Looking stupid

I’m sitting here, watching my cursor blink on a blank page waiting for inspiration to come. I have been feeling like I need to write for the last two weeks, but every time I sit down to do it, I just stare at a blank page and don’t know where to start. I feel so overwhelmed that I can’t focus. It’s like there are so many ideas inside of me that want expression, and when I begin to open a gate to let some of them out, they all come rushing up and try to exit at once and it's chaos. So I slam the gate shut and wait for a time when the inspiration will just come and I don’t have to fight it.

That day is not today, but here I am writing anyway. I know that it’s time to open the flood gates and attempt to let out whatever needs to be expressed and hope that I can make sense of it all.

I’ve recently been in a tailspin of depression, self-pity and binge eating; you know, the “same ol’ same ol’.” I can pinpoint the trigger for this particular episode quite distinctly. Someone I trust and admire expressed themselves angrily toward me. It’s no use rehashing the details here, because they’ve apologized and the details don’t matter anyway. The fallout within my own heart is what I’ve been dealing with.

At the time it happened, I felt hurt and betrayed and I blamed myself. Honestly, I had no reason to blame myself, but the fact that the message was directed at me made me think it was my fault. Even now, looking back, I marvel that I could blame myself so quickly and automatically. I’ve spent the better part of the last several years learning that when people do or say hurtful things, it has virtually nothing to do with the “receiver” and everything to do with what’s going on in the mind and heart of the “giver.” I know this. And yet, in that unprotected moment when I helplessly received the unexpected barbs of someone else’s anger, I could not see the other person – all I could see was that I had somehow let this person down; enough that they would “reprimand” me. I knew, without question, that the fault was mine; that I had done something wrong; that I had let this person down; but I could not for the life of me figure out what I had done wrong.

The truth is, I hadn’t done anything wrong – at least nothing that warranted such a strong verbal response. Unfortunately for me, self-pity doesn’t need truth to exist; it can make up its own truth and self-perpetuate. And it did. I felt sorry for myself and I blamed myself for letting down someone I admire. I turned to comfort food because I knew comfort food would make me feel better, even if in just the short-term.

And I ruminated. I couldn’t immediately identify what I had done wrong, so I made things up: “I just don’t measure up;” “I’m not as capable as I thought I was;” “that’s what I get for trying to be confident or feel good about myself;” “I’m just not good enough;” etc. These thoughts never lead to anything positive and this time was no exception. But after pondering this experience for several days, something dawned on me – one of the main reasons I was so hurt by this exchange was because it made me feel stupid. I walked away from this experience believing that “I should have known better…” 

This insight may not sound like such a big deal, but it was immensely profound for me, and I hope I can capture why.

For all of my life I believed I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t good enough to warrant my father’s time and attention and I wasn’t good enough to warrant my mother’s praise or affection. I was fat and I lived in a world where I did not fit in. I wasn’t good enough, cool enough, attractive enough, etc. to have close friendships and I was often getting hurt by the frequent rejection and/or lack of inclusion among my peers. I desperately prayed to be attractive, and athletic, strong, confident, witty, etc. so that my dad would want to spend more time with me; so that my mom would stop criticizing everything about me; so that my friends would actually be friends and want me around instead of just tolerating having me around occasionally.

Through a lifetime of putting myself down I always had two things that I held onto that were positive about me – I was spiritually sensitive and I was smart. I’m not talking Mensa level, genius smart or anything, just regular smarts. At the very least I thought I was “smart enough,” and coming from a guy who didn’t think he was “enough” of anything, that was a big deal.

I suppose it was inevitable that this would become a point of pride for me. I would (well, let’s be honest, I still do…) feel angry or highly defensive whenever anyone doubted or questioned my intelligence – like, really angry. It was if I was saying, “this is all I have going for me, if you take this from me then I have nothing….” And I really believed that. The unexpected problem I encountered was that, in order to maintain my identity as a “smart” man, I had to know everything. I held on to meaningless facts and figures, so that I could whip them out at a moment’s notice and “impress” everyone with my knowledge, aka smarts. The problem came when something came up that I didn’t know anything about, because suddenly, I looked “stupid.”

Without really recognizing it – until recently – I had learned to hold myself accountable for all the things I didn’t know, but SHOULD have known. I could subvert the feeling of “looking stupid,” with good old fashioned “shame.” I would rather beat myself up for what I didn’t know (shame was familiar/comfortable), than accept feeling stupid.

For me, feeling stupid and/or looking stupid in the eyes of others is unbearable. I have nothing else going for me, and to have my intelligence taken away is to strip me of anything worthwhile and I might as well find the highest cliff to drive off because I have nothing and will only ever be nothing. My head knows this is wrong, but my heart is stubborn and doesn’t let go of fears easily.

This was the culprit behind my intense, visceral reaction to being “dressed down” by someone I love – they hit me exactly where I hurt the most – they made me feel stupid and like I should have known better. And I retreated. I turned to comfort food and self-pity because feeling mock care is better than feeling no care at all, right? I avoided going to work because my heart was sick. I stayed in bed for two days straight because all I wanted was to stop existing. I vowed never to get too close to anyone again because people you care about can wound you so deeply. I resigned myself to feeling lonely for the rest of my life, because loneliness is better than getting hurt, right?

No, the problem is not my relationship with this person (By the way, I told them how I felt and they responded in a loving, apologetic way, which I’m grateful for). The problem is my relationship with myself – how I think of myself. I thought I was making so much progress and then in one moment, it seemed shattered; as if I was back to square one, or that I hadn’t made any progress at all.

But I know that’s not true. An emotional setback, yeah, that’s what it feels like, but it doesn’t mean I haven’t made progress. If anything, maybe it just means that I’ve made progress to the point that I’m ready to address this underlying faulty belief, and that this “unpleasant experience” was the catalyst to bring this to my attention. I wish I had handled it better, but I guess I can just add that to my pile of “lessons to learn.” And I think there are nuances here I need to work out. It’s okay to be smart, and not know everything. In other words, being smart doesn’t mean knowing everything. No one can know everything anyway. What I really need to do is to learn how to deal with looking stupid. How do I deal with those moments when my intelligence fails me? How do I deal with those times when I feel like I should have known better and I’m left feeling pretty stupid and bad about myself? Previously, I immediately turned to shame, self-condemnation, comfort food and self-pity, but that’s just not healthy (and, ironically, a pretty “stupid” way to handle it…).

Maybe it’s not really the stupidity that bothers me. Maybe it’s the feeling that I won’t measure up or be deserving of the praise of others – that I’ll never be worth the validation I’ve been craving since a child. Messing up, making mistakes, looking stupid, I mean, maybe it’s all part of the same war I’ve been fighting within my heart my whole life – am I good enough?

I can’t help but wonder, what advice I would give someone who came to me and expressed these things? I think I would want to give that person a big hug and say, “I’m sorry this has been so hard for you. It’s human nature to feel stupid (ashamed/embarrassed) sometimes. When that happens, ask yourself, ‘did you do something wrong that needs to be made right? Try to make it right;’ ‘did you do something that you truly need to apologize for? Go ahead and apologize;’ otherwise, if you didn’t do anything wrong and there’s nothing to apologize for, accept that there was something you didn’t know, but now you do – this may be an uncomfortable way to learn something, but it’s still a learning opportunity. Chalk it up to a learning experience and move on. Don’t waste your time hurting yourself, because – even the you who makes boneheaded decisions from time to time – is still worth being treated with love and respect.”

Saying it is one thing, believing it is another. I guess I still have some work to do.