This year opened with feverish rupture. It was New Year’s Eve, I was out at a music event when I was deeply triggered. Feeling emotionally & physically abandoned, I spiralled. I texted and called for help. The night grew strange as I phased between performing my public people-pleasing self and losing control of my most private emotions. Old and new friends came to my rescue. With some distance, the whole fever dream is hilarious to recall. Up close, it was a nightmare of many parts.
I’m usually thankful for my experiences no matter how hard they are, but I struggle with this one. That night, I found myself at the mercy of my emotions—something I’d not experienced in a long time. The stakes felt high and I felt out of control. I was in an unfamiliar location without a hideaway where I could take a proper timeout. A fresh and precious relationship of mine took a hard turn, one that seemed irreversible and doomed. The wounds felt unforgivable, and momentarily irreparable.
In a way, I can see how it was inevitable. Despite all my healing, the fears that were triggered had remained latent within me, an inheritance of trauma that shaped the way I looked at life, the way I lived. I was afraid of being abandoned, so much that I pre-empted it, and any sign of a void materialised the whole horror I believed in and carried me.
These thoughts had already been playing in the background of my life. At some point, with the appropriate circumstances in place, they were bound to be set off fully and enlarged into an immersive fantasy. I was bound to come face to face with this part of myself again.
Now, I can look back and recognise that night as a beginning. It was a beginning that belonged solely to me.
Despite the hurt and chaos, my gut told me to stay with the trouble. Don’t walk away from the relationship. I questioned myself about this. So did many of my friends. While I recognised that this pushback stemmed from concern for me, I grew tired from bearing the force of doubt, and from the impulse to defend my choice.
Then again, I’ve become quite good at standing up for what I think. What actually made this so utterly exhausting was this:
I couldn’t put into words what exactly my decision was based on.
My intuition recognised something incredible and vital in the situation, and that knowing was strong, persistent as a rock against the coming stream. Yet I couldn’t articulate what it was to another person. In my attempts, I conjured something about attachment styles. Stranger still, I tried to explain the perspective of the person who had hurt me. Everything I said was indirect and feeble. In some ways, I felt pushed back into the cold womb of my childhood and teenage years, where I had struggled to speak my mind.
*
For the first time in my life, no one, not a single person amongst my most intimate relationships, understood or fully agreed with a decision I was making. (The greatest grace I experienced was from two friends, who each listened to my rambles and concluded that the decision was mine to make, regardless of what they thought.)
I found myself reaching for a lojong slogan in Tibetan Buddhism that stilled me the first time I read it:
Of the two witnesses, hold the principal one.
In other words, you are the primary witness of your life. You know best whether you act or speak truthfully or deceptively. You understand your goals, capabilities, and aspirations more clearly than anyone else can. When it comes to two perspectives, another person’s and your own, stick fast to yours. This is true regardless of whether they’re saying something positive or negative about you.1
Up to that point, I’d practiced this teaching in ways like insisting on taking a path of my own making, and standing up for my own experience against authority. Those experiences usually had some external support, whether from a friend or the Internet.
This time though, I stood there without an ounce of external assurance, agreement, and understanding, and knew I had to trust myself.
I chose my intuition. I stayed with the terror of that lonely knowing, that sense of isolation from the values my friends spoke from. I still felt that I shared those principles, but the ideas failed to apply to what I was contending with. Or rather, something far more important was overriding usual logic. I was in new territory. My principles had to be reconsidered against the landscape, against the hunch that persisted in my gut.
*
I call this a beginning that belonged solely to me—not only because I was alone in my decision, but because this decision set me off on a longer arc of witnessing my life and becoming my own person. The relationship I was committing to became the fertile ground upon which this shift would unfold.
Before I committed, I stood there on the prow and looked down at the water. I sensed, vaguely, the full threat of the relationship: that it would bring me to the field of my childhood trauma, that it would inflame my most stubborn wounds, the ones which I’d accepted would stay with me for much longer, maybe for life.
