Imperfect

“Forgiveness means giving up all hope for a better past.”

Sometimes I actually hear the click of it snapping into place. When, in moment of clarity, a thing that I’ve known intellectually suddenly becomes vast understanding. The sound accompanies the proverbial light bulb, incandescent over my head, powered by a surge of deep and profound comprehension.

There is a gulf of meaning between the words ‘know’ and ‘understand.’ Knowing something is simple. You learn it from a book, from another person, from the internet. Facts, bits of rote knowledge, items on a list to be regurgitated on a test. A known thing is known in our ego, in our conscious mind, described with words or charts or images.

Understanding is felt and experienced at every primitive layer of our psyche: it is seen, touched, heard, smelled, and tasted. There is emotion and a palpable sense of connection from the ancient and unconscious realms of the self. It is the difference between reading a book about the Sistine Chapel and seeing it in person. Only when you sit in rapt immobility on the worn benches whilst your eyes lovingly caress each curve and nuance of Michelangelo’s sublime figures — alive with breath and movement in their stillness — can you fully appreciate the depth of the experience in ways that transcend mere words on a page.

I was reading a book on a train from Portland to Seattle when I heard the click. In the space of a moment I immediately FELT with full realisation what I thought I had known but never understood.

I’d been working on my trauma for about a year at this point. I was deep in newfound personal knowledge, having gained incredible insight into my past through the miracle of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. But I was still lacking in the profound understanding necessary to move along the path towards true wellness. I knew what had happened, I could see some of the ways the traumas had impacted my behaviour and thinking, but at this point I actually understood very little of it.

When I stepped onto that train I was still looking for a cure. I thought that one day, if I were a good boy and worked hard and did all the things my therapist told me to and ate all my vegetables and went to bed on time, I would wake up and be ‘fixed.’ I held an image in my mind of a fully and completely healed me: a me without the scars of trauma, or the loss of hope and self-worth, that could show up in an innocent and uninjured way to the world.

That vision of me felt like a stranger but I wanted to believe. I could be him someday.

It had been gently suggested to me on many occasions that trauma is something that may never go away completely; trauma, like everything else we experience, becomes a part of our past and thus a part of us. This is why the goal of trauma therapy is to re-engage with and ultimately integrate with the trauma, not the impossibility of expunging it from our psyche.

I heard the download complete behind my ears, stopped reading, and froze. I remember staring out the window, slack-jawed and overwhelmed with a deluge of insight as the train ticked and swayed around a curve. I suddenly felt it in the most complex and far-reaching ways: there is no end to this journey.

I closed the book and stared out the window as the Tacoma Narrows Bridge passed overhead, the waters of Puget Sound glinting in the morning sun between the blurred trees speeding by. A slow exhale as this new wisdom settled into me and filled me with relief.

Taunting myself with this perfect, and ultimately fictional, self-image while I was working on my wounds opened yet another door for self-criticism and shame to enter me. It created a sense of inadequacy that I had not yet done everything I could or should. As long as I was not this perfect vision of me, I was less than I should be and therefore a failure.

Some of this comes from our sick culture. We live in a broken world that values commodities and tangible wealth over authentic humanity. We live in an age of shiny gadgets and geegaws that we have been trained to substitute for the things that truly nourish our spirit. I call this view “the great if.” IF I just get that new car, IF I make more money, IF I can marry the right person…then my life will be perfect and I will have no troubles at all.  We’ve been trained to believe that we are inadequate.

It would almost be funny were it not killing us all from the inside out.

There is also the daunting side of this view: how much more work do I need to do? I’ve already worked and cried and suffered so much, what else do I have to do to cure myself of this affliction I did not ask for? By thinking that I was still not fixed, that it was my fault for not working hard or doing enough, I was thinking of myself as a victim and not a survivor or a fighter.

In a flash, all that changed.

You are a human being, perfect only in your imperfection. The journey you are on IS the destination. You have already arrived where you need to be, you will never arrive at a place where the journey ends.

Stress and worry fell from my shoulders, I felt my body relax and take comfort from the fact that simply doing the work was the goal. By going to sleep every night having made some effort to incorporate healing practices into my day I had already reached a finish line that wasn’t actually there.  I was now able to see that I would never come to a place where I would not have more to do; the joyous work goes on until the moment my ego, this hilarious illusion of self, returns as a drop of rain into the great tranquil ocean of consciousness.

