Project 35

5:00PM I reflect on the emotional conflict that I’m currently experiencing and what keeps coming up is the conflict that I’ve avoided. There are at least five people, off the …

5:00PM

I reflect on the emotional conflict that I’m currently experiencing and what keeps coming up is the conflict that I’ve avoided. There are at least five people, off the top of my head, with whom I got into a minor conflict, and have since avoided sending them a message. I don’t know how they’re feeling, I can only guess. For me, I feel fear they may yell at me for not replying or attack my character or whatever.

I have noticed that I have this tendency to run away from conflict when someone seems to be more aggressive and assertive in it. Perhaps it’s natural. When something pursues, the other flees. When something flees, the other pursues. I find myself fleeing some of these conversations. One with an ex-girlfriend, one with a business colleague, two with friends through organizations, and can’t even recall the fifth. I think that I’ve become good at resolving conflict when the person runs from me—I stand my ground and tell them what I want to say and say that I’m here if they want to eventually talk—but not so much when the people are chasing after me.

As a side note, I notice I say “I think” a lot and can rephrase some of those, like the one above, to “I feel confident” or “I feel unsure.”

Anyways, back to the original topic. I believe that running away from these conflicts doesn’t resolve them, but rather allows them to continue to fester in my mind, spoil in my heart. And as they do, they seem to interfere with my ability to resolve other conflicts in my life. I feel so embarrassed at not having done the assignment on time that I don’t talk to my one colleague, and my worry over that can make me avoid certain platforms of communication because I don’t want to “bump into him.” However, by avoiding those platforms, I may cause other conflicts in life—people may think I’m avoiding them or that I’m struggling with other aspects of life.

I feel excited to resolve more of these conflicts, to repair more of these relationships. At the end of the day, I feel confident that so many of our interactions end us pushing us just a little farther away from each other and that over time, our bonds start to break. When these bonds break, we struggle to work together to build things, fix things, and overall live a united life. Something about the combination of strengthening, protecting, and repairing these bonds gives me confidence and a proper challenge to move forward. There will always be conflict to resolve, relationships to protect.

I feel a little unsure about how much I rambled in this writing and I also feel confident that rambling is OK. If I am to get more comfortable with conflict, I must recognize it will always exist in some form, even in this.

5:10PM

1:00PM Why don’t I want to show how I feel? Why don’t I want people to know more about my body, what I’m thinking, what I’ve done, and other aspects …

1:00PM

Why don’t I want to show how I feel? Why don’t I want people to know more about my body, what I’m thinking, what I’ve done, and other aspects of my life?

I think it comes down to a simple thing: do I believe someone is going to help me or going to hurt me?

I think about the times in my life that I’ve been hurt the most and they have often come from the people who know me the most. These people, typically friends and friendly, and more so, romantic partners, know which buttons to push, as we’d say. They know what makes me angry, what makes me sad, what makes me ashamed, what makes humiliated, and often hit those points hard and strong.

However, I believe that most of the time, they’re not trying to deliver that hurt. As I once read on Twitter: “hurt people hurt people.” Even so, I often don’t know if someone is going to use their new information to hurt me, so I hesitate to open up.

At the same time, if people don’t know me, then they also cannot help. They don’t know where I’m struggling, they don’t know what causes me pain, they don’t know what I dream to achieve. I remember speaking with a professor from the University of Michigan Ross Business School about compassion in business. She was talking about how to get more compassion in the workplace and the metaphor that came my mind for compassion was that of the body’s immune system. For the immune system to heal the body, it must first know where in the body there is damage. Similarly, for an organization to heal itself, it must first know where in the organization is damage. So, I imagine the damaged cells/tissue must send an alert of some sort to communicate the need for help in a specific location. Likewise, I believe in an organization, the one who needs help must show that they need help so the others can come to help.

I think we all have the ability to help or hurt, heal or damage. I like to think that I believe people are going to help me, that they have good intentions to help me, and yet I think that I often believe people will hurt me by accident or out of their own pain.

