The Air Purifier: Thoughts on Anger and Self-Authorship

On Monday when I returned to work from a week long vacation, my air purifier was missing. I use my air purifier to maintain a healthy environment in my windowless office, and, more importantly, as a white noise machine to block out the sounds of people in the hall and other ambient noises. This helps me concentrate and maintain my energy levels – not having it's soothing noise causes me to feel physical tension and then energetic depletion in response to ongoing environmental sounds.

I discovered via email that my air purifier had been given to a resident who just moved in and complained of air quality in the hallway. Next week, promised the email, an ionizer would be installed in the hallway and my air purifier returned. No date was given. Meanwhile, back in this week, I had become aware of an ongoing squeaking noise from the laundry room next to my office. As I tried to focus on my writing, and process my emotions of being back at work after vacation, the noise began to push on my brain with an ever growing force. It became hard to concentrate and hard to think clearly. I longed for my air purifier to block the sound. I tried to ignore it, I told myself that my colleagues, and any reasonable person, would surely say I was being oversensitive, I tried to tell myself it's just 7.5 hours a day, I tried to tell myself that I could handle my energy being depleted, but eventually I just couldn't take it anymore.

I became angry at my co-workers for disrespecting my needs and my property (technically, their property – management giveth and management taketh away!). I became angry in my story that despite all the hype about diversity in the workplace, no one ever seems to take my sensitivity seriously. I think I was even angry at myself for being sensitive!

I decided to act on the anger, but in an effective way. I went downstairs, and took the fan out of someone else's office  who wasn't there (promising another staff I would return it when that staff returned). I took the fan back upstairs, plugged it in, and delighted in the white noise.

Later on when I wrote about this experience to my mother, she asked me if I was able to distinguish where exactly the anger was coming from. She told me that anger is a response to not getting what you need – and what did I need? When she asked me this, I realized that although I had thought I was angry because I felt disrespected and misunderstood by my co-workers regarding my sensitivity – the need being, to be respected and understoood – I realized that actually I was angry because I wasn't getting my more basic need of white noise being met. I was angry at my co-workers because I felt dependent on them to get me what I need, and they weren't doing so. When I realized I could find a way to meet my need myself, their respect and understanding became less important and in fact irrelevant. I was content again in my world with my white noise.

This isn't to say that the need to be respected and understood isn't a need – it is, particularly in situations where that respect is the vehicle to obtaining other needs – but that for me, what was powerful was to recognize that what I often experience as a social need – respect, understanding, being 'seen' – is actually a physical need – having quiet, having space, getting food, getting sleep (four very basic Highly Sensitive Person needs). This happens because I equate getting a physical need met with having a social being or structure give it to me. This is understandable given the structure of human culture, in which we are reliant on others to provide many of our needs. However, authoritarian, coercive structures, which tell us that others know better than us what is right and wrong, and that we must listen, convince us that we are much more reliant on others to have our needs met than we really are. 

I think the shift away from this incorrect understanding is in the approach. Once we separate the essential need from the social structure giving it to us, we can creatively problem solve how to get that need met. We may still rely on the social structure, but our relationship to it changes. I still needed to borrow a fan from a co-worker, but I didn't feel as though one of my co-workers had to go search it out for me, or buy another one right away, or given me my air purifier back. If I had not been able to negotiate the fan, I would have possibly biked to the nearby mall and bought one of my own! I had detached the need from the structure and was thus able to work with the structure, rather than in reliance on it.

Additionally, because of being less reliant on being experienced and treated in a certain way by my co-workers, I was able to let go of angry behaviour within relationship at work, and hold non-naive trust towards my co-workers, recognizing the realities of the social structure (both at work and in the culture at large), and being curious or remaining neutral about their experience of me. This allows me a freedom and generativity in my relating to them which further reduces tension and stimulation, and leaves the door open for increased mutual understanding.

This is called self-authorship and it is extremely liberating and energizing.

Scarcity, Desire and Relating

I was biking past the LRC house one day and I saw a person that I have a crush on leaving the house. I got very excited about seeing this person – I don't see him very often. As I was preparing to stop and speak with him, I saw that Jean was standing on the porch, and she was talking to him. I experience irritation – now Jean was getting in my way of having a one on one conversation with him! Feelings of scarcity were ironically abundant!

My crush had never displayed much interest in me, and I lived for this brief moments of saying hi, always hoping he'd "notice" me, and now this moment was about to be taken away by the presence of Jean. I felt a frustration, ergh, Jean, why now?? Why? Go away! Go away and let me have what I want! I can't have it if you are here! Just looking at Jean, she seemed nothing more than an object in the way of my desire, completely without interest and depth. Hoping to "wait out" her conversation with him, I stopped to say hi to both of them but it was an unsatisfying and awkward experience and I soon realized, while standing there, that I also felt shame and embarassment. I didn't feel as though I was good enough for my crush to like me. I didn't like myself and I felt like a failure, while also as if I was exerting an immense effort.