It took some time to come to this massive perspective change because I had been trained to think in a linear, goal-oriented way. This type of thinking where logic, cause and effect, and repeatable, predictable outcomes are the expectation is the norm in the Western world. Finding a new way was a necessary rite of passage in my journey because Western thinking focuses almost entirely on the ego, not the soul or spirit¹.

Believing that I would be able to do enough work, to find the right combination of things to say, think, and do, or even discover the perfect combination of psychoactive substances that would “fix” me was a natural result of my upbringing; if there is a desired outcome there must be a measurable and describable formula with which to bring it about. I assume most people born in the more technically advanced countries think in similar ways. We look for the finish line, the point at which we can stop and say, “it’s finished.” It’s very Newtonian: cause and effect, action and result, but the Laws of Motion do not apply to the numinous within us.  The cake is a lie.²

There is no point at which I will be perfect and no longer able to refine myself or explore further hidden corners of the eternal mystery of spirit. I will never be done growing.

It seems counterintuitive, and it is to Western thinking, but only in accepting that I would never erase my wounds did I finally begin to move towards true wellness. Healing means to completely recover from, to return to a baseline state unaffected by the injury. We can’t change our past, it is always a part of us and we can’t escape or ignore it. You can’t erase what has gone before.  What you can change is how you relate to that past.

Wellness, however, means being well and healthy inclusive of your wounds. I am a traumatised person, I am a survivor of child abuse, but these facts do not define me; who I am is so much more. I am a hale and whole person no matter what my injuries may try to tell me.

Accepting my challenges, acknowledging that I am and always will be a person with this past, gives me the ability to move beyond these facts instead of continuing to live or wallow in them. The old way was holding me in a stagnant place, unable to move forward. The pursuit of the impossible image of me robbed me of any possibility of growth.

There is no point at which I will be perfect and no longer able to refine myself or explore further hidden corners of the eternal mystery of spirit. I will never be done growing.

After the realisation on the train I stopped fighting and surrendered to this new way. I accepted that I would never be perfect, that there was no definable place at which I could check the box for having completed my work. This was a monumental change. Part of my trauma pathology had been the need for perfection because of the constant denigration I received as a child. I had felt that I was a failure every time I did not perform the absolute limits of human skill.

I had fought and raged my entire life, pushing back against anything and everything that got in my way. I had stubbornly refused any form of help or affection, demanding that the world conform to my ideals. I held tightly to my values of rational thought and a science-based world view, scoffing derisively at those who seemed to hold less empirically provable outlooks. It was exhausting.

I had been standing in a river and fighting and flailing at the current with my bare fists.

This new understanding rewrote so much of my journey, as revelations usually do. I looked both behind and forward with new eyes capable of wiser discernment seeing my trauma, my path, and myself differently.

By fully and truly accepting my imperfection I began to believe that I really was a human being. Surrendering to this idea, that it’s ok to be imperfect, felt like freedom. In this feeling was acceptance, humility, and even grace. I stopped punching the current like a madman and turned to face downstream, lying back to float with the gentle current with my smile turned towards the warming sun.

Surrender has been a common theme on my journey. At many stages I have encountered the painful and scary only to immediately put up my metaphorical fists. I tried to fight or subdue the beasts with force or cunning: it never worked. Release and relief only came when I relaxed and put down my guard. To accept and love the broken bits of me, bringing them back inside the fold and mending the break.

My father demanded a twisted version of perfection from me, a standard I had been trying to meet for over 30 years. No more. I can now accept my ‘flaws’ and my ‘weaknesses’ as quirks and challenges, the things that make me uniquely me.  I can smile and laugh at my own silly humanity.

Time and again on this journey my preconceptions have been challenged and I have resisted the new point of view. Each time, when I have gotten over myself and allowed my stubborn resistance to soften, the truth of understanding began to work its magic within until one day it snapped into place and I heard another click, a door opened, and I entered into a more beautiful place than I had ever been in before.

There are surely other doors ahead of me but I am not quite ready to enter them…and that’s ok.  This journey goes on for the rest of my life, no need to rush.  Patience, Grasshopper, there are so many beautiful things left to learn about yourself.

 

[EDIT] – a friend is struggling with just this issue. Read her post HERE. In her post she says “I am comparing myself with my Ideal Me and I find the Actual Me wanting.”  You aren’t alone, many of us have wrestled with this.  The actual you is perfect just as she is right now.  You are on the path, my friend.  That means you are already the ideal you.

 

1. Plotkin, Bill. (2003). Soulcraft. Novato, CA: New World Library.
2. Valve Corporation. (2007). Portal [Valve video game]. Bellvue, WA: Valve Corporation.