(new post) oh yeah baby, it's yom kippur: obligatory t'shuvah post
(view on the blog: https://cerberus.bearblog.dev/oh-yeah-baby-its-yom-kippur-obligatory-tshuvah-post/)
(this ended up being a somewhat heavy post - i promise most of them won't be like this. just a funny time of year to have started my blog!)
writing this while attending a virtual kol nidre service; it's strange.
i'm bringing a lot of strange feelings to yom kippur, this time. each year since i started my conversion, i'll find myself in some kindof state of personal upheaval or reflection, and then i'll realize that it's september and the high holy days are about to roll around. t'shuvah gets my ass every time!
this year was no exception. in fact, it's probably the strongest example so far. i'm coming out of 7 years in an emotionally abusive marriage where i internalized a lot of things that i thought were normal. i thought i was healing, but i was actually shrinking. we had an odd cycle of validating each other's fundamental emotional injuries by talking about politics, philosophy, and mental health, like if we just had the perfect thoughts, we would be good people. this made me think i was virtuous for excising parts of myself i didn't like, or that they didn't like. i abandoned my life in my home country for the sake of this relationship, and eventually, my own self. i developed a lot of layers of separation from myself over time, to justify the dissonance i felt from the neglect i experienced. i replicated it inwardly.
it dawned on me after we separated and i actually started going to therapy earlier this year, for all their talk about doing "self-therapy", not once did we really talk about cognitive behavioral therapy and its concepts, acceptance and commitment therapy and its concepts... or any philosophy of any therapy. i was never asked to challenge my core belief that i'm unloveable or broken. they resisted any attempt for me to question the same of them. over the last few months, i've been realizing that you actually really, really cannot hate yourself if you want to be healthier. if you hide from you, you can only elevate yourself by trying to punt yourself to a higher rung, because you still fundamentally accept the social ladder you were given with your trauma. i emphasize this because i've seen other abuse survivors (including my ex) talk about recovery in this way sometimes, with a tone of almost original sin-type preaching. like people who are abused have a mark they can never erase. and i have experience enough with this cycle to say that i think this is a) corny, b) performative, and most importantly, c) just plain unhelpful. you just end up creating a viral reservoir for your self-hate to perpetuate itself. it is actually, exactly the problem. it is bojack horseman.
i don't know if what i'm feeling on the other side of self-hate is necessarily self-love. that's always come off to me as a platitude, a bit idealistic or unnuanced. maybe it's because i'm not ready yet - but honestly, i just feel a sense of recognition. i press "A" and i take the action i intend to take. i am not constantly in conflict with myself or trying to dice myself into parts that i can't acknowledge and parts that i'm more tolerant of. i'm not operating by denying my thoughts, feelings, or my past. i finally recognize myself.
i was way, way into Elden Ring when it came out a couple years ago. i saw a comment circulating from Miyazaki at the time, where he talked about his philosophy regarding horror or unsettling concepts in his games:
To be realistic, I feel something beautiful needs something ugly—something that's depraved or tragic to heighten and embolden that beauty. I think that's a much more realistic depiction of beauty, to have something small and beautiful inside something tragic and decaying.
—Hidetaka Miyazaki, PC Gamer
i was kindof bowled over by this quote. i noticed this a lot more as i kept playing Elden Ring, this idea that beauty must be found within what is repulsive or scary. that they are not mutually exclusive. that motif completely captured me and it made me emotional when observing the environments or the stories of the game, at times. i originally chalked up this emotional response to catharsis, coming from how i am scared and repulsed by the world but yet, am tasked to find hope and reason to keep going within it. that's still true, but i realize now it's also because I Was Projecting. it was a little earth-shattering to me to find symbols i personally abhorred (like rot, decay, societal collapse, Guys With Ten Million Limbs) be treated with a kind of delicateness, a dignity. nothing is meant purely to shock or put you off. it's meant to disarm, to make you see a wholeness, a nuance, to humble you (if getting knocked around like a basketball and dying over and over wasn't enough to do it). it was shocking to me to identify with things that scared me, because i couldn't deny that they also awed me. maybe the same applied to what i was repulsed by most of all: myself.
so - it's very weird to come back to yom kippur once again, and where i would usually feel a desperate desire for validation of my spiritual connection and my intent to Be Better when hearing the liturgy, i moreso just... feel a bit solemn. i've been running from myself for a long time. i no longer feel like i need to cling to the feeling of spirituality or like i need to "dig down" to excavate some kind of fundamental badness, as a substitute for actually connecting with my sense of self. i simply feel a silent acknowledgement of mistakes i've made, and an understanding that the people in my life love me anyway. i realize that people i love are strong enough to handle being hurt by me sometimes. i realize that's what trust means. i realize by pushing past the feeling that i am radioactive to others, i feel safe to make mistakes, and i feel sad that i didn't allow myself to feel that, before. in my marriage, it was extremely difficult to connect with my life before living in the states - and now i realize that is violence, not healing. i can visualize my home where i grew up and feel like it's mine, again. the symbols and identities and ways of thinking that i find natural and comfortable are ones i am not embarrassed of anymore. i feel continuity with who i was, who i am, and who i'm going to be. (not always - but it's getting easier every day.)
i've been really, really struck by the fact that i was missing this "feeling" of what it was like to be myself, all these years. and even that i thought it was Virtuous, to be partially missing. slipping back into my natural ways of being, i can feel the bruises - but i am healing.
this yom kippur, i finally feel like myself again. this might be my most literal t'shuvah ever. (in contest only with last year where i actually did return home to reunite with family after several years, unintentionally during the high holy days.)
something kindof funny is that my heritage language (sm'algya̱x) and liturgical hebrew share a similar first-person pronoun: -nu. the difference is that in sm'algya̱x this is singular, meaning "me", while in hebrew this is plural, meaning "us". i listen to the liturgy addressing the unknown, confessing and asking forgiveness for us all, and in the collective, i hear a snippet of myself.
it's now the next morning. i woke up so early for this service, lol.
g'mar chatimah tovah. may we all be inscribed in the book of life.
(go to the blog post to leave a comment and upvote, if you like. thanks for reading!)