to be hard on yourself is not an act of healing

TO BE HARD ON YOURSELF IS NOT AN ACT OF HEALING

One time in the middle of an argument that was mostly me struggling with some internal rancor, my wife said to me, “Are you being hard on yourself right now for being hard on yourself?” Yes. Yes, I was being hard on myself for failing to be less hard on myself. Welcome to the circus.

I have this index card tacked up above my desk. It says “imperfect unified multiplicity.” It’s what I’m striving for every minute of every day, or more accurately, what I want to be striving for.

I initially wrote just “unified multiplicity,” meaning that all the parts of me are honored and brought together – that the poet and the bill-payer, the professional spreadsheet maker and the amateur collagist, the aunt and the daughter and the wife and the friend and the agitator and the peacemaker and the plant-waterer and the witch all get to co-exist. All get loved. All get to chime together into a gorgeous chord.  

In a New York Times opinion piece, Amber Tamblyn wrote, “The more we open our mouths, the more we become a choir. And the more we are a choir, the more the tune is forced to change.” She’s talking about the #metoo movement, but it applies to our inner lives, our inner choiring, as well. It all starts with the interior, doesn’t it? The powerful today self reaching back to last year’s self, last decade’s self, tucked away, still bruised, still tender to the touch after the attack, the shock, the betraying act, and saying here. Come here. You belong. You deserve to be heard.  

“The more we are a choir, the more the tune is forced to change.” I love the idea of being a choir, inside as well as out. That the first essential act in speaking truth to power is to find the parts of ourselves that have been silenced and inviting them to choir. To congregate. To sing. And not just the sweet and subjugated parts who are so easy to love, who get along with everyone, whose voices slide so easily into the harmonies. But the jagged parts, the ones who passed on the harm, the ones with impulse control and a suspicion of group activities. All of it. All of us.

I added “imperfect” before “unified multiplicity” to remind myself of this need to invite and integrate all of it, which means to allow the messiness and the dissonance, to stop believing that the end goal is a perfect tune instead of a good and healing one that is also new.

To be hard on yourself is not an act of healing. The more we are a choir, the more the tune is forced to change. The only attainable goal is one that permits imperfection.

I remember in college reading for the first time that our greatest weaknesses are the flipside of our greatest strengths. It was definitely in a magazine; I know that I cut it out and put it in a notebook. Insert giant cartoon lightbulb over 18-year-old Marty’s head. Our greatest weaknesses are the flipside of our greatest strengths. Holy shit. Maybe I can stop hacking away parts of me that I don’t like and instead look at how those flaws work for me, how they’re connected to my strengths. Holy shit.

To be clear, I’m still a perfectionist in the way an alcoholic is always an alcoholic. But I’ve grown to love imperfection the way my sober friends love sobriety, which is to say almost all the time, and with immense patience. This great work of a life, this incredible and endless revision, is so brutal and so bountiful. I’m so grateful that I get to be here, with you, in it. Choiring. Can’t you hear it? The tune’s about to change.