On AUTHENTICITY and belonging

Like all of us, I am exhausted. These past couple of years have provided a seemingly endless stream of reasons to find ourselves mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually exhausted. 

Lately what I am most exhausted by is this “you can’t sit with us” mentality that seems to pervade everything, everywhere. I’m going to say this all in terms of we/us/our because in no way do I count myself exempt from these pitfalls and this incoherence.

I am exhausted by the demonizing and vilifying of everyone who does not share our views. I am tired of the reductionist approach of simply equating these folks or people in general with being intellectually or morally substandard. 

I am exhausted by the times I see us saying we are being vilified / oppressed / silenced only to have us turn around and do the same to others. 

I am especially exhausted by the moments I see us standing on our soapboxes calling for unity, imploring us all to adopt a more nuanced perspective and way of engaging with others that doesn’t equate to rejecting and abandoning others for any opinion or viewpoint they hold that might contradict our own and then, in the next breath claiming that anyone who doesn’t see this latest iteration of an issue our way is ‘asleep at the wheel’ or ‘isn’t paying attention’ or some other high-minded version of saying ‘if you don’t see it my way, you’re a moron’. 

Do we have to accept and tolerate harmful ideologies? No. Do we have to remain in close relationships when those remain untenable because the chasm is so vast and we are the only ones trying to bridge it? No. Do we have to martyr ourselves and override our values and beliefs to stay in every circle we’ve ever belonged to? No. Does it mean we forgo standards of decency, equity or justice? No. 

We are also entitled to every single one of our feelings that these times and these polarities invoke. We are entitled to our anger, our sadness, our rage, and our grief at what we see around us. We are entitled to our joy, our hope, our sense of solidarity and belonging.

Belonging doesn’t have to be unconditional, nor does it have to be so intensely fragile from the conditions we place upon it. 

But we are making belonging a commodity exchanged only for complete conformity to the group ideal - regardless of what groups we belong to. I have seen it time and again that groups/folks decrying the lack of nuance and the conformity of others to the mainstream narrative are often equally as likely to hold such rigid expectations of allegiance to the group ideals and ideologies. It feels like a wolf in sheep’s clothing to me and I am thoroughly exhausted by being presented with an “alternative” that is really smoke and mirrors. 

When we are holding so tightly to our rightness, and our group identity as such, it makes it nearly impossible for our viewpoints to evolve and change. It makes it inevitably lonely, holding so tightly to belief that we have no room hold each other. 

Sometimes silence isn’t censorship but simply a recognition that we cannot possibly have a complete and well rounded opinion on everything (despite social expectations that we should). It is also sometimes a recognition that not everything requires our particular input. Sometimes my silence and withdrawal from discussion has been this. Sometimes it has been because small children tend to disrupt your creative flow and stream of thoughts with their very real and pressing needs. 

However, has it also come from censoring myself these past couple years? Yes. Possibly more than I ever have at any other time in my life.

I have people I love, care about and respect looking at life as we currently know it from every possible angle and from every extreme. The level of intensity of feeling, emotional attachment to beliefs and the way belief adherence has been linked to group belonging, whether real or perceived, has frequently left me clammed up or choosing to shut down. Turns out when you have questions and concerns about the views or beliefs of every single circle you belong to it can result in a bit of a self expression stalemate. 

This experience has been exacerbated by, or perhaps just equally highlighted by, my journey into parenting, and the seemingly endless number of topics in parenting that are contentious, triggering or made into causes for blame and shame. From the ways we feed and clothe our babes, to the way we attend to their sleep, to the way we set boundaries and define discipline. 

So between every other issue and controversy we’ve collectively seen over the last two years and all that comes with new parenting I am not shocked to have found myself defaulting to this survival mode of keeping my head down, my mouth shut and just doing my thing quietly in my own space. 

It is no one’s responsibility but my own to manage the tension between these innate human needs of authenticity and belonging in myself. And also, these are hard, triggering times where all of our long held, sometimes buried, trauma patterns and wounded coping mechanisms are being brought to the surface and re-enacted constantly. This surge of periods of self-censorship oscillating with periods of truth outbursts we see and feel from ourselves and people around us are provoked by these competing needs that we all have. 

When our authenticity is threatened by our foundational need to belong being held so precariously on the knife’s edge of holding to the group’s tagline, is it any wonder so many of us feel either unable to express ourselves truthfully or unable to stop expressing ourselves? 

The more I watch this all unfold the more I think we need a previously inconceivable level of compassion for each other and ourselves. I am in no way an expert on trauma, merely a deeply interested person who has read a lot of books on the subject over the last 18 months, written by actual experts. These times and the expressions of thought and behaviour showing up all over the place (and I mean all over, even in circles where we think we’re quite well healed) seem to bear all the hallmarks of living from inside our trauma patterns and wounded coping mechanisms. If that is the case, it seems to me that we all need that unimaginably vast compassion for the way in which we are reflexively reacting from the places of our hurt to try and protect ourselves and our families. 

There is no one in my life I agree with one hundred percent. Not my family, not my husband, not my beloved teachers and guides. In fact, I think at this point in my life I would be suspicious if I did. So I know for certain that compassion is needed and that it is something that has to be exercised and practiced in the face of our disagreements.

I also know that it is harder to do the more contentious or personal the issue is or the more aggravating to our nervous system’s sense of safety and security it is. 

And we need it. My god, we need it. Because we are all exhausted. Exhausted from what it means to live through such upheaval, exhausted from what it is to simply be human, and also exhausted from carrying the weight of our anger, shame and judgement. 

So I’m making this my practice now because I don’t know any other way forward that will bring more coherence and connection back: To tell my truth in the right contexts and in meaningful ways, even as contradictory as it can be, and to rigorously engage my compassion for myself and other people, regardless of whether we agree. I fully expect to fail at this, to have to pause, tend to myself, recalibrate and start over again and again. And I choose to see that as a necessary part of the practice, of honing my way of being to be more supportive of both authenticity and belonging.