Staying and facing yourself.
These words have been ringing in my head since I heard them last April:
“No matter where you go you just keep running into yourself.
Escaping isn’t the crazy and brave thing to do. Staying and facing yourself is.
And I know. I once said it too: ‘You only live once. Don’t be a hero. Take the money and run.’ But geography won’t make the blank page go away. Every place I’ve lived no matter how nice it is you always wind up looking for Neverland again. Whether I wake up stateside or in an anonymous Dutch country town, I have to wake up as me, in this body, wearing this face, with the same questions: Who are you? What are you doing here? What will you do now?” — Baron Ryan of American Baron.
“Escaping isn’t the crazy and brave thing to do. Staying and facing yourself is.”
I’ve never lived alone until this year, and let me tell you, it’s been more discombobulating than I thought it would be.
In the saturated alone time of the last several months, I realized how much I overestimated my tolerance for swimming in the pool of my own thoughts and the silence of my own quiet. The surface of the water of my surroundings has never been this consistently still. As a result, my reflection has never been more painfully sharp, and most days, I have to strong-arm myself into looking.
Previously, in living with others, I’d escape when the turbulence inside my head got to be too much. I’d hatch a plan of disappearance, vanishing from those around me to find solace in solitude. I’ve had friends across the chapters of my life comment on this saying, “Where do you go every Sunday?” and “I see you sometimes go off on your own. What are you doing?”
I thought I was escaping from people, but perhaps, I was escaping from me too. But in living alone, it’s gotten harder and harder to preoccupy myself with the buzz and noise of those around me or avoid my churning mind. My inner voice is taking the opportunity to speak louder than ever before, and my challenge is to develop the kindness to validate it by listening as well as the tolerance to stay with it when it’s saying things I don’t want to hear.
Author Melody Beattie talks about how the environment around us is not what’s most important. What’s most important is “the home inside of ourselves and how that home feels...” This idea of crafting the home inside yourself, inside your soul, body, and mind to be a sanctuary you can land day after difficult day, I’m convinced is a big, fat key to life.
You have you. Every day, you wake up with you. You are the common denominator in every single equation of your life. No one else can live your life for you. No one else is qualified to be who you are, give what you have to give, and live the life you have. “You are your longest-running commitment” as this creator put it.
The alternative to facing yourself is to keep running, distracting, avoiding, and filling the sinister self void with clutter, noise, and other people, but I believe it’s true that “no matter where you go you just keep running into yourself” as Ryan put it.
Regardless of our surroundings, life circumstances, all the milestones we’ve met, and all the ones we haven’t, the greatest gift I can give myself is to not run, to stay with my thoughts no matter how much they scare me, and to learn how to love and care for myself well. Every single asset I own is wrapped up in this 5’ 2” body, this curly-headed noggin, and this pumping heart.
“Escaping isn’t the crazy and brave thing to do. Staying and facing yourself is,” and I’m trying to live crazy and brave.