At the same time, I sensed that I was ready to do such a risky thing. For years, I had been “learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement.”2 Finally, I seemed to have the right conditions to meet myself completely—a meaningful challenge, a willing partner, a supportive environment, a skilful heart. I could risk hurt knowing I had not only the grit, but the skills and community that would let me dance my way through. Whether other people could comprehend it or not, I wanted to risk it—I wanted to risk the possibility of becoming myself. After all, I have gambled on this all my life.
*
I leapt into the water; I walked into the field. I tried, as much as I could, to keep my armour thin. My wounds opened and burned, leaving me choked, writhing, and worn. I practiced deeply: crying, meditating, journalling, resting. I let myself regress, and struggle, and escape when I needed. I sat with myself as I fixated on online resources, hungry for schema that would give guidance and a sense of control. I let each answer come and serve however it might, and then go away.
In the process, I learnt more than ever to ask for help. And eventually, as I found my balance, I could rely more or less on myself. I journaled feverishly. I let the big emotions in even as I feared being overtaken by them. As I touched my extremes, I began developing more resilient ways of catching and caring for myself. My self-compassion deepened as I devoted myself to bearing witness.
Despite pressing doubt, I trusted the fathomless knowing within me. Even when I felt plagued by delusion and anxiety, I recognised its sharp clarity resting at the heart of my awareness. It was a crystal centre, cold and impenetrable, undeniable. It reminded me again of what my writing professor David had once said, about the sliver of ice a poet has in their heart.
The aloneness has honestly been quite odd, quite new.
For one, it has been thorough. Even when I asked my partner about his experience of our ups and downs, he gave resolved answers. He was tired, but he felt settled about the relationship within his own frameworks. While we shared the experience of the relationship, he was not mired in the same mud as me, and the relationship did not act on him the same way it acted on me.
Even when I explained my experience to him, it remained my own. Unlike many of my past and present companions (friends, lovers, family, etc.), he never once took my experience on as his own. He did not express sympathy or empathy towards me. He did not console me or give any advice. He neither dismissed my experience nor dwelt upon it. He listened deeply, asked if he could help (I said no) and let it be. It became clear to me that while on the surface it appeared that I was grappling with the relationship, I was really contending with myself.
Surprisingly as well, the aloneness has grown warm and solid, like what I imagine a lit fireplace feels like. Even with the initial feeling of isolation, it has been a wonderful space of becoming and being. I have never been as connected to myself as I am right now. I have never felt so true. Carl Rogers’ description of congruence—a state where one’s internal and external experiences are one and same3—feels appropriate. More and more, I find my illusory fears and assumptions melting away. I look at myself with greater clarity; that is, I can see who I am as I am, without the need to inflate, warp, or obscure anything.
*
In the end, it seems that that comical, miserable rupture was a cosmic conspiracy to bring my greatest triggers into view, to nudge me down this journey that has now spanned eight months. But putting it this way undermines that hard choice I made, and the sheer amount of work I’ve put in to make it out the other side. It overlooks the years of transformation that have been unfolding since way before these eight months.
Perhaps it was this cliff’s edge that my intuition recognised and refused to give up on back on New Year’s Day. I must have known, even without the words, that I had a pretty solid chance of flying.
While I rest in this lojong teaching, I know that one’s ability to witness your own life can be warped by trauma or the slow harm of prejudiced beliefs. It can be so deeply warped that you cease to trust yourself and come to rely on the perspectives of other people (such as doctors, parents, peers, romantic partners, colleagues, bosses, etc.) to organise your idea of yourself. You come to leave your image in the hands of fallible witnesses who can only operate from outside of who you really are. I know this, I’ve lived the mud of that self-anxiety and self-abandonment.
Estes, Clarissa P. “Do Not Lose Heart, We Were Made for These Times.” Daily Good, 13 Mar. 2020, www.dailygood.org/story/1538/do-not-lose-heart-we-were-made-for-these-times-clarissa-pinkola-estes/.
Rogers, Carl R. On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin, 1961.