- Smiling through meetings while suffering excruciating pain from endometriosis. Would I bleed through my pad before finishing my stand-up presentation?
- Having to leave my elderly father at home with a caregiver during the month our team was offsite. Being halfway across the country when the house flooded and he was confused and terrified. Flying home to rescue him during a critical time for the team, disrupting operations, knowing my professional image was greatly weakened.
- Being forced to bottle my grief when he died and keep working because the final report had to get finished.
So true! Sometimes I think this world is a purgatory where there are no good choices - we're forced to choose which bad outcome we're willing to endure. But it's all worth it for the art and beauty. Thank you for your daily offerings of joy!
By the way - the images you chose for your story are exquisitely expressive.
That doesn't sound healthy. No human being should have to choose between their career and their health and human dignity. I know that, in individual cases, this is difficult or almost impossible.
But body and mind cannot be exploited indefinitely.
Interesting...I believe juggling different selves may indeed be part of the dance I've been dancing and that most Asians dance their entire lives. You're absolutely right.
I completely agree....but what does and what should happen a different categories. Once you have a job that's worth the pain, sometimes you end up putting up with things that aren't good for you.
Reading through this, I found myself smiling when I got to the comment about the duck...calm and serene appearing above the water, but paddling madly just below the surface. I've seen that so many times before at the local duck pond and it never fails to amuse me! Your human counterpart scenario is anything but amusing, however. It perfectly reflects the burdensome Asian culture-driven concern about remaining calm, collected and 'steady', regardless of any chaotic disorder occurring just below the surface or out of sight of the day's 'events.' Losing face, as it were.
It is something that Western occidentals too often have no real understanding or awareness of. In fact most Americans typically have no sense of subtlety whatsoever. They wear their 'hearts' on their sleeves and preserving equanimity is almost an unknown art to them (us). That's rather a shame, since such a marked contrast between two radically diverging cultures (Asian and the West) often helps forge significant misunderstanding, rather than accord. And of course "misunderstanding" causes stress and pressure, which the body then sublimates, coming out as CNS symptoms (such as gastric upset, anxieties, et al) on an individual basis. Larger, collective effects of a similar nature are then felt across a whole society or nation.
In this context, you are, simply put, a victim of your culture, operating in an "out-of-culture" environment. Out of the comfort-zone due to the need to cope with situations within which one has no long real experience or limited familiarity. That certainly can create stress! Unnaturally trying to 'be on' when circumstances create pressures that can put one off, is onerous.
Asian cultures force members of their societies to deal with unusually stressful circumstances, like it or not, but it's always a falsely induced battle with forces that belie the most basic harmonies of traditional Confucius-derived value systems. My own wife, who is Chinese and comes from a society in which many hundreds of thousands all compete for a paucity of opportunities, often unconsciously acts in ways that reveal this very same symptom you describe, here. I find myself constantly having to "as gently as possible" bring her to conscious awareness of these forces acting within her, at her deepest, most sublimated levels. It isn't always successful, for she's acting in autonomic response to decades of social conditioning and behavioral reinforcement.
You've done nice job of working through this set of processes here, by setting this down on paper. You might find some basic reading of 'Gestalt Therapy' of interest, since Gestalt stresses living in 'the present moment ', something along the lines of Taoist philosophy, in which one follows the seeming reality of events like a stream flows over and around rocks, rather than trying to run two distinctly divergent mode of action in the manner of the duck (LoL).
Flowing water does not challenge the right of rocks to stand in its way, of course, and merely flows around them in a dignified, unflappable and un-forced or artificial manner. It is the beauty of that timeless advice of the Tao that helps prepared one to 'be on' without being on the razor-edge of 'falling off.' We would all do well to emulate the way of the water, or the tides of the sea, which, like the tides of man might otherwise vaporise and vanish.
As I said earlier, nice writing...for it helps bring all of the above (subliminal) potentials and possibilities out of the murky darkness, where our minds have hurriedly stowed them, and into the bright light of rationality, while also preserving calmness and dignity, where they can operate effectively and unencumbered...both above and below the surface of events! -K2
There's a way out of this labyrinth: ask yourbody/mind continuum
1) not how, but what I am feeling
2) why I am feeling that
You don’t need to share. You need to open yourself up to your own self.
Once you start integrating the suffering Self, the professional Self, the emotional and rational Selves, you stop lying to yourself. You stop using up your energy to hide behind a a fragile screen.
You start feeling resilient again. Breathing again. Sleeping again. Dreaming again. A sense of mastery and agency will come back.
This is heartbreaking. I've been there -
- Smiling through meetings while suffering excruciating pain from endometriosis. Would I bleed through my pad before finishing my stand-up presentation?
