Me is still a We

 "What we lack is intensity of life" - Jung

Somehow, I had the luck and experienced the curse of being ‘twice exceptional’.

On the one hand, I was bright, and teachers noticed this quickly. On the other hand, underneath the surface, I struggled a lot to keep on track. Partially because the educational content was not adapted to my top-down learning style. Also, heightened sensory perception was quite distracting, and came with an equally strong bottom-up learning approach. Now, this made the whole learning process quite challenging! On an early age, I decided (or had already learned) to not let anyone notice what was going on mentally and emotionally, and I developed rigid behavioral tendencies to cope with the shaky interaction between the tendency to expand and the tendency to contract.

Counting ‘synesthetically’ luckily happened within the boundaries of my skin, I was sure to get the right (meaning: not wrong) answer on that painstakingly white paper….

The way I write about it may make it sound like it was all a heavy load. And even if attachment struggles born out of dysfunctional family dynamics had another impact on my resilience, this complex inner (rather: internalized) challenge did came with an intense inspiration for authenticity to develop. For authenticity to (t least) remain in the eye of the beholder, me.

I was quite aware I needed to find my own unique way of being human because overstretching adaptation was often so energy draining. I learned to work hard and at times felt betrayed when those nearby would emphasize that “everything came so easy for me.” It may have appeared that way, but that was not my reality. Day after day I tried to schedule my learning process up to the tiniest minute. Some might have called me a “nerd” for doing so. It was my way to survive in a period of social unsafety, loneliness and increased educational complexity while feeling an intense drive to get my degrees and, someday, feel liberated from those pressures to confirm and achieve in ways that did not fit me (and many others).

That same nerd just listened to rap music for hours (well, that makes one a word smith!), had intense (some might say obsessional) interests, and was an intense lover for deep connections. That same nerd preferred creating and often being alone, was quite ‘untouchable’; that same nerd showed leadership qualities.

A bunch of paradoxes became the leading theme in my identity search. At some point, I gave up the fight. The fight against myself, against adaptation, against complexity. Let this process of being me emerge from a shared goal of living; I can not continuously undermine my own needs, and I do want to be a vivid member of communities.

Nowadays, I hope to inspire others to recognize their authenticity within connection. Immediately I feel the need to share one of the communities that inspire me, how nourishing this reciprocity can be!, to do so: https://houseofthebeloved.eu/

I feel grateful for the awareness of the importance of my authenticity to survive the rather lengthy process of social adaptation. Grateful for the processes that have helped me to attune to others, understand them, and myself, from multiple perspectives, and keep some of my, and therefore also others, emotional integrity intact, even if a lot of things happened that need(ed) deep healing.

Authenticity has been a safe haven much as attachment this has been. Both have felt unsafe, both have felt opposites, both are immersed in an intense dance. They share a common goal, I’ll tell you. Allowing all nuances to be expressed on the spectrum of being human, and, if I would have a say in this (ha, and I have!): to push us beyond thinking in population, to invite us to think in differences.

Let me count; twice exceptional means more normal than the normal we expect. Any social interconnection is, in some way, ‘twice exceptional’.

You see, it is in the intensity of life that we recognize the continuous unfolding of ‘diversifying differences’ as the basis for that which we frame to be something (in) common. Bottom-up or top-down, it depends on your perspective.

Embodied understanding of intensity has saved my life, has saved my juice for life. Poring through the ‘pores’ of my skin, something beyond the boundaries we have been taught in Western societies. Me is still a We.