I walked into the kitchen and there was a very still lizard with no tail. On closer look, the place where the tail had dropped from, likely having to do with the cat, was severed and bloody, so I knew this creature had been through something moments before we met. I picked them up and put them outside on the earth in the sun. They squinted their eyes, and next time I checked they were gone. Later, I felt blessed to find the tail, to put it in a jar with salt and shake it up. This creates Lizard Tail Salt. The frequency of releasing and letting go infuses into the salt. I’ve been eating a tiny bit each day.
The ability to drop appendages is known as autotomy, or self-amputation. The specifics that interest me about this survival mechanism is that it works because of space.
My friend who first gave me Lizard Tail Salt for my birthday over a decade ago told me about an article in the New York Times, The Paradox of the Lizard Tail, Solved. Jack Tamisiea presents what scientists have figured out regarding the microscopic structures that make this survival skill possible. While I felt fear and anger that they coaxed lizard’s tails with their fingers for the research, I was interested to know the mechanism. “At a microscopic scale, (scientists) could see that each fracture where the tail had detached from the body was brimming with mushroom-shaped pillars…(which) were adept at releasing built-up energy…filled with minuscule gaps, like tiny pores and spaces between each mushroom cap.” These voids, also called nano-pores, absorb energy and allows the tail to hit a balance between “firm and fragile,” “adhesion and detachment.”
So, it is with the purpose of reactivating the technology of my own voids, to find that perfect balance, that I eat the salt every day.
More recently, the specific purpose of eating the salt, along with a number of other energetic tools and a commitment to observation and research of my thought-ware, is to release my own tall tale, one I’ve been carrying around with me for decades to “survive.”
The story is that of belonging, or not belonging.
Both stories, I now see clearly, are blocks to my evolution.
The word belonging in and of itself, be and longing, gives my mental body a hint into what is happening when I believe the story and come to the conclusion that I do or do not belong.
To be longing accurately describes what it is like to arrive into a space with a group of people, small or large, and scan for ways in which how and what I am, bring, say and do either fits, or does not fit. To be longing implies a reaching, a gap that needs to be bridged between myself and others, and the bridge up to now I’ve built is one of adaptation and changing to meet what I perceive are the needs of the space. To be longing implies a lack. It is to stretch across a divide for something I do not have, in order to feel safe and satisfied. Simply put, it’s a strategy and response seeded in old stuff that I’m beginning to unpack.
Growing up in a tiny evangelical Christian community, a few blatant things played out. For one, we were sinners and needed Jesus to give us salvation and purpose here on Earth. Immediately I was taught that humans were inherently sinful, unable to save ourselves, and my center, any bit of creative power, was forced away or given away, through this grand and damning narrative. In addition, everything outside of this community was considered bad and wrong, where we were “of God” and everyone else was “of the world.” The story was very much that we do not belong in the world, unless we are there solely to do the work to convert others to the path. I grew up judging, though nobody called it judging due to the bible verse “judge not lest you be judged.” I grew up believing that others were going to hell and I was going to heaven. I created a sort of superiority complex right off the bat.
I also remember being told we were outsiders in the world, and that is the way God intended it to be. Their road was a wide and widely acceptable one. We were on the straight and narrow, the more unique and harder to travel road.
Within my own family structure as well, I was reading signs outside of myself, as children do, for finding my value and place. I stayed nice and sweet, often stopped feelings from arising other than joy and sadness, having learned that crying uncontrollably sometimes got me what I wanted. There was a fear instilled through corporal punishment about acting outside of the commandments, and I see how I decided early on to adapt to the surroundings I was in. I learned how to compartmentalize and hide things that did not align with what I thought or knew would be seen as good. This binary of “us” and “them,” “good” and “bad,” and “acceptable” and “not acceptable” is a thought-ware that stuck and extended into my adulthood.
In soccer I was constantly evaluated, and as I got to higher levels I was always aware that I was being evaluated. I loved practice because I could play the sport I adored with no pressure from the outside. Games could go either way. I can still remember specifics of doing things to impress, like knowing college coaches were sitting in tiny chairs and sprinting to slide tackle the forward just inches away from where they sat. This kind of thing “worked,” and I played at the highest level possible until I was 28 and tore my third acl. Aging out with injury was so difficult for me, in that I’d given my purpose to being dedicated and it was a huge part of my personality. Even in this sport, I would often be focussed on how coaches interacted with me, how they saw me, and I’d plummet into insecurity when I didn’t get the validation I expected and “needed.” I pushed my body way beyond, likely due to believing that while playing soccer, I “belonged.” Belonging, in this case, related to me being good at the thing.
