Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(8)

“I just have a hard time comprehending why rehashing the past repeatedly, time and time again, is beneficial to people who just need to get up and move the fuck on. Get over it. There are people being blown out of their homes in Syria. We have a president who is rolling back women’s rights, and innocent black men are getting shot and killed by police officers every day. Get out of your own asshole, and look around.”

The irony that I was sitting in a psychiatrist’s office complaining about people who sit in a psychiatrist’s office was not lost on either of us. We locked eyes with an intense stare because what I had admitted was more profound than anything I was blabbering on about; I had sought out the help of a professional because I knew, on a cellular level, that I wouldn’t be able to help anyone in a real, meaningful way until I was able to sit with myself—a place I believed I was too smart to ever have to go to.

    “Okay, that’s fair,” he said, nodding, understanding where I was coming from. “Just so you know, from my professional experience, I have seen how it has helped a lot of people to understand themselves and the people they love in a deeper way. But we don’t have to talk about it. It’s totally up to you.”

I told him what my father told me about taking one piece of information away from any conversation and that one of my desires was to become more open-minded, as long as I was learning something, and if this was something he believed in, I was willing to hear him out.

“Your father sounds like a smart guy,” Dan said.

“Well, let’s not get carried away. I mean, he was and is smart, but he’s also a con man who cheated, lied, and probably stole from people. He is the epitome of a used-car dealer.”

“In what way?”

“He actually was a used-car dealer.”

“Ah, okay.”

“But please go on, because I’m here to become less judgmental, and more patient, and if I really lose interest in this subject matter, I’ll start rolling my eyes, which is also something I’d like to do less frequently.”

He went on to tell me that this default zone is the place you revert to when you feel uncomfortable, or nervous, or when things don’t turn out the way they were supposed to. When you are born into this world, you experience one of the three reactions, which sets up your disposition in life. In the Enneagram model, the reactions are located in the head, heart, and gut. Dan and his fellow researchers developed their own model, translating those three areas of the body to emotional states: fear (head), sadness (heart), and anger (gut).

    “I’m anger.”

“Okay.”

“I’m fucking angry. I just don’t understand how this man could get elected.”

Dan told me to just sit with that feeling and not talk.

What I grew to learn was that Dan didn’t want me to talk around my anger and pretend it was all about Donald Trump. What Donald Trump represented to me were things being out of control, and when things became unhinged, I became angry because that was my default zone. I realize that many people may think of me as someone who is completely out of control myself, and they’re not wrong. I am out of control, but within boundaries that no one knows about except me. I thrive in organized chaos. It keeps my juices flowing and it keeps me paying attention and on my tippy-toes.

Once the silence had gone on for what seemed to me like an unreasonable amount of time (less than a minute), I needed to break it.

“Anger makes sense,” I admitted. “All I ever wanted was financial freedom and independence and now I have it, but I’m stuck. I’m stuck with what to do next, because the whole world is upside down. Until I read Rebecca Solnit and James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates I had no idea how many women are beaten and raped every second in this world or what it means to grow up as a black person, or any person of color, in this country we call ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave.’ What is wrong with me? How could I be so self-absorbed?”

    I was saying things out loud I hadn’t said out loud to anyone before.

“I’ve spent the last fifteen years of my success believing that I picked myself up by my bootstraps and worked my ass off to get where I was. It never occurred to me that I have had an advantage just by being white. That I’ve never not argued with a police officer when being pulled over for a ticket, while for black people getting pulled over is a life-or-death situation. I’ve been so consumed with my own success and my own personal life that I haven’t spent enough time thinking about people outside my lane and what their struggles are. I have shame for my entitlement and for not learning all of this sooner. I feel great shame and outrage. I’m embarrassed for our entire race, but I’m really mostly embarrassed for myself.”

By the time I was done with this little diatribe, my eyes were starting to water. I needed to pivot and change topics before the lip-quivering kicked in. It would be mortifying to lose my composure in front of a stranger. I was not going to let myself cry.

“I come on strong.”

“To whom?”

“To anyone who I think needs me.”

“Tell me more about that.”

“I want to fix people. If someone doesn’t have friends, I’ll introduce them to people. If someone needs money, I’ll give them money. If someone is hurt and is going through a breakup in Germany, I will fly to Germany to be with them. They don’t really even have to be a close friend. I’d do that for a stranger. I have a boundary issue, I think. Why do I do these things unless I am making up for some other terrible quality that I’m trying to camouflage? It’s too much. I always go too far. I’m like a calf that needs to be faked out with an electric fence inside a bigger electric fence, like a Russian nesting doll. I have to be tricked to stay inbounds. Like an animal. I hate boundaries.”