It's been awhile since my last episode. I've been reflecting on my postings thus far. What I've realized is that our early experiences do create fundamental frames - narratives - stories around which we continue to shape the deep sense of who we are. Our identity - myself - who I really am. Therapies such as cognitive therapy can really help us to find broad stories - schemas. It was no surprise to find that a fundamental story around which I organized my senses of self was the 'abandoned child'.
Finding this out in my adult life was indeed a revelation and has since been a key source of my own healing. But... change, deeper change is much harder. One would think that trauma, disturbing experiences would not be places of comfort, and of course they are not in any conventional sense.
We all know about the idea of imprinting - a baby duck imprint the idea of 'mother' on the first moving object/being it sees. That become its mother and it follows it everywhere. In the same way early experiences become 'organized' as a story - a narrative that becomes our context. It's as if our narrative is a dynamic all surrounding film in which we are always the focal point - the star, even if we are a type of marginal or supporting character actor.
Finding out how how early experiences shape a story that we used to solidify or form a centre of gravity that is our sense of self. And as traumatic and distressing as that narrative is - it becomes the sense of self with which we are 'comfortable'. This doesn't mean it is a pleasant sort of comfort, instead it's like a sense of where we are our 'authentic or true' self. It it familiar territory where we feel like a native.
There is a paradox. The motivation to undertake the process of exploring ways to change or heal ourselves arises becomes for reasons our life as we make it and as we experience it is not just working but somehow keeps recreating some sort of suffering. But the core of the paradox is the deep discomfort with stepping outside of that strange attractor of our patterns constructed by our narrative self. To truly change involves becoming an alien to ourselves for long enough, intense enough to replace our 'imprinted' narrative patterns.
As an example, think about how hard it is for us to break bad habits and how easy it is to fall back into them. It is as if the is a type of comfort, familiarity that re-minds us about who we are.
To entrench good habits means we must make them who we are on an unconscious level - where our body and unthinkingness feels native.
When I began my job in the government I was thrilled and filled with anxiety. It was the first job where I felt I had been hired because I was smart - and I was completely fearful about 'when they would find out' - that I wasn't the person/capability they had hired - that I would fail to meet their expectations. Maybe on a deeper level I was fearful that I would be abandoned. Now I think this was the discomfort of having moved into 'alien territory' - a territory where I was expected to be a native while I really felt I was an immigrant.
This September, I will have worked for the government for 24 years - in many ways I am more comfortable with being a 'smart person' but I still feel deeply like an immigrant - still an alien in a strange land. I have become a 'known alien' one that has been able to form some sort of comfortable habitat in this environment. But I still struggle with the 'imposter syndrome' in the sense that I feel I'm unlike the other. Then again, I think everyone is also a curious anomaly.
I have for a while described myself as 'organizationally disabled' as a way to explain myself - to justify myself or to excuse my weirdness. Today, walking home I realized that in the context of bureaucracy (as a Kafka-esque arcaneness) - the context of being a 'scientist in a science organization' with the expectation of having achieved a sort of basic mastery of administrative competence - that I am suffer something that is more like organizational autism. That I am 'unable to see' (not individual emotional signals) but the political signals of bureaucratic life. What I have recreated in my career is a sort of 'abandoned child career' within the bureaucracy. I have never been able to lose that abandonment 'accent'.
However, what I have done is transform this narrative into a more useful and healthy form. By becoming a 'futurist' a 'foresight' research/expert I remain totally 'outside the box' - in fact I have been introduced as - 'here's John, you've heard of someone thinks outside the box - John doesn't know where the box is'. Many people have remarked that they are 'happy' that someone like me is part of the organization. This truly is a compliment - a real acknowledgement of my uniqueness and the importance of the different contribution that I make to the 'whole'. Yet - I continue to feel that I've never been understood - that I anyone has grasped how best to 'use me and my particular intelligence/capability/skills'.
The metaphor of my career is the David Bowie song with the line, "Ground control to Major Thom". I have always felt like Major Thom at the very end of a very fragile tether, a ethereal connection to the broader purposes of everyone around me. And in a very complex way - this is where I have been comfortable - where I've felt I am my 'authentic self'. What I have done in my career is transform the narrative 'abandoned child' (conflated with the isolated male archetype) into a more positive and 'comforting' strange attractor that - gravitates around this alien uniqueness - this 'high performing' organizational autism.
In the end - I know I have to continue on this path of self-transformation. And in some way I have to step up to and embrace the expectations of some sort of organizational competence. This is deeply uncomfortable. But that is the whole point - real change of self - can never be an experience of comfort - an experience where we feel that we are in our 'native territory'. Real change of self must always be an experience of immigration to new territories of self. Is it a surprise - that one of the most popular lines of the 20th century - anticipating a future that is everpresent is "to boldly go, where no man has gone before". This is line is a paradox as well - highlighting in its word a truth - yet comforting in its stories - for Kirk always remained Kirk. The truth of change is the experience of emigration from the known territories of self and immigration into alien unknown territories of possible new selves. Selves that we are not comfortable with or even can know before we learn to inhabit.
This is what the modern man fears - this is deeply part of the the fear of men.
