My Life Under The Bushel

Thinking about Francisco and his relative invisibility started a thought process that's still coalescing in my mind. It's on an emotional level like Einstein's Unified Field Theory - I can get glimpses of it in its entirety from certain angles, but I want to be able to present it in a way that it all hangs together regardless of the perspective.

It starts with my own emotional history, and my trying to categorize it.  However, while absorbing stories of the unique situations and the resulting pain others carry, there seems to be a commonality such that there is perhaps a common avenue of remedy.

I've always had a hot button when it comes to feeling like I'm not being and haven't been heard and feeling invisible. but it wasn't until recently that it's become clear that I create much of the invisibility myself as a consequence of some painful moments that were made worse by also not having the right to protest or to make my feelings heard. This has been a repeating motif within my family, within my friendships, within my work situations, and most painfully, within the church. The result is that I have chosen to expect mistreatment or being ostracized and having no effective voice in protesting what's being done. The short version of the story is that I can see how this has resulted in a lot of self-sabotaging behavior and I can see direct correlations in the ways I've tried to self medicate the hurt, the anger, and to fill the vacuum.

But there seems to be an overall pattern that has two basic components - the hurt/trauma/what have you, which is bad enough, but what might be the more traumatic part follows when the victim has no advocate or safe place to go, or even register a protest.

To avoid feeling betrayed, we limit who we trust. We avoid risk. Whatever light we might still have, we hide under a bushel. And to a large extent, that's been the story of my life, even more so after I got laid off even my boss acknowledged that it was his fault, but there was nothing that could be done about it. And I took a 15 year sabbatical, essentially hiding from the world and only allowing selected portions of the world in through my monthly dance parties.

But even then, there's buildup of resentment over time, to the point where it becomes enough just to be heard, to have any sort of voice, to feel that you have their attention, and the actual pain that was a consequence of the initial grievance have been more or less forgotten. So there's no real chance for the oppressor to experience the empathy that seems to be necessary for true reconciliation.

I think there's more, but this seems to be a good stopping point.