In this moment, I was able to realize to myself – what I most want is for my crush to be genuinely interested in connecting with me in an ongoing way, as part of a community. If I was connecting to my crush in that way, it would be a pleasure to include Jean, or at least, a neutral event. Jean wouldn't be taking his attention away from me, she's be a member of our extended relating.This situation wouldn't feel painful, but energizing and warm.

I realized then how much my desire and sense of scarcity was shutting me down to my relationship in that moment with Jean – was making her invisible, or, an impediment, a source of irritation. When I am not in that desire/scarcity mental model then I experience delight, enjoyment, connection to Jean. I also realized it was shutting down my relationship to myself - instead of loving and enjoying and respecting my wants and experiences, experiencing my normal delight in self, I was thinking of myself as deprived and worth depriving, an unsatisfying person that I didn't like - an object in my own way! And not to mention how incredibly non-relating I was at the moment towards my crush, the person I was supposed to be truly wanting in this situation. He was becoming completely lost in the dynamics. So at that point, I was in relationship with no one, not even myself - no wonder it was awkward and unsatisfying!

When I told Jean about this we reflected that many of the coercive decisions that are made in the culture come from this scarcity/desire blindness – when a person becomes so caught up in wanting something and feeling they can't get enough or don't have enough, and yet continue to push for it, they become blind to others, which includes blind to their own impacts.

Although it can be painful to let go of something you want that you feel scarcity and desire around – a sort of withdrawal, an emptiness, a disorientation – it helps to remember what you most want, what grounds you, what you love.

Guest Post! Finding Ease and Awe

This post comes from another member of the community, Tanya Williams.

Last night Charlotte came into my room.  She told me she had waited til she was in a generative space to talk about the situation of the need for space for guests during the upcoming Ontario Jam weekend and her need to continue to stay in the spare room.  She didn’t, however, BEGIN with saying this: that she needed to stay in that room, for she told me later she didn’t want it to be felt as: this is my need, so too bad for you!  She wanted first to reveal her process, hear mine, and to think together about what might be possible to create what we all wanted and needed. 

She described her experience of being in a delicate unfolding process, and how staying in that room in the heart of this community allowed her to experience her fears and discomfort in a context that held them as fuel for learning.  And she had been having coercive thoughts too: such as, feeling like she was taking up space that should be going to someone more deserving from the Jam.  When she paused and said she wanted to make space to hear my experience, she dropped her eyes for a moment.  I then saw her discipline lift them back up to meet mine.  Not a discipline that forces her gaze, but a discipline that reminds her of the reasons why it makes deep sense not to pull in, to stay open.  There was no tension in it.  I could feel the smile spreading on my face with the delight in her revealing all of it.  I knew she had worked hard to be aware of all the layers, and to be able to lay them all out for me to see, with relative calm. 

I felt that the impacts of this work she was doing would be part of the rich experience that people would have here.  I told her this and that I had actually already worked out something with another member of the community to meet the particular need for a spare room for one of the people staying here.  Charlotte said she had been ready to offer her apartment as well.  We sat and marveled at the ease of the conversation, and Charlotte reflected on the shift from seeing herself as a burden: “I will be this broken person hiding in the spare room” to: “I will be part of the powerful learning that will unfold.”  She said this changed everything.

There is something in this ease that is at my learning edge right now.  I reflected to Charlotte that I had opted out of work tonight, and this feels like very different behaviour for me.   I had been feeling a sense of urgency and anxiety stemming from the idea that I should seize the opportunity to work, and a generalized sense of scarcity.  And also a desire to seize the moment to work with the youth in the youth theatre company on certain things, and I have been having an experience with the co-director where I feel like I get a mixed message that if I have an idea to go for it, and then in practice it seems like he would rather do it himself.  I had the thought that I could reveal this to him and ask him what his experience is and what he wants, and, like Charlotte, I will wait til I am feeling the flow of the generative coursing through my veins.

I have been noticing the effect of this subtle coercing of myself, and how it relates directly to the tension that mounts in my body, manifesting mainly as pain in my jaw and shoulder.

