“Show me your ugly,” my good friend said to me when I beat myself up for the feelings I had been having. “They are ugly feelings,” I explained, “I am such a horrible person for thinking this way.” “I’ve been there,” she continued to console me. “You are not alone.” “Show me your ugly,” she repeated.
Are we really bad people for feeling our real feelings? Or are we only bad if we act on those feelings? Is there really any good or bad in any of it? Feelings that is. Each one can be a teacher, if we pay enough attention. And the question is, are we willing to pay enough attention, to really feel what is there? Once we feel what is there, are we willing to stay in that moment, notice the sensations, and allow them to be? Can we feel our ugly?
In the black hole of ugly these past few weeks, I am here to tell you that feeling that shit is hard. And even when you manage to give yourself the permission to go there, noticing how that feels in your body and staying with it, allowing it to be, is even harder. Everything in me fights this stuff, from some place I feel I have no control over. Some very old, beaten into me place, that reacts, being triggered by the badness of it, can’t tolerate it. My belief that that way of feeling is bad, keeps me chained to the floor. I must be a good girl.
But I want to fly. So I have learned to feel. As crappy as that is sometimes, I have learned to notice, allow and be in the present moment of my ugly. I sit with my ugly and talk to it. It talks back, a lot. I sit with it in meditation. I run with it. I kick with it. I talk to friends (the ones that get it) about it. And it is here, in this moment of connection, with a friend who gets it, that I find my bolt cutters. The simple act of telling my ugly to my friend (who shrugged at me and wasn’t phased) set it free, and the chains were broken.
You have to be brave to connect, and show your ugly. You have to know that your ugly is not that ugly. You have to be willing to bring it out and give it some air to get perspective. Sometimes in the act of sharing, you realize your ugly is rather pretty, compared to someone else’s ugly. So why were you so afraid to show it in the first place? If you are human, and hang around with a family, or people of any kind, you have some ugly. Inevitable. Remember that book, All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum? Here’s the list and pay particular attention to #1. I added the bit in parentheses.
“These are the things I learned (in Kindergarten):
1. Share everything. (Including your ugly)
2. Play fair.
3. Don’t hit people.
4. Put thngs back where you found them.
5. CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS.
6. Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
7. Say you’re SORRY when you HURT somebody.
8. Wash your hands before you eat.
9. Flush.
10. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
11. Live a balanced life – learn some and drink some and draw some and paint some and sing and dance and play and work everyday some.
12. Take a nap every afternoon.
13. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
14. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Stryrofoam cup: The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
15. Goldfish and hamster and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.
16. And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first workd you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK.”
― Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
I love this list. We don’t harp on kindergarteners for feeling their feelings. From full on belly laughs, to serious tantrum, it is all real, and right, and ugly or not, it’s just what is. They aren’t afraid to show it either. Until someone tells them it is bad.
I have remembered that feeling certain things is bad, my whole life. I listened intently to the people in my life who told me, in no uncertain terms, that what I was doing, what I was saying, or how I was feeling, was bad. I believed them. For a long time. At this amazing point in my life, I am willing to show a little of my ugly and sacrifice you thinking I am not a good girl, for my freedom.
I am keeping the bolt cutters in my pocket just incase I forget and get chained down again. Just incase I forget I am made to fly.
