“It is not until we get lost that we begin to find ourselves.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
I spent most of my life feeling like I was standing outside a circle.
Not always, but every time I step back and look at my whole life, the line that runs across it becomes a feeling of looking out.
I think that feeling has been driving me for a long time. I want to prove something to get my place through hard work and excellence. I want to be the kind of person that happy people know.
I pushed myself in the sport, trying to create great games to win the admiration of the crowd. I dream of playing my bass guitar with the energy that the listener will feel as it moves through them. I created my resume and did my best to become a great life-changing teacher.
Those desires came from deep in me. The love of games, the music, and the joy of good teaching is a true expression of my heart. But weaving into it all under it all is also desirable for connection.
Each wish came true in one form or another, and I completely surrendered myself to them. What I found inside them was something I did not expect. The things I try to find are not the things I want from the outside.
I was in my twenties when I arrived in Philadelphia for high school graduation, still unknowingly taking all of this with me. A friend took me to a party on a cold night, meeting close friends in someone’s backyard, and we were all standing around the pool.
The group is chatting and having fun in the evening. I tried to move from one small conversation to another, finding a way in. Nothing works.
An hour later I was standing by the pool and something was shaking me.
Without thinking, I stepped from the edge into the deep. Fully dressed. Cold water stuck to me and I was down for a few seconds.
My friend is shy. I am numb. We drove home quietly, I was wet in the passenger seat.
I could not explain what I did not do that night, and not long after that. The memory sat with me for thirty years, once painful and strange. And under its strangeness, there is something else, a layer of shame that I have not yet found the courage to see firsthand.
The shame is deeper than the act itself. Underneath it was something I hid, even from myself, the evil that I wanted to own that night, and the revelation of how much desire had left me.
For years I was embarrassed that night, seeming to need to see and value a weakness or a flaw in my character. It took me decades to realize that my own needs were not an issue.
I read a story that made me think. For almost all of human history, people lived in small groups of twenty or thirty or fifty, and your place in that group was everything. It determines whether you have eaten, whether you are protected, whether you and your baby are alive.
I also read that the brain processes the pain of being removed through the same path it uses for bodily injury. So while my cold fall is strange and unimaginable, even for me, it is also a response to the ancient and the real.
Researchers studying this subject put the need to be in the same category as hunger. The needs that everyone has, whether we recognize them or not.
I did not know this when I entered the pool in Philadelphia. And after many painful reflections, I realized that now I do not need to be ashamed. I was just a young man who suffered alone in the crowd.
I think at the time I chose the rejection that I could control over the rejection that I could not. Cold water is honest. It did not pretend to be my master, and if I were to be evicted, I would have decided to be perfect.
What I saw was the embarrassment I experienced at the party and then thinking about it for years, this is part of being the person I have always been.
Because I know the invisible feeling and I know the shyness of this feeling, I can recognize that struggle in others and I can help. I have lived too close to loneliness, misunderstood or overlooked when others are suffering.
Thirty years is enough time to see the pattern of my life come to mind. And what I see now is that the feeling that I have taken so long to try to escape is giving me an understanding of something I could not otherwise understand: in one way or another, we all need ownership.
When I walk into a room today, whether it is a party, a family reunion, or at work, my attention is drawn to people standing alone.
Those who laugh too hard at something that is not funny. Those who connect with their phones because it is easier than sitting there without a purpose. Those who arrive hope that tonight will be different and who is beginning to wonder if there will be?
I know that person. I used to be that person and in some ways I am still that person.
Feelings do not go away because you know and work on them, at least not for me. Sometimes it is relieved, but it never leaves completely. And I stopped waiting for the day when it would happen.
What I have found instead is that pain becomes something you can take without being hit by it. It becomes part of who you are that you learn to accept, relate to, and even draw on because it makes you honest about what it means to be human.
That’s what my life has become. What I want people to know and feel in their bones when they leave a room is this: You are seen. You are heard. You are valued. And you are loved.
I have to be honest with myself about the limitations of those words. When I was hiding parts of myself, I was afraid to show, no external guarantee could reach me completely. And sometimes people around me do not look carefully enough to find what is good in me anyway.
I have to admit that the things I desire are not always blocked by my walls. Sometimes it just is not provided. Face it, the world can be cold and cruel at times.
I have learned that we tend to give others what we need most for ourselves, and that is true for me. The pain I was experiencing did not just hurt me. It shows me what I was made for.
Not everyone will see who you really are. Some people will be tuned to different frequencies and it will hurt. But the more you give yourself to the world, the more the right people get to know you.
That belief has been tested and proven in my own life. In my 20s, I thought it would be ridiculous to bring home-made cookies to a New Year’s Eve party full of people trying to look chic. It’s like bringing a baked cake to a nightclub and a perfect example of my sense of humor.
One young woman laughed heartily as I handed out the noodles and joined me at the kitchen table for pies. We talked and enjoyed each other’s company until the party drifted into the background.
That young woman became my wife.
We have been together for over twenty-five years and since then she has told me that she has never liked cake lime. The truth is, she just wants to know the man who dares to be himself in a room full of people pretending to be someone else.
The qualities that make yourself most visible to people who know how to look. You have a place in this world here and now as you were, not when you got it. And when you show others what is true about you, you give the right people the opportunity to find you.
Calling on people to help them open up and truly belong is not something I chose. I found it by following my own injuries, my own personal needs for the same thing, all the way to its other parts. It was a continuous journey with a difficult fall on the road, but it was the most precious thing I have ever stumbled upon.
The young man I was when I entered the pool in Philadelphia was not broken. I searched for the truth with pain and without my words. And even though I still struggle with ownership from time to time, I find it.
I learned to own it. I have learned to see the pain that people rarely name and recognize it without judgment because I know it from the inside. That vision changed me from someone who was capturing a place to someone who was trying to create that place for someone else.
Outside is a difficult place to learn. But it teaches you to see.
About Daniel H. Shapiro
Dr. Daniel H. Shapiro is a speaker, author and mentor. He is obsessed with human relationships and the things we take with us. For more information on his book 5 Practices of TrainersOr his guidance and speech services, please check yourinherentgoodness.com.
