Maybe Sartre was on to something...

mmm...

We really are stuck here in these mechanics. I am reminded of it every day that I spend living with my mom.

The first twenty-five years I spent with my family I spent in relative silence. I would participate in the fun stuff, but I never participated in family arguments, and I never intervened when I thought I could be helpful. I saw my mom being mean to my dad. I saw my dad complaining about it and never standing up for himself. I saw my mom and my sister say terrible things to each other.

Everyone adored me. They confided in me, I heard their perspectives and I was "such a great listener." The thing is that it was all sort of a lie. I was holding down everything that I was seeing. No one ever asked for my perspective and I never offered it, but the bitterness that developed in me was palpable. Why didn't they ever ask me what I thought? Why didn't they ever want to know what was happening in my life?

Finally at age 23 I exposed myself. I told them everything. I told them what I thought of each of them and what I thought about the way we interacted with each other. No one disagreed. But they stopped telling me how great I was, and what a great listener I was. In the meantime, they kept being mean to each other in the same ways. Year after year I watched it, tried to point it out, tried to get them to talk to each other, tried to confront them about what I saw, and every time I did things got worse, and I got more committed to transforming the situation.

Then I met human design and finally it all became clear. Ah! I'm a projector. I can see the things I seem to be able to see. I'm not crazy! But I can't share it with people until they ask me. And because I'm a 5/1, my family never will.

Since then it has just been years of dealing with the fall-out. I apologize, but it kills me. It feels like I'm lying to myself, like I'm stabbing myself in the back. I am right! I think while I tell them I am wrong. But there's no explaining it. They can't ever understand what it's like to be a projector. But ah! It's so hard to let go! It feels like a cruel joke - to be able to see what we see and to be sentenced to do nothing about it until the apes recognize that we have something to offer. Sure, they're beautiful apes, but fools. They are all fools.

It reminds me of No Exit, by Sartre. In fact, it is making me reconsider these existentialists and their brilliance. Three people are in a room. They are all dead. Garcin is the newest to be dropped off in the room. They know only that they cannot leave the room for all of eternity, and that this is hell. Otherwise, there is nothing. The three dead people begin to argue. Finally Inez understands something.

INEZ ... Ah, I understand now. I know why they've put us together.
GARCIN I advise you to - to think twice before you say any more.
INEZ Wait! You'll see how simple it is. Childishly simple. Obviously there aren't any physical torments - you agree, don't you? And yet we're in hell. And no one else will come here. We'll stay in this room together, the three of us, for ever and ever... In short, there's someone absent here, the official torturer.
GARCIN... I'd noticed that.
INEZ It's obvious what they're after - an economy of man-power -- or devil-power, if you prefer. The same idea as in the cafeteria, where customers serve themselves.
ESTELLE What ever do you mean?
INEZ I mean that each of us will act as torturer of the two others
[There is a short silence while they digest this information.]
GARCIN [gently] No, I shall never be your torturer. I wish neither of you any harm, and I've no concern with you. None at all. So the solutions easy enough; each of us stays put in his or her corner and takes no notice of the others. You here, you here, and I there. Like soldiers at our posts. Also, we mustn't speak. Not one word. That won't be difficult; each of us has plenty of material for self-communings. I think I could stay ten thousand years with only my thoughts for company.

Their attempts at not torturing each other are obviously failures, but it's funny to see the way that just them being who they are, each of the them being themselves tortures the others. Funny in a very dark way. Funny the way that I feel now when I realize that I am in that same situation. That I am Garcin, trying, now that I have discovered the mechanics of it all, to get out, thinking that by understanding it I could change it. And slowly, SLOWLY surrendering to the reality of the limitations of human interaction, to the fact that there is no exit.

I just can't help but continue to wish to dream of a time when we could understand each other. When we can be separate but also know each others' experiences. Maybe that wish is my own private Inez or Estelle. Or maybe that's exactly what human design promises. Guess I'll just have to wait and see. For now, the bitterness encompasses me. The thing is that if anyone valued what I had to offer from this bitterness it would only feed the bitterness, and the feeling that everyone else had owed me. It's not from here that I can find resignation. I have to resign first, and that's a bitter pill to swallow!


photo from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NoExit_cover.gif