I want to be seen, I want to hide

Honoring conflicting parts

I often find myself swinging between two starkly different parts of myself. I’m split in two: the part of me that wants to express and share and create — and the part of me that wants to hide, to sit in quiet, privacy, to not be seen or perceived.

There’s a part of me that wants to bear my heart to the world because nothing really matters and a part of me that wants to throw my phone into the ocean because nothing really matters. And these parts are always shifting, one of them being in the foreground while the other is in the background, until they eventually switch spots, as they always do.

This is an inner tension that I think many creative people face, wanting to create and therefore connect, but knowing that you have to be seen in order to connect.

Maybe you relate to the inner conflict I describe above, or maybe you have conflicting parts that look a little different, like:

• having a complicated relationship with someone — a relationship with both love and hurt — and wanting to “decide” how you feel

• wanting to travel and not be tethered to constancy, but also being a homebody who craves routine and predictability

• wanting to be surrounded by close relationships and community, but also wanting to recharge in solitude

Regardless of what the conflicting parts are, it’s the same inner experience: feeling this agitation and urgency to “decide” which part we are, so that we can rid ourselves of the pendulum swinging.

Am I this or am I that? Are they good or bad? Am I right or wrong?

What can we do, other than allow all of these conflicting parts to exist?

This pressure to “decide” how we feel — and which part to eternally be — is inherently a delusion. One part might think: If I were to delete everything and hide away, life would be completely peaceful. But it wouldn’t. Problems would still arise, and I’m certain that my desire to hide would be replaced with an agonizing starvation to share. Each part of us has its own desires, dreams and preferences, and to silence one part means to silence all of the needs that go with it.

That doesn’t mean we can’t want things to change, or even fully commit to what one part is calling for. A major myth of mindfulness is that we should be able to be content anywhere and in any situation, but that’s not true. Mindfulness is about seeing things clearly, so sometimes it’s seeing our current job, relationship, situation and seeing it clearly enough to know that something needs to change.

And yet, most of the time, no matter our external circumstances, we’re still going to have conflicting parts, stirring something within us.

We fear permanence (what if this pain never goes away?), but we also fantasize about permanence (If I just feel this forever, I’ll never need to feel conflicted again). We want to bathe in black-or-white clarity — to land somewhere solid, to be certain, so we don’t have to hold the discomfort of not knowing.

But what I’ve been thinking about lately, is that the existence of these conflicting parts is merely a rite of passage to being a person. Our minds want to categorize, to put things in boxes, to simplify. We crave and cling to this or that as a way to feel settled in certainty. But life is never that. Or this. It’s always going to be both. It’s always going to be messy, and nuanced, and complicated.

Trying to erase our conflicting emotions doesn’t make those emotions go anywhere; it just creates more tension around those emotions. Motivation fluctuates. Energy fluctuates. Inspiration fluctuates. Feeling stuck right now doesn’t mean you’re stuck forever. Feeling momentum right now doesn’t mean you’ll be feeling momentum forever.

How easy it is to forget that there’s no point in trying to ‘figure out’ the conflicting parts because everything is always changing, anyway.

Can we let these emotions, these various parts of ourselves, exist without creating a fixed, permanent story about them?

There is enough spaciousness in your being for all of these conflicting parts to exist. You don’t need to decide how you feel. You don’t need to commit to a part of you. You can just allow whatever part is the most prominent right now, to be honored. And then that part will naturally fade into the background, and the other part will come forward. Honor that part, too.

There’s room for it all.

1. In what area of your life do you notice conflicting parts of yourself?

2. What is the black-or-white fantasy that arises? (If I just quit X, then my life would be perfect)

3. What parts of that fantasy are true? What parts aren’t true?

4. How can you support yourself in lingering more in the grey?

Thank you so much for being here, exactly as you are. All of the various parts of you!

Until next time,

♡ Meg