Regarding the Woman in the Mirror
“Relationship is a mirror in which I see myself as I am; but as most of us do not like what we are…” — Jiddu Krishnamurti (Photo Credit)
“Sit down, girl, please, sit down! You’ve been going so fast, doing too much all the damn day! You’re making me tired just watching you!” It was an invitation that came from a place of love, one delivered with a broad smile and a twinkling eye, but it did not land that way for me. My girlfriend’s mother was visiting and had come along on what was for me a normal day. Running errands in town, tending to finicky kittens, nourishing beloved humans, attempting to keep domestic entropy in check. Nothing unusually taxing or out of the ordinary, just a steady stream of to-do list box checking resulting in a heady, handcrafted cocktail of accomplishment and fatigue.
My love, Brandy, was home from work, and I was in the kitchen preparing dinner or cleaning up after it — I honestly can’t remember in the blur of my hyper-productivity — when her mom, Brenda, made this entreaty to me from where they stood together in the living room. Inviting me to slow down, to sit down, to stop doing and just be still. I did not receive it well at all, or at least not internally, but I smiled back, said I was fine, and kept it moving. Kept doing what I was doing because I didn’t know how to stop. Really, I could not stop — could not be with what I was feeling in that moment, nor receive the image that this loving, relational mirror was reflecting back at me. Despite my weariness, which had taken root hours before, I powered through and continued my domiciliary dervishing, slave to an inner emotional arhythmia. Obsessively tidying my physical house to avoid being with the messiness in my inner home.
As the evening unfolded and my doing continued, I kept saying, “I’m tired, so tired! Oh, I am so tired!” An unconscious, but deeply revealing mantra emerging from the depths of my being. Brandy reflected that I must have expressed my tiredness over 100 times in the past half hour as I continued my relentless laboring. “Why can’t you stop? Why can’t you do less? Just do less!” she pleaded, her frustration with my inability to cease and desist growing with my every movement. Why couldn’t I see that I was the source of my spiraling exhaustion, that I alone had the power to change it by pausing what I was doing? Why was I doing this??
Her reflections and inquiries hit me the same way as those that had preceded them. I felt criticized, my contributions and efforts unappreciated, my value in question. Her loving appeals were anything but appealing and had the opposite of their intended effect, causing me to redouble my efforts as I attempted to make up for perceived shortcomings. I think I finally stopped and sat down with them on the couch, but I can’t remember clearly because, by that point, I had shut down, closed myself off. Physically present but emotionally barricaded. No longer doing but navigating an inner restlessness that made me want to stand up and keep going. Anything to avoid sitting still and considering the images staring back at me from not-so-fun-house mirrors all around. I picked up my phone and started to mindlessly play Mah Jong, my preferred disassociation that had lately become my go-to avoidance strategy when I was feeling exhausted and overwhelmed.
When we lay in bed later that night, Brandy tried to talk about what was happening for me, but I couldn’t meet her in a space of mutual vulnerability. This space was so easy for me to occupy when she or someone else was going through something and needed witnessing and listening, but not so much when the roles were reversed. What might have been an exchange of loving authenticity evolved into a frustrated interchange, more simmering than heated, but unpleasant and alienating nonetheless. She continued to hold up a powerful mirror of truth, one that shone light on unconscious patterns of behavior running like ancestral firmware within me. Root programming that was operating in the shadows at the core of my being, draining my life force and stealing my joy. I dug in, defensive and unwilling or unable to give voice to what was swirling inside me, holding back the authentic truths that held the keys to my liberation. In time, we found our way back to one another, or perhaps just gave into our shared exhaustion, an authenticity gap — really my authenticity gap — still present, separating us and preventing meaningful repair.
As I lay in the dark, internally disrupted and unable to sleep, I resisted the image of me my love’s mirror reflected. In keeping with Krishnamurti’s wisdom, it was showing me who I am, and I did not like what I saw. It was her face — my mother’s ghostly visage — staring back at me hauntingly. I kept hearing my love say, “Do less! Do less! Why can’t you stop making unnecessary work for yourself and do less?” Why was I doing this? Why couldn’t I stop? Were my years of my mother-shadow work all for naught? Was I really just like her?
