There’s an idea of a feeling, a sensation that I need to work out. When I realized that how I feel about myself is based in part on how people around me feel about me, it came as — not as a shock, but yes…how did it feel? That’s what this is about. It started like this:
Someone I loved—still do, but this was years ago—articulated things about me that troubled her. Maybe irreconcilable, unchangeable things. And the problem was, these were things I knew about myself, and I was OK with them. I thought they were just what made me me. So to have someone I love think less of me because of these very same things — it had an effect on me.
A few weeks went by and I realized, oh fuck, I’m not feeling very good about myself, and I traced the feeling back to the conversation when she expressed these things.
I was surprised. I was surprised because I had embraced the things that made me different, these things among them, and I was surprised because I have lived most of my life unconcerned about what the world might think about me. But this was different.
(The things themselves are less important, but so they don’t they become a distraction, since you’re probably wondering: one had to do with how I communicate, how I talk… and the other had to do with my attitude toward financial growth and security.)
What I’m thinking about right now is something else entirely. What I’m thinking about now has been swirling in my thoughts for years, something deeper and more personal.
This happened as we were on our way to a sad but amicable breakup of a multi-year relationship. I couldn’t argue with her feelings. She was not petty or mean in the way she told me about them. I could see that, considering her perspective and point of view and array of personal interests, for her these things were true.
But how could they be true when I considered the same things so differently? Well, I know how, because truth is relative. What is true for you might not be true for me. My truth is different. It’s never really bothered me if someone believes different things than I do. Who gives a flat fuck?
(Lots of people do, actually. People kill over those irrelevant differences, and it seems stupid to me.)
But then suddenly I realized that someone else’s truth — their truth about me — did affect how I felt about myself, deeply. These beliefs, hers and mine, were a bridge between us. I think about how I always want my partners to feel loved, and smart, and beautiful and desired. Because my beliefs about these things affect them, and it breaks my heart when I see my side of that bridge in disrepair.
The connection between what people believe about us and how we feel about ourselves is a real thing, and a powerful thing. And it comes in many forms.
For example: so far I’ve couched this in terms of criticism or conflict, but consider the opposite: how one feels when two, three, or seven people in their inner circle love them unconditionally, think they’re wonderful, if not perfect, and that they can do anything, almost anything. Those beliefs radiate somehow. That love sinks into you and it affects the way you feel about yourself and how you see your place in the world.
When that idea settled on me, I realized I was conjuring the essence of healthy parenting. Creating that atmosphere is a pretty sure way to build a kid’s sense of themselves. And if you surround a kid with criticism, shower them with stern articulation of their shortcomings, and under-articulate their gifts, do you think you’ll get a luminous soul attuned to their potential?
One of the things I came to later in life is the importance of our communal surroundings, the tribe, what we glean from our place among our peers, neighbors, and colleagues. This blind spot was nurtured as I spent many years slipping through tribes, ideological and physical, time and time again. In my first two decades of adulthood, I was a compulsive wanderer and I was quick to abandon my own place in a burgeoning tribe, and indeed to abandon the tribe itself.
As far as I knew, that was okay, but then something changed about the time I was 39 years old. Up to that point, I had held 28 different jobs across almost as many resume headers. I’d lived in 15 different cities or towns, a few of them multiple times, set years apart.
After the age of 39: three cities and a single occupation.
I did not become sedentary, but I came into myself in some way that curtailed the wandering. I also became more conscious of community and what happens when you let your roots dig down past the topsoil.
If there’s been one thing that has guided my personal and professional choices over the last 15 years, it’s been the longing to find my tribe and earn my place in it. And this ties directly to the realization that the people closest to us are mirrors. We project something to them and something happens in them, we affect them, and then something — I don’t know what it is — radiates back and sinks into us.
When the essence of that exchange is positive, it’s the best feeling I know. And when it’s something else, well, you understand...
It’s hard to say what I lost by not nurturing tribal relationships more deeply. Surely something. I hope whatever was lost was the toll of nurturing something else, something that allows me to be who I am.
But this I do know: it was the decades of lack that made the realization so stark. I finally accounted for this phenomenon, and I accepted that we are not isolated beings circulating among 6 billion others, that our experience as human creatures is a mysterious hall of mirrors, and the impression of those closest to us absolutely shapes who we are, in profound ways that the lone wolves among us are loath to admit…
I’m happy to be a reformed wolf, even if that tribe is still forming — especially because that tribe is still forming.
So shine on, you crazy diamond, and you can count on me to shine right back.
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Chip Warren
Chip Warren
Chip Warren
