Permission to Contradict Myself

Perhaps it’s about seeking something a little more mysterious…

After training to become a somatic practitioner, I’m feeling the weight of believing my point of view always needs to be polished and clinically correct. I’m noticing how with every blog post idea, I’m putting myself into a box, neatly tied up with a bow on top, trying so hard to say the right thing.

This isn’t new though, me clinging to the idea of certainty, constructing my thoughts and beliefs around absolutes.

The thing is, I’m a human first before any other title. And thinking that has to stay so neat and uncontested doesn’t leave much room for humanity.

I am in an ongoing evolution with myself where the stoic and creative-spaghetti-brain parts of me are still learning how to get along. Spaghetti-brain is helping me see outside the lens of a strict, no-shades-of-gray upbringing and into a world where at least two things are almost always true, often in contrast to one another.

That is a confusing amount of gray.

I can feel compassion and be completely pissed off all at once. Or I can feel empty and really proud of myself in the same breath. Sometimes it can be really subtle too. Lots of things slightly adjacent to each other, not creating so much of a contrast as just shading. It is a very generous and spirited experience, and the parameters of my need for certainty would often quite like to shut it all down.

Just the other day, my husband was processing something that touched a very old, painful wound for me. There have been so many times like this when my wound took precedence over his experience. The last two or three times, though, I have felt the gut-wrenching sting and its rush of heated, reactive compulsions, while also having access to a deeper felt sense of this emerging-and-a-little-bit-scary generosity of spirit. I felt an okayness that grounded me enough to let it in. It seems I was no longer taking what he was struggling with as a direct hit. I could feel more separation between what was his and what was mine.

This particular time, it still hurt, but with far less heat and a lot more compassion toward my man. In fact, there was little energy pulling me into the usual turmoil. I just felt mostly present with my pain and with his. And that was deeply connective. There was no my truth versus his. No competition or tunnel vision that deemed my side of the story, the only version. It was just us, inside our own experiences, but together.

I think I want to make the same kind of room on the page when I write. I want to allow for the fumbling of ideas and feelings to breathe more before I button anything up. Instead of the scared part of me calling all the shots in the name of collecting surety, I can let what feels true in this season be true without needing it to become the final word. Everything I share is really just a snapshot in time of my ever-evolving process. What feels relevant now may not hold the same weight later.

This is why I’m now giving myself permission to contradict myself.

My stoic part is a little disgruntled. But even she is tired of trying to make the same old clichés work when life gets messy. Maybe looking for something a little more mysterious and rugged, as opposed to the perfectly formulated conclusion that piously tidies away all the complexity, is a relief. Maybe looking for something that humbly reflects the real grit of life is freeing.

I know we talk about how important it is to find one’s truth, as though it is a tangible absolute. Something solid and immovable that we can build our lives on.

I grew up learning that truth just is. It is the black-and-white rules we live by, the right way, something that can’t be disputed.

But no matter how hard I gripped at it, that understanding didn’t hold up in the thick of life. Something was missing. And it felt dangerous to notice that. Yet, the more I tried to ignore the niggling feeling, the more I felt betrayed by this paradigm. Because truth that is imposed leaves no room for experiences that don’t fit neatly inside its box. I just don’t think one person’s interpretation or understanding of what is true can ever hold the entire story.

As I lived and learned through season after season, wrestling with this, I began to see how significant my discernment was, and how sort of slippery that was in and of itself. It wasn’t a solid construct. It was adaptive to what was happening, with no formula. So intuitive and primal. So unsettling. This is when I started understanding that finding truth could be more like seeking wisdom.

I had been exhaustingly measuring my every instinct against something fixed and external, suppressing or perhaps even denying the existence of my inner knowing. It was starting to make so much sense why I wound up burned out for so long.

Listening inward, getting curious, and building a new relationship with myself and how I participate with truth, cracked open the paradigm.

Seeking wisdom felt spacious. I could feel my body letting go of this idea that I needed a rigid line in the sand to live by. The audacity to entertain contradictions in my thinking actually started to feel like a deep inhale and exhale, a clearing out of stale air.

And I fell in love with the nuance, the spaces in between where wisdom breathes and dances with the unique way in which I experience things. I got excited by how this felt in the day-to-day, and how it helped expand my mind. I found out that life is more vast than I can imagine when I can gaze through its many facets and witness how in any particular moment, the light being reflected is so distinctive. It never looks the same from one vantage point to the next.

Wisdom isn’t static is seems. It moves and winds through the details, revealing itself in unexpected ways. Sometimes, what it shows me in one season can challenge what it showed me in another. This is astounding to me.

As a human, I too am multifaceted and nuanced. So why wouldn’t my voice, the way I express myself, and how I articulate my story be? Why wouldn’t I weigh lessons learned up against each other and allow different perspectives to coexist through the various stages of life?

I don’t want to live in a neat little box. I want to make room for process, for wrestling things out, and for moving toward more of my humanity, to honor it and inhabit it. I want all the parts of my process to be invited to the table.

Sometimes I want to lean into that unwavering part of me. Sometimes I want to gaze up at the stars and let the weight of all the unknowns consume me. But the overarching desire for me now is that one doesn’t get to dismiss the other. When I feel rigid about something, it usually means I need more time before those opposing parts of me settle together in the nuance. And when I feel undone by thoughts that are wildly racing, it calls for the same grace. Being able to oscillate between different thoughts and different parts of myself, each carrying their own ideas, depths, and lessons learned, feels like that same generosity I mentioned earlier.

And you know what’s poetic about it all? The more I embrace all this the less desperate I seem to be for certainty. I’ve never found more of myself than when I have been in the dark. It’s a kind of letting go of tired, external scaffolding and making room for more mystery.