Not bland, not seasoned, but tasty

I've taken the invitation to be bland.  Written precariously here, I am really describing how I fight back the need to be noticed. I find myself feeling boring, invisible, and yet energized by being aware of how I can never escape the cosmic and collective participation in society.  I think it might be what faith desires of me, and in contradiction for what my hormones demand of me.  The invitation I am describing is written poetically here, maybe less poetic and more ambiguous, but it pragmatically means my greeting the hurtful angst and restlessness that visits me when I feel inadequate.  For me, I find being bland is my spiteful way of embracing simplicity.  I find it hurtful, although disciplined, to be bland, maybe a more gentle description is modest.  

I find myself struggling to keep from wanting to decorate my life with style.  I want to dress up my appearance to be dazzling.  I find it punishing to withdraw from the ego driven desires of feeling respected.  I am talking about the desire to be seen.  Often happening when there isn't anyone to take notice of me, the moment when I feel indiscernible, the moment I am no longer abstractly poetic but ambiguous.  I am describing the moment I worry and begin to wonder if I'm significant. As I had a child client learn to say, rather scream,  "I want attention".

The invitation I am describing has the feeling of when:

• a child recognizes other children playing together and cannot muster up the idea of being included; 

• a child notices another child with a dazzling toy that looks eternally exciting, observing, perplexed, accepting only being able to watch; 

• a lonely adolescent catches a couple romantically sharing a stare, sneaking a stare, admiring their existence, not knowing how it feels, but bitterly frustrated, for a fear that it will never happen to them;  

• a recently grieving divorced dad observes the peace on a man's face who is walking through a park with his family, smiling, striding, and in unison, being forced to feel his failure.

• I say goodbye to a desperate family because time is up, clinging to the final moments of safety in a therapy room, knowing there is a realtor out there buying an 8th pair of overpriced shoes, celebrating some unjustifiable percentage of a sold luxurious home, somehow separating themselves from this struggling family's suffering. 

.  

This is the moment and emotional invitation I am writing about.  This is the experience I am working to understand, so that when it happens it doesn't derail my internal harmony.  I am writing about the absorption of pain.  The active recovery from the emotional hurt from pangs of perceived deficiency.  The pangs come from the moments where the darker and more violent existential invitations grab my focus and throw my hopes to the ground.  And this is where my psychology has taught me to use right and wrong.  This is where I put down my tools and go to work.

This is where I have to change my neuroplasticity, and begin to see that right and wrong are constructs that can be dismantled and rebuilt with care, tenderness, and dignity.  What is rebuilt will need to be looked upon with reciprocity, not to reuse the dismantled morality of right and wrong.  What is put together with the new mind will not be seen as bland, will not be seasoned, but will hopefully be tasty.