I ask myself, what am I’m feeling when I play this internal belonging not belonging game, and energetically invite other’s into this game they may or may not know anything about?
I feel fear going into spaces that I might not be liked, will be judged, will not be accepted. The unconscious fear that I’m attempting to make conscious is more than simply not be accepted; it spans to worry that I won’t be paid enough attention to, what I say will not matter, what I bring will not be valued, and that I won’t be perceived as unique and wonderful and talented and undeniably needed and wanted.
This fear is not simply a feeling, which I believe is a neutral energy that arises to take care of things in the small now/the present moment, it is an emotion. The distinction is that an emotion sticks around, aka doesn’t go away even once it is expressed, until I go in and find its point of origin and feel fully what I didn’t feel at the time. One way I do this is through something called an Emotional Healing Process.
The emotion of fear attached to the story of not belonging comes from decisions I made long ago that:
I am separate from the world, and,
my value is based on what other people see in me, how they respond to and think about me.
When I look back over my life, I’ve been pushing this fear down for decades. It’s been “easy” to figure out my value by evaluating what I see outside of me in the people I am around. I now understand that I act this out in two distinct ways:
In one iteration, I scan a space and do what I can to figure out what will make me acceptable. This has looked a lot of shape shifting ways, and I at one time prided myself in this capability to read the room and become what would work. I believed that being adaptable was not only necessary, but a super power.
In high school I prided myself, internally of course, that I had many groups of friends and that as a high level athlete, I was taken in by the older “popular” aka “clique” of girls at my school, which somehow made me desirable as a friend to the “popular” group in my own grade. I never acted in any way that would make me less likable, andI did, at times, feel superior to others. I have to admit that I was scanning constantly my high school for who was who, and what was what, and that I felt validated in how many people chose to “keep me around.”
Some of the things I was doing to stay accepted were giving people long massages on the bus rides to and from soccer games, (who wouldn’t want to be massaged for hours), and later, cooking feasts and hosting parties. The ways I extended myself, the ways I went over the top (like the pulling my shirt up on a Main Street while walking around at night with my friends to be seen as wild, that resulted in us getting chased by a carful of aggressive men and one of my friends fell in a hole and sprained her ankle, or how I’d do anything on a dare, like eating a worm at soccer practice for a dollar), and the ways I knew how to be shy in other circumstances to be seen as a good girl, was all based in a constant internal, and exhausting process: looking for what would result in acceptance and attention.
The drama with boys began early as well, and it became an unconscious goal to get as many boys to want to date me as possible, because them wanting to be with me, or even just have sex with me, meant I was desirable, pretty, cool, and valued. In college and beyond, often with the support of substances, from alcohol to legal forms of speed to allergy meds to pain killers to psychedelics, I could be the most outlandish jokester in the room or at a dinner table, perhaps teasing or perhaps just being blunt and confident, in order to be liked and fit and be validated by how others react to me.
In the second iteration, I might initially try these things, try to make an impression first in subtle ways to feel out the space, and then I sit back and stay quiet once the standards of a group seem impossible to break into. I will then either judge and become superior in how much of an outsider I am due to their exclusionary ways or inability to connect, or inferior, resulting in me turning inward, isolating, telling myself I’m inept, don’t know how to be, and holding back completely or leaving.
Sometimes, I have been so in my head, that I evaluate an interaction line for line. I say something or act something out, and if it lands in the space with laughter or affirmation, I experience bliss and confidence. If it doesn’t, I am defeated.
This, I now see, is The Theatre Of Belonging, as one of the space-holders I’ve been training with calls it. An insidious game I’ve invited people close and people not so close to me into, where your affirmations are my gold and your lack of affirmation is my poison. If you validate me and tell me I’m a pivotal member, I’ll stick to you like glue and do all the things you think are me, in order to continue to please and be held close by the “family.” I’ll cook and clean and carry everything to the beach and back. I’ll get drunk and dance on a table to bring attention to me and us. I’ll be a bitch to someone you don’t like. I’ll sprint back and forth to the car to put more money in the meter to be the hero. I’ll laugh and listen and love you and myself when I’m around you. I’ll push myself beyond energetic limits, and become exhausted of the charade, then potentially begin to resent you for the ways you expect me to be.
