The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.
Maya Angelou Acclaimed American poet, storyteller, activist, and autobiographer
I think Maya Angelou is right about this and it reminds me of Spanish philosopher George Santayana’s ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’, and also what Winston Churchill wrote, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
Put them all together and what I come away with is an increased desire to NOT make the mistake they are all warning us about. Actually the two men quoted here are focused on the cost to me of not staying with my current project ie. Reflecting on my history and hopefully understanding its effect on me today. What I love about the comment from Maya Angelou above is she turns my attention to the positive, what happens if you do make the effort to learn and understand. In the few minutes it took me to read and think about her comment it had what may have been part of her intent, it put a little fuel in my tank.
It is a pretty well established fact that fear is a great motivator. not only big fears but even the little ones can push people to produce the behaviour the threat is demanding. It’s true for me, over the years fear has pushed me to do all kinds of things but, and here’s the problem, fear doesn’t always produce the best kind of behaviour or the best outcomes. As a matter of fact being motivated by fear can end up producing the exact opposite behaviour and can lead to dreadful outcomes. ‘Dreadful’ is an interesting word, ‘Full of Dread’ I guess is the etymology and if it is then it explains a lot for me. Being full of dread is really another way of saying full of fear and both can and often do lead to dreadful outcomes.
All through primary school I remember teachers handing out lots of worksheets and some of them were a kind of ‘pop quiz’ or a quiz, landing on our desk with no warning. I hated those things because my brain didn’t seem to work the way it needed to. It was almost as if I couldn’t process the question itself. I was terrified of being wrong. Actually I’m not sure that’s correct, I think it might have been the fear of of what getting it wrong would cause and for me that was and probably still is the ocean deep fear of being shamed. Feeling shame on my own is bad enough, it can feel like a hand grenade exploding causing emotional shrapnel to rip though my body and mind.
Being Shamed in public though is more like a nuclear bomb exploding and flattening an entire city leaving only rubble and a deadly atmosphere behind.
RD
When it happens it results in me never being able to live or even visit that site, never being able to even approach or think or reflect on memory. Public shame renders me unable to revisit and learn from that history. I suffer the exact warnings from those two men above and instead of becoming more liberated, as Maya Angelou urges me to I am stuck in what feels like an unbreakable loop, a cycle that just keeps happening.
When one of those quizzes landed on my desk, driven by that fear of shame it caused behaviour pretty much guaranteed to cause the shame and explode another nuclear bomb. For many people I understand the dear of getting that quiz wrong would motivate them to concentrate and focus all of their mind of each question on that sheet. for others though, and ninths case for me it has never worked that way. As soon as I got the 10 question maths quiz, rather than read it I just scribbled any number that came into my mind as my answer. Yep, I would go down the answer column on the right hand side of the page and just write random numbers as my answers. I know how crazy that sounds believe me but that’s exactly what I would do. I can’t say I had a strategy behind my random number generation but I can tell you that at least once the teacher assumed I was just being a lazy little shit trying to cause trouble. Not a good outcome but far better than anyone finding out what was really going on.
To be honest about this I’d never really put much thought into all that. My partner knows that story but I don’t think I understood until this morning what was actually going on back then. I think in writing this I have just experienced one of those Epiphany’s I wrote about in a previous post. In my simple terms this is what was happening.
The fear of shame triggered by this little maths quiz was so intense, such a nuclear bomb level fear that I had to get rid of it as fast as possible. So, quickly writing down any answer at all was less painful than letting it sit in front of me unfinished for another second. Maybe it’s like dropping a hot baking tray I’ve unwittingly picked up with my bare hands, on to the floor. Sure I might step on it or it may land on my foot but for this moment, for even a second, it keeps my hands from being badly burnt. It is a survival instinct rather than a rational thought and action.
RD
That story has always had a bit of mystery for me, why would I do something that would so obviously cause the very thing I was afraid of? I think might be because some fears are so extreme that they cause me to do anything, even self destructive things to stop being ‘blown up’ even if that postpones the inevitable for a little while, a day, an hour, a few minutes, even a few seconds. The terror inside, that comes from having experienced, in this case, public shaming is so powerful that is blows the circuit board and sometimes knocks out the electricity for the entire block. If you’ve honestly never experienced this the I can imagine it will be hard to empathise but I suspect I am not the only one and perhaps there are a lot of people who have experienced the lasting effect of an emotional nuclear bomb going off and, because of the radioactive fall out are simply unable to return to the site.
I can see a little more more clearly now that there are many historical ‘sites’ I have not been able to return to, the fallout from things that happened feels too dangerous, even deadly, to even get near to them. I realise as I write that this means I have history I’m yet to know and that means I am yet to be liberated from.
Even know as I become aware of this I can feel myself pushing those memories down, trying desperately to find something else to fill my mind, my consciousness. Another coffee, another newsfeed, more food, another whiskey. Anything within reach to instantly change the subject. Exactly how I dealt with those maths quizzes, with no thought of the outcome of the action. It’s so disturbing to my equilibrium that even if another whiskey makes me an alcoholic it’s far less painful than walking back onto the site where the nuclear blast happened.
It’s not less painful of course. It’s never better less painful in the long run. The instant avoidance of the fear of this moment, as far as I can tell, almost always eventually leads to something worse. It’s like borrowing ever more money to pay the interest on the past loan, one day thee will be no more money to borrow, no more credit and then what? I believe all this is true but unless you have had the experience of walking back to one of those sites where the emotional radioactive fallout feels like it threatens your life, then I imagine it’s hard to understand why a person would, in an instant, run as fast as they can towards safety when that apparent safety almost always turns out to be greater danger.
Knowing is better than not knowing, of this I am certain. What I’m not certain of is how the courage is found to do that, to willingly learn my history, to willingly revisit the memories that are my ground zero, the sites that have been ghost towns, buried under tonnes of rubble keeping me safe from the fallout, the shrapnel that can ricochet throughout a persons emotional sinew causing them to reach for anything to stop the damage from getting worse.
The thing is, and this is a real thing, the thing is that those awful memories, hidden under the rubble are, in the end only memories. They cannot actually hurt me now. If I’m not mistaken, and of course I often am, what hurts me now the thing that does all the damage is the fear of what happened back then. I don’t discount the force and effect of feelings, not at all, I know that feelings can and often do effect my physical world as well as my emotional world so it’s not as simple as saying the feelings from the past can’t hurt me now. They can and they do. Even so, I have some hope that, done the right way and with the right support, a person can revisit their history, their memories of what they did and what was done. Maybe that’s the path I’m on now, I hope so and I hope not. Both seem opposite but both are true and I think I’m supposed to welcome both. I wish liberation was easier than how it seems but maybe that’s more the point. Perhaps it’s a lot about perception, the place from where I am looking, it is not out of the realms of possibility that how I see and experience my history may well change as I begin to see that history more clearly.
It may not be true for me now or even soon but perhaps one day, Johnny Nash might turn out to be prophetic when wrote and sang:
I can see clearly now the rain has gone, I can see all obstacles in my way. Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind.
Johnny Nash, 1972
To be motivated by the hope of blue skies is to be drawn to the sunshine, to be drawn to the promise of liberation from the past. This must surely be a better motivation than running from the fear of being doomed to my history repeating itself. Perhaps this is the process of Redemption.
I guess we shall see.