what exactly is going on here?

years ago, driving up from new orleans with my mother, it was the middle of the night and i was behind the wheel. we were having a more or less honest dialogue for the first time maybe in our whole lives during that year, and on that particular drive i worked up the courage to ask her why exactly she'd always seemed to dislike me. she said "because you're never satisfied" and went on to explain that nothing had ever been enough with me, nothing had ever made me happy. i'm in a space right now where very few of the stories from my past hold any emotional charge for me, and many of them seem to have been almost wiped from my memory, lingering maybe like ghosts in the corners somewhere. that story still remains pretty focused in my mind, the details are clear as daylight, and it almost makes me shiver because it speaks to something that holds a clarity and a charge like no other: the truth.

the thought that i have never in my life been satisfied is an interesting one. at that time it made me really sad, because i couldn't argue with it. by that point i'd already done some serious work on myself, i thought, and had surrendered the kinds of demented hysteria, violent rage and pain that had pushed me around for most of my life, childhood, teenage years and my early twenties. by that point i'd learned to lean into what hurt me or made me afraid because it could bring about emotional resolution. i'd committed myself to "personal growth" and had a vague idea of a perfected being i could become if i was courageous enough, and dedicated enough. i had traded in outdated behaviors of anger, chaos, constant irritation and lies for kindness,equanimity, composure and honesty. i tried to live well by the standards of taking care of life on earth. i had even gone so far by that point to really disentangle myself from the chains of society by pretty much dropping out. i owned virtually nothing, was capable of finding food and shelter as a homeless traveller, and had spent weeks at a time in the woods. i felt like i'd done a ton of work to deconstruct all these demons that had plagued me in my young life....

and yet...

and yet...

and yet...

i could be sitting quietly in the woods, looking around at beauty, having no responsibility, no demands on my person or time, no job, no debt, no social or relationship drama to deal with... i could be sewing or reading or anything, hanging out with other people who were dedicated to the same take-care-of-life or personal-growth philosophy.... and there was always, still, that dissatisfaction. that creeping, nagging sense of something that was not quite right.

i wondered about it occasionally, because even as i would be experiencing completely blissed out states, dancing in ecstasy, heart exploding in ferverent prayer or gratitude, or living weeks and months at a time in peace, constantly thankful for my life and happy as can be...

it was always there. the inability to complete the lie, to give into it entirely, to lose myself in it.

there was always a sense that something didn't add up. and so all the seemingly "good" things would end. and i'd be back to moments of this crystal clarity that came with the starkness. it wasn't exactly a depression, per se, although there was sadness that the bliss or goodness never seemed to last. it was a kind of a glaringly obvious starkness that held a feeling i couldn't argue with. i simply could not argue with that sense, because it seemed to be mocking all that i thought i was, all that i wanted to become, and it held something that all the emotional or psychological or spiritual states didn't seem to have: the utter obviousness of the truth.

i can only weave this whole thing together in retrospect, and although i didn't know it at the time, the seeking for the more perfected angela was wearing itself down. there is a lot of energy in this body, and a lot of passion and get-out-of-my-fucking-way kind of gusto. if anyone was changing as a person, i certainly was (as anyone who knew me in my teenage years and then later in my twenties can attest. i went from being a terror to be around to being everyone's spiritual friend. whatever that means.)...

i never thought of any of this at the time with the term "truth" or any of that. it was happening, and all i could muster was the clarity to take note.

sometime in 2006 i read a book by jed mckenna called "spiritually incorrect enlightenment" which for the first time in my life introduced me to the idea that maybe i don't exist. that there maybe isn't a self inside anywhere and there is no perfection to be had for that non-existant, only living in the imagination idea of angela.

i was fucking floored. shocked to death. bloodless, stark, cold, cruel, horrified. i wanted to throw the book across the field of the perfect organic farm i was living and working on in california, to beat to death the awesome well-meaning hippie types who were my fellow workers, to drown it in the ocean that was walking distance from where i lived, to hurl it across the entire swath of the 'awake' northern california landscape that i was surrounded by.....

but there it was. that familiar knowing. that gut level thing that was a kind of a knowing that can't be explained or reasoned with because it exists fully outside of the so-called rational mind.

the author was telling the truth. (or as close as words can come when it turns out that no words can contain the truth.)

and i couldn't argue. it was clear to me that the thing he was pointing to with his words was the same thing that had haunted me year after year of my life: i was living a lie. and i knew it. and for the three days and nights i was haunted by this book, i sensed the cost of digging into what all of that would mean in my life. and sensing that cost, i balked.

i returned the book to the library, left the farm, got involved in some personal drama trying to save my ex husband from an addiction, got involved in more drama around my relationship with my parents, got involved in more intensity and drama by going to new orleans to work katrina-related jobs, got involved in more personal growth projects as i returned back to my spiritual college in colorado, got involved in a real identity-forming situation as i committed myself to working to "wake up" the human race from the dream of separation and thusly save the people and the planet from destruction.....

and yet....

and yet...

and yet...

it never left me, the sense that i'd begun to unravel a lifelong sense of dissatisfaction, a lifelong lie, and i'd turned my back on it. i'd seen the price of truth and just run for the hills. i'd finally begun to have a sense of what an answer would look like to this aching, burning, awful lifelong question that i'd always had and not even known words for.... and i'd just burried my head in the sand.

or had i?

last year in the fall i was blessed to run into a friendship with a challenging person who was uninterested in meeting ego to ego, and was self-contained enough to be able to be friends, and yet be unattached to human drama. and every action from this person was an affront to my sense of self. and beautifully, wonderfully, at the same time, jed mckenna's book came across the shelves of the library i was working at and i picked it up again. i ordered his two other books and read them all in short order. and something inside became fatally wounded, and died.

over the next four months i tried to ignore it through various ego posturing, through self destructive behaviors, through lying to myself, through trying to date and meet ego to ego with people.... but something really key was missing and it just didn't work. as much as i tried still to escape, and tried to flare up the belief that there was something inside that could be perfected, that there was somewhere to go to, that there was some thing i could do, that there was a way to escape this dread.... nothing worked, and my personality became deeply unstable. i couldn't concentrate, couldn't do much of anything.

one day i was sitting at my desk, so overwhelmed with the intensity of the feeling that i was literally beating my head against the wall saying "i have to know i have to know i have to know" and shortly after that another collapsing took place, or a knowing, and it fundamentally changed my entire life in a way that i can never ignore again.

what i saw that day in early march was that truth exists. it was clear, unmistakable, and known in a way that cannot be unknown.

finally seeing that truth exists was like coming to life from a dead place, and finally made my entire life make sense. i knew without a doubt that i was/am a lie, and further, it became clear that i don't even really exist in the way i had thought i existed.

anyway. that's where the ability to talk about it ends for me. it's just important that i get into words the sense i am having of this thing always pulling, always driving this life, always leading the path and never letting up for a second. i gave up fighting against the obviousness of it all, and am surrendered to whatever may be - come hell or high water i am going with this because it's the only thing in the whole of 33 years that has made one iota of sense.

there is truth and i will die to be with it.