The same day, on a walk with my partnre along the Grand, we were talking about our relationship and I let myself rest in a pause as we looked out onto the expanse of swiftly moving water.  (A meta-pause.)  I breathed out the thread of tension that had risen in me as my partner accelerated in his points and questions… and this feeling like I HAD TO keep up, but couldn’t… “I HAD TO…” was the clue: the tension was stimulated by the thought that I HAVE TO respond, have answers, reassure him, at the very least stimulate an epiphany or revelation, illuminating a tectonic shift to Humanity 3.0!   I shared this with him and he laughed and said that he wouldn’t expect that from me, and I noticed myself stiffen a little.  “What do you mean??” came out of my mouth, fueled by the thought that “I am someone who regularly stimulates revelation in people!”  Oh, the identity that hooks me!  Filled with a sense of fascination, I could just reveal that to him and then he revealed that he just meant that there are times when he asks me questions and I confound him with more questions.  We both laughed. 

I see the structure: I HAVE TO because THIS IS WHO I AM.

Charlotte brought up the old commitment: “Offer no praise and no blame.” and how she has conversations with herself, where she says: “you are not wrong for _____” and “you are not right for_____”.  I found myself relating to that old commitment in a new way: apply it TO MYSELF.
It is so damn subtle!  I feel amazed and deeply excited to be noticing these ways I am blaming or praising myself, as well as having a part of me strangely in awe at the tenacity of the old thinking in my system.  And there is a tenacity in the practice of meta-pause and the sensation of awe.

Asking without shame

Something I'm practicing, and this was incredibly inspiring and came into my life at the exact right time:

An 8-Foot-Tall Woman Is Destroying The Entire Music Industry

As for me, as I continue to spend my nights in the small spare room at the Household as Ecology, surrounded by boxes that have their contents marked by such labels as "Current Unfolding Knowledge", being able to sit on my bed and look through two doors and hundreds of books into the kitchen, the central hub of the world and work as it unfolds at this time, knowing this room in this hosue is where I want to be right now, in completely new territory, the white walls reflecting the simplicity of my experience, the rawness of my experience, the spartan presence of just being here, vulnerable, in the kind of need that watches with big loving eyes, eyes that are able to contemplate and consider yeses and nos and maybes and sort ofs

... and in all this, the coercive, the shame, the feeling that I "shouldn't be here", the constant urge to give my housemates money to make it ok for me to be here, to balance life's books in some way, the fear that I am in the way of bigger and better and more important activities that should take place in the room, that this room should somehow be not a cocoon, but a butterfly in flight, that I should turn myself inside out and fly away, rather than be percolating in the deep, the still, the inside.

I am learning how to ask, fearlessly. What a gift to the world my asking is!

I have a good reason for doing this, even if I don't know what it is.

Recently I have found myself eating badly, watching Netflix excessively, and surfing Facebook addictively.  I can see myself doing these things, and I'm thinking to myself, I don't want to be doing this, it isn't serving me, it's making me unhappy, it's having a negative impact on my life, and yet I keep doing it. I feel myself unable to stop. When I think about why I am doing it  I feel that somehow I need to do it in that moment, because I am uncomfortable or unhappy in some way. This addictive behaviour is a response to my suffering, rather than a relief from it. It's also perpetuates my suffering, and thus the familiar cycle of addiction.

When I'm about to make a choice between an addictive behaviour or a healthy one, it is a conscious moment. It is quite rare that the cookie goes to my mouth before I even think about it.. In that moment of decision, which is also a moment of my suffering, I look for a reason to do or not do the addictive behaviour. And in my suffering, I feel a sort nihilism or despair, and I can't think of any reason not to fulfill my urge and to continue on the path of suffering. 

The other day it occurred to me that in that moment of choice, although I can't think of a reason not to continue to destructive behaviour, the very fact that I am thinking about reasons for making choices means that I do know there is one. Or, to put it another way, some part of me DOES know why I should make a healthy choice even if I can't remember what it is in that moment.

After realizing this, I started an experiment. When faced with the choice to engage in addictive behaviour, I said to myself, "There is a reason to choose the healthy behaviour, even if you do not know what it is right now." That was on Wednesday, and this is Saturday, and I had a great week. I didn't eat bad food once, I didn't spend any extra time on Facebook, and I didn't watch too much TV. By Friday I didn't even feel the urge anymore. I feel more awake and more calm. Most of all though, I feel the strength of self-discipline. It's a liberating feeling of joy and centredness. Reminding myself that there WAS a reason to choose the healthy behaviour was enough to motivate me to choose it.

I'm going to keep using this practice to keep me on the reasonable course. I have discovered that when I am faced with the desire to engage in addictive behaviour to alleviate suffering, I do want to make the positive, healthy choice, and I just needed to find a way to give myself a reason to do so. And feeling as good as I do now, after only a few days of these healthy choices, I am viscerally experiencing the reason why I would choose to make these choices - greater happiness and confidence leading to a more positive impact within my community.