Everybody's
Weird
“Almost
everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, scared, and yet designed for
joy...Besides, those few people who aren't a mess are probably good
for about twenty minutes of dinner conversation.”
Anne
Lamott (Almost Everything: Notes on Hope, p.55)
Anne Lamott's chapter in
Almost Everything is titled, “Humans 101.” My friends and I often
comment that “everybody's so weird,” or that we don't know any
“normal people.” We laugh, but it's true, and it includes each
and everyone of us. Everybody, especially people who appear to have
it all together, have an equally large “not-together” side. Jung
called these two parts of us the persona (how we appear to others and
how we often perceive ourselves) and the shadow (those parts of us we
try to keep hidden, or don't know about at all). Many of us function
in the outside world as competent and reliable people, while on the
inside, we are filled with fear, and blundering. Our incompetence may
show itself in our personal life—in how we keep our home or how we
treat our family. We may be besieged by fantastic fears based in
unreality. It is almost as though we make up things to torment
ourselves. Humans...we are well and truly strange.
Given that all people
have quirks and inconsistencies, I would say simply that these are
the very things that make us interesting. These parts of us, some
capable, some utterly pathetic, give depth and color to a life and a
personality that would otherwise be robotic. Because we know our own
incapacity, we all feel insecure, which we either try our
dead-level-best to conceal, or else fall prey to crippling anxiety in
the face of it. We compare our insides to other people's outsides—our
shadow to their persona. It's an unfair comparison. In the best of
all worlds, we could own all our parts, and actually learn to love
them. I am competent, and I am absolutely screwed-up. I am honest and
trustworthy, and I am a rogue and feral creature. I could go on, but
I'll spare you the dark details.
The 12-step programs
insist on uncovering all the parts we know about—the good, the bad,
and the truly ugly. They teach honest self-evaluation, and disclosure
of all the secret fears and destructive behaviors, first, to one's
sponsor, and then, to the group in the telling of one's story. I
confess I have never stood before a group of my peers and revealed my
seedy side and my failures—it must take super-human courage to do
that. But this is the way we learn to stop lying to ourselves and to
everybody else about who we are—in our entirety. What we learn,
too, is to not take ourselves so seriously; to laugh at our own
weirdness, and to understand that there are plenty of kindred spirits
out there who share our insecurity. Once revealed, we feel cleaner and
clearer. We can start over and begin to face our fears with courage
and strength. Now, we've brought our shadow, or at least some of it,
into the light of day and incorporated it into our persona, giving
depth and texture to the person we recognize ourselves to be. And
sometimes, our stories are truly hilarious, which is why tears and
laughter mix at 12-step meetings. In addition, revealing our
“insides,” our insecurity, our failure, is like taking off a
hair-shirt. It opens us to freedom and possibility. Humans---we are
complex and weird, and “designed for joy!” Thank God for that.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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