- Having to leave my elderly father at home with a caregiver during the month our team was offsite. Being halfway across the country when the house flooded and he was confused and terrified. Flying home to rescue him during a critical time for the team, disrupting operations, knowing my professional image was greatly weakened.
- Being forced to bottle my grief when he died and keep working because the final report had to get finished.
This is brutal and I feel it. Life. Keeping your sanity is no easy feat.
So true! Sometimes I think this world is a purgatory where there are no good choices - we're forced to choose which bad outcome we're willing to endure. But it's all worth it for the art and beauty. Thank you for your daily offerings of joy!
By the way - the images you chose for your story are exquisitely expressive.
You've made my day. If there's anything you'd ever like me to write about, send it on over and I'll give it my best.
That doesn't sound healthy. No human being should have to choose between their career and their health and human dignity. I know that, in individual cases, this is difficult or almost impossible.
But body and mind cannot be exploited indefinitely.
Some interesting and insightful writing here. I'll be back to absorb more of this, shortly. -K2
Thank you so much
Interesting...I believe juggling different selves may indeed be part of the dance I've been dancing and that most Asians dance their entire lives. You're absolutely right.
I completely agree....but what does and what should happen a different categories. Once you have a job that's worth the pain, sometimes you end up putting up with things that aren't good for you.
Reading through this, I found myself smiling when I got to the comment about the duck...calm and serene appearing above the water, but paddling madly just below the surface. I've seen that so many times before at the local duck pond and it never fails to amuse me! Your human counterpart scenario is anything but amusing, however. It perfectly reflects the burdensome Asian culture-driven concern about remaining calm, collected and 'steady', regardless of any chaotic disorder occurring just below the surface or out of sight of the day's 'events.' Losing face, as it were.
It is something that Western occidentals too often have no real understanding or awareness of. In fact most Americans typically have no sense of subtlety whatsoever. They wear their 'hearts' on their sleeves and preserving equanimity is almost an unknown art to them (us). That's rather a shame, since such a marked contrast between two radically diverging cultures (Asian and the West) often helps forge significant misunderstanding, rather than accord. And of course "misunderstanding" causes stress and pressure, which the body then sublimates, coming out as CNS symptoms (such as gastric upset, anxieties, et al) on an individual basis. Larger, collective effects of a similar nature are then felt across a whole society or nation.
In this context, you are, simply put, a victim of your culture, operating in an "out-of-culture" environment. Out of the comfort-zone due to the need to cope with situations within which one has no long real experience or limited familiarity. That certainly can create stress! Unnaturally trying to 'be on' when circumstances create pressures that can put one off, is onerous.
Asian cultures force members of their societies to deal with unusually stressful circumstances, like it or not, but it's always a falsely induced battle with forces that belie the most basic harmonies of traditional Confucius-derived value systems. My own wife, who is Chinese and comes from a society in which many hundreds of thousands all compete for a paucity of opportunities, often unconsciously acts in ways that reveal this very same symptom you describe, here. I find myself constantly having to "as gently as possible" bring her to conscious awareness of these forces acting within her, at her deepest, most sublimated levels. It isn't always successful, for she's acting in autonomic response to decades of social conditioning and behavioral reinforcement.
You've done nice job of working through this set of processes here, by setting this down on paper. You might find some basic reading of 'Gestalt Therapy' of interest, since Gestalt stresses living in 'the present moment ', something along the lines of Taoist philosophy, in which one follows the seeming reality of events like a stream flows over and around rocks, rather than trying to run two distinctly divergent mode of action in the manner of the duck (LoL).
Flowing water does not challenge the right of rocks to stand in its way, of course, and merely flows around them in a dignified, unflappable and un-forced or artificial manner. It is the beauty of that timeless advice of the Tao that helps prepared one to 'be on' without being on the razor-edge of 'falling off.' We would all do well to emulate the way of the water, or the tides of the sea, which, like the tides of man might otherwise vaporise and vanish.
As I said earlier, nice writing...for it helps bring all of the above (subliminal) potentials and possibilities out of the murky darkness, where our minds have hurriedly stowed them, and into the bright light of rationality, while also preserving calmness and dignity, where they can operate effectively and unencumbered...both above and below the surface of events! -K2
There's a way out of this labyrinth: ask yourbody/mind continuum
1) not how, but what I am feeling
2) why I am feeling that
You don’t need to share. You need to open yourself up to your own self.
Once you start integrating the suffering Self, the professional Self, the emotional and rational Selves, you stop lying to yourself. You stop using up your energy to hide behind a a fragile screen.
You start feeling resilient again. Breathing again. Sleeping again. Dreaming again. A sense of mastery and agency will come back.
J. 🌺