Strange bedfellows: resentment and boredom
As always, I started my day with a stroll through the blogs of some of the women in my life. In the words of each of them, I am often able to find myself. I know that each of them is an expression of some aspect of my own ‘consciousness’; and in paying attention to what I notice, I can more effectively discover the ‘more’ that there is for me to learn about myself.
Today, Amy is aware of the degree to which she is her own power source! It is a reminder to us all that indeed, is there ever really any other way? The moment I forget that, I begin to rely on things outside of me (people, events, stuff, etc.) to connect me to myself and my own life.
Marie is noticing and claiming her need for far more powerful expressions of herself! Hers is not just the need to move but the need to move in huge, vibrant explosions of herself! How many of us spend our lives dedicated to living with our knees pressed tightly together, hands folded neatly in our laps…. wondering why the hell we feel so restless and wired????
And then we come to Anita and her (in my opinion) dead-on comments about women and resentment. In my many, many years of working with women, I can think of nothing more crushing to the body and devastating to the soul than resentment. Resentment literally eats us alive… slowly, meticulously, relentlessly destroying one cell after the other; feasting on the body, mind and spirit until the dis-ease that remains (chronic debilatating diseases like Chrone’s, fibromyalgia, cancer, diabetes, etc.) has become the context from which we exist – and life has long left the building!
What came to mind for me as I read Anita’s words was all those years of working with women and remembering this ever-present sense of a deeply held secret: the degree to which women are bored out of their minds with their lives! Bored with the roles they occupy. Bored with the tasks they do on a regular basis. Bored with the relationships that they’ve learned to ‘manage’ effectively (including the one with themselves!) to keep everything flat and orderly. Bored with the things that await them around the next corner. But more importantly, they have become bored with themselves.
Their own thoughts have become small and puny and repetitive. Their own dreams and visions and intentions - for themselves and the people they love – have become weeny and tedious. Their conversations – inside themselves and outside with others – have become repetitious and vacuuous.
What they are most aware of is the gigantic, enormous, ever-present, constantly-pounding, soul-sucking, body-wrenching SCREAM inside their body!!!! And they are terrified to tell anyone about it.
It’s not nice to be bored with being a mother. It’s not acceptable to be bored with our marriages and our relationships with our family members and friends. It’s ‘bad manners’ and ‘in poor taste’ to defy the rules and expectations of how to live and know, deep inside the belly, that it is possible for us to love deeply AND be bored by our own lives!
We can profoundly love our children AND tire of engaging with them. We can love our partner/mate/spouse AND often prefer the company of other women. (Let’s face it – most women I know are far more interesting to hang out with than the vast majority of men I’ve met! Sorry, guys… and if the women in your life are telling you otherwise, you may want to test what I say by asking them the degree to which their conversations with you gratify their soul!.) We can care deeply and be profoundly committed to the wellbeing of the people we love AND still prefer to spend time elsewhere. In my view, these are not the things that are killing us. What’s killing us is our deep shame that it is so.
I visited the dictionary and found the word ‘ennui’ as a synonym for ‘boredom’, and here’s what it had to say about ‘ennui’ (which, having a French background, felt immensely accurate): “a feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from satiety or lack of interest”. Women are dying, filled with seething resentment, because they are bored out of their gourds with what women are encouraged, expected, allowed and rewarded for being in our neat and tidy little world.
Women are dying (breast cancer has reached epidemic proportions; women over 40 have rates of hypothyroidism that are off the charts; anxiety, panic, gastro-intestinal/stomach disorders have become ‘the norm’ for women; food-related issues (too fat, too thin) are rising in the causes of heart disease killing women; etc, blah-blah-blah, and on and on it goes… and that doesn’t even begin to list how we’re getting crazy in the head!) in huge numbers; and many who aren’t, wish they could. For some, dying feels like the only way out.
For many women, living as small, powerless victims when they know the roar of their own passion for living and ability to engage it, has become intolerable. Dying is looking better and better by the day.
So thanks, Anita… for putting resentment out there for all to consider. May I add the invitation to also look under the resentment and allow ourselves to see the truth of boredom/ennui and the toll of its tedium (droning, mindless, numbing repetition) in our lives. Having worked with hundreds and hundreds of women, I know that I am not alone. Only when those voices are willing to be heard, will anything change.
Our commitment to being polite and inoffensive will see us to an early grave.
[...] My world has been stirred up by the recent gathering of women at the Women Awakening event; by recent blog entries from Anita, and Amy and Marie ; and by my subsequent posting to the Women Gathering area. [...]
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BINGO!
“Little Women” … That might just be my next blog entry. Bored, stuffed into little, tedious lives, small, soul crushing identities that have been assigned. I think of feet bound to be “dainty”, waists cinched tightly making it hard to breathe and wonder how we continue to put up with all the compression in our lives. These are the physical metaphors of fashion that are merely a reflection of a consciousness of compression and smallness.
You are quite right, Louise, when you write that its not “polite” to be bored with your partner, your children etc – even though you love them dearly. Its not about them – its about us. I think as women we need to be taught to love ourselves with the same ferocity that we love the other people in our lives.
We need to reclaim our lives, our power and our potential. But that’s not enough! We can’t hide out in the closet while we do it. The rubber has got to hit the road. We MUST step into our own lives. We have to show up and allow ourselves to be seen.
And as many of us already know, showing up in your life doens’t require crushing anyone else. There is enough potential to go around!
There may have been a time in our personal history or in the history of our collective, when showing up wasn’t a safe thing to do, however, I believe that there has never been a time more ripe for change than right now. Not a generation from now … right now. Women in this part of the world are so blessed, that it seems that the only thing in our way is ourselves! Our committment to the status quo, our habits of thought and our reluctantce to simply be ourselves, without compromise. As I write this,I have to wonder, just what I have I been waiting for? What have each of us been waiting for?
Being seen means that the people around you can finally breathe a sigh of relief. They knew you were there all along! You aren’t fooling anyone and when you get honest with yourself it is as if a great mystery has been solved and no one is walking on egg shells anymore.
The potency of the fire of resentment can be used to create a future rather than eating us alive or wounding those close to us, leading us down the path of ever greater highs and lows as the cycle of guilt, self-oppression, resentment and rage dances through us.
Who knew “boredom” had such edges! And nothing changes until we take the time to breathe, pay attention to the impulses moving in our bodies and tell ourselves the truth about what we are feeling. When we do that, we are no longer “Little Women”.
Thanks for openning the conversation even wider, Louise! I’m sure there is more
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Anita Allen | January 20, 2008