****This has to do with when you are fully grown up in terms of one society, but barely knowledgeable in terms of another, the host society after migration.
Instead of being locked into the nourishing space that belongs to very early childhood, I was barred outside of it. I was in a very adult and responsible space, but I couldn't nurture myself emotionally. I COULD act in a very dutiful way, but not in the sense of being able to understand, seek out, fulfil, or take care of my own needs. I was certainly not primeval, nor capable of relating in a relational way. I could only relate in terms of what was proper and what my conscience deemed necessary. Hence, I was compulsively truthful, very compliant to authorities without questioning them, very detached from my body -- from emotion and sexuality. I simply couldn't put myself first. I had no idea where I was in the equation. In a sense, I had been an adult since I went to nursery school at the age of 4. I learned to contain my emotions and not to make a fuss.
That is why when contemporary Western people, who have had a different upbringing, have sometimes in the past accused me of being "immature", because I hadn't figured out how the system worked yet, I literally could not make sense of what they were getting at. In fact, I had to go backwards and do a lot of the work of BECOMING immature, so that I could trace some developmental steps that I had missed.
In fact even today immaturity bugs me. I can't take my time with it, for instance in the case of children whom I could take or leave, or indeed with most of Western adults who don't seem to be able articulate their needs very well but become hostile if you can't gauge what they are indirectly implying. It took me YEARS to be able to "read" and understand the ubiquitous nature of an expression of inarticulate desire. Just being direct works for me, although I can backtrack a bit in some situations, to understand the ways in which most people don't express their thoughts directly.
Backtracking, for me, meant learning about immanence from a position of alienation from it. I'm now okay with it, and feel I have fully closed the circle, so that I don't need to keep trying to fill a gap of missing knowledge in my consciousness.
Anyway, the other gap in my knowledge had to do with gender. For instance, people implying that I am "emotional", when emotion was something I was trying to get hold of, which was in me somewhere, but profoundly cut off. It's exploiting a gender stereotype to insinuate that any problem that a woman has must be due to what is deemed to be her essentially emotional nature. Mine was that I was separated from any source of nourishment or any ability to refer to myself in a meaningful sense. Not too much emotion, but the absence of any emotion at all, was causing me difficulty.
For me it was very difficult to find my center, and basically break down my own resistances to finding myself. These are all unconscious resistances, with the prohibitions of one's conscience keeping them in place. Having too much structure, having to break down one's self-definition to build it again but this time with more content, became the governing principle of my life. In all, it's taken about 30 years. I was way too prematurely adult at 15.
Transcendence is the acceptance of a sharp outline: shape, form and structure. I had already thoroughly transcended myself by the age of about 15 -- nowhere else to go. I should have joined the military really, because I would have already been one of them. But, because I literally could not feel my emotions, anything complex or ambiguous (especially if coming from hostile sources), caused me to attack myself. Any sense of disequilibrium in the environment around me seemed to be, in my mind, my fault. Not recognising that I had emotions at all, I couldn't regulate them, only repress them. But the force of the repression was causing my physiology to overheat, sending out constant messages of alarm.
Now I have come to terms with this somewhat by accepting that whatever I do I am always in the wrong. I was never afforded that slow pattern of development of gradually learning to discern what is right and wrong on the basis of recognising subtle emotional patterns, though a slow maturation process. I just learned to comply. And now I am always wrongfooted as regards contemporary morality. It's not that I have any negative drives, but that I don't care for community one way or another. I'm not interested enough in society to wish to bless it or harm it.
But if I try to enter the community -- which I do not wish to do as I have no drive to do so, nor any particular need for that close level of emotional belongingness -- I end up showing that I really don't know how to read between the lines enough yet, with regard to other people's mores.
That said, I am really an ideal citizen -- very decent, very capable of reciprocating, aware of what my responsibilities are. I just don't play politics or gossip and can't seem to take an interest in them.
Developmental patterns really leave their mark on us, and we can change them to some degree, to the extent of creating a much healthier internal equilibrium, but that takes decades. In a way we have to work with what we have. I could be a war journalist or something that involves repressing emotions, although that doesn't seem to be the trajectory of my life now. But certainly I could handle the extremes, for stints at a time. Not to be confined in a place where very refined emotions are shared seems ideal and rejuvenating.
