Replaying Our Wounds

“You get your wounds early.”

—“Early,” by Michael Prewett

People replay their wounds with each other again and again, but not in a way that encourages growth. Rather, they seek endlessly for the validation that their wounds once denied them. They repeat their pain over and over. Consequently, they become stuck and stunted people who cannot grow. How can they stop this cycle of dehumanization?

In Will I Ever Be Good Enough?, a book about maternal narcissism by Karyl McBride, there is a diagram of a hoary old oak tree. The tree has a massive trunk, a full crown of branches, and roots digging deep into the ground. The rough bark of the trunk is labeled “childhood scars,” while the body of leaves is labeled “adult: branching and growing.” The idea is that, like a tree that lost some bark or even a limb when young, a person must overcome her ancient wounds and keep producing new branches.

When you begin to see people in this light, you realize that a categorization is possible, however uncomfortable it is to share: some people are still growing, even in middle and old age, while others are stuck, repeating the same heartbreaking idiocy over and over.

It’s not like those who are still growing never received any wounds. They did. But what sets them apart from those who are stuck? What, in their upbringing, their past, their present, or their nature, allows them to overcome the obstacles that threaten to destroy their self-worth?

We must examine our own wounds. We must examine what we are carrying forwards with us and what we are inflicting senselessly on those around us. We must go to therapy in our heads. And if we don’t have therapeutic insight there from great books, great conversations, or great love, we must seek it out. We must approach someone else and ask for help. It’s this repetition of our own wounds that wounds others and gives them something to repeat. On and on, the cycle of destruction will roll over—unless we stop it.

A few days ago, I wrote about grace. The article is here. Grace is the answer—but we have to give it out rather than seek it from others. Those who can’t reference the receiving end of grace in their own experience can’t pass it on. We have to show it to them. We have to give them an experience that they can reference. We may even have to do it more than once. The only way to stop this toxic cycle is to start extending grace to those agonizingly ungraceful people in our lives.

Maybe this is what a certain teacher meant when he said something about the speck in your neighbor’s eye and the log in your own.

Extending Grace to Yourself

In his essay The Lesson of Grace in Teaching, Professor Francis Su suggests that grace is the most important component of the teacher-to-student relationship. By extending grace to students, he says, teachers relieve students of the burden of measuring up. They even rehumanize them.

Our culture’s lauding of achievement whispers to us with “the poison call of fame,” to quote Will Stratton’s song “The Relatively Fair.” Whatever podium you’re climbing towards, you may think that getting there will give you a sense of arrival—that perhaps the world’s recognition of your achievements will open up to you a truer, more vibrant, more joyful existence.

Trust me: it won’t.

I’ve dreamed of having my novels widely read. I’ve worked for 16 of my 26 years on story after story—so many that I truly do come across whole novels from childhood and adolescence that I’ve forgotten about completely. If it takes 10 years or 10,000 hours to reach that elusive level of mastery, I’m as much there as I can be at 26. After all, I’ve written three-quarters of a million words in practice of the craft. I’ve been read by others (even if the number is probably still under 100). I’ve received praise that makes me uncomfortable. I’ve learned to recognize respect in people’s voices and facial expressions and online comments. It stuns and humbles me (though not enough to not state the above).

I’m there, right?

Yes, but it’s not enough. I’m already planning the publication of my next book as I work through its edit. I’m doing the cover at the same time. I’m working through the concrete ways that I can give this book a bigger chance to make an impact. I’m looking into Kickstarter. I’m filling out spreadsheet after spreadsheet of information. I’m working from a shadowy, brainstorm-style plan towards something tangible. I’m cracking the whip on myself.

But achieving this isn’t going to make my life any better. It will add a lot of stress this summer, or whenever I do it. It will teach me many new things. It will get my book into the hands of more people who’ve never met me in person. But it isn’t going to make me feel at home, really at home, for more than a few moments here and there.

Solomon’s declarations of “Vanity, vanity! All is vanity!” in Ecclesiastes have begun to ring not with a deficiency of dopamine, but with cold, hard, intellectual truth. The guy wasn’t depressed; he was right. It is vanity. It is striving after wind. The fruits of this labor are not tangible or measurable. There is no way for me to look at my work and say “I have succeeded.” It could always be better. It could always have been better. When I hold the finished version of thisbook in my hand, it will just be the words that I wrote, edited, and typeset. I won’t be able to read the book and enjoy it, at least not for a while. I’ll be damn sick of it. This is just something I do. It’s something for me to build while I’m on this earth. But it isn’t going to fix me.

If you’re a workaholic like I am, you’re constantly pushing yourself. You go to bed dissatisfied with the day’s little achievements and wake up preparing to try again. You think about your project in the middle of the night. You think about it on Sunday afternoons. You can’t stop thinking about it, and when you finally sit down to work on it, you can’t always get it right. You can’t accomplish enough. You can’t earn your own approval for the day’s work, however great or small it was.

This is when you need to extend grace to yourself.

You extend grace to yourself when you give up for the day and say, “Oh well. It is just vanity of vanities, after all.” You extend grace to yourself when you stop expecting divine powers of you, O pinprick of significance—when you stop imagining that with a little more effort, with a little more gusto, you can crack this. You extend grace to yourself when you look at yourself from the outside and take a moment to chuckle about how obsessive you are, how insane you are.

But most of all, you extend grace to yourself when you remember that everything will be okay whether you succeed or not.

 

Show Up Ready To Make, Not Ready To Take

A thought for hipsters everywhere: love of money is the root of all evil does not mean that money itself is the root of all evil, but rather, that desiring it as an end in itself is. At the heart of it, evil—laziness and self-centeredness—is the root of the need for money.

Money is the scourge that keeps us working. It is the curse on the ground in Eden. Most of us aren’t working the fields for our food anymore, so the curse comes up in new ways. We are still getting our bread by the sweat of our brow, though now that sweat may take the form of long hours bending over a keyboard or shrinking digits in an online real-time bank statement. But it’s still sweat, and the world of digital work and digital compensation is no less fraught with thorns and thistles.

It’s real hip to say that we don’t want to play that game, that we don’t want to feed into the world system, man. But a caveat to you pure artists and revolutionaries who wish to bow out: if you don’t want to feed into the world system, you will have to stop taking from it, too. You will have to stop promoting your work on the internet, which runs on devices, scripts, processors, and fiber-optic cable designed and built and implemented by people who need a place to live and something to eat. You will have to stop using your car, which was likewise designed and built by people. You will have to stop eating out, since the local people who work at your favorite restaurant also need to pay rent. You will literally have to go live in the wilderness and be totally self-sufficient, because that’s really what you’re pining for when you complain about your bills.

If you want enough money to live (which, by the way, is not the desire that the passage speaks against), assess your skills and see what you have to offer. Everyone needs everything every day. The economy may be “bad,” but everyone is still buying things and subscribing to paid services.

If your attitude towards work is, “I just want something that I can show up to and get paid for without having to engage my heart and mind,” you will get exactly what you deserve, which is frustration and difficulty. People will give you a hard time at work. You will be reprimanded for laziness. You may even get fired.

We need to stop viewing an income as something to which we’re entitled and remember that it’s something for us to earn. We should not approach the work transaction ready to take, but rather, ready to make. People need things. We are all talented. We can meet each other’s needs. Money is just the moderator in disputes over the value of objects and services. As such, it is a necessary part of a messed-up world. It is the stand-in for having faith in people we don’t know.

So humble yourself and work your hardest at your job. If you get paid, consider it grace.