A dear friend posted a picture of her nursing school shoes, and a wonderful conversation emerged. Most notable (for me) was the symbolic relationship between the shoes and a person's pace. The shoes themselves have no pace, of course...it's the person inside of the shoes that creates the pace.
My shoes...my pace.
This may be a profound statement, but in reality (for me) this is not always the case, because I feel ever in battle with invisible forces that serve only to make me feel never good enough for failing to keep up with the expected pace.
You should be there, already.
It's me, of course. I am the one who has internalized this long list of shoulds. However, awareness alone is not enough to make this undermining stop.
Number 1 on my list is about my bagpipe progress. You should already be up on your pipes! This shaming force has undermined me so much, I have stopped practicing on the bagpipes themselves. I don't understand this, of course...when I so dearly want to learn to play them....and the not practicing only fuels the undermining even further.
Number 2 has to do with this trip to Nova Scotia, of course. Enough said.
When computer programming goes bad, all we generally have to do is reboot. If that doesn't clear out the glitch, we can erase everything and upload from the beginning. Brains don't work this way, of course...once a glitch is introduced, it takes great effort to rewire the connections to yield more positive outcomes.
Am I even wearing my own shoes?
There is another wise saying about not judging people until after walking a mile in their shoes. This truth implies that the shoes, themselves, hold some kind of inherent truth about a person or their journey. So if I am so easily undermined, I am forced to ask myself, "Whose shoes, then, am I wearing?"
Whose journey is it?
Truth tears burn hard. It matters how our parents send us out to face the world on our own. For me, it feels like whenever I walked my own journey, something bad happened to the parts of my life that meant the most to me. I can logically sort this through a rational lens that clearly shows no causal connection, but that doesn't change the feeling. And, I wonder if I've ever really stopped trying to live my mom's life for her.
I miss her so much. As angry as I was with her when she was alive, I have never really recovered from her loss. The news of her death hit me like a shock wave. I remember sitting in the chair in my COs office wondering what that sound was off in the distance...crying, someone was crying....only to suddenly realize that it was me....I was the person who was crying. My mind had completely blacked out. For how long? I'm not sure. Had I been standing I would have certainly fallen.
Some shockwaves just never seem to pass.
My mom is not to blame for where I am, now, any more than I am to blame for where she is. It's delusional wishful thinking on my part to believe that had I been at home (rather than stationed halfway 'round the world living my own life) I would have been able to save hers.
Bad things do happen when we're off living our own lives.
The shoes I wear have always been my own shoes, of course...even if I allow the thoughts and opinions of others (about how I should walk in them) to influence the way that I feel about myself as I do.
Does it really matter (to ME) how long it takes me to get up onto my pipes? Or how long it takes me to work out all of the related details for my trip to Nova Scotia? If it were just about me, it wouldn't.
There are many days that I actually wish I were marooned alone on a deserted island...with no one else to worry about except for me. It's a telling fantasy about how affected I allow myself to be at the expense of the opinions and expectations of others about me and how I choose to live my life.
The funny thing is that these opinions & expectations don't really affect the choices that I make...just the way that I feel about myself when I do....which is interesting in a helpful insightful sort of way.
My shoes...my pace...my feelings.
