'Drop your pictures. It's your pictures that are causing you pain.' I heard that many years ago from a friend. It was simple unadorned wisdom. She didn't indulge my story or my pain any longer than she had to. In one instant she silenced me. What I realize in looking back is that my friend had really good boundaries. She knew where she began and where she ended. She knew not to take on what was not hers. She knew that letting me go on and on wouldn't do her or me any good. And she knew it was a lie. The whole rant about my life would perpetuate a state that would not get me anywhere. She knew it - even if I didn't.
I had an opportunity to do the same thing for someone today. To stop the rant of fear and victimhood and I took it. I listened as long as I could to a friend's painful outpouring of sorrow and to what could of been and should of been. And then I said it: Drop your pictures. It's your pictures that are causing you pain.
Instead of the resistance I expected, he looked at me with something approaching relief. It had never occurred to him -- like it had never occurred to me all those years ago - that what was causing him pain was how he looked at things and the assumptions and judgments he made as a result. He was focused on all the things he wasn't rather than all the things he is - all the beautiful, capable, powerful, original, sensitive, gifted things he is. And where did that habit come from? From a father who could never appreciate him and always, he felt, cut him down. But now, at 45, he was having the opportunity to not do that any longer. He was seeing he could drop his father's pictures of him. To tell his father's pictures goodbye. The amazing thing was that when he did, he felt more love and forgiveness and tenderness towards his father than ever before. Dropping the pictures liberated the love.
I was making my bed this morning when an old picture drifted into view. It made me laugh that it was still kicking around in my consciousness looking for any opportunity to deliver its delicious judgment. When I was 12 or 13 and visiting my aunt, she came in to my room and saw me making the bed. She huffed with disdain and said that I would never get married because I did not know how to make a bed with perfect 'hospital corners' - sheets folded so precisely they looked like paper origami. I never forgot it. In fact, I would draw on that and many other pictures when assessing my life and deciding it didn't measure up. 'Well! ' I'd say, 'If you knew how to make hospital corners...then your life would be....'
My aunt was innocent and plagued by her own pictures of her own imperfections-- and my taking it on was innocent. But around the time my friend told me to drop my pictures - I began to sort and sort and throw away the pictures that no longer fit me, that no longer were me. They were somebody else's pictures. Or they were mine from a long time ago and they didn't resonate anymore - like from high school. Dropping the pictures liberated me to see myself, probably for the first time. I wasn't this mish-mash of somebody else's pictures. I was an original being - like we all are - answering the call of my own soul and carving a path that was uniquely my own. Did I know where it was leading? Would it have the common markers I was told to look for? Maybe not. But that was okay.
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