Creating The Webbd Wheel: Me, Not Me
In which we learn to play one of life's most important games ...
In post #38 of The Hanged Man, we are introduced for the first time to the game of ‘Me, Not Me.’
It seems a simple thing to know the difference between ourselves and others; surely the boundaries are perfectly clear. For some people it is simple, but others struggle, and I have always been one of the struggling kind.
It’s not just a question of identity. I know who I am. I’m clear about my integrity. I’m also clear about my needs and wants until another person enters the picture. I’ve always been more attuned to the needs and wants of others than I am my own, and if I’m interacting with someone I love my default is to turn my own resource and personhood entirely over to them.
I use the word ‘default’ because it’s not a conscious choice; it’s the way I’ve lived since I was very young. My earliest memories are of trying to please those around me to the complete exclusion of my own needs.
If someone I love likes diamonds more than garnets, it’s imperative I do so. Preferring garnets would be a kind of betrayal. It would prove my love is false. It would hurt the diamond lover, be a personal rejection.
It would make me bad.
I don’t want to be bad. I want to be good. So I tell myself (and everybody else) I love diamonds more than garnets, but deep down in my soul, somewhere safely out of sight and hearing, I know it’s a lie.
Gemstone preferences don’t matter much, but when it comes to things like shaping a life, if we are unable to be clear about what our needs are, what our priorities are, and what works and doesn’t work for us, we can’t thrive. We abdicate ourselves and our power for the sake of staying safe and loved.
The problem is if we have to become a non-person in order to feel safe and loved we’re not safe and loved at all. We might believe we are, and we’re probably being told we are, but we’re not.
For me, the hardest part of being authentic is the fear I’ll be letting down those I love, inconvenience them, hurt them, cause extra work, be viewed as needy and demanding or selfish.
I’ve discovered over the last ten years that fear is entirely justified, but only in the context of unhealthy relationships. Healthy relationships have room for authenticity, room for the essential boundary work of saying yes or no honestly. Most of us accommodate some needs of others every day at home, at work, in the world. In turn, others accommodate some of our needs. But we can’t meet all the needs of all those we’re connected to all the time and pretend to have no needs of our own.
I know this because I’ve tried to do just that for most of my life.
It can’t be done. It accomplishes nothing. It doesn’t make those we love happier or healthier. It doesn’t keep us safe. We don’t get more love. We wind up permanently drained, a shell, a convenience and appliance for others to use as they will until they’re tired of us or we break, and then we’re thrown away.
Rose Red is entirely enmeshed with her mother. She loves her. She feels responsible for her ill health and unhappiness. She struggles to comply with her mother’s idea of who she should be and what she should like, but as she grows through her teenage years her resentment, anger, and grief increase with the tension between her perfectly natural need to individuate and make a life of her own and her mother’s expectations and dependence.
As children with parents and as parents with children we encounter the shadow side of these unique bonds, and often that includes the expectation or desire to live for someone other than ourselves, to dream their dreams instead of our own, to show our love and gratitude by living a life as close to someone else’s idea of perfect as possible. Parents can’t help dreaming of their children’s future, and young people can’t help dreaming of their own future.
Very often, these dreams don’t look at all alike. Then what?
Then parents and children face some hard choices and conversations (this process is called individuation), or move into deeply dysfunctional relationships which are not sustainable and make no one happy.
Rose Red, as she moves into womanhood, feels more and more trapped by her parents’ expectations and unhappiness. They are unable to see her as a separate person with her own needs and experience, a whole, authentic person rather than a paper doll labeled ‘daughter.’ Her mother depends on her, and therefore is unable to provide her with the support to figure out who she is independent of anyone else. The dwarves and her friends, however, help her with the ‘Me, Not Me’ game. They teach her a vehicle for sorting, for discernment between one thing – or person – and another.
This is ultimately Baba Yaga work. The Yaga teaches young women to cleanse, to cook (alchemy), to sort poppy seeds from dirt, all sacred female work. It’s not about gender stereotyping, misogyny, or (in the case of the gems) crystal magic. These tasks teach us wisdom, patience, and the ability to tell one thing from another, lies from truth, love from not-love, that which nourishes from that which does not.
In the case of Rose Red and Jenny, the dwarves teach these essential skills. Baba Yaga, after all, can’t do it all, and she mentors (if you can call it that!) Vasilisa.
You are not me. I am not you. My sons are not me. I am not my parents. We may be connected by love, blood, or both, but my responsibility is to live my own life, as yours is to live yours. If we don’t, something is wrong. Some boundary needs repair. We have a power leak, and we owe it to ourselves and those around us to fix it, even if it does cause hurt or inconvenience.
It’s a shame to waste a perfectly good life trying to live for someone else.
(This essay was published with post #38 of The Hanged Man.)