Peeling The Onion

I sat down for lunch with a dear friend of mine a couple of weeks ago. We hadn't seen each other for some time, so we were eager to summarily divulge everything about our lives in the span of forty minutes. We each shared our successes and struggles in the same easy tone. "Oh, I changed jobs." "It was the first time that I saw my family in years."

As we traded updates, as children trade their most treasured toys, I confessed a question that was sitting with me over the last several months: if you know what will make you happy, what prevents you pursuing it?

I have been exploring my subconscious about this question for most of the year. My intention was to strive for a greater sense of freedom--releasing myself from my perpetual caregiver role, surrendering any self-definitions or identities in which I casted myself, shedding a structured schedule to follow the way of my own presence. All of this effort is toward loosening the suffocating grip of responsibility, my own "light shadow" which distances me from myself.

Yet, I disclosed to my friend sitting across the small metal table, I wouldn't always let myself get there. What stopped me from embracing what was good for me, what was satisfying, what was fulfilling? Why would we--and I--negotiate with self-sabotage?

She nodded in agreement, and simply replied, "It's like peeling an onion, Baby."

Since that lunch I've peeked at, picked at, and begun peeling layers of habit, comfort, expectation, uncertainty, anger, and pain. For me, the onion analogy is a description of a deeply-inward process of refining my fundamental self; a piece-meal transformation through exuberant trial-and-error. This unglamorous but necessary road has characterized 2013, which I can hardly believe is nearing an end.

Many of these layers are messily mundane. For example, earlier this year, shortly after celebrating twenty-eight years of life, I discovered that through my long-time stomach sickness that I developed a bad gluten-allergy. One which made me disoriented for hours with too much exposure. It took me almost six months to take it seriously! Now, I have a mostly gluten-free, vegan diet, but it took many congested days, yeast reactions, and nights out-of-commission to arrive here.

And some of these layers are leading me to unconventional choices. I'm slowly entering a community of people who have chosen to carefully shape their livelihoods. We aren't climbing mobility ladders, we aren't part of a single "profession," we call upon our ingenuity, creativity, and available resources to get by. We question and challenge the norms around work, what it means to us (and doesn't define us) and creating lifestyles to happily survive. I've long-talked about holding similar values, but only last month realized that while I like organizing and law, I love writing and healing. So, as a former paid organizer and current lawyer, why has it taken so long to make writing and healing work my priorities? I laugh out loud when I think about it--how obvious but not obvious it is.

I still don't have full insight about the hidden parts of myself or relationship to the Universe that immobilize me. After all, the layering of our own self-imposed limitations, and that of our environments, is a thick, useless moldy sheet, which some of us constantly try to pull away.

Admitting my self-sabotage struggle isn't an exercise of self-flagellation. I actually think it's one of the kindest self-inquiries that I have held for years. It's a challenge to do more toward my Purpose. And if anything has come of it, I've become better friends with myself by saying "yes" more often to that which serves me instead of making excuses to ignore parts of myself.  

Recently, I've also come to terms that I'm  most motivated when my lens of the world is reduced to the naked existential reality that our human experience is finite. In the past it was an occasional panic that would befall me every few years, when I would enter a state of hyper-reality for a minute, aware of the preciousness of every millisecond. The fear of not being here was paralyzing yet revelatory.

These days I try to induce the same without the panic everyday: What would it be like, Richael, to feel heart-opening splendor? What would it be like to possess a passionate urgency for the moment in front of me? Peeling this layer, and another layer.