Wrote Too Soon

I guess the Galway poem didn't help. (How is it possible??) I got sick again! Just hours after the strep throat/ear infection seemed to go. These last few days have been hell, as Gabriel's been sick too. We are weak and indigent. I have not done my poetry lines, or taken photos, or school essays/homework, or written here seriously in at least two weeks, maybe more. I feel so disconnected from being an independent adult. It is all just snot rags, advil, throat coat tea, and begging each other for naps while the other one groggily 'plays' with the kids.

I swear I will get back to my real life!

I want to write about an exercise we did last week in Gestalt class, because it was really interesting.

This exercise was about "projection", that is, the ways we project our inner feelings and stories onto others. We do this positively as well as negatively. This is something I am really interested in, because I know I do it chronically. Fritz Perls (the Founder of Gestalt) says it may be that up to 90% of what we experience is projection. It's strange to contemplate the world from this lens.

So, for this exercise you chose someone you did not know and then you sat down and for ten minutes said everything you could think of that you were projecting onto them. The other person says nothing. Then you switch. So weird!

I was paired with a man and I started in first, "You're a vegetarian; you're hetero; you're from the country, not the city; you're into yoga; you're a writer; you're an athlete; you ride your bike to school." And then, after a few minutes, it got hard, and you had to start risking a little more, "You have older sisters; you wish you didn't have to live in the city; you're dating several women; you're very careful about what you eat; you're from the Bay Area; you're for Obama; you're close with your parents."

It turns out I was right about a lot of it! But, some of the things I laid on him mystified me: he was in a serious relationship, living together in fact (why did I see him dating multiple people?); he was from the East Coast, not here (I'm from EC too, why didn't I pick up on that?); he had one brother and no sisters (I was pretty sure he had feminist sisters and had been close to women growing up).

He guessed some things about me correctly, that I want to be an artist (poet); that I am a mother; that I am not married but am partnered; that I live in San Francisco. He said something really perceptive about how he thinks I must be struggling hard to be a mother, be a serious student, and be a writer. This made me feel really recognized. Then some other things he got wrong: I'm not from the Midwest; I'm not the youngest in my family; I'm not into theatre. I noticed that I felt happy when he guessed correctly about me, and sort of ashamed when he did not.

Later, when we debriefed in the larger circle, some other people said the opposite, "I can't believe she guessed I was from Connecticut! What makes me seem like I'm from Connecticut?? I thought I had gotten all that out of me!"

I guess the opposite of projection is, in a way, asking questions and reserving judgment. This sounds easier than it really is. In fact it is an explicit rule in my Group Dynamics class; that each person is the authority on their own feelings. But this is hard to really allow inside of me. In my own half fucked-up, half-experienced way I feel like I can sometimes know what another person is feeling. (Gabriel would say I am wrong about this.) But anyway, it is hard for me to turn off my sense of what I "see" going on in another person. And this happens in Group Dynamics, sometimes. I think I "see" that another person is upset, though they say they are not. I don't know what to do with this.

As I write this, it seems absurd to follow the rule that you have to accept whatever the other person says about themselves at face value. In fact, I feel like I have had breakthroughs and success as a client and as a listener using that sense to say, "You seem angry," or "You seem hurt". I have denied it, and so have others, even when it is true. And the outside perspective has sometimes been a help "I seem hurt? Well, maybe I am..."