Who am I? Where am I? What am I doing here? Where did the years go? Just what is happening to me?
These are questions I find myself asking more and more these days. I remember most distinctly the first time these questions appeared. I was walking across the Penn State University campus in State College, PA. I was a junior and had absolutely no ambition to know or understand why I was in school. I knew I did not want to be there, and I could not find meaning for why I was there. The only reason I could fathom was this was what was expected of me - and I was tired of doing what was expected of me.
I could not find a reason for studying. I wanted to be a doctor, but my elder brother had taken this path most successfully, and he did not see my following this path as wanting to be like him. Instead, he took it as a challenge, with the consequence of discouraging me from doing so. The only subjects I found of interest were animal behavior and psychology, and when my GPA hit an all-time low of 0.9 on a 4.0 scale, I decided to quit school and go to work. I was trying to figure out the meaning of life, and so far it made no sense. The row this caused in my family was amplified by the screaming and yelling in Arabic that must have been heard for miles. And it reverberated for years.
Whenever I was asked why I chose to quit school, I could only say, “Life had no meaning.” I did not understand why I was here — there was no purpose, no reason. Life became shrouded in darkness, and there ensued a many-decades quest to alleviate this. Interestingly, I was never seriously suicidal during these years. I did try, but I was always stopped by energies I did not really understand. One time, I was planning my demise by thinking about the number of pills I would need to do the deed - then I got distracted and forgot about it. Another time, I thought about breaking glass in a window and cutting my wrists, but decided I did not want to clean up the blood.
There developed a hole inside of me that could not be filled. It had never been there when I was young. I realized this hole developed as I made decisions of which my family did not approve, decisions that separated me from them. As these decisions multiplied, the hole inside me expanded. It was almost an imperceptible increase, one not easily apparent. There was a funny thing about these decisions. It appeared that, as I grew, I grew in independence and, almost unintentionally, I decided to be myself. But this tendency was always tinged with guilt and fear, making it kind of shriveled around the edges and not clear. I sought for others to have control over me, yet when they did, I rebelled and moved on. People became afraid of me, instinctively.
Then I found people who recognized my vulnerability, my need to be accepted, to be wanted and needed. I have been involved with these people for more than 17 years now. Somehow, I have always had a sense of being a watcher – a watcher of myself in this life and a watcher of others. I had a sense of never really participating in, but being separate from, emotions in a way I could observe them. I could analyze them but never became truly involved with them. Emotions remain so, for me. I know them and I understand them, but it is almost as if they are someone else’s and I am watching them develop and trying to truly understand them.
Even love has been something I have had to feel for myself in order to receive it from others. I finally do now, after 70 decades of life. I know how to receive love because I have learned how to give it to myself. Therefore, now I can give and receive it from others.
But why do I write about this and expose what, for me, is an intimate feeling? I do so because realizing myself as human means I realize this feeling is not mine alone. I am human, so inherently others feel it with me and deny and hide from it themselves, as well. It is an emptiness so often perceived by humans as our true selves. As children, when we run and jump for joy or when we cry for the sheer sake of crying, or laugh for the sake of laughing, we so often hear, “Stop that!” and “Don’t do that!” or “Will you shut up?!” On and on. “What do you mean you want to be an artist?” “You are a what – a Lesbian? You like other girls?” “You do not want to get married?” The statements go on, as does the hurt and the desire to escape them.
Eventually, we realize the only place to escape is into ourselves. When we do, when we free ourselves from the fear society has taught us about this process, we find incredible joy and freedom. We don’t find a lack of problems, nor any greater acceptance, but what we find is a center that is ever-loving, ever-compassionate, and ever-accepting. This center provides us the courage to be human and to learn to love this living of it.
Would it not be spectacular to provide this to our children? To allow them to totally accept themselves for who they are and to allow them to have temper tantrums? To be unreasonable, to be disobedient, to rebel? To try out every new thing they can find. To allow them the ability to move out from this center and to return to it as a source of strength and knowledge of the amazing, amazing process it is to be human. What a different world this would be……