Armadillo Ride

I sometimes act before I think. Or rather I act and only realise what I had been thinking after the ramifications become clear. Let me be specific here: I feel like I overshared. It's perfectly fine to tell billions of strangers your innermost thoughts, but woe befall you should there be a familiar face amidst the mysterious masses.

This me experiencing vulnerability. I do not express myself and what I'm experiencing either because people do not listen or because I think they won't. I'm not saying people ought to listen or that I'm entitled to be listened to. Many people have as much shit to deal with as I do. Many have to contend with existential threats rather than existential crises. Many are too busy trying to survive to even fathom whe meaning of "thrive".

At any rate, the instinctual response is to withdraw, to engage in a pattern of behaviour I've come to dub "Armadillo". Having met Armadillo had allowed the opening of a dialogue with a part of me that I have had a love-hate relationship with. Ultimately this dialogue allowed me to understand it's benevolent intentions viz. to protect me.

In short, it is a coping mechanism. It is my coping mechanism, for better or worse. Am I bound to its dicta? I firmly believe that I am not. For starters, there are other parts of me that conflict with it. I believe in personal responsibility and response-ability. I believe in free choice. The part of me that exercises free choice is separate from those parts that have been shaped by my experience.

This is where dialogue comes in. Rather than ignoring the different motivations, I engage them. All of us have these conflicts. Society tells us to be lean and in the same breath tells us we should be body positive. It shames sluts and fuckboys and shames prudes. It glorifies wealth and tells you the best things in life are free. And it does not do this with heavy handed sermons but with feint writing in between lines of seemingly irrelevant conversations, adverts, articles, memes, songs...

Some of us find a set of values and live life according to those. Others seek to perform, to live what they think society believes is the ideal life and are inevitably and invariably torn apart by the schizoid society they seek to satisfy. Is it any wonder then that Armadillo pleads his case to put some distance between myself and the madness of the masses?

In this relative silence you create the space for your forgotten sides to re-emerge. How can anyone remember a fond childhood memory or deal with repressed trauma when they're dealing with incessant stimulation from sources that try to outcompete one another in terms of who can pillage the most attention?

This process of allowing the forgotten and ignored parts to re-emerge is not sudden nor is it permanent. My experience has been that it requires work, it requires suffering and that it is easily undone. That it can be undone is not a condemnation of the human condition inasmuch as it is of the strength of social forces.

To avoid victimising myself ("it's society's fault!") it must be repeated: we are response-able, and so we are responsible. It is fair enough to be upset when you find out you were duped, but you bear the responsibility of allowing yourself to be fooled again when jig is up. To assign blame is to deny responsibility and empower said jig. But I digress.

So the undoing of this delicate process occurs and reoccurs, like some kind of Groundhog Day remake written by Brene Brown. And like Groundhog Day, new memories and experiences we carry from one cycle into the next. Slowly - excruciatingly slowly - we remember the past and allow it to guide our present. I'll always remember something I once heard Oprah say twenty or so years ago: "the universe keeps teaching you the same lesson until you learn it". I suppose it also repeats the same lesson until you remember it.

In the end, there isn't one clear and simple thing to express other than laying out this process of feeling and responding to that feeling. The feeling of vulnerability is Armadillo telling me something. I can fight the feeling by burying the emotion with other sensations or I can delve into it, interact with it and integrate it.