So I sort of feel bad that I haven’t posted anything in a long time. Like I have some obligation. I mean from some of the positive feedback I had gotten in the past on this blog, I feel like because my blogging has gone so silent for very long that now I’m no longer meeting expectation, being a disappointment to some audience. So for the many weeks that have past, I’ve found myself very busy in my day job, often with no time to write about something special that strikes me, and then when I have time not having the desire to write. So there is one aspect that pushes me to now post something, which is guilt, which is a “I should be”, “I’ll lose some popularity” , “I’ll lose legitimacy” , “I’ll be a disappointment” kinds of feelings. These are all roundabout ways of describing that I feel bad –> or as I have been coming to accept in these past few months –> an acknowledgment of an internal childhood bound belief that some part of me is Bad.
And what do I mean by Bad? Is it like a naughty boy who stole a piece of candy at the store, which one might describe as mildly bad. Is it like being a very pushy and manipulative personality, which some might describe as bad, good or something in-between? Is being Bad like being impolite and unfriendly, which could just be a judgement of the goodness/badness of a person who is shy and gentle. So maybe these examples are at best examples of “sort of bad” gray areas of badness. But what if we could somehow filter out the “not so bad parts” from these situations so we come to the small core of pure badness? What would that look like?
Imagine if I had a handful of “sort of bad” stuff. This “sort of bad” stuff would be on the darker side of colors and not very dense. And then I start filtering out the “non-bad” stuff from this mass. And what remains gets darker and darker and more dense. What remains are maybe a few grain sized kernels of pure badness and super dark beyond imagination. And what would that be? The essence of pure evil? The driver of the worst imaginable maniacal serial killer/rapist/mass murderer? Or something like a unfathomable demon far worse than what has ever been portrayed in the scariest ghost/monster movies?
With what I’ve come to realize is that this line of thinking of “Badness” is still quite external to the essence and core of Badness. I’ve come to see that Bad is truly a judgement that we impose upon ourselves based upon beliefs and images that most of us would deny we have because it sounds too crazy (“crazy” is code for unbearable) to believe how “bad of a person” we think of ourselves as.
But the truth is in our lives we spend an immense amount of our energy, time and life force trying to counter, cover up, and hide this badness. It’s in our actions and behavior to look better, and be better for others and to our self critical view of ourselves. We look in the mirror both literally and figuratively. And when we look in the mirror it’s not that often to see the beautiful reflection of a wonderful beautiful being (partly because we might have been told that’s vain, and vain is Bad). More likely we look to see all the shortcomings, doubts, pimples, scars, wrinkles and imperfections that we might have varying degrees of shame, embarrassment about –> all these lead to feelings of Bad. And many of us as grown ups sort of get good of covering up those core feelings of Bad rather quickly so that we actually kind of numb them out and move on with important stuff in our lives like “earning a living”
–segway to a scene of a young me looking in the mirror: “Oh wow what a huge pimple. I look bad.”
— my early inner critical voice: “Only a few can look pretty. Come on grow up, toughen up. You can’t be too sensitive if you’re going to grow up and be successful. It could be a lot worse. ” –> and the bad feeling is repressed.
But the thing I start to realize is that although feeling Bad is ultimately the result of my own inner judgement of myself as I witness myself being seen by other, the act of pushing past inner judgment may only just be repressing and storing away that Badness deep within me. And these stored away Bad feelings are still moving me or trapping me in cycles of behavior that I although I may want to stop, I can’t — no matter how much I believe it makes sense to stop.
Where it plays out most prominently for me is in establishing my boundaries. So for example if I’m asked by someone to do a favor that I really don’t want to do, if I have that badness there in I’m more likely to say “yes” I can do that favor. Because if I say “yes” my inner judge says “I’m nice, generous, selfless and Good,” but if I say “no” my inner judge might say “well then they won’t like you anymore, or they’ll talk behind your back about how I stuck-up or selfish or unfriendly” —-> translation “how I am in truth genuinely, is just a bad unloveable person”
And yes many of us may have heard encouraging words of wisdom like:
“No one can make you feel Inferior without your consent”
“You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.”
“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter, and those who matter don’t mind.”
But yet still internalizing the truth of the above quotes does not change how you feel. And it’s because the power of “Bad” is not in the realm of wise thoughts. While you can certainly start quieting some of those inner critic/judge voices with words of truth and wisdom like the above, the driving power of “Bad” is the very fact that it HURTS!
The power of “Bad” is one on in the same as the “pain” that we feel when feel we haven’t done enough, we should have been, we could have been, wish we were, feel guilty, and in more or less ways can’t show ourselves to others and especially to those that seem to matter the most in our lives. And for most of us we think the pain is just a “dull” pain, not to be compared with say a broken leg, a major physical wound, or major burn injuries. But what I’ve come to believe is that the pain of “Bad” is actually quite incredibly intense, it’s just “dull” because life affords us so many ways to avoid getting close to the pain of those parts of us that we deeply feel are “Badness”. Many of those ways are just getting lost in work, constantly moving on, earning more money, or spending money on things to distract you from having to fall into feeling exposed and starting to feel that “Badness”.
Lately I see this interplay in how it has moved me to work longer and longer hours at my workplace, for fear of being late on a project. My critical adult might cast reasons why this is justified, making up a horrific story like “if you are late than this other big mega-dollar project will be late and you’ll be at fault, and this other multi-billion dollar plan will be messed up all because of you. You boss, your bosses boss, your bosses, bosses boss will be so so so angry with you. So if you right now decide to take it easy and go on vacation and dare “have fun!” while your project is in the depths of chaos …. oooh … You will look SO BAD” You will be in BIG TROUBLE!. “ –> This is the edge and intensity of BADness. And to avoid that edge and intensity I will be compelled into giving up my boundary and may work longer hours to make up for taking vacation, work weekends or put off vacation, or even if I do go on vacation feel really guilty about it and not have that much fun or even feel miserable.
And if I were to visualize and draw a picture how how the Pain of his Badness feels I see something that looks like my heart and when I feel the Badness it’s like a sharp knife jabbing me with sharp intense pain into my heart. So then if let’s say I’m in a disagreement with a loved one and I say “no” to something and they’d rather I have said “yes”, when that Badness is there for me in relationship I will feel guilt, I will feel pain, which I will try the best to ignore, keep busy and numb out as best I can, but the truth is that often it will drain me, it will feel like asking myself hold my breath for more than 2 minutes (honestly I don’t know if I could actually hold my breath anywhere near that long). And like the pain of holding your breath for as long as possible you might initially consider it a dull pain, but with time you realize it’s actually a very great pain that is ultimately the very essence of what pain means –> the belief and fear that you are imminently dying, being destroyed, or being annihilated into nothingness.
Your Badness, those purified dark grains of badness I described earlier, are those intense entry ways into the parts of you, you really don’t want to be seen because you believe if others and possibly you truly saw the depth and entirety of those parts of you would be rejected, outcasted, possibly put into jail with your mug face plastered in shame on the front pages of of newspapers, unloved, unworthy of living –> just plain Bad. And that kind of Badness, despite how much you can effectively deny it, is very very very painful. So painful that you dare not come close to feeling it and so it you don’t feel it. And in your not feeling it moves the way you behave, it moves you into those cycles you wish you didn’t fall into, because it’s those very cycles that are your means to not feel your “Badness” as best you can, so that you can remain as “Good” as possible and as least “Bad” as possible.