Outer Limits Inner Limits No Limits

I’m reupping this here from my instagram stories from Friday bcz people seemed to appreciate it and bcz I forget I even have a substack sometimes and bcz it seemed substacky.

Limits

This morning I may have experienced, processed, and eaten some feelings. I already told you I wasn’t sure how many multitudes I contained but these are three more.

I can’t even talk about the specifics right now or I will experience more unpleasant feelings and since I just ate some of those feelings away I would like to sit with the less unpleasant feelings for as long as that lasts, a cookie’s worth, if there’s a measure.

Earlier this morning, running errands, I was driving and thinking about how we’re all so limited as humans; we can do great things with our bodies and minds, sure, but most of us are limited in what we can do (I haven’t met all of us, LMK if you’ve met an unlimited person). We’re limited in what we can offer other humans or non-humans. Sometimes, sometimes, we can make choices about which other humans we spend time with, who have limits that are different than ours, or limits that endeavor to cross beyond our boundaries, sometimes. Sometimes.

I was thinking specifically about my own limitations and flaws, which are many, maybe not as many as I’m inclined to think on a bad day, but they’re all there, in me, after 32 years of sobriety and a shit ton of therapy and support, waiting for their moment to tell me I’m the worst, and all the specific ways I’m the worst. I get through the majority of days now not thinking I’m the very worst, but then mistakes are made (one mistake! not even multiple mistakes, one) and suddenly my ability to accept my own limits, my stupid, annoying humanity, is out the window, and what I would offer anyone else who told me of their own mistakes is not extended to myself, which is love and kindness. I extend to myself You are an irresponsible, pretend adult who (insert long list of adult things I don’t do perfectly). You are a fuckup.

If you made a mistake and said this about yourself I would say to you Please don’t talk that way about my friend.

But the difference is that when I make a mistake and I say this to myself it’s actually true. (It’s not. It’s not, I hope it’s not. But goddam sometimes it feels so true.) And then my first thought is I want to be alone with this terrible truth, to swim in this terrible truth, and the other terrible truth which is that I’m alone anyway, and nothing and no one can make this truth (which could maybe possibly be a lie?) better.

And then in spite of myself I am talking to friends about it, and they tell me about their mistakes, which are not unlike my mistakes, and I feel a little less alone, a little less of a fuckup, and also they tell me that I’m not only not a fuckup I’m at least a few levels up from fuckup (these are my words not theirs, but I’m still moving away from full fuckup as I write this), that feelings change and pass, (which I forget almost every time I’m mired in the ones I don’t like), and that it’s okay to eat a cookie too.