Zero of Ten

The Banks of a River

There was a long stretch of my life when I did not so much have my experiences as become them. When grief arrived, I did not feel grief — I became the grieving. When fear came, it did not visit; it took up residence as the whole of what was real. For a long time after a particular loss, I was not a person feeling pain. I was the pain itself, with nothing in me set apart from it that could call it one thing among others rather than the whole truth.

What I eventually found was not relief from the pain but a place to stand in relation to it. A position — quiet, and at first unfamiliar — from which I could say I am the one feeling this and mean something exact by it: not the pain speaking in the first person, but the one to whom the pain was occurring. It was not a thought, and it was not consolation. It was closer to awareness turning back to find, beneath the grief, the bare fact of someone here — someone to whom the grief was happening. Nothing about the pain changed in that recognition. What changed was that it was no longer the whole of me. There was now a vantage: close enough to feel everything, far enough not to drown in it.

Only from there could I see what had been missing — and it was not awareness itself. The capacity to notice is always there; what I lacked was a steady enough sense of myself to stay inside it. Without it I kept being pulled back under, becoming the grief instead of watching it move — the pain running with no banks to hold it. What was only loosely built was the self steady enough to hold the awareness — and, with that, the slow recognition that the right relationship to that self, one built on compassion, grace, and curiosity, could become a sacred shelter, a steady haven.

For someone whose awareness runs vast and deep, there is a great deal to take in — and when the center is elusive, as yet unmet, there is nowhere for all of it to gather. It simply becomes everything, and from inside, the absence cannot be seen, because what is felt is all there is. There are gifts in this depth as well. In closeness it can mean an enduring constancy of feeling; in my work it lets me feel intimately, and meet others in a register of real depth. But holding that much without a steady center has made the discipline of who and how I am the central work of my adult life — by turns grueling and exhilarating.

Across these writings I have returned to the relationship a person has with themselves — how we meet our experience, the space that can open between us and what arises, the tone we carry toward our own inner life. What I had not yet named is the one who does the meeting. The self at the center of that relationship. The I from which all of it is lived. It is the ground the rest stands on, and it is what I wish to explore here.

There is a felt position — an I — from which a life can be authored. It can be a yoke or a liberator; it determines our access to ourselves and to others, and it is the point from which everything else is named. It is possible to learn this position so early and so completely that one never notices standing anywhere at all. And it is possible for it to form less fully, or to form too rigidly — each with its own cost.

A note to the reader. Many traditions speak of the I, or the ego, as something to dissolve, quiet, or see through, and what I am describing may seem to run against that. I do not think it does. Much of my work has turned on a single distinction: that what matters is less who or what we are than how we are with ourselves. To take up the I as an enemy — to decide that having a self is the problem — is only another way of going to war with oneself, the opposite of the relationship I keep pointing toward. A center cannot be met with compassion and marked for eradication at once.

With no center, there is no refuge — no place to stand apart from what you feel, and so you feel all of it, constantly, with nowhere to go. Every emotion is total. Every difficulty is the whole sky. You are not having the experience; you are inside it with no door. And because there is no steady place to return to, all of it gets managed however it can be: by leaving — numbing, going distant, disappearing from yourself; by reaching for something that makes you feel briefly solid; by reaching for another person to be the steadiness you cannot yet supply, asking them to hold a shape on your behalf. Over time this becomes over-giving, exhaustion, the sense of being shaped entirely by whatever is around you, because there is not yet enough shape within — and it can be harder to see. The more finely you feel, the worse this runs — not because feeling is the problem, but because there is no one home to feel it from.

The opposite costs just as much, and is harder to see, because it can look like strength. When the I is held too tightly, you stop being flooded — and you stop being reached. Very little gets in: not other people, not the unexpected, not joy. You become hard to find, and hard to let in; another’s heart may reach for you, yet live outside the definition of what or who could ever get through. Life happens at a distance, on the other side of a wall built for good reason and no longer possible to lower. The loneliness here is the loneliness of being sealed off, misunderstood, rarely touched by anything. One self feels everything; the other can barely feel at all. Both are missing the same thing: a center with edges that hold and open — solid enough to stand on, porous enough to let life in.

Why a center forms more fully in one life than another is worth asking. I have written that understanding our history is no substitute for the relationship we have with ourselves now, and I mean that still. The past is useful here not as a place to dwell or excavate, but only as a way to see where the center comes from — so it can be tended in the present.

You are not born with a self; it gets built. A child is seen — someone notices what they feel, names it, reflects it back, year after year — until that outside seeing becomes an inside sense of being someone. Two things build it: being seen accurately, and being valued in what is seen. When that was missing or wrong, the self forms poorly — staying vague and unformed, or hardening into a wall. That is not a flaw in you. It is something that was never built, and what was never finished can still be built now.

The body matters too. A self can only settle in a system that is steady enough to settle. When the nervous system is in turmoil — swinging high and low, never at rest — there is no still place to stand, and no self can form on ground that keeps moving. This is why anything that steadies you from the outside, a substance most of all, cannot build a center: it moves you rather than settling you. Steadiness is not a luxury here. It is the ground a self stands on.

What I found was not relief from what happens, but somewhere to stand while it does. With someone home at the center, the hard things become bearable — and more than bearable, they become a kind of school, something to meet and move through rather than be swept away by. The one who stands there can stay more level, not because the difficulty is smaller, but because it is no longer happening to no one. That is the difference: not a life with less in it, but a self steady enough to be there for it.

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Jennifer