I've been thinking about the messiness and complexities of being human a lot lately.
I’ve been thinking about how society tries to teach us to see ourselves as anything but messy or complex, and how because of this, I’ve had to spend the last few years of my life in agony trying to comprehend all I never learned about society while being a Black girl growing in a small town with only white people. I could fill many newsletters when I think about the ways I gaslit myself into what I believed I had to do in order to be safe in white spaces. All the ways that I told myself that if I could only change that much more, do things a little more differently, be a little more like everyone else, maybe I would be enough and people would see me as I thought I could be. I’ll always be healing from all the ways I came to see myself as the problem and never once considered that what made life difficult at times could be due to the environment and systems around me instead.
I don’t think that I will ever be able to aptly put into words what it’s like to grow up afraid of everyone around you because you don’t look like them. Then learn that you should be afraid of the people who look like you, while clearly getting the message that people aren’t actually afraid of you though, they just don’t want to be you, at the same time. They don’t really like you, but if you keep trying to be agreeable, do what you’re told and don’t speak up too much, you just might be able to be seen as good enough. It’s almost as if you get the message that even though you’re never actually seen as human, if you worked at it hard enough, maybe someday you could be.
Only… it never seems to happen.
It’s strange that we grow up hearing that it’s OK to be different, but we learn that we must be the same. We hear that we are all human but none of us is ever truly allowed to be. So we are the ones who must change when we don’t quite measure up, but no one tells us that no change we make will ever be change enough. There is no middle ground either. We’re either wrong if we’re too different or right if we fit a very specific “checklist of just like everyone else.” Although no one is ever truly right enough, some of us learn quite quickly that we will always be seen as what is wrong. One thing I think we never really understood was that the more parts of who we are that we were told to hide, the more we rejected those hidden parts in order to cope with what it meant to be less than ourselves.
Less than human.
We learn to judge ourselves and compare ourselves to others in search of all that should be hidden, reducing us to fractions of who we used to be, all the while blaming ourselves for the ways we can’t fit the prescribed “only right way to be box”. Internalising voices that were never ours to begin with in hopes of finding the right combination that will allow us to hide what is bad, show what is good, and still somehow manage to be ourselves. But we can’t hide what we think is our “bad or unacceptable” without some of our “good and acceptable” being inaccessible to us at the same time.
I think that neurodivergent brains are wired to easily slip into binary ways of thought. We might be more apt to want to be ourselves when it comes to gender and sexuality and doing things in ways that work for us, but we also have nervous systems that are very sensitive to threats it senses around us too (whether real or imagined). Our brains are always hypervigilant to the discomfort we feel because any specific thing or situation might connect to something we’ve experienced that could mean danger for us. It wants to keep us safe and do so immediately.
Unlearning the idea that discomfort in our bodies somehow means that we must be wrong, and therefore must ignore or avoid it, is a tough reaction to sit with and get through. But without learning to discern whether we need to do what our body is saying or not, we will continue to struggle to make decisions that will support feeling safe enough to be ourselves. When we can’t find our unique ways to understand what we’re sensing in our bodies, how can we truly know what we really need to thrive?
[ID: Greyish cat with black stripes, wrapped up in a light grey blanket, looking unhappy. Graphics say: “When I'm trying to "lean into what I'm feeling with curiosity," but really I'm just judging myself cuz I'm probably doing it all wrong anyway.” Admittedly, this meme could be the topic of another newsletter, especially if you’re not aware of how judgement keeps us stuck and curiousity allows us to expand our thinking. End ID]
It's why I started learning more about somatic attachment therapy to better assist the people that I work with who are learning to reclaim their neurodivergent lives again. This society aims to separate our minds from our bodies so that we are following along with what is expected without asking ourselves if that is what we actually need. In the process, we continue to uphold structures in society that are the real harm to all of us. By reconnecting with our bodies again and learning to get comfortable with the discomfort we can start to take back our power and find our way back to ourselves.
Find our way back to our humanity.
Every day I’m relearning to be with more of the messiness of what it means for me to be human. I know that I have to find my own just right to humanise myself in a society that works to destroy and dehumanise me on a daily basis. I’m trying to integrate the traumas and pain of growing up conditioned to believe that it was OK to hate parts of myself or that convincing myself safety meant rejecting parts of who I am, at the same time. I’m learning to slow down, make more mistakes, practice some self-compassion and lean into trying to being a little more curious about what I’m thinking and feeling about myself rather than being so judgemental.
It’s a very slow process. It’s spirals, weaves and bends. It’s never lienar progress. It often feels like long, hard work, but it’s the work that helped me look in the mirror and finally start seeing glimpses of the person I once thought I could be again. There’s still so much I’ve lost or thought I could never be because of what I believed I was expected to be. But I’m slowly learning what might be possible and all that could be reclaimed when I bravely lean into what it means to just be myself.
How are you learning to see your humanity more? What judgements about yourself do you need to start getting more curious about so you can start to let them go? Let me know in the comments.