The Places We Hide and the Reasons We Do It

I'm unclear where this came from.....the idea that we might all have ways and places where we hide our most vulnerable selves......ways we 'put on a face' or otherwise avoid being challenged or questioned, avoid being exposed. 

And then I think, “maybe it's just me”. BUT, I don't think so. Too many people have written to tell me that the things I talk about that are real and true for me in my life resonate with them in their lives too. Admittedly, most of those emails come from women. And that's just fine. I am a woman and it doesn't surprise me that we share common threads. Especially women of a certain age. Because I am one of those too....

Greg and I have finally gotten to watch Ted Lasso...a television series people had been telling us for years we needed to see. Which we did. We saw all 3 seasons in about 10 days because it was so good and every episode would make me laugh and also make me cry. My personal standard for what works. Somewhere in there, one of the characters makes reference to someone famous saying that youth is wasted on the young. And I get that. Totally. I'm not sure I can explain what the writers may have been thinking but it resonates with me. Then just this morning my friend Baxter wrote to say he sometimes wishes he still had the energy of his youth. I get that too. It's kind of the same thing. But isn't exactly related to what I intended to try to speak about today. I think relevance is that because when we age, we learn. When we stumble and fall and shatter and completely fall apart, we have the most glorious scars from which to let our light shine through. We have wisdom. We have grand ideas about things. We just no longer have the strength, the endurance, the flexibility, the platform from which to do something with or about all the things we think we have learned. 

Maybe that's it. Maybe that's the tie-in.

Hopefully, by now, unless you are a brand new listener, you know I fall down rabbit holes. Almost as though I go looking for them...

What I sat down to talk about today are the places we hide and the reasons we do it. And it just occurred to me that maybe rabbit holes are one of my hiding places. Maybe I go down rabbit holes as a way to avoid something. But I really don't think so. I think it's more a sign of a very undisciplined mind and a body very willing to follow it.

I know I often use the vernacular “we” too easily; it pulls us all onto the same raft. I probably do it hoping I won't be alone. Which is why I mentioned the emails I receive from people who feel grateful when I speak about things they themselves may feel but have never spoken about; maybe because they don't know how or maybe because they have never been with someone who they trusted to hear it. Anyway, I don't like feeling alone. I don't mind being alone but I do not like feeling alone. Those emails help me understand that I am not alone.

Anyway, (speaking of rabbit holes) the rabbit hole of the moment being that I just mentioned 'hope', which reminded me that I had the very random fleeting thought earlier today that maybe hope is also one of the places we hide. It helps us not feel the broad stroke of fear across our hearts when we learn that our sister's cancer has returned or when we think we know something that is yet to be proven true. 

If I stay focused on the hope that my sister is not going to die of cancer and that the thing I am thinking is true might be proven to be untrue any minute now, then, I can breathe. 

And breathing is so important. 

I found a page in a journal that I used years ago in a group I co-facilitated at the cancer center. It was a writing group that met once a week. We used prompts to write, then would share among ourselves whatever we had written. The group was for cancer patients who wanted to explore writing as one way to process life. I knew that there had been a prompt once on HOPE. I wanted to find it and in opening the journal I found a lot I had forgotten about. 

We all hope. We have all at some point held onto hopefulness. It's human to hope. But what really does it mean to hope and what really does it do for us? In what ways does it serve us to be our best selves?

“We can always hope!”, means, what, exactly? To me, it means that our current circumstance is in some way unsuitable, not to our liking, and perhaps not what we want? So, we hope for something other.

And what does hoping for something else do, to what we have right now, right here? 

How we are with what is gives us a place from which to move, a place from which to shift to something else. But we have to be in what is in order to even know how it needs to change. 

To me, hope often feels passive. It feels like relinquishing our power to make change. 

What has happened when I feel the need to hope for something to be different than it otherwise is in the moment, and I hold the vision of what I'd rather see it be, is that I know I am doing the thing I can do. Then being in what is, as it is, until that shift happens. Because it almost always does.

When Gandhi said, “Be the change” (if I am even remembering correctly who has been given credit for that piece of brilliance) I like to believe this way of being in relationship to our lives is what he was referring to. I'd equally like to believe I always remember to take a breath and do a check in when I start to feel confused, rocked or otherwise dismantled by whatever is going on around me. And I do not. BUT, when I do? My life is smooth sailing.

So I open this journal and I find a page where the prompt for that day was “Hiding Places”. And the choice of prompt that day was mine.

Seven years have passed since that day in that writing group. Today when I chose this topic to write about I had no memory of having written about it seven years ago. So clearly, on planet Sean, I needed to take another look.

And not necessarily a new look but just another look. When I suggested, seven years ago, that we all write about hiding places it had come from a sense that we all have them. But maybe we don't ~ maybe some people are so authentic and real and present that they never need to hide. People like Jesus or Gandhi or the Dali Lama.

Most of us, I believe, hide, at least some of who we are or how we feel, on a daily basis.

Our very faces are hiding places ~ smiles on the outside when we are weeping on the inside. 

The saying, “We never really know what goes on behind closed doors” reminds me that some people hide behind closed doors. “In the closet” is another metaphor for hiding. Putting 'things' in a box as a way to hide or 'contain' certain emotions.

One participant in the writing group that day described Winter as 'a time' of hiding. I found that fascinating. It was a new way for me to hold the word 'hiding'. 'Nesting' is what I call what she was describing. I realized I had held the word 'hiding' in a negative space and I appreciated the new more expansive way of looking at it. And Winter is a kind of hiding time. It is certainly a time of nesting, hunkering in, a time to do mending. Mending socks and quilts but also mending hearts and souls. A time to reflect and rest. A time of less busyness outside and needing to find busyness inside our homes. 

My own hiding places are where I go to either avoid pain or to lick the wounds of being hurt. I hide under the covers, in the shower, in a hot bath, or on a rock by the river. I hide sometimes in my car. Sometimes I hide in humor. And sometimes in sarcasm. 

Safe places are my hiding places for times that feel unsafe.

The amazing grace of a momentary place of hiding is that I am allowed to fully recover myself ~ to come in to myself ~ to pull myself in there with me and hold the injured part of myself in love. Safe places to be, when we are feeling vulnerable and raw, are important. For all of us.

I've moved from referring to hiding places to referring to safe places as though the two are interchangeable, because in this context, they are. The places I go to lick my wounds, cry my tears, mourn losses and just let the tank fill up again, are my safest places. I take good care of myself in those places. I don't have to stay long, but I do have to know I have them.

When I work at the hospital I am reminded of the need for places where staff can step away, momentarily, from something that feels too big, too awful, too unimaginable or just something that feels too sad, for what ever reason. I have been known to call security to meet me on the fourth floor to unlock a door to one of the balconies so that I can breathe real air, or so I can step out there with someone else who may need one or two breaths of real air. 

Know where your places are. Know where you can easily go to recover yourself, to right the catamaran in the storm, to breathe. And then know when it is time to re-emerge. We have this one glorious wonderful painful beautiful life to live. 

We don't want to live it hiding. 

This is Sean Jeung. Thank you for listening. 

Please feel free to email me at sean@seanjeung.com if you want to comment on this or any other episode or if you'd like to suggest a topic for future episodes.

Meanwhile, may you lead with your heart and I hope you'll join me again WTVGT