When I walk my dogs on the trails, I often fall down a tricky rabbit hole. It’s a mental drama in which some fellow hiker confronts me about whether I am cleaning up after my dogs. I then set fire to precious time coming up with ways to prove to this imaginary busybody that I am responsible. I will show them the bag of bags I carry! Yes, and what tone I should strike with them? Indignant? Bemused? Blasé? Would they be convinced? Would I be let go with a look that says, “OK, but we’re watching you.”? I feel quite high and mighty if I just happen to have a little bag of poop on hand that I can wield like a VIP pass before this self-appointed hall monitor of the hiking trail. “Well, what do you have to say about this!” I picture myself dangling it in the air between us.
It’s a spirit-diminishing reverie.
And it is a rotten and poisonous little fruit, the harvest of a lifetime of thinking there’s something wrong with me, that I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing, and I don’t belong anywhere. It can pop up anywhere. Like at a store, where I wonder if someone will think I’m shoplifting. There’s an extra twisted and bitter one attached to this website. All the Tara Brach, Kristin Neff, and Brené Brown in the world is helpless before this florid case of imposter syndrome.
When I catch myself in this fugue state, I’ll try to make the shift into awareness, where I become a witness to this suffering I’m creating for myself. I’ll watch the brainworm unfurl, pay attention to how I react to it, notice how small it makes me feel. I ask why, in this absurd scenario, it feels so obvious to me that some fellow hiker would have the authority to see my papers, so to speak, and that I should debase myself to produce them for inspection. Why do I feel I should answer for my being here in a way that I don’t believe others should? Why do I concoct implausible scenarios that just scratch wounds into soft, new days?
I know the answer to that question. It’s a long and tedious one that lots of people know well: a childhood of not belonging and having that fact made mortifyingly plain by those who were responsible for me. Then, naturally, continuing to make it mortifyingly plain to myself when there was no one else there to do it for me. That must be what I’m doing on the hiking trail — telling myself a story about how someone could come along and let me know that they carry the authority of belonging and I do not.
The gurus of self-compassion would point out that I would never consider another child of god on this planet unworthy of taking up a little space in a public park. (And, though they wouldn’t put it quite like this, isn’t it massively egotistical to believe that I ALONE am unworthy? I mean, what a narcissist.)
In recent weeks I have been gently prodding at how perhaps I could find some meaning in the sense that I am an interloper from no-man’s land. Could I learn to see that fruit as a kind of organic puzzle box, concealing the magical seeds of creativity and authenticity. The inkling was sparked when I shared a picture on Facebook that I had just taken on my daily hike. It’s of a decomposing stump, covered in mushrooms, with pine sapling growing out of it. I captioned it with something like “I wish Shel Silverstein had done a sequel to The Giving Tree.” The ensuing discussion with friends inspired me to revisit his work, which was so important to me when I was a kid. It was important because it was weird and ugly, and I felt weird and ugly. But it was exuberantly, joyfully weird and ugly, so that it was transcendent. It felt like the key to a place I wanted to get into.
That feeling his work gave me was so powerful when I was a child that, returning to it decades later, it swiftly breached the surface intact. Shel Silverstein had my rapt attention a lifetime ago, and now I get why. His work was fruit of the no mans land. It’s raggedy, but it’s sweet, somehow both wild and lovingly cultivated. He made it his. Meanwhile, in my no mans land, nothing is tended to. I sprinkled it with shame and longed to get out, so it has become overgrown with these bitter, mealy daydreams and self-debasing habits of mind.
I can feel the allure of allowing this insight to produce another mean little fruit, “You wasted your entire life; you squandered this gift, you dummy. You don’t have time to do anything with it, now that you’re old.” And, “Everyone already knows this, you know. Get your shit together.” The hook is seductive. I can’t remember which one of the gurus suggested this approach, but I will welcome this mean little fruit to come along with me, if it wants, as I turn around and walk back into the no mans land. But it’s going to have to bring up the rear, this time.
Ilse Thompson 