I was once again navigating shadowy realms, separated from the love that was all around me always — lying right next to me in the bed in that moment — but often sadly lacking within. I replayed my day over and over, watching myself reenacting all too familiar maternal patterns of behavior that, for her, had such a heartbreaking outcome. Patterns of behavior I’ve come to call “dervishing” because they involve me whirling about in a frenzied, altered state, wiping, washing, and/or tidying as if my very life depended on my continued motion, my essential value tied to their perfect performance. A tragic outcome I had worked so hard to avoid through my commitment to doing the inner work that she was sadly unable to do.
Flooded with childhood memories, I was transported to our old apartment on the Upper West Side. My mother was a blur, so quickly was she moving about the kitchen as she painstakingly followed one of Julia Child’s fussy French recipes, Suprêmes de Volaille aux Champignons, while simultaneously polishing the silver and the crystal, hand washing gold-rimmed china, setting the table, and cleaning anything and everything around her as she went. Driven by exacting judges within and without, her value and worth were dependent on a level of flawless execution that was inherently unattainable. It was as if an invisible chef instructor from Le Cordon Bleu was critiquing her culinary performance as she engaged in a Lady Macbeth-esque battle with phantom blemishes that plagued her from every surface.
And I was her shadow, whirling about in her wake, trying to keep up, making myself in her image — the perfect good girl who exists in a perpetual state of disappointment, her perfection and goodness never enough to earn the unconditional love she seeks but which she has been conditioned to think is actually contingent on her behavior and productivity. She my Sufi shaykh, I her eager faqīr, I had learned how to dervish from the master. Like her, I was driven by a core wound of being unworthy of love. A wound that was apparently not yet healed despite a decade and a half of inner exploration and devotional mental wellness practice. It didn’t matter that we were both continually awash in love and external validation. Our internal receptors were blocked by a belief that we were not worthy of adoration or celebration, that we were not enough, that we had to engage in a continuous performance for love. A love that, sadly, for my mother was at the end unrequited and led her to take her own life.
Our shared personality traits have, in the past, haunted me and fueled my commitment to personal transformation. A commitment largely driven by fear, doing my best not to be like her, and, most importantly, not to end up like her so that I could avoid some version of her tragic fate. As I regarded the woman in the mirror, I realized I was once again engaged in shadow projection, resisting our similarities rather than accepting and integrating them. Like her, my dervishing in the presence of Brandy and Brenda was driven by a false belief that their love for me and my value as a partner were contingent on my constantly anticipating their needs and exceeding their expectations, performing domestic labors that would have made Hercules throw in the dish towel. Unlike her, and because of the 15+ years of deep inner work, I can see and name this truth, and have compassion for myself and the woman who gave me life. She did the best she could with the tools she had available to raise me to be the woman that I am today. And I am doing the best I can to pick up where she left off, to transform what was transmitted to me and play my part in our ancestral healing journey. Most importantly, I can give voice to these truths in the space of compassionate witnessing because I have come to know that to heal ourselves, we must feel into what is true inside of us and then muster up the courage to reveal it to another.
The next morning, I shared my realizations with my love and her mom and felt a weight lift off of me as I shared my authentic experience of the previous day and the insights I’d mined as I delved into my authenticity gap. In the days that followed, I was able to give my kitchen over completely to Brandy’s cousin Lourdes, a chef from LA, and sit back, relax, and watch as she made culinary magic. I let others do the dishes while I sat and presenced with our dear friend Amy. I related to her all that had transpired in the recent days, a level of vulnerable authenticity that was far deeper than any I’d had the courage to share previously. Our relational container of friendship deepened, opening up new dimensions of possibility that brought warmth and resonance. We both marveled at how hands-off I was able to be and how this was a real departure from previous evenings we’d shared in our home.
Is my shadow synthesis finally complete? Haha, probably not. This deep, soul work will continue until I take my last breath. My inner landscape is a multiverse, not an onion, and so is yours. Do I find this prospect daunting? Yes and no. At this point in my journey of becoming, I am learning to embrace the unknown and accept that no matter how long I am blessed to live and how committed my devotional practice, my life will end with vastly more unknown than known. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.