Johnny Harmony

       In this moment, I’m looking through the center of my self, down a long hallway, and I feel so far away and small; the way something looks when you turn a pair of binoculars around and look through the other end. That’s what I feel like to me right now. I am far away from my own true self. And that true self appears so small that it feels insignificant.
       This dynamic is not created by my true self, by the person I really am, but by my false self. I at once experience an inner person as completely separate and distant from who I am on the outside, and at the same time the two feel merged, and I don’t know where one begins and one ends.This is extreme disharmony; when the very experience of who I am feels simultaneously far away and merged with something else. I’m in there somewhere, but I don’t know who I am, so I don’t know who I’m looking for. So I can’t find myself.
       My false self, also called the ego, has sensed it’s own mortality lately. My ego has sensed that he no longer serves me like he used to. I’ve been looking to minimize his role in my life. And like a street fighter who’s in a life or death struggle, he’s fighting back. Hard. There’s a struggle happening within me that’s shaking me to my depths.
       I’m not depressed about this, which is good news. Because before, when I would sense this struggle, this disharmony, I would often go into depression and anxiety. Those two clinical ailments would keep me from being able to look deeper into what’s happening. I would focus on the depression and be unable to get to what’s truly behind the depression. That’s no longer the case. I’ve made great progress there.
       Recently, I’ve heard from more than one intimate friend, that I appeared to them as a dichotomy. That they were having trouble knowing who I really was. I didn’t understand that for a while. Now I do. Because I experience it myself, on the inside. They were sensing something going on inside me before I could see it. Before I even knew it was happening.
       I have not yet reconciled elements of myself. They do not live harmoniously in me, so they are going to present that disharmony to the world at large. And certain people pick up on that.
       I know myself to be a deep, tender, sensitive man. I also know myself to be colorful, outrageous, bold, and irreverent. It’s not about asking myself “Who’s the real me?”. It’s not about choosing which pieces are me and which aren’t. Because all of that is me. I can be bold and outrageous and sensitive and tender. If I’m asking which ones are me, I’m asking the wrong questions. To paraphrase the song “11 O’clock Tick Tock” by U2; “I have the answers. It’s the questions I have wrong.”
       I should be asking myself how do I reconcile these pieces inside of me. How do I get them to live in harmony. How do I accept them all as part of me and come from a different place, a more whole place. If I’m coming from a fragmented place, where I experience those elements are disparate and incongruous, where my insides can’t come to terms with itself, then that’s what’s going to show up on the outside. That’s what some people have been reflecting back to me. Because it’s going on inside of me. It’s not happening all the time. There are many hours when there is harmony within, and thus harmony outside. That’s when my MoJo is working. But there has been enough discord, and on a very deep level, that it’s showing up enough to be noticed.
       If I make peace with all those parts of myself, then I’m not asking the question “Who Am I?” anymore. Because I know that I am all of them. I am tender and sensitive and deep and irreverent and outrageous and bold. If they are in harmony, then they will show up different. They will show up as integrated and whole and harmonious. So that’s what will be reflected back to me. People won’t experience that fragmentation if I don’t come from fragmentation. They won’t experience me as disharmonious if I’m not feeling disharmonious inside. It’s about me making peace with all of those elements. Then that peace is what I project. And that peace is real. Because it’s happening inside of me first.
       I know all of this. Now, however, it’s in my face in a whole different way. I’m experiencing this disharmony distinctly and powerfully and painfully right now. I’m not looking at it as an outside issue anymore. It’s not completely in my behavior, but in my energy behind that behavior. If I’m in harmony with myself, my behavior will be different sometimes, but not always. What will always be different, however, if I’ve made peace with myself, is how my behavior shows up. How I show up. My energy will be different, and that makes all the difference. I could take the exact same behavior, and if it’s coming from disharmony, then it’s going to come off one way, and be reflected back to me in that way. If the behavior is coming from a place of wholeness and harmony, that’s how it’s going to show up on the outside, and how it’s going to get reflected back to me.
       If I am clear inside, that clarity is what gets projected. Over the past six months or so, I’ve experienced lots of clarity. I’m experiencing a great sense of unclarity currently. On a level I haven’t been to before. Another layer has been peeled back, and that’s where I’m looking.
       I’m finally getting that this isn’t about self improvement. It’s about self acceptance. I don’t want to look at me as something that needs to be fixed. Because that means there’s something broken. There’s something wrong. With me. I’m getting that, as long as I see it that way, I will never be “fixed”. I will always find something “broken”. Not because anything is broken, but because that’s how I’m framing the whole process. If I make the shift to self acceptance, that’s how I shift myself. I don’t shift by trying to “fix”.
       I shift by accepting. By loving. Myself. Others. Life.  


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