“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” — Marianne Williamson

I have heard the above so many times, most often being read by a teacher while I was lying in savanasa at the end of a class at Tranquil Space in Washington, DC, where I practiced yoga and worked as Creative Director Kimberly Wilson‘s assistant from 2002 to 2003. I was moved to tears by it the first time I heard it, when I was 19, though I didn’t really understand why I was so upset.

This month, inspired by my friend Meggy Wang, I signed up for a community project called 21.5.800. The goal was to write 800 words a day and to practice yoga 5 days a week for 21 days. Since writing and yoga are both practices I’ve found fruitful but have neglected in recent years, this seemed perfect. I fell far short of 800 words a day and 5 yoga classes a week. But I filled an entire (small) notebook, rediscovered my headstand, started updating this blog again, and, thanks also to some intense conversations, I realized why that Marianne Williamson poem, general enough to almost be trite, inspired such a strong reaction in me.

I don’t know how to say this. I want very much to tell you this secret. It’s not a secret, but the secret is: whatever it is you’re most ashamed of, your deepest darkest fear, your worst flaw, your worst habit, the secret terrible thing about you that you’d rather die than see revealed, THAT thing, yes THAT, is going to save you. Look at it until your eyes bleed and you think your heart is going to combust, bring it out into the open, because the passageway is there. Dig a way out through the bottom to the ocean, Rumi says in my favorite poem.

Something lucky happened to me; someone caught me. Worst habits are not easy to mask, so of course this was not the first person to notice or to complain about mine, but this time was different. There was a suspended moment in which someone I love and respect was articulating my worst characteristic to me so clearly that there could be no mistaking the fact that he had seen it, that the full extent of my selfishness and self-absorption and hypocrisy had been uncovered and it was out there, plain as day. I was being called out, and the shock of it was so great that I was neither angry nor hurt but simply stunned. This wasn’t just some paranoid idea I had about myself. It was true. The nightmare was true. I had acted selfishly, I had hidden things about myself out of shame, I had considered only my own interests, my own feelings, and I had really hurt someone who loved me. (I had, in fact, hurt many people over the years.) I was horrified.

I know what guilt feels like, I have a lot of experience with guilt, and what I felt in this moment was something altogether different, something like a knife actually piercing my heart. Yes, I was crying, I was sorry, but true repentence isn’t an apology, or a confession, or a resolution to make it right, or anything having to do with words, or with fixing it, or with the past. It has to do with seeing.

I was sitting there, horrified, my heart out on a platter with it’s black snake writhing around in it, uncovered, being seen. But the strange thing was, as much as I was appalled, as soon as my friend, the one I had hurt, the one who called me out, was able to see my bad habit clearly enough, this bad habit I had so desperately wanted to hide, he could see not only what I had done, but the causes for what I had done. He could see that I was selfish because I thought I had nothing to give.  He could see that my harmful actions stemmed from a belief that I didn’t have enough power to cause any harm. That I withheld help because I thought I was incapable of helping. That I grasped and I begged and I pleaded and I took more than I reciprocated because I thought I was impoverished. That I conducted myself as if I were powerless, even though I already had the power. Power to help, power to hurt. I had power and I was terrified of it. And my bad habit, my selfishness, the thing that hurt him, and shamed me, was directly linked to my greatest treasure.  My worst habit stemmed from thinking that I needed to hide. My worst habit stemmed from was refusing to acknowledge my own worth, and the responsibility that comes along with it. My worst habit held its own solution within it. And, because it was seen, and I was seen, and because I saw too, I was already, in that very instant, forgiven.

In the place where I grew up, the deep South, shame and secrets are palpable, the land is saturated in them, and the land, the beautiful, blood-soaked land, is everything. In every family there are stories that everyone knows but no one is allowed to tell, and everyone longs for faded beauty and honor and dignity and glory. But that dignity, that special, unique, specific beauty is so tightly intermingled with, even sustained by, a past filled with such unspeakable abomination and cruelty, a past which is still present. We learn to take good care of the skeletons in our closets, to polish them by hand. We pay more attention to our skeletons than to other people. We become quiet and ashamed.

The structure is intricate, there are many hidden chambers, the past layered on the present layered on the future, the beauty layered on the horror. The habit layered on the cliche layered on the true insight. I don’t know how to say this, but please, please, look. Look at that snake that you think you are, the one you want to cut up into a million tiny pieces and bury so deeply no one will ever find them. You don’t have to believe the story. You just have to see it. Right there, right in that urge you have to take the sword to the snake. Everything you need to know is right there.

