Reflections

Why am I starting yet another blog? I love to write. I love to write because I need to express - and I also need to know, and learn about what there is to be known.

About myself. This mysterious thing which some skeptics doubt exist. Yet I feel it. I am certain of it's substantiality because there is a frame of reference - and a way of experiencing reality - which is painfully different, excruciatingly morbid, obsessive and compulsive - and in this slew of experiences and witnessing yourself as being this way, it can feel like an embarrassment to be you.

It is not anything to me but the proper expression of the potential that exists in every healthy body. A "self" is the essence, the core and unique dynamic that enables a sense of oneself as competent and able. Sufficient, strong, and healthy. An ability to present oneself - before other eyes - and maintain, unconsciously, an autocentric way of experience.

To be liked is to be embodied. When we live in our body's, the energy of it's eruption - calm, yet forceful - stable and resilient - we experience ourselves as alive to ourselves. The body is the Self. We only experience our selves when we experience bodily emotion. From the affective core to the form of expression, emotion suffuses cognition, and the subject experiences himself as 'in a flow'.

To even be with other people, in a comfortable and relaxed way entails an unconscious embeddedness in a relational dynamic that operates, through us, in the form of expressed actions. The Self is therefore, paradoxically, not entirely ones own: it finds its most coherent expression in relation with other selves. Together, two selves, mutually sensing one anothers experience, enact their similar desires, in finding a topic and enjoying themselves together 'in it'.

I love these times. I cherish, and I am absolutely wedded to the beauty of embodied experience, experiences with others, and the overall, breathtakingly challenging - yet exciting - process that is human existence. But I also suffer, greatly, and painfully. I lose myself, it shatters and falls apart in ways I feel I cannot control. My heart falls into my chest. I feel weak in my body and the way I'm holding myself: I'm self conscious, horridly, as a shameful, repulsive force that others minds expressive instinctive distaste for.

Those moments when I feel this way, where I turn inwards in myself, unconsciously identify with some part - another me - I unknowingly throw my system into disarray. The whole thing happens so quickly. I can be in an automatic, embodied state of consciousness, and something will happen, either in conversation or the local setting, or even the emergence of a random feeling with no specific contextual trigger, and my mind changes to a different state. I identified with a weak, submissive part of me. Who fears other people - and has good right to. Good fucking right indeed. This person holds himself vigilantly and tentatively. He ruminates about what other people are thinking of him - constantly and non-stop. He contemplates his closeness to other people and what they might think. These are impressions he has - not as fully articulated 'thoughts' but as feelings that guide and structure his self-reflective experience.

Just the other day - or today, actually - I sat in the magazine section in the library next to my house. I do this everyday. Today, as I walk in, later in the day, I see an attractive woman, probably late 30's early 40's, just reading a magazine. My first impression upon seeing her was "oooh, she's hot". Yet in that thought, in the background, or as a central element of my weak-submissive 'parts' experience, there is a tendency to experience fear at random and unpredictable moments.

Coming in, I turn back and then turn around again because I am drawn to sit near attractive people (who isn't!?). I know. I'm a dirtbag - or maybe as a virgin 29 year old with developmental trauma - I can be excused for innocent experiences of proximity to another - attractive - human being.

I decide to sit across from her, on the opposite chair from hers - as the farthest possible area. I recall this being an element of my consideration. I sit down, take off my napsack, put it to the side of my chair, and take off my jacket. I'm conscious of how I'm looking the whole time. Initially, I come in confidently and relaxed and experience myself as giving off a good impression. She has a smile on her face and seems relaxingly involved in her magazine, which tells me "you're having a good effect, Mike". I know this because after a few thousand times, you get an almost psychic sense of how other people experience you. If I came in involved in a traumatic thought - and giving off, quite noxiously, signs through my facial expression, eyes, and overall body language what I was feeling, the other persons unconscious 'picks' it up and passes it off to attention. The person becomes aware, assimilates a meaning, and enacts in their own, probably unconscious way a response to my presence.

But this time it went fine. I sat down, opened my book, and from time to time couldn't resist not getting a peaking glance at her. I'm thinking about how odd it is. She's pretty, beautiful even, but older. And she's wearing loose pants and a shirt that don't do much in accentuating her body - so she's a parent with a different set of priorities and concerns in life. Going to the library is less about showing off her body for others than it is for bringing her daughter to a big sister get-together.

But before I figured all that out (through observation) I looked at her and felt within me the first burblings of shame. Unpredictable, ineluctably 'sticky' - shame. When I experience it, I try not to push it away violently through enactment - that is, showing through my actions what I'm feeling. I've gotten very good at regulating my breath and feeling into my body, and calming myself, quietly and peacefully, to assure myself that nothing is wrong, all is okay. But there are times where I feel absolutely defeated and thoroughly overwhelmed. It feels like its in my stomach, deep, impressing into my nervous system a deeply disturbed take on reality, and this, despite the knowledge that what I'm feeling is nothing else but a reenactment of my grade school traumas.

I don't think I did very well holding it down. The nervous system - and human cognition - has surprising flexibility. Sometimes the difference between 'confident' and 'unconfident' can seem like night and day. Other times, they can shade into each other, and for some reason, for me, the appearance of unconfidence in an attempt at confidence can strike you with a shame that obliterates your frontal lobes.

She started looking across from me towards the windows. Why? I'm not sure, and then she gets up, picks up her jacket and purse on the other chair, puts her shoes back on, and walks over to the chairs towards the corner of the magazine area.

Did I have that affect? Or rather, did my thinking - and my specific, repetitive worry of myself as being so close to a woman so attractive, and feeling vulnerable to being approached and spoken to by her - leak through into my actions, despite my conscious belief that I was carrying myself relaxingly, and subtly impress on her mind that she would rather sit some place else?

Or, what about, why do I care so much? Ah, the double bind! I feel locked between my narcissistic claim to knowledge - which seems so plausible - and the uncomfortable, insistent worry that other people don't like me, don't want to be around me, or aren't stimulated by my presence.

The psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin quite rightly emphasizes the importance of recognition in establishing the 'shield' that becomes somebody's avowed self-confidence. The assumption throughout history, and as ignorantly touted by business junkies, is the 'self-made man'. The idea that someone accomplishes something great as a result of his inherent talent, and not, as the evidence shows, as a consequence of contextual factors determining individual forms of expression.

The science is pretty clear. Most fields are moving towards a 'field' view of reality. Molecular biology has 'epigenetics' - the study of the processes which intervene between genes and the environment. Psychology is moving towards affect - the way emotion influences and catalyzes cognitive processes; relationships in psychoanaysis as relational theory. Enactive cognitive science is coming to replace computational theories of neuropsychological processing. Environmental science shows the earth - and, consequently, all of us - as tied into a wider biosphere, involving chemical interactions, us giving off carbon, plants giving us oxygen, trees growing, species developing, and all of this is delicately maintained at a particular atmospheric and biochemical balance.

Well, I'm sleepy, and my computer is at 9%, and my chord is downstairs. Too tired to get it.

I'm sure I will have more to write in the future to come.