Reflections
This year has been good for me. Living away from home for an extended time has given me breathing room from my routine life, which has…
This year has been good for me. Living away from home for an extended time has given me breathing room from my routine life, which has given me the opportunity to process, reflect, heal, and grow. Many things that were dark and confusing are making a little more sense. Many things that were painfully raw are now scabbing over. In many ways, I feel like I’ve recovered more of my fragmented self this year.
One important life lesson has come to the forefront in a new fresh way during this strange, leveling and restructuring time in my relationship and sexual identity status:
Do not judge what I do not understand. If I have not walked in someone else’s exact shoes, as that person, with their myriad of variables (personality, history, experiences, biological influences, religious worldview, life circumstances, available options, perceptions, etc.), I cannot possibly judge another’s decisions and choices with any accuracy, insight, or knowing.
This is such a deep truth that uproots all judgments and hypocrisy (and resulting strained relationships). It is a hard-won awakening in my consciousness. It’s taken me a near-lifetime to finally apprehend and own this ugliness of how I have sometimes (or often) judged people in their various life struggles, transitions, and little understood (to me) choices. And this, even when I know by experience what it feels like to be on the receiving end of being harshly scrutinized and judged by others for many of the counter-cultural beliefs, behaviors, and pursuits I’ve chosen. It’s interesting, living from within my skin and the deep knowing of the many reasons why I choose what I do, and not being able or willing to explain or rationalize to others why I’m doing what I am doing.
Please understand, I’m hardly being (outwardly) judged or oppressed by others about my current life choices and circumstances. I expected much more pushback, shock, and disappointment from my peeps. But the surprising new development is that I’m painfully aware of my old self judging my new self. I’ve been my own worst enemy on many fronts throughout the past couple years.
For example, when I am out in public with my love, Marita, I feel the uncomfortable stares, curiosities, disdain, and even distrust of people around me who might possibly think like my old self. I feel like I’m on an awkward, uncomfortable, well-lighted stage of religious judgment. Church ladies, older generation folks (including my current house residents where I’m managing an adult care home), homophobic people, and spiritually conservative social media friends who have barely deconstructed the doctrine of hell, let alone other false Church teachings.
Now, I realize that this is more of a projection from my old self than anything, but even then it is still a valid, visceral, profound feeling of judgment. I am the one judging me now. I am the receiver of all the heaps of disproval I placed on others in my lifetime. What an interesting take on “karmic debt.”
I am really grateful to have the opportunity to confront and remove this old, tenacious, destructive root of unlove. Regardless of whatever judgments come my way — from myself or others — I know that I am currently living my best life right now. I am living with the highest possible choice I could have made at the time with the available options and the information I had at that time. This has led me to a second life lesson:
People make the best choice they can make with the available options and information they have at that point in time.
For the most part, nobody wants to mess up their lives or choose badly. We come to crossroads, we look at all the options available, and we choose the paths at that point in time that we are most capable of choosing.
When I started down this path, it was scary. I didn’t know what was going to happen or how things would turn out. I still don’t. But I have learned many important life lessons through this experience. I have become a better, more whole, more grace-filled and loving version of myself.