[This is something I wrote when I was 21, about being 21 and regretful and cold.]

. . .

Jenny and I live in a house of tears and cheap wine and tampons and hairs collecting in the bathtub drain. Actually, we don’t live in a house at all, but a two-bedroom apartment, a fourth-floor walk-up in a 1915 building in Astoria, Queens, as far from the nearest subway station as you can be without being closer to another one. Our rent checks are perpetually lost or forgotten, but never for long enough that anything happens. The pipes hiss, the air smells faintly of rot or mildew when you walk in the door, and there are books everywhere. The kitchen shelves, meant for food, spill over with literature. The books — some mine, some hers, some duplicates, some of unsure origin — remind us of our expectations for ourselves, of how we were not quite living up to them. Colonies of hairpins camouflage themselves in my grandfather’s oriental rugs, which our brothers and fathers hauled up the stairs for us when we moved from our old basement in DC in July. The rugs, like my giant mahogany bed, do not belong in this apartment, but in that other life I wanted and might have had if things had only gone differently, the life with framed art on the walls and hardwood floors.

I make my bed in the middle of the night. I line up loose bobby pins in rows on my bedside table, which isn’t a table, but a burgundy suitcase on a wooden suitcase rack that my mother got from a Goodwill in Georgia. Jenny fights with her boyfriend in New Jersey on the phone. Through the wall, I can hear the sharpness in both the ‘I’m not angry at you’ and the ‘I’m just so mad.’ The fury in her voice when she yells is the best proof I have that we are not as alike as I once thought we were. More than anything, I want to storm in there, take away her cell phone, stroke her knotty hair until she sleeps, and tell her I’ll always love her.

I sleep till noon, and she is gone when I wake up. I eat boiled shrimp and fruit roll-ups for breakfast. I am afraid Jenny doesn’t eat enough, but I’m also jealous of her figure. It’s snowing. Five pigeons huddle together on the windowsill. My longest-running sexual fantasy involves being trapped in a snowstorm with a stranger, forced to have sex to keep from freezing to death. Children shriek and throw snowballs in the alley below the kitchen window. It sounds violent. The neighbors’ shovels scrape the sidewalk on the hour, and I do not understand why they bother, when it just keeps coming down, and they could easily hurt their backs. Our Blockbuster rentals sit on top of the television, unwatched.

I go to lunch in Manhattan with Mitsu. He asks me how I feel and I tell him how intense all the smells are, how I feel dizzy. He says, well, that’s how they say it is. I don’t have enough cash to pay my half of the check and he gives me a twenty because he says it isn’t safe to be walking around New York City with only nine dollars in cash. Nine is more dollars in cash than I usually walk around New York City with. He says I can pay him back later. Then he takes me to a sporting goods store to buy decent gloves because I’m not dressed right and I shouldn’t have to be cold when there are technical fabrics and wind-stoppers. I don’t see why I need to spend $40 on gloves when I always lose one (I have about five half-pairs of gloves, which would be alright if I just didn’t always lose the right hand) and the only reason I have gloves on at all is because they are Jenny’s and I have a harder time losing things that don’t belong to me. But he says it will Really Make A Difference so I put the new gloves on my credit card.

At work, I am oppressed by variables. I sit before the computer screen in the lab and the program jumbles. The language is Hebrew to me. Brackets versus braces. Vectors, matrices, cell arrays. I am sick and afraid. The headache approaches. A function and its arguments. Subroutines. My stomach tumbles. The length of time I’d like to sleep increases exponentially, but at night I dream I am stuck in the command line in MATLAB and someone keeps pressing enter and getting an error and backspacing over me and retyping. This goes on for hours, or else, I am falling down a pit with tumbling numbers, and I wake up anxious.

My boss gives me two tickets to A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I take Jenny. At the end of the play there are fake flower petals and leaves falling from the sky onto the actors, and I cry because this is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. Jenny and I grin at one another. Outside it is snowing, and I pretend the snow is flower petals. When I reach my hands into my coat pockets for my gloves, I realize the right one is missing. I know that it must be under my seat cushion in the theatre, but I don’t go back in for it, because the play was longer than I expected and I am late to meet my boyfriend from DC, who has come up to see me. After the long subway ride and the twenty minute walk, I see him standing on the stoop in his Icelandic wool hat, wearing two pairs of pants and frozen icelashes. Later, when I tell Mitsu, who made me buy the gloves, about the loss, he says I can keep the twenty to pay for the missing one.

