Last week I got to see Florence + The Machine for the first time, a band that I’ve been pretty nearly obsessed with for a long time. Florence Welch was an angel, filling up the stadium so effortlessly with a voice that soothed a primal need for validation I didn’t know I had. Even from the nosebleeds, I could see quite clearly that we were kindred spirits. After a week of feeling stuck under my own raincloud she broke down the barricades of emotional suppression I had built up for myself in one fell swoop, and then there was no going back. There was something about the way she moved, so joyfully uninhibited, that awakened a dormant free spirit that I had almost forgotten about. That fearless little girl inside of me who lived for cartwheels and frolicking in the sun was told one too many times to settle down, and so she did. For a while, anyway.
I trained myself to restrain myself because that’s what I thought mature people did. It was certainly what young women did, and good students, and professional employees… It was certainly what the role models in my life appeared to do. The churchgoers, the teachers, the coaches, and all of my peers who were far too cool to act their age. I was lucky to have parents that encouraged imaginative play, but my community enforced that the place for such a thing was not in public. I replaced my hyperactivity with stoicism, a much more socially admirable way of dealing with inner dis-ease. There seemed to be something so noble about having a large amount of restraint; it seemed fundamentally human, even. As I grew older I began to learn to move only deliberately, and only when necessary. I conserved my energy and then spent a lot of it in front of the TV, where the fragile identities I clung to were reinforced over and over again by the media. And soon they began to become narrower… kids had to be fashionable, women had to be skinny, boys had to be assertive cause girls couldn’t be. And I began to learn it was my job to suppress that elated inner child that so desperately wanted to come out and play. It was the only way to focus, and focus was the ideal of ideals.
In our culture individuality is wrapped in identity, and identity is totally dependent on focus. All throughout school I was told to zero in on the things that made me tick, and then obsess over them. I should weed out all of the stuff that I’m not great at, give up on it, and embrace only a couple of things that I should be great at. The first thing I was good at was being a girl, and my self esteem relied so heavily on it that I wouldn’t even associate with colors that weren’t designated for me. I was great at embodying some of the best feminine qualities, so identifying strongly with my gender made me feel stable. But in the long run, of course, this created some real problems, especially when I fell in love with another girl.
Oh no, what a masculine thing to do. Boys had been falling in love with girls since the beginning of time, that was the way the world worked, and now I felt like my identity as female was compromised. My friends in middle school started to call me butch, and I hated it so much. When my hair was short I once walked into the girls restroom and had some kids tell me I was in the wrong one… very silly, but it was enough to profoundly affect my self concept. That ‘butch’ identity wasn’t right for me because I thought it meant I wasn’t desirable, I wasn’t sexual, I wasn’t a normal woman. I was other, and I hated that. My identity wasn’t right, so for a time I even hated myself.
What a tragic phase of insanity I went through. Thank goodness I can now see what a narrow concept ‘identity’ is, and how limiting our labels can be. The societal rules of my identity as female allowed me a lot of options, but it kept me from accessing so much of my self. It made me vulnerable, because all those rules were just bound to be broken. So how can I be more expansive, how can I nurture all of the personas that I have been neglecting my whole life, and what does Florence Welch have to do with all of this? Well, she (and her openers, Lizzo and St. Vincent) showed me how to obliterate my identities.
In that concert stadium, time stood still. I was in bliss, and everyone around me was in bliss, especially the performers. Flo asked us to fall in love with a stranger, hold hands with the people next to us, and link up to the universal energy in the room that was pure magic. It was reverse individuation, I could feel myself dissolving into the crowd and at the same time having a deep sense of knowing that I was exactly where I needed to be. I had previously been so focused on my outward purpose and my outward place in society, that I forgot the first world I inhabit is my own body. Before I answer to anyone else in my life, I answer to my self, and all of the healing that needs to be done is internal. What rules and restrictions did I put up for myself, and how did they serve me? They served to limit me, and that’s about it.
I have now decided to identify first with my inner rebel for the time being, it’s a lot of fun. Definite destination will be the death of me, and it has been suffocating my creative process for far too long. Any time I sit down and write with an ulterior motive, my words suffer the consequences. But I have only just started playing with stream of consciousness writing for the first time, and it is awesome. Sometimes it makes no sense, but then all of a sudden a whole line will stand alone, and it won’t matter what is said before or after that line, because the words are so imbued with a kind of presence. If nothing else I get to watch my untamed fingers dance across the keyboard in that weird geographic motion that I haven’t seen since I was a kid… I’m frolicking through the pages again! I can’t type correctly to save my life, but damnit these fingers can play.
I feel like my true self, whatever that means. She used to seem elusive, but once I realized that I am her always, life has become way less dramatic. I can be so many different things at one time and be whole, what a revelation. I am so far from perfect. Even when I am sweet grounded well rested Laura, I am not completely severed from the exhausted, frustrated, emotional Laura that shows up on a monthly or maybe daily basis. She shows up and I see her and embrace her. Impatient Laura is a bit more of a dominant persona than I’d like, but I can’t just tell her to go away because she never will. She’ll always be in here and I will always have access to her and sometimes that will be exactly what I need. As long as I don’t lose sight of those other Lauras, then they are never out of reach.
Embodying that change is the hardest part, because so often we want to deny aspects of ourselves that contradict our identities. We build up the qualities that serve our identity and block out all the naysayers (even the ones in our own head) because otherwise we have no ground to stand on. This is what our egos tell us, but they don’t have our best interest at heart because they aren’t us. They are a projection of us, a picture of us, a piece of us… but not us. If we keep on living our lives to serve our egos then we might never be satisfied. Being is not something that can be chased; you do it now, or you miss out.
I have been able to ask people in my community to support me in my transitions and I feel so privileged. When I am feeling spread out thin and I can’t be a caretaker any more, sometime I get to just decide to be something else. Party girl! Or maybe I’m stuck in an archetype, a pesky one for me is The Socially Awkward Fool. Well, I’ll just make myself known! By saying: I’m the socially awkward one right now. But it’s when I see people smile at that, laugh even, and accept me, that the profound transformation happens. I’m so allowed to be the awkward one that I notice I am not even being it anymore, and not even trying. There is no restriction, no being without, no sense of lack. I am held in my imperfection by the people I love and I see that I always have been.
I am just feeling so lucky to have been lead to such an understanding this summer, I did not get here alone. I have witnessed so much beauty in the various life-affirming rituals I have taken part in. I’ve been at my best and I’ve been at my worst, and I have been loved. I have learned to take from others without depleting their energy, and I have learned to give without draining mine. I am not the famous writer/self-actualized outdoorsman extraordinaire that my youth aspired to be, but I no longer want that and my inner child is happy. Doesn’t that break the system?
Shoutout to Eckhart Tolle 🙂
Rove & Ponder 