Taexalia

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The Creepy Lurker

"But what shall we do with those inner beings who are quite mad and those who carry out destruction without thought? Even these must be given a place, though one in which they can be contained. One entity in particular, the most deceitful and most powerful fugitive in the psyche, requires our immediate consciousness and containment - and that one is the natural predator." ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes Women Who Run With The Wolves

I wonder why we often choose to remember the negative things people say about us instead of the positive comments, why we hold up a singular negative comment like a beacon and batter our self esteem to death with it.

Yesterday I went to see Joe Satriani and I was sat in row B right in front of where he stood for 90% of the phenomenal set. I was even one of the lucky few to get one of his randomly flung guitar picks (complete with power guitar maestro authentic one of a kind chipped edge).

But this morning the most prevalent memory of the day is the negative comments made about me by someone I know. What was said isn't important or particularly accurate, but the sting of the words remains. My self esteem muscle knows that someone else's negativity isn't mine to own, but a little effort is needed to discard those words as the least important part of yesterday. It's quite probable the person in question didn't even mean to put me down.

My inner predator wants to hang onto those comments, repeat them over and over, give them power and run rampant with them. My inner predator is a Crazymaker who revels in destructive criticism, she is the Black Dog who wears masks and wants to block me from being me. She is the creepy lurker and she is the Judge.

The natural predator is a shapeshifter and if I cut off her head, another one grows in her place. She's like a combination of the Marvel characters Multiple Man and Mystique - populating the psyche and looking like teachers, parents, employers, colleagues, ex-boyfriends, friends and anyone else whose comments and actions hurt... It isn't so much the real person who made the comment who is the monster, it's the part of ourselves that latches onto that memory and milks it forevermore.

In the Artist's Way, Julia Cameron prompted readers to identify "creative injuries" and heal them. She called the memory bank of these injuries "The Monster Hall of Fame", a title which appealed to me when I worked with the book.

For instance one of the inhabitants of my Monster Hall of Fame is an art teacher who, in front of a whole room of students, ridiculed a piece I was working on and told me I could not draw. Rationalising that such a person shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a creative soul is fine, but that incident damaged my confidence for like a whole decade. I gave up drawing and painting. Last year I made a painting and it hung in an art gallery. I stood in a corner of the room watching people looking at my painting and photography and I gave the memory of that art teacher's humiliating behaviour the bird.

I've been in a bit of a funk recently and I've been allowing my low self esteem muscle to flex rather more than it needs to. I can't shield myself from what others choose to say to or about me, or how people treat me. I can only choose how I react to it, or whether to react at all. If someone wants to make a judgement about me it doesn't necessarily mean it is true - their judgement may be more about who they are than about me.

So I ask myself - am I letting my natural predator run amok when I am being reticent about being me? Where are the boundaries of my circle of influence and where am I leaking power to something I cannot fix or change?

"To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive." ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

"Every time you don't follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness." ~ Shakti Gawain

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