One morning I write my boss an email saying that I’m sick, and I go downtown with my boyfriend from DC to have an abortion. Because it’s my second, I ask for general anesthesia and I hardly tell anyone.

Jenny and I leave our darks and colors in the dryer overnight, in the laundry room, in the basement of our building. Our eyes are hardly open at eight in the morning and I don’t wear a coat down, though it is 10 degrees out. Peering into the cave of the machine, it looks like our clothes have been sprinkled with glitter. The blue jeans are frozen solid, crumpled denim ice sculptures waiting to be thawed.

I take my tea one flavor at a time. English Breakfast, Constant Comment, Apple Cinnamon, Darjeeling, Vanilla Chai. It takes about a week to get through one box and start on the next one. My bedside table, the suitcase, is covered with empty coffee cups with drying tea bags stuck to the insides, and paper flags hanging off the rims. Most of the coffee cups belong to Jenny and say things like Rutgers Medical School and Be Happy Forever. Sometimes I pile them all up and take them to the sink and wash them, but usually I just substitute one out as needed.

For my oatmeal, I get the instant variety packs. I have even more bowls than cups in my room, and when the bedside suitcase is full, they migrate over to the bed, where I sleep with my head buried in a stuffed animal’s stomach, surrounded by dirty oatmeal-crusted dishes.

It’s easy to stay up all night because of all the caffeine from the tea (unless it’s an herbal week), but hard not to stay in bed all day. I walk to the bathroom in the morning or early afternoon and there’s a pair of tweezers on the sink, a single tiny black hair. I can’t stand it, and I go back to bed without brushing my teeth. I have a lot of cavities from not being able to afford a dentist for so many years. I bury myself under the covers and the bowls and the film starts forming over my eyeballs and the headache sets in.

My boyfriend from DC sends me a bouquet of red roses for Valentine’s Day. I don’t expect it and, by the time the department office tracks me down, one rose has a broken neck and two have lost their entire petally red heads. Thoughtful, sweet, beheaded flowers are a perfect analogy for our relationship, I think. I also get a valentine from Pinelawn Memorial Park and Garden Mausoleums, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Kathanie A Tillman. They offer me a Pinelawn Memorial Property for as little as $35 a month, interest free, as well as a complimentary copy of Let’s Face It Now, a booklet every family should have.

Outside it is rainy and all the buildings seem beige even though they all aren’t really. I have an umbrella but I don’t have it up because I don’t have gloves and having my hands in my pockets keeps me warmer than the umbrella, which just turns inside-out in the wind. Even in my pocket my right hand is a little cold, because I picked up a seven of spades from the sidewalk and it wasn’t dry.

After climbing the stairs to my apartment, I go into the bath but don’t wash because I’m not dirty. I just want to use the hot wet to get the cold wet off of me. I have the towel on the floor next to the tub so I can dry my fingers in case I have one hand in the water and one on the book I’m reading and then need to turn the page. The towel is pink. The towels all turned pink in the wash once, when one of them bled on the others. It’s been so long now that I don’t remember which one did the bleeding and which ones are really white but stained. I don’t even remember which towels are mine and which ones are Jenny’s anymore.

Sometimes Jenny leaves her many papers and comes knocking at my door to tell me her sorrows. I try my best to offer advice, but I envy her even her problems, however genuine her tears. In order to hear her, I have to block everything out — her narrow shoulders, her Cleopatra eyes, they way she always looks better in my clothes than I do when she borrows them, her academic record, her bigger vocabulary and more books read, her med school boyfriend, her sentences, her wit, her long long hair, her diligence, her keys clicking until 3 am, the way she loved me when I was young — and listen only to the part of her that feels like a failure, the part of her that feels like I feel.

I could name her virtues as quickly as she could name her flaws, but she is not mine anymore, and I wonder if that limits how much I can help. She has her boy and her best girlfriend isn’t even me anymore, and sometimes I’m afraid to hug her, even when she cries. I don’t know if I’m allowed to. She points out that it’s been eight years with us, and it has, and now I watch her live a life I might have lived if I hadn’t made so many mistakes. She’s still in school. I offer my parents her accomplishments instead of my own. “As long as someone is considering law school,” says my mother. My jealousy is thicker than the wall that separates our bedrooms, and I wonder how it could be possible to miss someone I see everyday.

The apartment is shaking with a drum beat. The clock ticking. The water dripping from the bathroom faucet. My heart echoing. Bam bam bam. Get up get up get up.