Naming the Nuance

What happens when practicing the pause prevents you from ever pressing play?

I am someone who interrupts. I’m not proud of it. It happens to be something I often don’t even catch myself doing, despite my awareness of it. Weird sentence to write but it’s true. I know this about me. I try to push this persistent part away. But she has a lot to say and doesn’t want to wait her turn.

I come from a large Irish Catholic family and sometimes you just have to butt in to get your point across. I saw it modeled often yet I didn’t adopt it until I was an adult. I spent decades feeling misunderstood yet never brave enough to find my voice and project it over the noise. I watched my fun-loving family forget formalities and dialogue pleasantries. Like waiting your turn to speak.

Today I find myself thinking about how waiting your turn to speak sometimes turns into remembering how scary it might be to say the thing you know needs to be said. Like if you don’t say the thing now, you’ll lose all courage to utter it aloud.

I’m thinking about how often I didn’t say what was rattling around in my head and heart. Out loud, at least. I did always write. I did keep diaries and stories that looped in my head.

I find it interesting that as a 47-year-old woman, I am actively working on the pause. The etiquette of waiting my turn before I speak. The waiting to say what I think ought to be aired even when there is a break in conversation. Because aren’t I supposed to be discerning? Those of us who live in our heads and narrate every iteration of a conversation can find listening a very hard skill.

I practice the pause. And all the words I pushed pause on pile up inside me.

The vault of overwhelm delivers me a laundry list of thoughts that beg to be aired out. And the pause that I am perfecting is only making me doubt myself. Why do I want to say that so badly and am holding back? I guess that thought will now go in the category of “not worth it.” I lose track internally of prioritizing what should shuffle up to the top of things I need to say when the “time is right” so I shut down. The speaker system in my mind amplifies every word I don’t say. Every feeling I stuffed away while stiff lipped.

It feels familiar. Like it’s something I taught myself years ago.

I frequently fawn. I become withdrawn.

I noodle around all of this lately because, well. Because menopause. I think my dear friend Menopause is sending me messages. She’s one big fortune cookie. I open her up and she tells me:

Crack: You are officially retired from stiff lipping your feelings.

Crack: Your next chapter requires less composure and more honesty.

Crack: The era of polite silence has ended. Your feelings are cleared for departure.

Crack: You have completed your training in endurance. Truth-telling begins now.

Crack: What you feel is meant to be felt. Out loud.

Crack: The woman who learned to hold it together now learns to let it out.

She is warning me. She is saying, be careful with the pause. Because sometimes practicing the pause prevents you from ever pressing play.

I look at all my contradictory ways with a lot of grace these days. One month ago, I showed up here writing that Stillness is Safe:

When I don’t plug in to the battling energy in a room when frustration and fear flicker across the faces of those I love, I am actually helping. This is true support. I resist the reflex to rush in and buffer the impact. I stay. I breathe. I let the heat exist without absorbing it.

I wait. I witness. I allow the ache to move through the air instead of intercepting it, instead of blocking another from meeting their own knowing.

When I don’t plug into another’s pain, when I practice the restraint of not sanding it down into a tidy solution, the channel clears.

And I do believe this. I do believe that unplugging from another’s heat and swirl when emotions are emitting high voltages serves all of us. It is a practice worthy of attention.

So is naming the nuance. Speaking my mind aloud feels urgent to me, maybe not in the moment when another is flooded but I can’t just let that flood wash away what I want to say in response to the moment that happened.

A question I am holding is: COULD PARADOX BE A PANACEA?

Because it feels like a kind of medicine to me. Paradox doesn’t dissolve tension, but it allows it to show up without forcing a false resolution. It loosens my grip on certainty. Instead of demanding answers, it makes room for my thoughts to expand. My task master mind that insists on fixing everything begins to soften when it realizes that opposing truths can coexist.

Two truths can be held at once:

You can seek growth and accept yourself as you are.
You can listen deeply and still carry unsaid words.
You can be both the wound and the balm.

And what I find most ironic of all is that pausing for paradox often illuminates my aches while simultaneously softening my stance with them. Which just might be the closest I get to any cure. The ache is my medicine.

All the time I spent trying to choose between silence and voice. All the time I spent berating the part of me that urgently interrupts with self-explanatory pleas. Paradox provides me with permission to pop the guilt. To no longer let it calcify. Permission to admit that wholeness was never the absence of contradiction. Maybe paradox is the runway where my body can learn to carry opposing truths without breaking beneath them.

The paradox pudding I keep tasting makes life go down smoother. Like Goldilocks’ porridge. The middle road, where I look left and then look right and then nod because both roads could lead me home. That path feels right for me.

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

I want more time with this paradox parade. For the rest of March, I will be marching through my own internal paradox parades. I would love your company. Bring all your contradictory ways back here and share them with me. My favorite moments are meeting you all in the comment section.

JOIN THE PARADOX PARADE:

• Do you think about paradox ever? Or do you habituate to either/or? Sometimes we toggle back and forth.

• What pain have you been pausing instead of letting speak?

MARK YOUR CALENDAR!!!!

Our next DARE TO BE Creative Co-Working Gathering will be on Thursday, March 26th at 8:00 AM EST. For now, this will be open to ALL SUBSCRIBERS. Zoom link will go out in a Chat link a couple days in advance. Bring a creative project and work along others in real time. No sharing of work is required but you’ll be amazed at how shared energy can drive your work. There is a certain kind of comfort in knowing others are also there choosing to focus, to make something, to show up. I’d love to have join!

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