I’ve always felt a sense of urgency to catch up to my imagination, to chase down whatever future fantasy I happen to be fixated on in a moment. I’m often frustrated when the data and details of my actual life don’t yet line up to an imagined future that sometimes feels so real I could roll it around in my mouth like candy. Crashing back into the moment I find myself actually inhabiting can feel violent and jerky, like I was floating on the clouds and suddenly I’m on a rickety wooden roller coaster and no one is having a good time. I’m always looking forward, never back. I’m always planning. Always dreaming. Always. It’s like breathing, the constancy of the forward-ness. The story my Ego tells me is whatever I think I’m missing in a given moment is abundant in the next, if only I could catch up.
Catch up.
Keep up.
Somewhere along the way my personality picked up this fear that I would run out… of money, of ideas, of influence, of whatever currency I’d convinced myself made me valuable to the community. Something about this is biological- I don’t want to be the sucker left in the field when the tribe has moved on, forgotten and alone to fight off mortal threats AND gather my own mushrooms and berries (not entirely a euphemism…). Part of it is cultural- I was socialized as a white person in the upper middle class suburbs of Dallas/ Forth Worth and learned early I could perform my way into most groups by being An Exceptional Girl, especially for my age. No one would know I was the youngest in the room, and when they found out they would be impressed, dammit. I would not be a liability to the group. I would be exceptional. I would not run out of evidence of my belonging. I would keep up.
I think was Richard Rohr who called the Ego “the incessant self”; the part of us who is addicted to our own comfort and fixations and aggrandizement. Nothing quite shatters that addiction like realizing you had no control over any of it in the first place, it was all a vapor, that you weren’t floating in the clouds at all but grasping at them, as if you could take hold. Isn’t that what COVID did for all of us? Showed us how, as I recently heard Russell Brand say, we were “smaller than a cough.” As it turns out, the entire world can turn itself inside out rather quickly without consulting any one of us. My practice during these months of illusion busting has been to change my relationship to the fantasy. Instead of trying to chase it, I began to get curious about it. “What does this reveal about what is true to me right now?” “What does tell me about what I want to create?” “What about this turns me on, and where does it already exist in my life?” It brings me back to myself, the curiosity. It releases the pressure. It helps me feel the air on my skin without becoming addicted to the feeling of flying.
I’ve learned a lot about what scares me and what turns me on, what lights me up and what makes me feel heavy. Every time my Incessant Self starts spinning stories, I try to notice what is really true and what is a narrative my addictive Ego wrote to protect her comfort and sense of her place in the world. I try to trust when my gut and my heart line up, and not let my thinking brain cling to old stories about who I am and where I’m headed. It’s a million adjustments all happening in real time, nothing stagnant, nothing permanent, nothing lasting forever. It keeps me inside of moments, rather than lurching forward, forward, forward. It keeps me attuned to the small, the right now, the specific.
I still get off on the fantasies sometimes, all tangled up in anticipation and craving. But I know it’s happening and I know I can choose to get off that ride. I don’t always, this shit ain’t perfect. I am easily aroused and totally horny for more possibility always, but I know I can get off the ride. Most of the time, that's enough.