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Revelation: The confidence isn’t real. I created it. No, that isn’t accurate: it is real, but it isn’t genuine. It is reflex and conditioning. For months, I made a mantra of positive thinking, every time I walked into a situation that made me uncomfortable. I thought to myself, in literal words, I am a queen – the queen of the room, the bus, the audition. Whatever it was that made me nervous. It was strange and maybe childish, definitely not original (how does the cliché go? I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like me!), but it worked. It calmed me, pushed the fear away. Ah, but let me repeat that: pushed the fear away. Did nothing to change it. But it worked so well, has worked for so long, that there’s nothing much to show you any more that it isn’t real.

But it isn’t.

I’ve been reading a lot of Zen theory and teachings lately, and one master explicitly mentions the futility of so-called positive thinking: it is the little mind trying to change the little mind. It is a perpetuation of illusion.

Even as I write this, I try to find ways to distract myself from the truth of it. I notice how messy my room is, how uncomfortable my seat is, I get up to change the music. Telling myself I am confident over and over can only make me seem confident, and also, even more, implant in me this frantic fear of being found out, a fear to which I must now impart much more energy to maintain. There is a distinct difference between facing fear and subsuming it into something else, burying it in action, even positive action. Yes, I have made good friends and found lovers, learned things that I would likely not have learned if I had not taught myself the skill of assumed confidence, but that doesn’t mean that I should continue to pretend to be something I’m not.

Recently – very recently, since I began writing this, even – I have noticed a reoccurrence of a phenomenon that had essentially ceased: I am with someone, talking, and a person approaches who does not know me but does know my companion. We are introduced, and the other two talk for a while until the new person leaves, at which point they say their goodbyes to the person I had been talking to, and they go. Without acknowledging my presence at all.

This is distressing to me: when I am being honest with myself and my comfort and not forcing myself to be more outgoing and – there’s no better word – sparkly than I would naturally be, I can’t bring myself to take that additional step to further the interaction. And I hesitate to say that I fade into the background, because that isn’t really how I feel, but it seems like I diminish somehow.

My ego wants to cover this up by saying that they are intimidated by me and protecting themselves by not reaching out, either. I suppose I have no reason to think that this isn’t the case, but it seems more indulgent than true. Maybe I just become more cryptic when I am not trying to flash; even at my most outgoing, if you put me in a big party I will find a comfortable place to sit and plant myself there. If people want to talk to me, they will come up to me and talk; I don’t have the emotional energy to seek them out in a setting like that. In general, I am more likely to feign ignorance of the presence of someone whose feelings about me I am unsure of, rather than approach or greet them and risk – what? Rejection, I suppose it must be. Or worse, a feigned interest on their part. If I sit and appear involved in my book or with the scene out the window, and they approach me, then I can feel comfortable again.

I imagine, now that I think about it, that more than one acquaintance has picked up on this to some degree or another, and thought that I was ignoring them on purpose. Which, of course, I was.

So the next step, then, is what? To sit and see if I can’t figure out where these feelings of inadequacy are coming from? It’s been a long time since I had any significant interactions with people who were outwardly hostile or abusive towards me, so it seems logical enough that I should have gotten past the negative social interactions that haunt my past. But there is revealing language, there: haunt, not even past tense. Clearly these things are still with me, clearly I have not really moved through them.

We talked about this recently, when you told me that you thought I made you a real person. And I told you that your friendship in that critical moment gave me the confidence to become who I am today. Your friendship gave me the ability to begin standing up for myself, speaking my mind, walking with my head up. From there, I made the choice to be sure I had an opinion on just about everything, and to share it. I made the choice to deny the parts of me that are shy and insecure, and to begin the creation of the elaborate persona I wear now.

There might not be anything more terrifying to me right now than the idea of abandoning that persona. (Proof: I’ve barely even put the period on that sentence when I get up to check my email, get something to eat, lock the door, do my laundry. I don’t even realize that I have shied away from it until I come back here and look at what I’ve written.)

But that’s why it’s a practice, right? This afternoon, I will try to sit for a while, light a candle, and think about this more. I’ve been struggling for years with this feeling of dishonesty in my personality, but the dismantling of your sense of self is a pretty imposing goal. I was really, really unhappy for quite a while, and I changed my behavior because I wanted to change that.

