Cheesy once had a roommate who broke up with his girlfriend of six years. The girl had had a fit. Cheesy could hear her calling every night. One evening, Cheesy asked her roommate, “Is your ex okay?” And the roommate said, “Ah she’ll be fine, she just needs to go away for a while and find herself.” The roommate had said this as if “finding oneself” was the most obvious, self-explanatory course of action anyone could take.
But years later, the only thing Cheesy had found was how hard it was to find oneself. You can’t just pack your bags and say, “See ya folks, I’m going to find myself,” then come back a few months later and say, “Hey folks, I found myself. I was hiding in a cave in southern France. Now where were we?”
Something strange had happened, though. After a full fourteen months on the road, Cheesy’s mind had sort of caved in (pun intended). Previously, she had envisioned her life as a linear progression. One thing happens, then another. Past events were points on the line that could not be retraced. Every moment extended the line a bit further into the future.
But all of a sudden, Cheesy’s line had warped. It had split in two and bulged out, like an aneurysm. The bulge was overtaking the whole line. It was growing and stretching. Cheesy’s line was turning into a sphere.
Cheesy couldn’t be sure if the sphere was a sign of sickness or of health. Unrelated events in her life were becoming connected. Events from the past suddenly mattered in the present again. Everything was becoming unified – not coherent yet, but unified.
What’s more is that Cheesy was beginning to see that other people were spheres, too. People were not sequences of actions and attitudes. People did not consist of Side A and Side B, which could be flipped over like a cassette tape. People had infinite sides, kind of like a sphere. But to describe a sphere as having “sides” is misleading. It’s just a big blob where everything is interconnected. And people are like that. Cheesy realized you can’t selectively speak to one “side” of a person, which is what she had been doing all along. If you say something to a person, your voice reverberates throughout their whole sphere.
As a sphere, and not as a line, Cheesy realized she had always been just “one” person bouncing through the world. There was no divide between who she was ten years ago and who she would be in another ten. Actions, emotions, and thoughts were inextricably connected. You can change the course of your sphere’s roll, you can change the rhythm of its bounce. But the substance of the sphere comes from years of acting, emoting, and thinking. You can’t just toss your sphere away for a new one. Cheesy was essentially abandoning an existentialist view of human nature, in which we have no essence and are redefined continuously by the flow of our actions.
Now Cheesy was a bit behind. While everyone else had had plenty of time to get to know their spheres, Cheesy had only just discovered hers. In fact it had pretty much exploded in her face. She realized she could no longer “write off” events from other parts of her life. She couldn’t ignore things she’d said or opinions she’d had. She realized that the linear/existentialist view of life is a self-protection mechanism. If you say or do something that you’re not happy with, you can just write it off as a point on the line that you’ve already passed. You can’t change it, so forget it and move on. When you live in a sphere, everything you’ve done rolls back into your face at some point. There is no choice but to see and embrace everything. To Cheesy it was overwhelming.
Cheesy believed that many women live in a line, because they think it’s the only way to be strong and independent. Society says, “Strong women move on. Strong women push forward.” Every time a woman admits she’s hurt, she admits her weakness. She reveals herself as a sensitive, driveling stereotype who can’t accept that what’s done is done. The modern “strong woman” sees re-encounters with the past as a sign that she isn’t doing her job well. She opts for a linear life, where she able to run away from her demons instead of with them. Sure, she moves forward. But she doesn’t always move on.
Linear living perpetuates shame. Suppose Lady gets hurt. (Duh. Even REM knows that everybody hurts sometimes.) A strong woman is supposed to “cope.” So Lady feels ashamed at her pain. She also feels ashamed at the continuity of her pain, since a strong woman “moves on.” She hides the pain to maintain the strong-woman image. But then Lady feels ashamed that she’s lying to herself. And she’s ashamed that she’s ashamed, because a strong woman is “confident.” She can’t go back and deal with things, since she is now “moving forward.” Indeed Lady has moved forward straight into the jaws of self-loathing.
Cheesy’s friend once worked in a women’s shelter. There she’d learned what strength and independence are really about: overcoming shame by becoming genuine. Cheesy realized that linear living was not the way to go. Only in a sphere can one connect with oneself and confront oneself. Only spheres can bounce back. Cheesy admired the incredible bravery of men and women who lived in spheres. In the end, seeing spheres was probably a sign of health.
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Cheesy feels uncomfortable writing acknowledgements, first because each person who inspires her deserves an homage and not just a crappy list-mention, second because she fears accusations of favouritism, and third because it’s totally pretentious to write acknowledgements for our blog. But to honour a special request, our friend Emma got the ball rolling by introducing us to the following lecture about vulnerability: www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html. By the way, whoever TED is, Cheesy and I are love-stricken. Though we intend to guard him jealously until our dying day, you can get to know him better through the link at the top of this blog page.
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