that I ended up at the urgent care thinking I was having heart issues. The waves of extended panic attacks/suicidal spirals that followed have humbled me and distanced me from my pursuit of being fully present with what is. I touched a very hot stove without gloves and now the gloves feel safe and necessary. It’s not how the core of me wants to live though.

There’s another quote I love that talks about how you can’t selectively numb yourself to just one thing and remain present with the rest (can’t find said quote right now). I can’t just put on emotional gloves for one area of my life and expect that I won’t feel a difference. I have been feeling that difference more and more in the last few months. I think part of it comes from changing my relationship to sugar since April. I have always had a massive sweet tooth, despite eating quite well otherwise, and it finally caught up to me in some recent blood work. I faced a fork in the road: address what my body is telling me or continue down a path that will lead to unnecessary health issues. I chose the former and I have to keep making that choice each day. A huge nearly daily distraction and comfort was removed and I can feel all the ways my mind is trying to swap it with something else.

Sometimes it feels like I’m just trying to get through enough of life in order to then crash as if there’s some sort of final future time when I can rest and fall apart. It’s illogical and keeps me in a heightened state of trying to hold things together. I talked to another pal about this recently and how we can both set our sights on “I just need to get to X day/event/etc” without thinking too much about what happens after. It’s a reflection of the overwhelm of life being so much that we’ve broken it down into something more bite sized. Over and over again, I do this and I wonder what it would be like to instead feel the expanse of the present with trust that I can care for myself as I need.

It reminds me a bit of a tactic a soccer coach of mine used that I hated growing up where we’d have to run sprints without any sense of how many sprints we actually needed to do. Other coaches would tell you that you needed to run ten full field sprints but this coach always kept it a mystery. We’d get on the line over and over again without a clue as to what came next. When I get too rigid, I deploy this tactic on myself at the gym, demanding an extra bonus set or a few more reps at a lower weight. Some of it is to prove to myself that I have more to give and some of it is to remind myself that I can’t always perfectly plan out how much capacity to give to something. I will never know how many sprints I need to do in this life. I digress.

I don’t want to live my life just trying to get through it. Right now, that’s a bit what it feels like and I can see all the ways it’s keeping me small and focused on what I imagine will keep me safe but that won’t really (money! health!). I want to nurture the largeness in me that has always had a deep appreciation for sitting with what is and learn from my hot stove moments to ensure I can remain sitting with what is. The latter requires interdependence with others and the vulnerability that comes with that. There’s a fear and excitement building as I write this. There’s so much I long to feel without a layer of protection and there’s so much I worry will wreck me if I feel fully. It’s all my existence to embrace though. To use a phrase from Thomas Moore, it’s my “raw material” for soul making. What might come of feeling it fully?