Do you ever catch yourself looking into someone’s eyes just a little longer and thinking “holy **** there’s an actual person in there!” before quickly breaking eye contact and saying something like “ugh, winter” or “thank god it’s Friday” just to lighten the tension of the tangible spirituality you just experienced between two powerfully human beings?
How much energy do we spend trying to avoid seeing each other as humans and deeply connecting?
And then, once we’ve carefully avoided truly connecting, how much TV do we watch alone on the couch wishing that we had someone there to talk to? But like to really talk to?
And then when we do find someone to talk to, how quickly do we replace the magical mystery of deep connection with a less fragile, less volatile, maybe less explosive normalcy like “how was your day?” again or “what do you want to watch?”
Really seeing someone is uncomfortable. Really being seen is uncomfortable.
When someone says “Hey. . . . how are you really doing?” there’s this strange hit–half ecstasy, half terror.
Deep connection is too good.
And full of too much potential.
So we sign it away in exchange for casual predictability.
No more rocking the boat of our lives or each other’s lives. Safe familiarity. Safe predictability. Safe blandness.
Safe nothingness.
Lonely nothingness.
And then one day we dare to hold someone’s gaze a little longer and speak with a deeply felt emotion for the first time since high school. And the possibilities of being a human and how magical it is come flooding back.
How many words do you speak in a day? And of those, how many do you actually care to speak? How many of your words are just social lubricant so you can avoid honesty and vulnerability and connection? Tailored to avoid the smallest chance that you’ll reach your tender, childlike hands out for connection and be rejected again?
Toughness is manufactured. Toughness is protection against the chance of experiencing the pain that can come along with being deeply human. And so toughness accidentally protects us from the magic of being human at all.
But what would happen if you looked someone in the eye just a little longer and said something like “Hey . . . I appreciate you.” . . . ? Or even the terrifying baggagey words that you’ve learned not to use, or at least to breeze quickly through, diluted with as much casualness as you can muster: “I love you.”
What if you risked connection?
What if you risked touching souls with someone?
What if someone else is waiting for the same thing?
Do you think the weather could wait?
Is it scary? Yeah. Yeah, it is. We’ve all tried before and failed.
As a kid, I laid it all out there with my crush after years of “being mature” about stuffing my feelings, until she’d thoroughly moved on, and I realized I had to go ahead and speak from my heart, and . . . well, it didn’t go as planned.
Then as a young adult, I shared with my mom some deep feeling of sadness over leaving my students, and she just brushed it aside and updated me on her garden or something and it felt so yucky.
I learned it’s safer to stay surface level. “How’s work?” when I’m really more interested in how my friend is doing on their insides. I learned to make sure there’s an “activity” planned instead of just inviting someone to be together to be together.
This is a lot of rambling.
Okay.
I guess what I’m saying is,
it’s not too late,
look at someone in the eye,
see that they are a human,
feel that you are a human,
and say something real.
Live your deep humanity.
Don’t live a script.
Let your insides out a little.
Not every place is a safe place,
but I think we live as if there are no safe places,
and a world with no safe places isn’t the world you’re looking for.
You know at least, like, 20 people. Chances are, one of them you could get real with. And find in that realness–that connection–a strange feeling of care and love and aliveness and togetherness and magic that you haven’t felt since you were listening to Death Cab for Cutie as a teenager.
You’re allowed to go off script and show up as your deeply human self. And it just may free someone else who needs the same thing.
Sights, sounds, smells, and all those senses enter the brain through something called the thalamus.
The thalamus passes this mix of sensations in two directions: The amygdala and the frontal cortex.
The amygdala keeps you alive by freaking out about stuff. It quickly checks with the hippocampus to see if the new information might remind us of any yucky stuff that’s happened to us in the past. And if it feels any threat, it goes “Okay, it’s time to stay alive!” And it bombards you with stress chemicals and makes you do things like fight or fly or freeze.
The frontal cortex, on the other hand, thinks a bit more critically. Like “Um that’s just a shadow” or “Not all bosses are as evil as your old boss” or “No stress, zombies aren’t real” or “Actually not everybody who calls your name from another room is about to beat you.” And so it helps you not try to hit everybody or run screaming from the room.
And here’s the fun thing.
The information travels from the thalamus to the amygdala more quickly than to the frontal cortex.
In other words: “Not responding emotionally” is literally impossible.
Your brain is wired to save you from lions and to feel suddenly hurt by your partner when they didn’t mean anything. You literally can’t help freaking out sometimes about things you don’t need to freak out about, especially when it looks or feels or sounds a little bit like something that has hurt you before.
This doesn’t mean you can’t practice and get sort of good at slowing your reactivity so that your frontal cortex has a chance to be like “Um you don’t need to punch them in the face.”
But it does mean that you’re not a bad or defective person just because you get emotional or scared or react sometimes in ways you wish you wouldn’t.
Especially when it’s stuff that brings up your deepest scars.
Your amygdala is just trying to save your life.
Deep breaths, count to 3, trust the process, your frontal cortex can help you sort it out.
That being said, for some of us these pathways have been screwed up by especially rough experiences. If you feel like you’re always, always being hijacked by overreacty feelings, don’t blame yourself–maybe you’ve just had to work too hard to keep yourself safe in life. It’s not fair, but don’t give up hope. There are some PTSD therapies that can really help to rewire this.
But in general, I think it can really help to understand about ourselves: None of us are “calm, cool, and collected” the instant something happens. Your amygdala will always show up before your frontal cortex. Which means working on nurturing a baseline of safety and taking deep breaths and counting to 3 are all a much better and fairer use of your energy than calling yourself stupid or sensitive or irrational.
You’re just good at staying alive, and sometimes it makes life weird.
That’s just human.
~
For a so-much-deeper-life-changingly-eye-opening exploration of this and other humany topics, read The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.
Good luck with your amygdala. <3
If you’d like some company figuring out this weird experience called being a human, subscribe below. We’re in this together.
peterelbridge.com 