Befriending Too-Muchness

What is it about too much that strikes fear into me, can spin my wheels in ruts of old, run my mind into the ground with worry, anxiety, self-loathing? Too much manifests in many ways, of course: too much emotion; affect more intensive than one expects; logic overridden by intuition; extension of self or desires in appropriate or inappropriate ways, connection to another felt whether desired by either involved or not. Too much drives my mind into cycles of self-analysis that wear me out, not to mention those who love me, choose to share time and space with me. I think this is one of the things that Clarissa Pinkola Estés soothes in me. She’s way more than my simple too much…and she seems to relish it. One of these days, that will be me.

Given the energies involved, "family of origin" must certainly be involved. I am my family and my family is me, but whoa, are we verbal and intellectual. Affective, yes, but always controlled. Contained. Proud of being so contained. I remember my parents arguing when I was growing up, and while it scared me, it was also explained to me. They wanted me to see that adults could disagree and remain in relationship. They were angry with each other. They did what angry humans do—silent treatments, guarded outbursts, and more. But it was still anger-with-a-purpose. A lesson. Controlled. A blessing for which I’m thankful.

I did learn in such trajectory, however, that emotion has its place, direction, purpose. It’s educational, restrained, channeled. It never just is. Which means, perhaps, that any emotion that simply is what it is? Well…that kind is simply too much. It must be pared into its cognitive pieces until each one has its purpose and the too-much-ness can be contained, rationalized, understood. I remember one of my uncles watching a favorite movie of mine with me: Romero. I love the movie for several reasons—a bookworm believed to be harmless becomes a gospel-steeped leader, a poignant & difficult portrayal of polarizing ecclesiologies, more. But mostly I love it because it highlights the strength-in-weakness that liturgy offers.

The American military has taken over a cathedral to be a barracks in one of the Salvadoran cities. Already Archbishop, Romero comes simply to retrieve the consecrated host. The hostilities he endures for even this small rescue of the sacred open way for full liturgical dress, clear ritual action that signals he is about to perform a Mass, and the evicted Salvadoran people joining him as they walk peaceably but surely into the cathedral. They approach the armed soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, and with regret but realization, the soldiers make room for the people to enter the sanctuary. A Christian mass proceeds and participants & viewers receive proclamation of liberation theological hue. 

When my uncle and I watched it, however, we spent over an hour debriefing the movie until he could parse his own emotional reaction to it enough to be able to sleep that night. To this day, I don’t know what the governing emotions were—anger, even outrage, sadness, fear, guilt? I don’t remember ever addressing the emotional realities present for him. But we spent a lot of time in Latin American politics, that’s for sure. I was exhausted and relieved when he had finally sorted out his “too-much-ness” in the ways he knew how.

I’ve done similar things with my own too muchness for as long as I can remember. Find the presenting cause. Assess it. Discern it with compassionate listeners. Resolve it with care and attention, perhaps a little courage and risk. Allow myself to feel it, just feel it, and let it shape my life for a time? Unacceptable.

The analytical behavior serves a good purpose sometimes, of course. There are times when I have shared too much, or emoted too much, or hoped for affirmation too much and from the wrong sources. One learns from these over-extensions and, if willing, befriends them into a narrative of “Oh well. Live and learn.” But then if they shape our learnings, or if they communicate a too-muchness of something beautiful, are they really too much in the end? Can one receive too much grace, for instance? Or listening? Or compassion? What if the too much serves a purpose of ratcheting open something that had become closed? Charting a possibility that it really can be as good as all that, if we but allow the possibility and sustain the learning to receive it?

I have served for years now in one of the most emotionally-emaciated ‘businesses’ or ‘callings’ I know: higher education. I have learned to translate an intensive emotional capacity into channels of acceptable creativity, comprehensible institutional innovations, and effusively poetic prose that drives establishment-press editors batty. I have internalized my own too muchness as an Achilles heel, a weakness for which I must compensate. What if there’s a new way to re-frame this anxiety-whirlwind that is too muchness? What would it take to befriend one’s own too muchness and welcome the confrontation with others’ preferences, norms, boundaries as teaching/learning tool—for me and for others? Would this new friend have something new to tell me, a new story?

I’m on the cusp of believing in a new writing project that would terrify my family, for instance. It's way too 'naked' but it's probably the liveliest thing about my life right now. As such, I’m experimenting with sharing glimpses more broadly, but not so much so as to take my legs out from underneath me. I’m alert for self-sabotage—which I can specialize in—while I’m intentionally listening for how to broaden the circles for discerning directions, listening to this ‘naked-writing-prose.’ For example, I’ve recently shared a couple links of this writing with a woman I do not know, nor know whether I can trust. Good risk? Self-sabotage? Time will tell. Will the too-much-ness overwhelm or will it instruct…me and others? Will it expand my abilities to continue to write or will it confront them (and me) with new (difficult) learnings?

