Recovering Cynic
Hi, my name is Laura, and I’m a recovering cynic.
It’s been maybe three weeks since my last deeply cynical observation. But I’m getting better. I promise.
There was a time in my life when I was kind of proud of how cynical I was. For me, cynicism was synonymous with ‘healthy skepticism’, not being gullible or naive, and most importantly of all not looking like a fool. For as long as I could remember, I’d carried around a deep (largely unexamined) fear of appearing foolish or uninformed, and as a consequence I’d built myself a suit of armour that I liked to imagine protected me very well.
I rarely shared anything that revealed who the real me truly was, or admitted my fears or the things I dreamed about achieving. As a whole, I mostly communicated through the means of observations, jokes and wry comments.
People told me I was funny, sharp, quick, that ‘nothing got past me’ and I confess I preened at the idea. As a teen I wrote snarky, mean-spirited poetry about my teachers, politicians - anyone that seemed fair game - that now makes me squirm with embarrassment, and which I’ve since shared with my daughter in the hope that she can avoid the same trap.
I didn’t understand back then that the persona I was constructing for myself would serve as my cage for the next 30+ years. And that I would eventually come to the crushing realisation that no-one in my life really knew — or consequentially loved— the real me.
The real me, you see, was nowhere near as cynical as the person she presented to the world. In fact the real me was a sensitive, deeply curious, somewhat whimsical creature who longed to find evidence to prove the fantastical.
The real me had read every copy of ‘The Unexplained’ with wide-eyed fascination. She’d built fairy rings at the bottom of her garden, had believed her sister when she’d told her she‘d seen an angel, and had once experienced something inexplicable that seemed a lot like astral projection. But talking about any of that stuff with anything other than contempt was not (she understood) cool or safe. Much cooler was the idea of laughing at it, or better still making smart funny wry jokes about the gullible idiots who did believe.
Luckily for cynical, heavily-armoured me though, something happened to me at around 40 years old which — in one fell swoop — knocked pretty much all of the cynicism out of me like dust from a living room rug.
Firstly, my mother died, and everything I’d ever intellectually understood about grief and loss and deep profound sadness seemed suddenly ludicrous in the face of my reality. My mind ceased to function in the way it had previously. I couldn’t think coherently or quickly any more, or string together ideas in the way I always had. Instead it felt like I was slowly edging my way through fog, constantly reaching for a rail or handhold that never appeared. My design business ground to a halt, I couldn’t communicate or create or produce anything original, or even talk to my clients with any kind of real understanding any more.
In fact, for over 2 years, all it seemed I could do was secretly and silently haemorrhage emotion, and completely ignore how deeply and furiously angry I was.
And then, in the wake of that devastating depression, something else happened. I began to realise that my feelings of sadness and confusion at the death of my mother were just the tip of the iceberg.
For the longest time, I’d believed that my quickness, my ability to string together thoughts and ideas, to show that I was ‘someone who got it’ was the most remarkable thing about me. I’d valued and prized my intellect above any of my other qualities, because it was the main quality that I’d always been prized for. No-one had ever taught me that being sensitive or gentle or curious or open-minded were qualities of value, instead I had been taught that those were things that got you hurt or laughed at.
It was as a result of my bid to understand all these newfound revelations, that I discovered a community of people involved in something called ‘Radical Honesty’, who believed that being open to revealing everything about yourself was the antidote to loneliness, anxiety and depression.
During the final year of my training to be a therapist, and as my way of explaining some of what I’d discovered about myself, I produced a shadow-puppet play about character called Little Lai.
The story begins with Little Lai playing in the woods and fields as a child, talking to the animals and trees and spending her days in nature, much as I did. Then one day Little Lai’s father calls her and her brother and sister together and presents them all with suits of armour, that he tells them he has crafted for their protection.
Little Lai obligingly puts on the armour her father has made for her, and goes out into the world to make her way, and eventually she forgets that the heavy armour she is wearing is there.
One day, as Lai stops to rest in a wood while carrying a heavy burden she has been asked to carry, she meets a young girl who is playing there.
“You look so tired!” exclaims the little girl, “Why are you so tired?”
“Because I’ve promised to carry this burden,” says Little Lai, “And it’s almost more than I can bear.”
“Well,” says the little girl, “Why on earth don’t you take off that armour? It would be so much easier if you weren’t wearing all of that!”
“What armour are you talking about?” says Little Lai, puzzled.
And the little girl laughs,
“Why all that armour your father made for you when you were small, to protect you from all the things that he was afraid of!”
I have a recording of when I performed the story of Little Lai to my class on our last day together, and on it you can hear my voice breaking during the last part. Even though I’d turned my story into a puppet-play and made myself into a storybook character, it in no way lessened the sense of vulnerability I felt when I shared it.
I often describe my willingness to be vulnerable and expose myself to the stuff I used to terrify myself about as ‘fireproofing’. I like to imagine that regularly allowing myself to be seen entirely as I am, with all my flaws and ignorance and — yes — my naivety and whimsy on show, means that I am rarely afraid of the idea of exposure, of being caught out or ‘burned’ in the way I used to imagine. I regularly ‘burn’ myself and ‘out’ myself, and tell my every embarrassing little secret, as an exercise in proving that it did not and will never kill me.
Because I am not my mind or my intellect, or my ability to string clever ideas together, or make people laugh or entertain them. What I am though, is truly seen and deeply loved by the people who know me.
My name is Law, and I am a recovering cynic. And I will continue to do my best not to replace my armour, and to tell everyone that I meet that maybe there’s no need for it. It’s heavy and uncomfortable, and if you take it off you’ll feel so much lighter.
And who knows, you may even feel like coming out to play in the woods again, and talking to the animals and the trees, just like you used to.
………………
Law Turley is an MBACP-registered Integrative Therapist and certified Radical Honesty® Trainer living and working in the south west of the UK.
