Hi all,
I think I am going to stay a little with my own story again this week because I can feel lingering voices of old narratives rattling around my body. Which is what can happen when we – I – turn toward something new.
What is new is that Bill and I have been talking about what it would be to build community. I want to say “again” but I don’t think that feels right. Maybe “anew”.
It feels tricky to turn toward this possibility because of, in part, my past experiences [see last article] and because of how some of my old voices can gain traction because of this.
This is all true.
It is also true that I carry some fear around turning toward the possibility of community building and being in a “leadership” or more “facilitator” role around it all.
Which makes this a place where those old voices can gain some traction. The voices that say I have no business in even considering this, that ask who do I think I am to even consider the idea that I could do it differently.
That say I will turn out just like my old colleagues who turned the organization into something that needed to be all about them and not the community. And caused great harm in the process.
What is great is that I can hear my mother’s [terrified] voice in these voices. Saying I have no business to do [fill in the blank but basically anything]. Saying I must think I am so clever and able [you think you are so clever] to do things in a new way.
And my own frightened voice that says if I step into something new where I am anything other than small, that I will turn out to be just like my mother.
I even had a moment with Bill when, talking about this work and what we do, I realized I was afraid he was saying I was like my old colleague. I knew he was not saying this and I could feel my fear arise in my body – because it was already there. I even articulated it in a muddy way so that Bill felt like I was saying he was telling me this.
Oof.
And.
I feel what is more true in the quagmire of these voices, in these old narratives and my stumbling around in them, is not the voices themselves – they have been here for my whole life – nor even the fear of becoming the thing I dread the most – like my mother or like old colleagues or like anyone who wants to take and use power over another person.
What is more true – most true – is just the fact of the fear. That I have fear in me.
The voices want to come in and define my fear through the old narratives and latch onto it with language and stories of the past. Saying how I am still just as I have always been. Which, of course, is bad and incompetent and, well, just like my mother.
But when I just sit with the simple fact that I have some fear around all of this, I feel how those old voices with their dusty and rusty old narratives are just not true.
I can feel how it is just scary to step toward building something new without really knowing how to do it. That it is just scary to come into conversation and community around dreaming in a way where the members of the community and the dreams co-create what is possible.
That it is honestly just scary to say that this is something I would love to open in new ways.
Simple, really.
The old narrative wants to come skipping in and claim everything for its own, wants to bring its complications and make everything seem impossible and implausable. La La, La. Just as it has always done.
And, again, when I step out of the old twisty stories, it is so simple to know that I just have some fear here. Without needing any other narrative – old or new. That fear, whenever we turn toward something new – whenever I do – is a normal and healthy response.
And, that, in this fear, is also excitement.
There is also excitement here. Which is also more true than the old narratives and also what is scary to admit. That, damn, starting community again – in new ways – is kinda exciting.
There, I said it. I’m excited.