“God, grant me one good humiliation each day.” ~ Richard Rohr
You’d only know this about me if we were really close… and then, you’d probably wish that you didn’t know it as well as you did.
Given what I do for work, you might be surprised to hear this, but there are certain moments in certain contexts where I become what my friends have come to call “the dragon lady” (think Daenerys, but when she finally gets to King’s Landing). It doesn’t happen often, but given just the right confluence of circumstances, something clicks inside me and I turn into someone (or something) else. I don’t yell and I don’t call anyone names, but I do use every ounce of my personal power to non-verbally convey what a useless, ignorant, pathetic idiot I think you are. I’m told that I can emit a deadly, withering gaze that can suck all the oxygen right out of the room and make you feel about two inches tall.
So I’m sharing a converted camper van with my three closest friends for a week as we tour Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, and the “good humiliation” comes on the second morning when a conversation about our itinerary comes up. I had put many hours into researching and crafting this itinerary before hand and given the scarcity of camping spots available for our last-minute trip idea, I thought it was an elegant work of logistical art. So when the request to revise the itinerary comes from precisely the person who had bailed on the pre-planning sessions… well, it makes my blood run cold and narrows my gaze into a hyper-condensed laser of hate. I feel the prickles start to run up my arms and my neck and I just can’t believe I’m stuck here in this godawful situation with these idiots.
If you could only read a transcript of the conversation that ensued, you might not notice anything amiss. I answer their questions and offer my perspectives, like any reasonable person might. But if you were a fly on the wall inside that camper van, your delicate little wings would freeze right off just at the icy tone of my voice (or you would spontaneously burst into flame if the laser beam of my hateful stare happened to fall upon you).
When I realize how irrationally frustrated I am (and that everyone in the van has basically stopped breathing), a tiny, dim light flicks on in my head and I remember a perspective that I offer my clients all the time, “Anger can be a signal that you are failing to set a boundary that you need for yourself.” So I pulled myself together and said, “Look, change the itinerary if you want to, that’s fine, but I put so much time into creating it without you before hand that I won’t be able to re-create it with you now without feeling resentful.”
They accepted the boundary, gratefully no doubt, since it meant I would be about three steps further away from them. I slid back down into the driver’s seat of the van and plugged my ears back into… wait for it… the episode of Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday that I had been listening to just moments before (laugh all you want).
Fate would have it that I happened to be listening to Oprah interviewing Jeff Weiner, the CEO of LinkedIN, about compassionate leadership. So after having just ripped into my very best friends in the whole world, I hear Jeff saying that, while it’s easy to manage people and lead a company with compassion when things are good and when you like the people, the real test of character is whether or not you can do that when things are hard or when you don’t like who you’re working with.
Cue the humiliation.
Hot, sticky, sinking humiliation. I hate it. I want to fight back, to take up the gavel of my righteousness and justify my anger by pointing out that people who want an opinion should participate in the pre-planning sessions… but it just evaporates like Voldemort in the arid heat of this humiliation.
So I let myself finish listening to Jeff and Oprah, sitting there in a puddle of my own shame, and I let my friends finish the itinerary. Turns out that after going over it, they only made minor changes (I mean, of course), but it also turns out that I did need to set that boundary because I wasn’t ok with putting in more energy. I’m glad I did that, but I was definitely not glad about how I did it. So I went back over to them and said, “You guys, I see that there are some moments where I get really frustrated and I really don’t handle it well and I know that’s got to be really unpleasant for you and I’m sorry. I don’t know for sure all of what’s happening for me there, but I know it’s not okay I am going to start working on it a lot more.”
Everything softened immediately and a candid, heartfelt conversation ensued. Their feedback for me about this bad habit of mine was hard to hear, but they delivered it with love and care, and in the overall atmosphere of apology, amens, and affection, I could see what a gift it was. Even still, there is a singular kind of pain that comes when other people see the dark, ugly, crazy bits of you — stuff that contradicts the way you see yourself and the image you usually present to the world. It is humiliating, but in the way that the word humiliation is really close to humility. This too is a gift.
(I should also include, for honesty’s sake, that one of them really did need to get in my face and say, “YOU F****** SUCK when you’re like that! I hate it! It feels so AWFUL to me!! AAARRRGGHGHHH!!!” It’s a very good thing that she did that — letting her anger be heard is something she’s working on — and I also needed to be able to see the real impact I had on her.)
At the end of the conversation, one of them said to me, “Do you want to know what I think this is all about? I think that when you were a little girl, things got chaotic and scary for you and you felt like you had no control. So now, whenever it feels like things are getting chaotic or messy or that you’re losing control, you kind of lose it yourself. You’re the kind of person who needs to feel like she is in control of her life and her experience.”
That rang true, but it wasn’t until about forty-five minutes later that it really hit me and I found myself in tears, hunched over the steering wheel of the parked van. I choked out the name of the friend who had offered me this reflection, and the ragged sound of my voice brought all three of them immediately to my side. They all put a hand on me as this deep grief poured out about how scared I had felt once upon a time, and how this little-girl part of me really does believe that she needs to be always orchestrating things in order to prevent something awful from happening (again).
While it’s true that the sheer willpower and stubbornness that are also part of this pattern have done a lot of good things for me in my life (I can orchestrate all kinds of things like nobody’s business), it would also be nice to have more flex and flow with life’s inevitable messiness and chaos. It would be nice to not have to be so vigilant. And I can’t keep going around being emotionally violent every once in a while towards the people I love the most. This is humbling to see about myself, but I am grateful. And I am even more grateful to the friends who are so patient with me, so willing to forgive, so brave as to risk my wrath in order to give me the feedback I need to hear, and so wise as to help me see myself in ways I hadn’t been able to on my own.
This picture was taken just a few days after my meltdown, and to me it is a symbol of the stronger, deeper, more realistic friendship that can only come when you meet one another’s darkness and you choose to lean in instead of run away (even if it’s only because you literally can’t run away given that you’re stuck in the middle of Idaho in a van — that will still do the trick). When someone has really seen your crazy (has even gotten scratched up by it a bit), but then they reach over, take your hand and say, “I see you, and I love you,” well, that’s real friendship, I think.
