It happens all the time. More than we realize. It insinuates itself into our psyche from the moment we begin to understand right from wrong. One little rule to start, something simple and obvious like “Don’t hit.” A few more. “Don’t scream.” “No biting.” “Don’t play in the street.” “Always say please and thank you.” Rules to live by. Pretty soon it gets more complicated.
“Don’t talk back to your parents.” Wait, because they’re always right? Or because they might NOT always be right and they don’t like us to point that out? Or because talking back might earn me a slap on the bottom and a long sit?
How about “Don’t be rude?” Is it the natural bodily functions that are rude, or is it only rude if I don’t excuse myself? What if I can’t help burping? What exactly is it about me making funny faces at somebody that is rude? Why can’t I close my eyes if I don’t like what I am hearing from another person? If I call somebody a baby, but I really like babies, is that still calling them names?
If I make a mistake and break one of the rules, even if I wasn’t sure exactly what the rule was, then the ones responsible for me have to punish me because I wasn’t good enough.
Then, of course, as we get older, we start to snap all the rules like reeds in a hurricane. A little voice in us says “That’s bullshit. My teachers don’t always know best. They don’t know me at all. Neither do my parents for that matter. They just want to control me.” Some of our friends think the same things, and so we have a little club. A club of rebels. And the club has new rules. “Question everything.” “Don’t listen to The Man.” “Grown-ups can’t be trusted.” “Don’t be a sissy.” “Try this.” And, damn, it feels good to piss all over those old rules about obeying and being nice all the time and not being too loud. Except we don’t actually ever throw most of them out after that. We bury them. Our subconscious still keeps track so that some part of us always knows we are breaking the rules, and when we break those old rules we aren’t really being good.
Of course, we have new rebel rules now, and if we break those, we aren’t being good rebels either. Tricky.
Somewhere along the way we become adults. Perhaps we go in for a steady job and get a slew of new rules about being smart enough and thinking for ourselves and doing what we’re told and whose turn it is to clean out the sludge from the coffee pot.
Perhaps we have long-term relationships wherein we draw upon our family history and the other person’s family history and what the media has to say about being involved with a person and what our friends say and our cultural impressions and our religious upbringing, and we lay down rules for the relationship. Rules about division of labor and romance and appearances and expectations for holidays and who has more control or for fuck’s sake we will be egalitarian and how much sex to have and where to have it and how many positions we should use to keep things spicy so we can know we are doing our part to maintain the relationship. Don’t forget the money. If the relationship isn’t working, one or both of us is obviously breaking too many rules because we or they are not good enough.
Perhaps we become parents – on purpose or on accident (don’t forget those rules), and we get to have the complete nightmare joy of unwrapping all the rules of our own upbringing that we had previously buried, blending those with our partner’s rules about his or her own upbringing – if we even have a partner (oh the broken rules)! Add in all the rebel rules we are busy acquiring because we are parents of a new age. Then cobble together a shambles of rules that we can use to control completely mess up lovingly raise our own children with. This is important, goddammit, because we LOVE our children, and we would hate to be responsible for their years of therapy, so we carve our parenting rules in stone and then varnish them with several layers of reasoning and then bludgeon other parents with them in internet forums. Sometime during this process, we might realize our parents didn’t know what the fuck they were doing, either.
All of these rules are floating around in us at any given moment. They are contradictory, so of course we are always breaking one or two or a couple dozen of them, and it absolutely drives us crazy when other people break our rules. (If you have any rules about run-on sentences or sentence fragments or beginning a sentence with a conjunction, your eyes are probably bugging out by now.) We made these rules so we could be sure of being perceived as good enough so we would be loved and accepted by our family, our teachers, our friends, our community, our children. Yet here we are, breaking our own incongruous rules all of the time, which means deep down or maybe right up on the surface, we know that we suck at being good children/friends/parents/producers/humans.
Some things we don’t want to know about ourselves, though, so we rationalize. We complain. We try to tell ourselves and everyone else the circumstances that led us to breaking those rules. “You would do it, too, if you were me.” Maybe we give up all together or maybe we try harder so that somebody will tell us what a good job we are actually doing, what good people they think we are. Lord knows, it’s hard enough to believe it ourselves.
If you’ve read this far, you know what I’m talking about.
Perhaps, just now, as you have been seeing these same rules and others reflected in your psyche, wondering how each of them came to be so damn important, now flayed open and exposing all their lies about being good enough, your inner judge will p…a…u…s…e… With this breath, right now, you are just seeing these words on the page, the letters that make up each word, the spaces, and you notice how you can feel your breath moving in and out of your body. You can feel your chest rising and falling, and whether you are sitting or standing or home or out or relaxing or working, with whatever little or big sounds and movements around you, you are right now having the experience of being richly alive. The rules are still there, but they too are like meaningless words written in your mind. Words that, given time and attention, may be erased, dissolved. They don’t matter right now. This moment is not based on human rules, not part of the story of good enough. This moment and always, you are just right – perfectly you. And I love you.
Tell me about what it means to be perfectly you, just as you are. What does your soul sing?
