Living in My Head

I spend a lot of time in my head. I always have.

Ideas, thoughts, facts, information, daydreams …. These all took up most of my attention when I was a child and teen because, frankly, it was too painful and scary to feel anything. Much safer, much easier to control what was going on in my head.

I needed the buffer, quite honestly. I know that now. I wasn’t ready to confront any of the pain and trauma inside me. So it was a necessary survival mechanism for a while.

But even after I started the healing process, I still spent a lot of time in my head. By then, it was habit. Automatic pilot. The only thing was, it wasn’t a survival mechanism anymore; it’d become corrupted and perverted, changed into something that really wasn’t healthy for me.

My survival mechanism became focused on other people’s opinions, perceptions, approval/disapproval, appearances, creating and maintaining an image….

I know it’s because I didn’t love myself. I know it’s because I was ashamed of myself. I know it’s because I felt unworthy and … unformed. I didn’t feel like a whole person, so I looked to others to tell me who I was by giving me their approval or disapproval on what I said, did, wore, thought.

Jamie molesting me took away huge parts of me – or buried them so deep they might as well have been taken away – so I felt like half a person. I felt like I had to earn my place in this world, so I would let them tell me who they wanted me to be. I gave away that power in myself without realizing that’s what I was doing.

I became what I let others make of me. Kind of like “My Fair Lady” or “Pygmalion.”

This kind of inauthentic living is incompatible with true healing, because as I healed, I came closer and closer to the truth of who I really am – the reality inside my heart and soul, not in the stupid, shallow, meaningless machinations of culture and society.

So I slowly realized I can’t live in my head and expect to heal, to live a life that is true on the deepest levels of my being. There will always be a conflict there.

I’ve become aware that I still revert back to being in my head when I feel vulnerable, afraid, insecure, threatened, nervous. As soon as I feel those frightening, uncontrolled sorts of feelings, I immediately think - I can get out of my body where I’m feeling all this BIG stuff, and retreat into my mind where everything is controllable and manageable.

Escapable.

But it doesn’t feel NEARLY as good as it used to. Being up in my head doesn’t feel like the safe-haven it used to, because I’ve come too far in my spiritual journey – I’ve connected too deeply with the parts of myself that really matter, down deep in the heart and soul. I’m overjoyed to say I’ve fallen in love with those parts of me.

And it’s not that my mind is bad. It isn’t. I’m highly intelligent, I learn fast, I’m interested in a lot of things – and so my mind is a great gift and something I enjoy using. It’s just that it’s not where I make choices based on who I really am. It’s not where I … feel my life happening.

It’s not where I feel anything.

And that’s the crux of the issue.

Living in my head makes it so easy to escape the real, true me. It’s an externalizing of my experience, a kind of rejection of who I really am. Up in my head, I begin to look with others’ eyes instead of my own. I think about how other people perceive me, what image I project when I’m up in my head.

That’s not how I want to live the rest of my life, being disconnected from the heart and soul I’ve fought – and am still fighting - so hard to heal, to wrest away from darkness and suffering. I lived years without feeling any sort of extreme, deep emotion or feeling and it was, honestly, a kind of death. Living like that isn’t being alive, not in the truest sense. The deepest sense. It’s a watery, faded, diluted experience.

I don’t ever want to feel that numbness of being only in my head ever again.

I want to feel my heart. I want to feel my soul. I want to make decisions based on what these two parts of me because that’s where life really happens in my opinion. Life is happening where I’m feeling it, not where I’m replaying the past or conjecturing about the future, or ignoring the present. Life is happening in what I feel inside my heart, in the yearnings and motivations of my soul; not where I’m over-analyzing words others said or wrote to me, not where I’m asking myself what image I project and what people think about that.

So yeah. I’m making a concentrated effort, starting this week, to break those habits of escaping into my head, of disengaging my full presence from whatever I happen to doing. The Buddhists call this being in the present moment. The catch phrase is “be here now.”

Whatever you want to call it, it’s time to give up my head-habit, my old survival and defense mechanism. I don’t need it – or want it - anymore.

There’s nothing in my life I need or want to escape from anymore.

Here’s to remaining in my body at all times: that’s where I feel my life happening.

And I have missed too much of my life to continue rejecting it, for any length of time, for any reason.