The part of you nobody measured

This is the third essay in my series, Remember Who You Are. If you're new here, it starts with How Did We Get Here? and continues with Who Handed It to You?

In my last essay, Who Handed It to You?, I left you with a question, and I said it was the one I was most looking forward to. If the verdict was only ever somebody's opinion, what was there before it?

I want to start with a story this time, because I think the answer is easier to see than to explain.

A red hot stove

The house I grew up in was small, though of course to a little kid it felt big. The kitchen had a linoleum tiled floor and a heavy table with steel legs and an arborite top, the kind every kitchen seemed to have back then. Four chairs. I don't remember many family dinners at that table, which is a little strange when I think about it now, but I do remember eating there with my older brother.

One day my mum was cooking, and I was fascinated by the burners on the stove. I'd watch them glow red, and when she turned one off it would go black, almost right away. I watched that very carefully. And then, satisfied that the burner had gone dark, I reached up and put my thumb right on it.

It was still hot. Very hot!

Mum had turned away for just a moment to empty the pots. She grabbed my hand and ran my thumb under cold water. She was upset, certainly, but not at me. There was no scolding, nothing about how foolish that was. All of her concern was for how badly I might have been burned.

Here's what strikes me, all these years later. I have no memory of the pain at all. What I carry from that day is the feeling of having found something out. I needed to know, and I found out. Curiosity was satisfied.

I've thought about that kitchen a lot while writing this, because it could easily have gone another way. Same stove, same thumb, same burn, and a tired parent saying "What's wrong with you? How many times have I told you not to touch that?" I'd probably still be carrying something from that day too. Only it wouldn't be curiosity. It would be the first little piece of a verdict. I do dumb things. Or, the world isn't safe to poke at.

That day she didn't hand me anything but cold water.

What was there first

So what was there before the verdicts? For me I think it was that curious kid at the stove.

Ashley Montagu wrote a book in 1981 called Growing Young, and in it he lists what a healthy child is like:

Curiosity. Imagination and creativity. Playfulness and humour. Open-mindedness, a willingness to experiment and explore, an eagerness to learn, honesty.

And what he called the most pervasive and valuable trait of all, the need to love. Then he puts it about as plainly as I've seen it.

"All normal children, unless they have been corrupted by their elders, show these qualities every day of their childhood years."

Now "corrupted" is a little strong for me, given what I said last time about our elders working with the awareness they had. But look at the two halves of that sentence. Corrupted by their elders, that's what we looked at in the last essay, what gets handed down. All normal children show these qualities, that's what was there first. Every one of us. Nobody had to earn it.

I want to go slowly here, because this is the part that matters most to me in the whole series so far. If that kid was there first, then the verdicts got laid down on top of him, one layer at a time, and he's been under there the whole time. A heavy weighted blanket of verdicts, covering what has been there all along.

In the first essay I wrote about an ache, the one that shows up even when we've done everything right. Quiet on the outside, and screaming on the inside. I've come to think that ache is him. That kid is still in there, and some part of us remembers who we were before anybody started measuring. The ache is that part, refusing to let us forget.

And that changes what the work is. If you're whole underneath, you never had to earn your way into being worth something, and you can't lose it by underperforming, because it was never attached to performance in the first place. Your behaviour can be off. Mine certainly is some days! Who you are underneath is fine.

You can kind of see the difference in that kitchen. Whole looks like a kid who puts his thumb on the burner to find out, and walks away with nothing but the finding out. Buried looks like the grown man who won't try something new, because he already "knows" he's in trouble for exploring. Same person. Just a few more layers on top.

Which means there's no improved version of you on offer here. I'm not selling one, and I don't really believe in it anymore. Robert Holden put it about as well as it can be put.

"No amount of self-improvement can make up for any lack of self."

So the work, if there's work at all, is more about subtraction than addition. Less about building, more uncovering, or rediscovering.

Montagu had a word for this, for keeping hold of those childlike qualities as we grow up. He called it "neoteny." It's a biologist's word, meaning to carry the traits of youth on into adulthood, and his whole argument was that this is what human beings are designed for. That we're meant to keep growing young. I'll admit I love that word, and I'm still a little curious about it myself.

I know how "what was there before" can sound, though. Some people hear go back. And back wasn't a safe or happy place for everybody. My kitchen had a kind ending that day, and I know a lot of kitchens didn't. If that's you, I'm not asking you to go back there. Growing young points forward. It's about carrying what was there first on into the life you've got now, whatever age you happen to be.

Layers

A couple of readers wrote back after the last essay (you can see their comments there), and one of them showed me something about those layers that I hadn't quite seen.

