Intense permeability

How shyness is best transformed into an even more intense permeability

I remember quite a lot of people talking about my supposed shyness above and beyond my head, literally. Words flew over my body, casting a spell with the magic of the self-fulfilling prophecy that our socialized identities frequently are. Shyness meant being afraid – aware – of the impact of other people’s opinionated positions. More than often, this fear also related to those intimately close, suggesting some sort of existential sin in being together, in being sensitive and receptive, similar yet different. Maybe it wasn’t a lot of people. Important though. Those with authority.

Even if coined shy, I was already a verbally very intense child and was told numerous times to quiet down the first years in primary school. A combination of a need to imagine and associate rather than learn step-by-step, the becoming of a passionate word smith and an animated body made it challenging to sit still and pay attention to other people’s priorities. I found my way in the system by creating many hour-to-hour, or even 15 minute-to-15 minute schedules - and securing a world of my own, inside. I talked less and less aloud but enjoyed petit leadership qualities in interaction with the other kids. I also counter-intuited socialized or even disciplined shyness by running for the podia wherever I could, founding an outlet for authenticity, or at least certain creative forms, in dance, poetry, and public speaking. Once a performance was finished, I often ran off the stage, or so something inside of me holds on to as a vivid memory, trying to keep the subsequent encounters with students and teachers as brief as possible. But, I did not succeed, diligently I wanted to mirror everyone and – to be honest - deeply loved people’s otherness, in-thereness. And it was addictive, at least a bit, particularly winning.

Developmentally eager, I sought a different, additional approach to renewed self-expansion and knew by now that development is a manner of “othering” like I did on stage. By not-being-me I became more-of-me, or more creatively me, transcending the felt imprisonment a partially suppressive, socialized self was. So, I decided to experiment with a different kind of language and communication style, not so much fixated on being kind, to try out self-transcendent activities (from bungee jumping to the experiential study – that sounds eloquent - of psychedelics), and juggle identities with cloths, music, social preferences, and perspective taking through listening, reading and writing. No shying away from the promising complexity of adolescence…

As a young adult there was a fruitful follow-up to this exploration when I was evenly juggling different career paths, study wise and with respect to jobs and extracurricular activities. All these processes surely expanded my understanding of life, humans and what Báyò Akómoláfé calls the “trouble with authenticity” on LinkedIn:

“From a processual, non-representational, posthumanist perspective, every social encounter paraphrases bodies in the sweltering heat of intra-action. Indeed, one cannot meet another without becoming modified. 'Our' identities - never reducible to choice or preference - do not pre-date the relational arrangements that are the condition of their emergence.

In some sense then, we drunkenly tumble through a hall of distorting mirrors wherein every greeting surface is a risk, bending, stretching, pulling, re-threading the inauthentic, cavorting with unseen possibilities. Failure is the motif, the very ground of encounter. We will not be seen. We will not be heard. We will not be reproduced. We will be paraphrased.”

Whereas my potential “keeping the options open” was paraphrased as a “she can not make any decision” when I was younger, I came to see it (again and again) in a different light once the emotional contagious state of adolescence transformed into the more autonomous, even if still poignant existential seeking of the following period. Ambivalences were re-interpreted to be part of a process called positive disintegration.

I remember how fond I was of literary studies offering me a world of words engaged in overcoming the need to pin down the world in neat categories, engaging me in paradoxes and ambiguities that felt enlivening familiar to the innermost streams of my experience and thinking. Here enters a gratefulness towards my parents patience in letting me seek my own paths.

And here, I am.

I would like to live this life as if it is at risk because it is. There are at least some parts that don’t want to buy into a presumed safety or managed coherence, even though I don’t want to deny (possible blind spots with respect to) privilege, relative safety and comfortable, backward rationalization.

At times, it was difficult to disentangle black-and-white trauma reactions from a deeper sense of our life’s sacred motionfulness and thorough ungraspability. It took another decade, it is taking this decade, to integrate a yet more expanded, relaxed sense of my self by letting the wounds speak for themselves instead of trying to raise them to the level of eternal healing and health.

Learning about the roots of the shyness from the standpoint of individuality, recognizing a deep sensitivity, lead me back to a different lens, namely seeing the shyness as expressive for our thoroughly collective, communal, and becoming ways of being this life form. Emotions being in constant motion, learning to lean into my feeling body, shattering conditionings by actively inviting the felt sense of our interdependency, daring to be even more permeable than the identification of shyness seems to suggest, I experiment with overcoming those past “socializations,” re-rooting a fundamentally alive sense of being. Shying away from one fixated stance or identity, dancing generatively with the falling apart of our perceptions due to an ongoing stream of sensations embedded in relationality. What a trip!

I like to be hold, but there is no-thing to be held. It’s in the holding that we both come alive to a sensitivity neither characterizing me nor you, opening the gates towards a nourishing and expanding othering in our most intimate inner lives.

I was never solely sticky sticky shy, very much alive though. Like we all are, I intuit, existentially. Permeable, and – able at it, so I learned. Failure can be the leitmotif towards fresh aliveness, a process enriched by many paradoxes. Even during our dreams we keep our inner eyes open, I noticed.

How happy I am now to receive the following testimonial of a wonderful (also co-)creative journey. It is honoring to have experienced this trajectory with such an artistically alive, other human being :

'Journeying creatively with Lotte as my writing coach has been a truly unique and inspiring experience. During every session Lotte and I explored new perspectives that expanded and enriched my writing process. Lotte is incredibly easy to talk with and it was so refreshing to be able to discuss deep, complex themes. Lotte also gave insightful, encouraging, and useful feedback throughout and this has unquestionably made my work better. If you have the opportunity to creatively work with Lotte I highly recommend you do so.'

Lil Jedynak Ph.D.

PS: looking for creative accompaniment? Working on an intensely personal and/or artistically complex writing project and long for someone to think along, provide fruitful questioning, perspectives, sources, and/or activities to deepen and co-guide the process? Feel welcome to approach your project also in a lively processual, relational manner. You can mail me to schedule an explorative online meeting: lotte@alotofcomplexity.com