I think sometimes people trying to help us can hurt us. They give us advice, they lend a hand, or they do all these things for us that we don’t necessarily want them to do. They can sometimes hurt us by helping too much.

However, I suppose this is the challenge of opening up: if we don’t open up, people can’t help us, but they also can’t really hurt us. If we do open up, people can help us but they can also hurt us.

Opening up is powerful. And just as many things, it is powerfully good and powerfully bad, just depending on how we look at it.

Still scares the hell out of me.

1:10PM

9:00AM As I type this, I feel a strong desire to use the bathroom. In some cultures, it’s OK to say this, in others, it’s not OK. By cultures, I …

9:00AM

As I type this, I feel a strong desire to use the bathroom. In some cultures, it’s OK to say this, in others, it’s not OK. By cultures, I don’t just mean national culture, but even family cultures as well. Some families are totally fine with people announcing they’re going to use the bathroom, and doing so in more graphic terms. Others prefer euphemisms and other indirect references to what one has to naturally do every day as a human.

In much of the cultures to which I belong (because we all belong/interact with many different cultures all the time), saying that I have to go have a bowel movement is considered quite rude. Even typing it right now in such a scientific way makes me feel uncomfortable. I remember running a training project in Germany and was really struggling with constipation throughout the week. One of my fellow trainers was from Romania and she kept coming up to me and asking me how everything was going, if everything was flowing, and in more graphic terms. I felt so uncomfortable. Then I believe she even mentioned that I was struggling with that issue in front of the 40 participants! I felt mortified! And yet, I also learned that in many European cultures, talking about it is not such a big deal—again it’s a natural process that happens for every human.

It helps me reflect on why so many of us don’t say how we feel: it reveals what is happening in our bodies at that particular moment. If I tell you that I have an upset stomach, you can imagine it gurgling and making me feel uncomfortable. If I tell you I’m angry, you can imagine my heart racing, my jaw tensing, and more. If I tell you that I’m feeling sad, you can imagine my tears, my slouch, and my overall weakness.

If I tell you about something that I did or something that I believe, it doesn’t give you so much access to my body. “I believe that the sky is blue.” That says nothing about my body. “I went to the store.” Yes, it says something about my body but in the past and not so much what was happening internally, but externally. “I want you to leave me alone.” Even that doesn’t directly say something about the internal state of the body—it may say I’m angry, confused, tired, annoyed, etc.

I believe that while we try to hide many things in our lives, we really try to hide what’s happening in our bodies, and thus, we often hide how we’re feeling. It can feel so vulnerable to almost open our skin and let people see what our organs are doing on the inside. To show all of our cards, to know that other people are thinking about our bodies. Maybe this is just me. Maybe it’s just a fear that I have about people thinking about my body. Maybe it relates to my own insecurities.

And yet, I think I’m not alone. If I ask you, “When you think about your body, what’s one thing that currently makes you feel ashamed?” I’m sure many will know.

9:10AM

5:00PM “Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to resolve conflict through peaceful means.” —Ronald Reagan I would create another version of it as well: “Love is …

5:00PM

“Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to resolve conflict through peaceful means.”

—Ronald Reagan

I would create another version of it as well:

“Love is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to resolve conflict through loving means.”

I heard someone talk about connection and togetherness earlier today, about the drive to belong, and a part of me felt disconnected from her as she said it. I felt somewhat annoyed or overwhelmed as I heard her talk about many of the things I’ve talked about over the last few years. Was it that I felt jealous of her being having strong fashion sense and being accomplished? Possibly. Was it that I felt tired of hearing author after author tell me their theory of the world? Perhaps. Was it also that I just have this weird relationship to the concept of connection? Yes.

