Emotional Currency Conversion
I clutter up my life with people and reading because I never know from where my next lesson is coming. It might be the two-month old "Living" section from my local paper with a story about a young woman finally speaking out about her rape; it might be from the lady at the wine tasting who tells me wistfully about her two daughters in New York; it might be an article in UTNE about overweight people. It could be from anything, or anyone, at any time.So it's incredibly hard for me to let go of stuff, and of people, because maybe I haven't learned all I can yet. Maybe there's some article or conversation I will miss forever if I throw a magazine out, if I stop talking to the man on the train, if I consciously drift away from a particular friend. (I rebut myself and say if I am truly meant to learn a lesson, then it will happen at some point, regardless of when or how I capture it, but this only consoles me if I believe in reincarnation. And the jury is still out on that one.)Today's lesson was from UTNE Magazine. It mentioned how many overweight people deal with the loneliness of their size by turning it to anger in order to survive. The trigger button word in this statement was "anger." (I used to joke that my middle initial was "A" for "Angry," because in the emotional toolbox doled out to me at birth, it felt like someone gave me more than my fair share of anger.) I do think anger is a great tool, but it needs lots of sharpening or it gets too dull to use. And let me tell you, spending a lot of time sharpening your anger is not a particularly pleasant pastime.The other striking thing about the UTNE article was the concept of one emotion (loneliness) shifting into another (anger) as a coping mechanism. After plenty of therapy, it's a mystery why this idea came as such a thunderclap. But it was comforting to think that maybe I wasn't born with too much anger; maybe I just shift other emotions into anger in order to cope.I have mentioned in prior musings about being a Change Agent. It's a largely business-used term, but it certainly applies at the personal level, too. Frustratingly, even a Google of this term yields very little in the way of a definitive description. There's very little in the public domain that defines this term/concept concisely, although there are an increasing number of books on the subject, at least from a business perspective, including Ken Miller's The Change Agent's Guide to Radical Improvement, and his definition helps inform mine. So here's my attempt to define "change agent," from a less-business, more-personal perspective:Change Agent (noun): an individual who, using facilitation skills, intuition, communication, inspiration, confrontation, and revolutionary ideas, both rapidly adapts to change and instigates rapid change, leading to reinvention and radical improvement.So the short version is: Change Agents tend to create chaos for people.Combine this rather incendiary path of Change Agent with the fact that even as early as my teens, friends and strangers alike have come to me to talk to me about their thoughts and problems, and I find I have quite the conflicted existence on my hands.I used to joke that I had "Dear Abby" stamped in my forehead. As a teenager with no experience in love, I gave advice to friends who had romantic relationships. With no experience in parental interference, I counseled other kids with discipline problems. And it still happens; people tell me things they say they have never told anyone else before. They disclose secrets with amazing rapidity. What drives them to do this?I can somewhat explain this weird allure with being "well-read." (I have always been preternaturally disposed to reading and learning, in that I pretended to read before I could, making up stories as I flipped the luscious pages of whatever book I could get my grubby hands upon.) People think I "know things," and so they ask me questions. It helps that I don't put up any barriers to disclosure; I am approachable in the extreme. But this was/is more than that. People trust me, they seem to sense that I see farther and more deeply than they can, and so they come to me, like they came to the Oracle at Delphi, and they reveal, they disgorge, they disclose, they plead.
The Delphi Oracle on Mount Parnassas was staffed by a procession of priestesses, who sat over a crack in the earth and snuffed fumes in order to answer the litany of questions posed by the masses (http://ehistory.osu.edu/world/articles/ArticleView.cfm?AID=8). These women certainly had to have been among the loneliest souls on the planet. Who would dare to invite the Oracle over for dinner? Others must have fretted about what might she have seen, or just intuitively known. It must have been really disturbing, being around her when she was off duty. Was Apollo still whispering secrets to her, even when she was away from that steaming fissure?I am no Oracle. There is no deference like that in my circle of F&A (Friends and Acquaintances), and that is fine with me. But I frequently feel that same odd distancing, like I'm in a place that no one can reach, positioned a little too tenuously over my own crack in the Earth. And it is lonely. All of the time.Change agents create change, but they don't seem to make soul connections much. I receive reactions of fear a lot, reactions tinged with anger and worry. I also get gratitude occasionally and some repeat visits. I do get loads of respect and admiration from my circle, but not real, warm love. I get sympathy but not understanding. No one gets me, and I don't blame them.Ironically, despite this singular even somewhat exalted relationship with others, I suffer and struggle with the same ill-adroit coping mechansim as the masses: converting one untenable and slippery emotion (loneliness) into one with a little more heft and more handholds (anger). And it makes me wonder what I could be, how differently I could exist in my own skin and walk this Earth, how much more I could know contentment and warmth, if only I could dissipate the loneliness that feeds my furnace of anger.I think about posting yet another ad: CHANGE AGENT seeks same.