I’ve had a thought which has changed a lot for me.
I’ve been at home convalescing for a few days, and it’s funny because it’s been a bit of a vacation from all the action I usually subject myself to - I’m not rushing into town, off to social engagements, to the various sports I like to play - I’m just hanging out at home with my cat, reading and watching various things on the internet, enjoying the sun on the deck. It’s been really lovely, and a peace has been gradually settling like gentle snow.
Yesterday was especially magical, so easy and surprising, and delighting & appreciating this peace & ease. Everything was so easy it was like it has always been like this, all my past depressions and anxiety seem like a bad dream only… the insanities across the globe seem incomprehensible from here (though I understand intellectually).
From this space it occurred to me that anyone I come across could be in a PCE - there’s no special cue that tells me in advance, they absolutely could be and I just wouldn’t know. And the peace and delight this thought gave me revealed something - it showed how scared I have been of other people. I have internalized all the nastiness, meanness, anxiety that everyone is capable of, and have recoiled from it - but this thought that they could be in a PCE pierced that narrative.
Suddenly now I’m seeing everyone as a potential collaborator in the fun to be had, rather than someone that might hurt me, an enemy. I have even weaponized actualism, as in “aren’t people so terrible” and thus to be avoided.
And now I can see how it is for a free person - they only meet the actual person. There is no need to recoil - there is appreciation, liking the actual person that they are. And that requires not putting up a defensive wall, I have to really see them, allow that intimacy to occur. And I can see how easy it is to do that now, actually it’s a joy to do because of all the fun to be had.
It doesn’t matter if they’re not in a PCE - they probably are not - because it’s clear now that they were never hurting me anyway, it was always me hurting myself. I was ‘protecting’ myself, but all it was doing was keeping this resentment and fearfulness alive. In this space, it’s evident how meager that life was - no wonder I felt like I was missing something, I absolutely was!