There are two beings living your headspace. Pressed up against one another, on opposite sides of the same coin but seemingly worlds apart.
One is exacting, demanding, uncompromising, harsh, critical and self-flagellating. She exacts a heavy price before letting you rest, relax and recuperate. She demands that you excel, beat, outperform those around you and justify the little bit of space that you occupy in this universe.
Over and over.
And always resetting to zero. An empty cup to be filled with striving, achievement, exhaustion and praise.
A never-ending cycle of rinse and repeat. Criticise, panic, strive and rest in contentment that you've done your best. Or at least done enough to stand out and be more than ordinary.
Surprisingly though, this being, this harsh mistress of your mind is not mean-spirited. She does not wish others ill, or want to put them down or seem better. She does not even want to hurt her master. Instead, she exacts as an act of love, as an act of self-protection. To insulate you, wrap you in a cocoon of over-doing in order to temporarily sate the state of not enough. Of deficient. Of vulnerable. Of being open to criticism or ridicule. She sees any threat to this insulation as life-threatening. Perhaps because she has been in the past criticised, odd, overlooked and outcast. The antidote, she has grown to believe, is to be above the fray. Go the extra mile, please the extra person and garner the praise that she craves, gets, swallows whole and forgets the next moment. So that when her tortured host falls exhausted to rest, a niggling doubt and dear resurface from the emptiness which is never filled.
She gets a bad name, but she works overtime to do what she thinks she needs to, to keep you safe. Loved. Accepted. Secure. And, oh, those few seconds, minutes of hours of rest that she allows you in between the striving taste very sweet. So sweet that you get up and start up again to enjoy the fall back and savouring of the temporary non-empty state.
But there is another being...
Hiding in the recesses of your mind. Quieter, subtler, older. The place where wisdom resides, the place that allows collapse and weakness and vulnerability. Because it knows those are the grist of growth and ultimate peace. She is not afraid of frailty, failure, not enough. She knows those are temporary states, as everything else, and simply the ying to the yang of success. She is calmer, less frantic. But no less loving.
She is strong, resolute and forgiving. She shows compassion, and willingness to be with - well anything. The ugliest outburst, the blackest act of hate or shame. She is non-pulsed. Always kind. She is a gentle voice at the back of the despair. And she is the one who comforts the first being when it inevitably winds itself into a painful knot of self-loathing. Because there is never enough- never enough beauty, success, all-knowingness, happiness, hard work, money, accomplishments, things, enlightenment or things to achieve. There is always more, always the next thing, always a gaping hole longing to be filled.
And thus there is always the need for the other to step in and put a gentle restraining hand against the onslaught of needing to do more, be more. The black hole of human desire.
And so I search, I call for the second being. I push aside, gently as it would, the layers of fear and denial and insulation, to glimpse its gentle smiling face.
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