Compassion Bootcamp

No one wants to be that person.  The person about whom you internally roll your eyes when they do that thing they do.  I've made it a life goal not to be that person. Until I couldn't help it.  And then I understood that that person doesn't want to be like that either, if they had a choice.

I became that person practically overnight after a texting teenager rear-ended me at a stoplight the day after my cat died, causing me to hit a tank of an SUV in front of me and shaking my cranium so violently that I got a concussion.

At first, I thought my symptoms were the result of raw grief and emotional shock.  I was irritable, sensitive and exhausted.  But then, as my whiplash treatment progressed and I realized that I was actually not experiencing post-trauma symptoms - I felt reasonably at ease being a driver, passenger or pedestrian amid multiple moving vehicles - I asked my doctor why I was thinking and behaving in ways completely opposite to my norm.  I knew I was moving more slowly due to my injuries, but I noticed that my cognitive functioning was also sluggish.

For the first time in my life, I was suddenly indecisive and vague.  I had difficulty planning ahead or staying organized.  I had trouble focusing and became overwhelmed easily.  I could not process more than a few external stimuli at a time, and I often forgot was I was saying in the middle of a sentence.  I slept copious hours and had little initiative.  These are not the predominant traits of someone who wrote on deadlines in news rooms for a first career.  They are not characteristics that anyone who knew me would ever use to describe me.  It was like Freaky Friday: I woke up one morning, and I was the complete opposite of who I was the day before.

I had to reduce my exposure to stimuli like never before, which turned me into the princess-and-the-pea person I used to joke about.  The person who asks you to turn down your music or your laughter.  The one who freaks out in crowds and would prefer to hole up at home with a book than interact with more than three people at a time.  The one who requires a scent-free environment, rubber soles and inside voice.  The one who asks you to repeat yourself because someone coughed in the background while you were talking.  I'd once judged a woman in a training workshop as controlling when she asked me to stop eating an apple because the crunching was disrupting her concentration.  I realize now that perhaps she had genuine attention issues.

Before the accident, I never had even an inkling of what it might be like to be so diffuse.  My attention was a laser beam I could focus at will no matter what chaos surrounded me.  Precision had always been a personal hallmark, a source of pride and income alike.  And, of course, because I demanded exactitude from myself in most things, I expected it from the world around me.  Which is fine if you isolate yourself in a bubble of like-minded individuals with who you interact exclusively online.  So, needless to say, I was frustrated with real live people.  Like, a lot.  And I often indulged in the self-righteous delusion that everyone else is an imbecile.  Except you, of course.

This narrow worldview is evidence of the construct that students of the Enneagram model of personality refer to as the False Self.  Progressive Franciscan priest Richard Rohr describes the False Self as the small self or ego identity.  He writes that "most of humanity is so enchanted with its False (concocted) Self that it has largely doubted and rejected—or never known—its True Self. And so it lives in anxiety and insecurity. We have put so much time into creating it that we cannot imagine this False Self not being true—or not being 'me.'"

This could not have been more evident than when I relocated from a city of 5.5 million to a town of 75,000.  I've already exhausted in another post the topic of my Type A dissatisfaction in a Type Minus P community.  I coped by glibly whipping up snarky slogans for the pervasive chillaxation of my new home, such as "where Mercury is always in retrograde" or "where every day is 4/20."  Which earned me a few laughs but did nothing for my adjustment disorder.  And ultimately, I really did want to be happy.

So I practiced radical acceptance. I made gratitude lists.  I recited the Metta Prayer. I took the "Complaint-Free World" challenge.  I volunteered in the community.  I bought a house and designed a garden and set down roots.  Nearly a decade passed in my new home, and still I found myself frequently irritated by the chronic slowness of my surroundings.  I fully understood why meth labs were popping up like cactus in the desert wilderness on the outskirts of town.  If I had to live my entire life in some remote outpost over there, I'd need under-the-sink crystal motivation to get my bored ass out the door, too.

And then it hit me.  The Ford Taurus, that is.  Little did I know that my prayers to be at peace, to bloom where I'd been planted, were being answered in the form of the two tons of speeding metal ramming into my brand new two tons of inert metal minding its own business at a red light, which rammed into two more tons of inert metal also minding its own business.  A divine intervention of absurd clusterfuckery that may have ultimately changed my life, or at least my mind, for the better.

That seems to be how authentic personal change works.  It's not like we can simply set an intention or invoke the power of grace and - poof! - an instant spiritual surgery occurs that frees us from our fixed ideas and stubborn defenses for life. Hell no.  The way it works is more like planting a field or training for a marathon. We start small.  We suck at first.  We sweat.  We trudge and backslide and twist our ankles and lose time.  We have mini successes and then inexplicable setbacks.  And our hard work and sincerity don't necessarily guarantee the results we would like.  Sometimes life has something even better in store.  We may not harvest a bumper crop or place in the race, but we are freed from our narrow ways and perceptions that have caused so much suffering.  We have a panorama of choices where we previously hyperfocused on being happy if only we could get our way.

To be clear, I would not have ordered this on a menu.  I could have done without the terrifying experience of a crash.  Followed by a nail-biting poker game of whose insurance pays for what.  Followed by three to four physical therapy appointments a week and reduced work hours.  Followed by ongoing pain in my neck and back that still wakes me at night sometimes.  Nonetheless, it turns out I received some unexpected gifts from my post-accident fugue.

For the first time in my life, I am having the experience of just-right vulnerability - that sweet spot between oversharing and manning up. By sticking my big toe into the scary water of letting people know my current limitations, I discovered that there really are a lot of very kind people out there. And most of them can be reasonably supportive when I can clearly ask for what I need. As a helping professional who typically gives, I probably would not have had this experience of receiving were it not for the fact that I was completely off my game for the better of six months.

As human behavior researcher and author Brené Brown, a self-described vulnerability hater, stated in her viral TEDTalk on The Power of Vulnerability, subjects of her studies who were found to have a strong sense of love and belonging "had, very simply, the courage to be imperfect. They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because, as it turns out, we can't practice compassion with other people if we can't treat ourselves kindly...  They had connection, and - this was the hard part - as a result of authenticity, they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were, which you have to absolutely do that for connection."

Of all my Traumatic Brain Injury symptoms, the most vulnerable was the unpredictability of the vulnerability.  One week, I would feel like myself again. The next it seemed like people were yelling when they were actually talking, while everything other than human voices sounded like nails on a chalk board.  My symptoms refused to resolve in a linear fashion.  I would consistently have to admit to others that I was "having a bad brain day."  Just when I thought I might be getting back to normal, I would inexplicably backslide into a mind-engulfing neuro-fog.

But it was precisely this repetitive experience of losing control after I'd just barely regained it which became the unexpected compassion curriculum that opened my heart to new levels of empathy as I experienced limitations I had never before had.  When the woman behind me in line at a cash register tried rushing me as I neurologically struggled to coordinate myself enough to put my change back in my wallet, I instantly felt what it's like to experience another's impatience.  And the delusion that it is ever okay to treat people like I am more important than they are broke open in my mind and heart like a sacred lotus - one with sharp thorns that stung me into realization.

The surreal and overwhelming convergence of the above-mentioned events left me with the breathtakingly saturated experience of just how completely loved, supported and held I am by countless dear ones.  I had been living by the unquestioned dogma that I am lovable only when I am strong.  It turns out that, while others may appreciate and enjoy our strengths, our frailties are the ports of entry into which they can actually interface with us on a human level.