I write one of these every year, since the age of 30. This is my tenth year writing, and from reading posts from the previous nine years you could see the trajectory of my identity. Apparently last year at 38 I found myself at 37 too serious, but today I have found my 38 year old self also way too serious. I think it is a good gauge of my personal growth.
It is strange to look back at my selves for the previous nine years and be able to see with clarity how tortured I used to be. I have way too many thoughts, and I wanted so much control over my life and myself.
This year, I am at a loss for what to write here. In the space where that many thoughts used to reside, there is an emptiness. Is it a good or bad emptiness, I do not know. Maybe it is related to the sense of emptiness I feel towards the entire situation right now, and the emptiness I feel towards my life for the past year.
In Buddhism there is a concept of emptiness called shunyata. I came across it while reading a book about Chogyam Trungpa (whose existence is riddled with scandals and for now I don’t wish to go into a debate if we can separate the teachings from the scandals, I am just cherrypicking what I want) – I found this quote in a previous post I wrote:
“For instance, if you are studying music, the starting point is to realise how unartistic you are. That’s a hopeful situation. That you have the intelligence to see how unartistic or how unmusical you are is the starting point. Hopelessness is the starting point. That is extremely powerful actually, and the most positive thought that you could have. It is an extraordinarily positive thing to discover how bad things are.” – Chongyam Trungpa, Glimpses of the Profound
I only remembered this today for the purpose of this post, but some of it must have seeped into the deeper layers of my consciousness as some time last year I tweeted:
The more I learn about neuroscience and psychology, the more hopeless I become towards the state of the world. So the gradual outcome is, I don’t ask much out of people including myself these days. There is an intellectual understanding towards why it is so difficult to ask for transformation. The emotional understanding, the compassion, is difficult to develop for me. But in a meta fashion I don’t ask of myself to develop that emotional capacity any quicker than I can too, because I have finally understood why I am not capable.
Perhaps that’s the biggest awareness I have had of myself this last year. I have always thought of myself as a person with a deep emotional capacity because I am an emotional person, only to find out that what I have are dysregulated emotions, not emotional capacity. What I felt for other people is a projection of my own feelings, not true empathy.
Recognising how empty of a shell I am has given me a way to ground myself, a starting point. I no longer ask of myself to be a person I am not, neither do I swim in a pool of guilt when I am unable to fulfil people’s expectations. You wouldn’t ask a person dripping of blood to give blood, would you?
I am not sure what comes after tomorrow, much less who I’ll become. I don’t really know who I am anymore and I confuse myself all the time, and I think I am beginning to be okay with that. I am developing a lot more respect for the unconscious processes that take place within us, and I have learnt to give less power to my conscious intellect. I am just a fumbling person, like everyone else.
If anything, I would like to be more capable of giving room to the fumblings of everyone, including myself. But I am nowhere remotely near there, yet.