Cf.
http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com.au/2013/11/the-road-to-freedom.html
Instead of being locked into the nourishing space that belongs to very early childhood, I was barred outside of it. I was in a very adult and responsible space, but I couldn't nurture myself emotionally. I COULD act in a very dutiful way, but not in the sense of being able to understand, seek out, fulfil, or take care of my own needs. I was certainly not primeval, nor capable of relating in a relational way. I could only relate in terms of what was proper and what my conscience deemed necessary. Hence, I was compulsively truthful, very compliant to authorities without questioning them, very detached from my body -- from emotion and sexuality. I simply couldn't put myself first. I had no idea where I was in the equation. In a sense, I had been an adult since I went to nursery school at the age of 4. I learned to contain my emotions and not to make a fuss.
That is why when contemporary Western people, who have had a different upbringing, have sometimes in the past accused me of being "immature", because I hadn't figured out how the system worked yet, I literally could not make sense of what they were getting at. In fact, I had to go backwards and do a lot of the work of BECOMING immature, so that I could trace some developmental steps that I had missed.
In fact even today immaturity bugs me. I can't take my time with it, for instance in the case of children whom I could take or leave, or indeed with most of Western adults who don't seem to be able articulate their needs very well but become hostile if you can't gauge what they are indirectly implying. It took me YEARS to be able to "read" and understand the ubiquitous nature of an expression of inarticulate desire. Just being direct works for me, although I can backtrack a bit in some situations, to understand the ways in which most people don't express their thoughts directly.
Backtracking, for me, meant learning about immanence from a position of alienation from it. I'm now okay with it, and feel I have fully closed the circle, so that I don't need to keep trying to fill a gap of missing knowledge in my consciousness.
Anyway, the other gap in my knowledge had to do with gender. For instance, people implying that I am "emotional", when emotion was something I was trying to get hold of, which was in me somewhere, but profoundly cut off. It's exploiting a gender stereotype to insinuate that any problem that a woman has must be due to what is deemed to be her essentially emotional nature. Mine was that I was separated from any source of nourishment or any ability to refer to myself in a meaningful sense. Not too much emotion, but the absence of any emotion at all, was causing me difficulty.
For me it was very difficult to find my center, and basically break down my own resistances to finding myself. These are all unconscious resistances, with the prohibitions of one's conscience keeping them in place. Having too much structure, having to break down one's self-definition to build it again but this time with more content, became the governing principle of my life. In all, it's taken about 30 years. I was way too prematurely adult at 15.
Transcendence is the acceptance of a sharp outline: shape, form and structure. I had already thoroughly transcended myself by the age of about 15 -- nowhere else to go. I should have joined the military really, because I would have already been one of them. But, because I literally could not feel my emotions, anything complex or ambiguous (especially if coming from hostile sources), caused me to attack myself. Any sense of disequilibrium in the environment around me seemed to be, in my mind, my fault. Not recognising that I had emotions at all, I couldn't regulate them, only repress them. But the force of the repression was causing my physiology to overheat, sending out constant messages of alarm.
Now I have come to terms with this somewhat by accepting that whatever I do I am always in the wrong. I was never afforded that slow pattern of development of gradually learning to discern what is right and wrong on the basis of recognising subtle emotional patterns, though a slow maturation process. I just learned to comply. And now I am always wrongfooted as regards contemporary morality. It's not that I have any negative drives, but that I don't care for community one way or another. I'm not interested enough in society to wish to bless it or harm it.
But if I try to enter the community -- which I do not wish to do as I have no drive to do so, nor any particular need for that close level of emotional belongingness -- I end up showing that I really don't know how to read between the lines enough yet, with regard to other people's mores.
That said, I am really an ideal citizen -- very decent, very capable of reciprocating, aware of what my responsibilities are. I just don't play politics or gossip and can't seem to take an interest in them.
Developmental patterns really leave their mark on us, and we can change them to some degree, to the extent of creating a much healthier internal equilibrium, but that takes decades. In a way we have to work with what we have. I could be a war journalist or something that involves repressing emotions, although that doesn't seem to be the trajectory of my life now. But certainly I could handle the extremes, for stints at a time. Not to be confined in a place where very refined emotions are shared seems ideal and rejuvenating.
Cf.
http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com.au/2013/11/the-road-to-freedom.html
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