But it hasn’t made me happy. I mean, yes, certainly I’ve been happy in the intervening time, and often, and sincerely. But I’ve also been afraid of losing that happiness, and I’ve often been afraid of losing that happiness because I’m afraid that people will discover that I’m not who I seem to be. I have been true to myself in many significant ways, and there are many times when I have been tempted to change something in my aspect or behavior to better fit some expectation or to create comfort where there is currently discomfort or pain: I need to acknowledge that, too. This isn’t a wholesale destruction of anything: I am who I am. That already exists. Like time, my existence is not negotiable, or isolated, or stationary. I am who I am, and who I am is an ever-changing thing; I am a fluid medium. At the essence of me – at my flawed and struggling center – I am made of the same substance as everyone and everything else in this whole spinning universe. Right now, I just happen to be casting my own shadow.

Ah, yes, the metaphor of the shadow. You brought me that one, darling: the thing that we carry around with us, that we drag behind us, the darkness we cannot escape. Is that where I am venturing now? It’s a hard place; I don’t want to put my feet there. Don’t want to put my mind there, don’t want to go there at all. Except.

Except that my recent contentment here makes me nervous. Yes, yes, here I am, making into reality the dream that I nursed and suckled from for two years, here I am living the thing I have wanted so hard for so long that I thought, then, that it must come true. And it has.

And I find that I am sure that I will lose it. That it will slip through my maladroit fingers, dissolve into dust, that when the test (what test? I don’t know, but my gut is sure there will be one), oh, when the test comes, I will be shown to be false. I will fail.

I do not want to fail. I desperately, desperately need to not fail. Not just for all the usual reasons, though those are true too. I don’t want to disappoint my parents, or my teachers, I want to seem smart and educated, I don’t want to have to tell people I left school again.

But this time, here, there is something new: I don’t want to fail because I believe very strongly that what I am doing now has something important to do with the fate of the world. We are, without a doubt or room for contention, going to ruin the land and destroy the systems that are now used to produce food, and I am studying new (and very, very old) ways to cultivate, irrigate, create sustenance from earth. At the bottom of my gut and in my heart of hearts I think that what I am doing now will help save us all. It is therefore imperative that I do not fail.

It is therefore imperative that I walk into the shadow and figure out what it has been hiding from me. Figure out what I have been hiding from myself. Polishing the mirror, polishing the mirror, until I can see all the downfalls, faults, and issues and call them blessings. I need to dig down into the old pain and the older fear (how many times have I used that word so far? But it is the core of all this, the root of my existential suffering), until the pain is just one more thing: just a passing cloud, only another grey against the wide grey sky.

The Buddhists tell us that life is suffering. Even joy is suffering, because entwined in joy is our fear of its ending and the pain that will come. The only way to avoid suffering is to stop trying to avoid it. Just goddamn be here now.

The book I am reading, Nothing Special: Living Zen, by Charlotte Joko Beck, talks about Sisyphus, the Greek king condemned to push a boulder up a hill forever in Hades. As soon as he gets to the top, the rock rolls back down to the bottom, and he must begin again. Asked for the teaching in this myth, one student responds: “Sisyphus’ punishment is awful only if he hopes for an end to it.”

I am stunned. Shouldn’t it be just the opposite? With the hope of reprieve, anything is bearable for some time, right? If I try to imagine doing anything for eternity, anything at all, I get panicky. Much less pushing a rock up a hill all day, just to find it slipping out of my grasp just when I thought the ordeal might be over. At the end of the chapter, the Zen master and her students seem to find a lesson: as long as Sisyphus resists his punishment, it is punishment; once he accepts it, accepts the present moment of it, becomes nothing more nor less than a man pushing a rock, he is free. It is awful if he hopes for an end to it, because it is awful if he believes he is separate from his action, if he focuses on the future – an eternity of shoulder-heaving, heart-pounding, always the same hill, always the same slope, always the same weight – or if he looks back on the past, where presumably once he was a king who committed some transgression against the gods. Not knowing the details of the sin, I will venture to guess hubris. The Greeks seemed especially fond of myths that remind you not to presume too much.

So where is my lesson, then? With what teaching shall I depart from this story? Is is pointless to turn my mind towards the past, try to unearth my niggling little doubts, my feral rage – away from which I also have made a long and magnificent ordeal of turning.