As a little girl she was called "a chatterbox." As a teenager she was called "quiet." Two labels about as opposite as it gets, and yet both of them fed the same belief. I don't quite fit. People don't understand me.

So the belief came first, and then any label at all could be used as evidence for it. When I read that, it made me think there's more than one verdict sitting on top of the kid. Somewhere along the way a verdict hardens into a belief. Then the labels pile on top, as evidence for it. And underneath all of that is whoever was there before anybody started labelling. Peel one layer back and you find another. Kind of like an onion, I suppose, though I'm aware that's not the most original image I could have come up with.

Another reader asked a question I've been chewing on ever since. In what we say to our kids, where's the balance between what's true, what's helpful and what's harmful?

I don't think there's a tidy answer, and the one doing the talking deserves an essay of its own. I'd like to come back to that. For now I want to stay with the one doing the listening, because I've come to believe the bigger part of the choice sits there. As adults do we take what's said as a verdict on who we are, or as one person's observation of something we did? Some people would call that self-esteem. For me it's pretty much the ability to tell those two apart, and to take in what's said in a way that serves you.

The catch is that as children we can't do that. A child can't read intent. Everything lands as fact. That kid at the stove would have taken whatever my mum said as the plain truth about him. Which is maybe why it mattered so much that all of her attention was on me and my thumb, and none of it was on what I'd done, whether it was right or wrong.

As adults we can learn to tell the difference. It takes practice, and I'm still practising, which is where I've had to learn to go a little easier on myself.

Permission

Here's something I notice in myself, and maybe you'll recognise it in you too. Once I see a pattern like this, I want it fixed. Now. I want to get serious about it, find the right program and get it done.

And that impatience is just another should. I should be over this by now. It's the same voice I wrote about last time, the one with the long list of "shoulds," only now it's aimed at the healing.

These days that voice has plenty of help. Between the internet and social media there's always somebody telling us what we should look like, what we should be earning, how we should be raising our kids, even how we should be healing. It's "Shoulds" on steroids, 24/7! And most of it comes with an image of somebody who seems to have it all figured out already.

Curiosity doesn't really work that way. You can't hurry it, because curiosity can't be confined by time. Often it's instant and spontaneous. Something catches your eye and off you go. And at the same time it can be kind of timeless. You've probably had the experience of being so absorbed in something that you looked up and hours had gone by. Athletes call it being in the zone, and writers and artists know it too. Most of us have been there at some point. Time stands still. I think that's the same state that kid at the stove was in, watching a burner go from red to black and wondering about it. He was curious, just playing, really.

So maybe this is the permission I most want to offer. You're allowed to come at your own life the way you came at things when you were small. With curiosity, playfulness, and a lot less seriousness. You're allowed to not have it figured out yet.

That's also where I find myself wondering about AI. In the first essay, How Did We Get Here?, I wrote that AI is an amplifier, that it meets you where you are and gets you there faster. It'll do the same with curiosity. A child learns by poking at the burner. If AI hands us the answer before we've even had time to wonder about the question, it's easy to skip the wondering altogether. Used the other way, to help us ask better questions rather than hand us the answers, it can be a pretty good playmate for a curious mind.

And for what it's worth, the answers are in there. They're not simple and they're not quick. But they're in your own history, and in my experience they come out with patience, a bit of looking back, and some acceptance of the life you've actually lived.

Invitation number three

Same as before, it's an invitation, not homework.

Find a quiet moment. Write down what you loved when you were around seven or eight years old. What you were curious about, what made you laugh, what you'd happily do for hours. Then, underneath it, write down what's left of it in your life now. Look at the two lists side by side, and see if you can do that without judging the second one.

And if you feel like it, pick one small thing off the first list and do it sometime this week, just to see what it's like. No need to be any good at it.

There's no wrong answer here either. And if something heavier comes up, which it can when you go back that far, take a few slow breaths, set it aside for a while, and talk to somebody you trust if it's more than you want to carry alone.

That's plenty for now.

In the first essay, How Did We Get Here?, I asked whether the life you're living was chosen or handed to you. In the second, Who Handed It to You?, I asked who handed it to you. This time it's what was there before any of it got handed over. I'm starting to see the three of them as steps along the same path, and I'm curious myself where it goes from here.

Here's the question I'm taking into the next one. If what was underneath was never lost, only covered, how do we turn back toward it? How do we rediscover what we already knew? And with all those shoulds on steroids going 24/7, how do we even find the quiet to hear him?

This is the third essay in a series. If you landed here first, it starts with How Did We Get Here? and continues with Who Handed It to You?. They'll make more sense in order. If you'd like the next one by email, you can sign up at www.releasedynamics.com. No pitch, no schedule. Just the next piece, sent once.