Old Ladies and Pilgrims...

A very wise woman I know once confessed to me that she felt she had a puritanical pilgrim who lived inside her, dictating her wrongs and rights. I so loved this image, and it made me curious, at the time, about what my own inner critic might look like. (I just loved imagining a tiny version of my friend bedecked in bonnet and long dress, shaking her head grimly at every misstep.) Not a terrible inner demon to have, as demons go--not like having a devious thug living inside you or anything....

Anyhow, many months have passed since this exchange with my wise friend, and it is not until now, these past few weeks, when I believe I may have come face to face with the shape and consistency of my own inner critic. And folks, it is not pretty. 

Let me back this up by saying that for the last month or so I have been working at a Los Angeles restaurant which, when I got the job, seemed like the perfect solution to my "day job" problem. Busy place, family run...good money, nothing corporate about it...in my neighborhood. Everything a girl could ask for. (Let me also say that I have not waited tables in quite a long time, and had been having some, oh, nostalgia for the ol' actress/waitress storyline in my life...and have also been determined since coming here to work the least amount of hours for the most amount of money...) But it's not as if I wasn't warned! I was! When I interviewed for the job I was told that the owner (an older woman of foreign birth) had quite the temper and one had to have a thick skin to deal with her. And I remember at the moment of being told, a little warning bell going off in my head, one that sounded a bit like...

"Lia. You do NOT have a thick skin. Nor do you want to. And people yelling at you makes you cry."

But, I ignored this little voice in my head, so convinced was I that I NEEDED this job. 

I could spend the next several paragraphs describing the various crazy and chaotic things that go on in this restaurant. I could talk about the disorganization and general grumpiness that abounds (no rare thing, in the restaurant biz, I know), but what I want to talk about is what it has been like to find myself faced, externally, with a kind of emotional chaos I have as of yet not experienced much of in my life.

Okay, that's not true. I have experienced this kind of emotional chaos...in fact, I experience it a lot...INSIDE MY BRAIN!!!

When I first started to see all the upset all around me at this place, I went through a fearful "oh my god, what is going on in my life that I am in the middle of all this craziness?" phase...which of course only made me feel worse about myself--as if working in this restaurant (for gods sakes) was some kind of shameful admission that I, too, am a miserable angry person. The aforementioned probably the best summation of my worst nightmare: myself as closed door instead of open book. 

Phase 2 involved me attempting to treat said craziness as spiritual exercise: how do I stand in the middle of this chaos and remain with myself? (This, I now see, working as a kind of denial...or as a way for me to pretend I have no involvement in said chaos). But as the craziness of the place has gotten closer and closer to me, culminating the other night in a confrontation so upsetting I still have not shaken it off, I have come to the realization that the craziness around me is, and must be, a direct product/reflection/embodiment of the craziness inside me.

It was when I heard myself saying (angrily) to myself, over and over (about aforementioned angry foreign woman), "Why is she so mean?! Why can't she say anything nice? Why does she criticize everything I do?" that a little light went off, like a neon sign emblazoned on my brain, and the sign read:

Girlfriend, why are YOU so mean to you? Why can't YOU say anything nice to you? Why do YOU criticize everything YOU do? 

And it hit me, oh my god, I have an angry foreign woman living inside me!! She gets red faced at any tiny mistake and she just can't wait to lash out at me...she is watching me like a hawk and she is trying to control my every move!! And, folks, I desperately want away from her. (In the external world and the inner one...) But I can not help but be astounded at the generosity of the universe...

Generosity? You might be saying, what generosity? You're slinging food under the angry gaze of a crazed old lady...what kind of generosity is that? Which, believe me, I have been feeling up until now that there is little to be thankful for in this situation, but when I LOOK, when I really look deeply I see that there is a partnership going on here in my life. I am not allowed, under any circumstances to run away from or ignore my own ill treatment of myself. If I do--if I try to deny it or shove it down to the depths, not only will it increase, it will present itself IN PHYSICAL form, for my investigation. That is a gift so great I can barely fathom it...that everything I need to learn in order to continue to open, and to grow, will come to me in the exact form necessary to force change.  In some moments the agent of change is beautiful--a birth, an experience in nature, a falling in love...and in some moments the agent of change is hard and sharp. But here's the deal--the universe (or god or your higher self or just your SELF, period) knows what it is up against. If your heart and mind are soft and open, well then, no heavy tools necessary. But if you are feeling closed, tight, fearful...man oh man, there's only a certain kind of machinery that's going to get through all that stone, and it might be a bit painful. But it's going to get there. Even if the heart doesn't break open until the millisecond before your last breath...that persistent partner that we all have in the universe will not quit. And that is a blessing of enormous magnitude.

So thank you, universe, for all of the things that break me open...including angry old ladies in restaurants...