And if you don’t seem to care one way or the other if I leave or stay, if you don’t pay attention to the ways I’m flipping upside down to impress what I perceive as you, I’ll demonize you as someone unkind, or more likely, tell myself I’m an outsider and that I do not know how to be here with you. That I do not belong. I’ll shut down. I’ll got away feeling insecure about how alone I am. Perhaps, in extreme circumstances, I’ll watch you from afar via social media with a furrow on my brow comparing myself to you, to your group of friends, and create a hierarchy trying to figure out if my people are as successful and creative and interesting as your people. I will be in a mental war with you that you know nothing, and care nothing, about. While you continue to Live your actual life, make music, take alluring photographs, write and share poetry and intelligent or heart felt posts, I’ll make part of my Life about being a victim to you and your “tribe,” and write you off as exclusive.
Up to this point my scanner has been looking for evidence to collect that some places are the places for me, and other places create aversion. That some people are my people, and other people are not.
What I now see is that all of the belonging story relates to dissatisfaction with myself and lack of clear purpose, and has nothing to do with other people.
The awareness came when I was doing this theatre in a space of people dedicated to feeling fully, radical responsibility, transformation, and creating next culture ways to communicate with one another. I was hitting rock bottom in the space, like I didn’t really know who I was, or have a purpose there, since I’d been trying to gain approval through all my usual tactics and none of them seemed to get the kind of results I was seeking. In fact, people were giving me the feedback that they were coming upon someone with a mask, and that they were finding it challenging to relate to my being.
I wasn’t “GOOD” at this.
I was becoming more and more silent, afraid to speak up or participate, and my scanner was fully activated in convincing me I didn’t know how to engage with these people anymore. Other people were doing it right, I was doing it wrong. The space holders liked them and not me. I became a victim of the space, and I wanted to run away and hide.
In this game world of Possibility Management, this is called the swamp. I became conscious of how incompetent I was at taking and incorporating feedback, and how to be aware of my feelings and express them.
What I got to see, by finally sharing with a few people what I was going through, another space-holder gave me a potent list of possibilities for me to try, that I’ve been using my Life force energy for striving for something outside to say to me: Yes, you fit here. This “pick me” story became thick and heavy and sticky, and I wove it into the fabric of the illusion called my personality. So much stretching to be seen and heard and understood and accepted by this group or that, and then so much isolation when my charade was no longer working.
From here, I began this research, and am dedicated to remain in the research and practice indefinitely, with no goal for me to fix something, only for me to practice showing up in spaces with what I want to create. For me the experiment is, how do I step into my purpose? The answer is that I practice new things.
For one, I’m practicing keeping my center by holding clarity with conscious anger. When I do this, the story that I could or couldn’t belong dissolves. In the same way, I’m practicing speaking about my fears of relating and connecting. When I do this, relating seems to happen organically, even if it is relating about not knowing exactly how to relate.
I am also making a new decision, but it’s not a spiritually bypassing mantra, like “I belong to myself,” or “I find my own sense of belonging.”
My decision is to delete the word “belonging” from my dialectic, and upgrade the thought-ware through consistent attention to when I’m giving my worth to someone or something outside of me. One thing I am now on constant lookout for is any time I’m trying to prove myself to others, in conversation or action. I also look for when competition creeps in, or I compare myself to others. I have begun to notice myself when I’m speaking or acting to appease others, rather than be with them, being to being. These are all versions of enmeshment, so I attend co-dependence anonymous to stay committed to enmeshment dissolution.
When I notice it, I state it or write it down.
When I notice it, I tell myself those stories are no longer welcome here.
So far I’ve seen in small doses how this elevates spaces and relationships, and, there is a lot of practice I’ll continue to do.
I keeping letting go of the story over and over again.
It’s not a tail, but it is a tall tale, and in the same way the lizard’s tiny voids let their tail go, I’m deciding to experience my own voids as a technology in me that is perfect, a place for stillness rather than this story. I can allow the space necessary for my own fresh growth. With a scanner no longer dedicated to this drama, this fantasy world, this theatre, I have the power to transform myself and the spaces I come into, not so that others see me as worth while, but to be in service to something I care deeply about: collaboration.