You grow, girl

This is one of my favorite comics ever because it reminds me of myself. (Clicking on the image will bring it to full size.)

The thing is, learning and growth are essential for me — mainstays of my identity, huge expenditures of my time and energy, driving factors in my most important decisions. I pursue learning and growth in ways that seem nearly random to people who don’t know me well (and sometimes to the ones who do, and sometimes even to me… although I can see the connective tissue much more clearly now than I could 20 years ago). I have left a lot of people blinking and bemused by the way that learning and growth drive me. (Nicola has taken to referring to them as the Evil Twins).

In order to justify myself, I have invested a lot in the assertion that Growth Is Good and Learning Is Fun.

And so they are. But that’s not all they are.

So these days, whenever I stop and ask myself any of these questions…

• Why am I so tired?
• Why am I so stressed?
• Why am I feeling like a failure?
• Why are my personal boundaries so fragile that I am crying over a story about an earthworm in Patagonia or feeling defensive because Nicola says there is too much milk in her tea?
• Why am I scared?

… this comic pops into my head. Because sometimes learning is really really hard and scary and makes me just feel like shit for a while. Sometimes there is too much of it, too fast. I do think Growth Is Good, and I’m also starting to believe that sometimes it’s good to not do it all right this minute. It’s okay to do as much as I can handle and then just sit around like a string bean for a while.

Why is this a hard lesson? Because somewhere along the line, I began treating this part of me as if were the only thing that would save me from… from what, exactly? I dunno. From Bad Things. From making mistakes. From failing. From being thought stupid or weak or incompetent. From being left behind. From the limitations of the class I was born into. From people’s disapproval. From my own flaws. From fear itself.

But of course, it’s not that easy. And it turns out that learning and growing often make me fail, make me afraid, make people disapprove of me, reveal me as incompetent and weak and sometimes just damn stupid. Go figure. Or as we like to say at our house, another fucking learning experience.

The Evil Twins aren’t really evil. They are passionate and demanding and ultimately disinterested in my outcome. The universe doesn’t really care whether I grow or not. Caring about it is my choice. I do care about it, and I will keep doing it. But I’m going to try to remember that breaking myself in the process isn’t the greatest long-term strategy. That if I really want to keep growing, sometimes I have to stop, unless all I ever want to learn is how much damage I can take, how long I can go without sleep, and how weird I can truly get when I feel overwhelmed.

Wow, I feel smarter already! (grin). Or maybe I’m starting to grow up a little.