I don’t any longer feel like I take a conscious control over my emotions, but still they often remain fairly subdued for long periods of time before exploding everywhere in a great, dramatic, uncontrollable display. Especially with anger. But that isn’t a surprise: anger and I didn’t bother each other until that once, when rage took me, filled me, shoved everything else aside and inhabited my body fully and uncompromisingly, so that for that one moment – which lasted I don’t know how long, perhaps ten minutes, maybe an hour – I was not myself. It was as though I woke from a terrible dream, afterwards, with deep crescent bruises on my palms, tears pooling on my collarbone, my gut empty and cold, my lungs full of poison air. I remember it barely, only as a smeared palette of deadly crimson and searing white, the icy reverberation of your voice, the heat of his eyes, the crackling silence in between.

Like the night in the ocean, they tell me afterwards what I did. Because I don’t remember that I lunged at him, I don’t remember screaming or hurling curses, don’t remember threats or accusations or sobbing. Just the physical sensations of hate and malice and fear, and the deep, deep, burning rage, a fury that colored my sight in blood and acid.

Since that day, I have not been able to sit easily with anger. Some days I will interact with someone – someone who irritates me for some reason – with a perfect outward calm while horrific scenes play themselves inside my head: I am unbearably violent against this person who has done me no serious wrong. I claw at their eyes and shatter their faces with fists and elbows and mallets, crack leg bones and arm bones and breastbones, cause awful damage, blood runs, intestines spill, screams wrack the sky.

From here, I don’t think I can even grasp the enormity of the struggle I will engage in to reclaim my anger, to make it an emotion and not a living writhing thing inside me, something that I have caged so securely and for so long that I often forget it is even there. These days I make no conscious effort not to get angry; it just doesn’t come. Only muted ire and raw images of destruction. It isn’t anger: my violent movies play themselves as from a reel, without my input or editing, without my invitation or consent. I wear a calm face because I’ve got nothing to do with it.

Oh, I know, I know, of course I do. It’s my brain, after all, I don’t want to be shirking my responsibility here, but it feels that way, really it does. A crazy, crazed screaming serpent is hidden somewhere, really, really, really well, and he’s still upset from way back then. And I don’t know where to look for him, and if you think I was scared before, when I was talking about abandoning my image of power, you should see the acrobatics my brain is going through to distract me from this now.

I comfort myself with the fact that it can take decades to establish a good Zen practice, and it isn’t until that happens that the really tough problems, the ones with gnarled branches and deep taproots into the dark abyss of denial, the ones that wait all wrapped up in snakeskin, not until you’re really good at sitting can you dig those out. So hopefully I won’t have to face that particular demon just yet; hopefully by the time I seek him out of his den, I’ll be prepared for it.

Because for right now, the heaving in my stomach and the gripping in my throat are telling me to let him sleep a while longer. Dig down into fear if you must, scrape the bottom of insecurity, pick at the veneer, but please, please, leave the rage alone.

My heart is racing just writing this, and I have had to force myself to not get up and make popcorn, not check to see if a new cd came out, not let my also racing mind lure me away. I’m going to have to sit for a long, long time to come to terms with this, it seems. I’ve done such a good job of protecting myself from my fury that I didn’t even realize it was missing. I just thought I had adjusted really well.

This is when I tend to think of the saying if our brain was simple enough to understand, we would be too simple to understand it. I want to think of a better word, but I don’t think there is one: I am stunned by the acrobatics my brain goes through, has gone through for all these years, to hide itself from itself. (And what before that incident? I never noticed myself feeling particularly upset very often, once I got out of my tantrum years. Was I hiding it then, so that it surfaced so explosively that once, or was there just a simmering, heretofore untouched pool of rage waiting for the event needed to set it off? Which is more frightening?)

Let me admit right now that when I set off on this endeavor, I did not expect to be uncovering any of this. I did not intend to go on a spelunking journey into the uncharted depths of my soul, much less planning to take any of you along for the ride. But here we are, and so that’s where we are meant to be. But fuck, it’s scary for me here right now.

I have been trying to sit and meditate for a little while every day, and the thought of doing that right now makes me far more nervous than anything that involves just sitting in one place and breathing should have any right to be able to do.

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