▒ Thread-letter: Paddling Your Own Canoe

What is your one and only directive? What is your urgent and ongoing practice?

Dear reader,

It’s a thread-letter day. I would love for this letter to spark sharing and conversation within this very Unsupervised community. Leave a comment directly, or respond to another reader’s comment and talk to somebody new.

✦ What is your one and only directive?

✦What is your urgent and ongoing practice?

✦What do you want the ways that you feel different to know?

Allow me to explain.

Once upon a winter’s eve, my nine landmates and I joined together on the sofas for the house meeting we share together every Tuesday. The fire crackled as spoons scraped the bottoms of bowls, previously filled with yet another delicious soup from Haley.

Things were going well, and the conversation slid down our agenda from item to item with ease. The idea of the ranch functioning as a last minute venue for a live music event over the weekend was brought up. I voiced my opinion and vetoed the the idea immediately. But then I found it extremely difficult to let other people voice their opinions, mostly because they differed from mine. I felt chill, until suddenly I didn’t anymore.

I should know by now that the times when I’m walking around like I’m wearing a gown with a sequined, twenty-foot train of serenity and gratitude unfurling behind it are also the times when my shadow is most likely to come out. Gotcha!

I notice that when I feel like I’m an outlier in a group, I’m especially susceptible to taking things personally. It happens when I feel like I’m the only one being protective, mindful, or safe, even though it isn’t true. It happens when I feel like I’m the one saying no, while everybody else seems positive, worry-free, and says yes. Deviating from group consensus feels threatening, and even though I can intuit the truth and confidence behind my differing opinion, I still experience a frenzied panic for having it.

It’s as though I’m on one side of the shore, and everybody else is on the other side, looking confused. But they aren’t confused because of my opinion — on the contrary, everybody in this house is generally open to hearing all sides, including mine. In this case, everybody is confused over why I’ve started shutting down just because I’ve outed myself as wanting something different. I feel attacked for being different, and that’s because I am being attacked — by me.

I am used to feeling apologetic or problematic for who I am. I have often felt like a “Different Problem” for the people I’ve been surrounded by. During adolescence and my early twenties, my mother theatrically described me to others as her “little militant!” in front of me. She pretended it to be loving, but I could sense that she was annoyed by and scared of my shrewd discernment and overall dissent. I don’t want to be this way, but you leave me no choice! I wanted to shout back.

What my mother’s teasing failed to acknowledge was that my readiness to assert myself in combat was my way to compensate for not being protected by her. I had not asked to carry the burden of being able to say “no” in a way that unsettled people, but as a child, it didn’t take me long to realize that learning to do so would save my life.

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Feeling like an outcast from the group dynamics I perceive around me is a sensation so raw, I become blind to the morsel of possibility that not only am I not an outcast, but the traits that set me up to feel like one are perhaps my greatest offerings. I’m insecure that people will see me as a negative, no-saying stinker, but what if my “no’s” are what make me a cautious and protective friend, one who is sensitive to the individual needs of a group and sees a nuanced energetic picture?

Similarly, I’m afraid that my differences will leave me all alone, but have I ever regretted paddling my own canoe? I wonder sometimes if other people are just hiding from the place of people-pleasing and are not actually offering their truths. It is an easier, more agreeable, and “friend-filled" life perhaps, but when given a choice, I prefer the consequences of airing my differences over the consequences of my pretending.

Let’s consider for a moment that my current offering to a group is not actually a gift of mine or an offering that anybody wants. Imagine that my system does need updating, and that both the tribe and I would benefit from an outdated or uninformed opinion of mine being spruced. It is still not an ugly problem for me to have held the opinion or feeling in the first place. Just because something might need editing or refining is no reason not to share it.

When I let go of the drive to internalize differing opinions as a sign that I need to change or that I’m wrong and not well liked, all that’s left is the task of being me. What if that was my one and only directive? I suspect I could let other people be more of themselves, too.

My main directive is to share my opinion without shame, and to let it rest “out there” while others think what they’re going to think. Basing my self-acceptance on the acceptance of others is even riskier than it sounds, because who I am surrounded by might actually be totally random at best, or a negative influence at worst. I must remember whose opinions I use to mold my own.

My main directive is the urgent and ongoing practice of being comfortable in my own skin — not to trying to control other people’s perception of me. If I am not comfortable in my skin, I have nothing to offer a group anyway.

I suppose it will be lifelong, learning to be proud of or at least okay with my differences, and not crumbling in the moments I am reminded of them.

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I want to hear from you. I’d like you to imagine whatever you’d most like to shout from a New York City rooftop or from the tippy top of a mountain and into the abyss of nature.

What are you most needing to remember in order to be kinder to yourself right now?

✦ What is your one and only directive, right now?

✦What is your urgent and ongoing practice?

✦What do you want the ways that you feel different to know?

Surprise: you can have more than one.

My one and only directive is ________!

My urgent and ongoing practice is ________!

Being different like ________ is ________ but I wouldn’t want to change it because _________.

Love,

Anna