In hearing her speak, I was reminded that I have similar feelings when I read about almost anyone talk about connection. I don’t seem to like connection for connection’s sake. Or something about it just seems to repel me. Maybe it feels too soft, too touchy-feely, too mushy. I’m not sure, but something about love for love’s sake seems to make me want to flee.

I think maybe it comes from my experience living in California and Colorado, surrounded by many people in the New Age spirituality space. I often felt frustrated when people in that space would speak, because it seemed as if they only wanted to feel “good” emotions, and didn’t mention the negative ones. I remember going to an event called T-group in Boulder, Colorado, and how relieved I felt when someone there said a swear word. I felt my body relax and my soul say, “Yes, thank God.”

I believe life is meant to be lived full spectrum. The highs, lows, and everything in between. I, for some reason, seem to feel attracted to many of the lows. The books I like to read are about how people end up doing evil things, the seminars I like to take are from martial artists and self-defense instructors who have seen much conflict, the stories I soak up are often from military veterans who have seen the full depth of humanity.

As I started this entry, I believe that love is not the absence of conflict, or the absence of hate, indifference, numbness, etc., but rather, the ability to resolve those through loving means. Love is the glue that binds us in our ability to resolve conflict. Love is our ability to resolve conflict and come back together.

For some reason, I like to talk about the hard stuff. Not that I feel good when I do, but something about it challenges me and gives me a raison d’etre. I don’t really want to feel closer to someone, I want to feel less distant.

I wonder if I’m the only one who thinks this way.

5:10PM

1:00PM Emotional conflict. Perhaps that’s what it is. For the past eight years, I’ve been searching for ways to describe the work that I do, to hone the essence of …

1:00PM

Emotional conflict. Perhaps that’s what it is.

For the past eight years, I’ve been searching for ways to describe the work that I do, to hone the essence of what I want to do for people and for myself. I have gone back and forth, up and down, and yes, all the way around, trying to figure it out. Recently, I’ve stumbled on the phrase “emotional conflict” a few times. Maybe it’s it.

I think about some of the most difficult situations in my life and they seem to have resulted from emotions in conflict. For example, me feeling tired of a relationship with one person and the other person feeling madly in love. Me feeling very focused on a project and the other person laughing and feeling very open and flexible. Me feeling very raw and vulnerable and the other person feeling distracted and avoidant.

And then I think about some of the times in my life that I have most cherished: when both of us have felt joy, when both of us have felt raw, when both of us have felt open and flexible. The specific emotion seems to matter less than the sharing of that emotion.

I’ve tried to look at this morning from this lens of emotional conflict, and more so, emotional conflict resolution. Sitting there with my dad while watching a TV series that required deep focus, I found myself feeling glued to the TV. Well, until my mom entered and started asking us questions. She seem to feel grateful to have returned from radiation and excited to be back and share what happened. I felt frustrated that she interrupted my focus. Really, I was wishing that she were also feeling focused or at least noticed that emotion.

How often does this happen? I think almost all the time. We feel one thing and someone else feels a different thing, and we wish they were the same. I get angry, I want the other person to be angry, too. If they’re too quiet, I get even more angry. If I feel sad, I want the other person to feel sad, too. I don’t want them to feel excited and grateful to be alive, laughing and smiling all the time.

I think framing it this way also helps me feel much more confident and motivated than how I had been framing it: “emotional connection.” I think the challenge I’ve had with emotional connection is that in a way, I’ve feared it—or in other words, it creates conflict for me. So to say that I’ve wanted to strive for something that actually causes me fear and makes me want to run away, has caused me a lot of trouble and internal conflict about whether it’s what I wanted to pursue.

When I think about hate, indifference, and love all being different vectors that may lead to conflict, I feel a lot more excited to resolve them. How to deal with the person who hates me? The one who ignores me? The one who loves me?

I sometimes feel self-conscious about what I write here and then, again, if I frame it as if we all have internal conflict, I feel grateful that I’m having the courage to show some of that conflict to myself and to others. Now time to get better at resolving it.

1:10PM