Maybe it comes down to a willing foolishness in the end. Befriended too-much-ness suggests that the only way to grow into new voice, to leave one’s chrysalis of new-becoming, is to fall out of it and see what’s received, what wings we can stretch into the air. A friend of mine assured me recently, “Artists love the intensity, the too-much-ness. They can handle it. So don’t worry about it.” Pursuing further artistry of my own requires I learn how to handle it, me, this gift of too muchness. 

This gift. That's a good way to start...

Frida Kahlo -- Companion for the Path

Sometimes companions find you after they have died.  Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) has erupted into my imagination and prurient interests. Or at least the sensate-intellectual fascinations of a recovering academic. Love, death, new life, birth...they're all here as thematic seductions for my writing-self today.

[Inarticulate intuition grasped from thin air this adjective, prurient, whose definition I was only peripherally/subconsciously aware. A quick online definition-inquiry later? I learn it means “marked by or arousing an immoderate or unwholesome interest or desire” with specific attention to sex. I laughed, unaware I had meant that but too amused to let it go. My sense is that it’s not unwholesome in the least, though perhaps ‘dangerous’ in the Estés sense of it… ‘held within my danger,’ my soul’s commitment and value, strength and passions for life.]

An artist of international acclaim, Frida beckons us into her work, her imagery, her “pain and passion,” to quote an introductory book. Her work became the first of Mexican artists to find ‘voice’ at the Louvre in Paris. She painted her way into a Surreal-esque style, but not through any training by Surrealists. As such, her work never quite leaves the reality at hand, so doesn’t qualify as Surreal in any formal sense. Throughout her oeuvre, she invites us into the complexities of impassioned human life—physical injury and painful (un)recovery, life’s loves fraught with connection and betrayal, awareness outside societal norms or preferences, cultural gifts unwelcomed by the “over-culture” around her…more.

From her, I learn that ex-voto’s are simple sketches or paintings of utter devotion, significant and popular within her Mexican (Mestizo) cultures. Estés offers examples of these in her own recent work on Holy Mother, Untie the Strong Woman. Is there invitation to explore such a tradition for me? Is it possible to offer a sketch or drawing or painting as an ex-voto, unconcerned about the aesthetics of others, concerned only to be true to the devotion one knows? I also learn that one of Frida’s “favourite subjects” is “the birth of new life through death.” Not only is it a part of her own imagination-psyche-understanding, it is a significant contribution of Mexican culture to all of us. The Day of the Dead in Mexico, for instance, is not a day of mourning but of celebration. Death’s intimate partner is new life, not the void or nothingness. New life.

Frida’s capacity to paint self-portrait after self-portrait after self-portrait enlivens the most of something unknown or unclear, however.  “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best,” she said. I, too, find myself often alone. I, too, write of my internal experiences (here) again and again. My Protestant propensity for guilt in self-assessed selfishness pains this practice sometimes. “What navel-gazing,” I sometimes hear my mind’s editors say—my “council of apes” who distract me from what yearns to pour forth. But perhaps there is offering to the world, to its healing and redemption, in such capacity for self-portraits, again and again. Frida’s inner-gaze has touched me deeply, enlivened something in me that I did not know was there, do not know how to articulate yet.

One image found me a couple months ago and it draws a lot of these themes together. “The Two Fridas,” painted in 1939. It marks a work completed shortly after Frida’s divorce from her life’s love, Diego Rivera, upon the affair he had with her own sister, Cristina. [I was startled to learn of their remarriage a couple years later, though with mutual understanding of redefined roles.] You can find a variety of commentary on the symbolism contained in this image, but I’m fascinated with the whole-hearted, full-blooded, earthy Frida in Tehuana costume, holding hands with the European-contained, lacy and blood-letting Frida. I do not think my receiving has much to do with her intentions or communications, but I value what I see, for what my experience is, is becoming. There is a whole-heartedness to the Frida connected to the earth, to her land, to her people. The European part of her shows much more pain, injury, surgical-trauma. What does it mean for the European side of an artist to lose blood? Even to die? I wonder. Is it better for such an attribution or accretion to die, or would that be a tragedy too? At the very least, this image mirrors something significant for me, for my learning. If death’s intimate partner is new life, is there value in letting previously chosen or imposed identities die? Do we welcome the pain of a life passionately lived, offering its images and intensities back in devotion that seems to come from elsewhere?

Ex-voto offerings. Birth of new life through dying. Repeated self-portraits. These are gifts to consider amidst a season of endings and beginnings. I love the poetry of her images the most. Purely symbolic items, tied to other symbolic items, resting within a reality everyone can recognize as it claims them, willingly or not. I love Frida’s capacity to startle her patrons or viewers the most, I think. She seems unafraid to paint-name the violence of life, or the things we work so hard to keep hidden. Like birth, our own or that of others. 

A blessing to receive such companions, even after they have died.