Swinging, like Kindergarten, Brings Out the Me-ist Me

There is a scene in High School Musical where Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens) and Troy (Zac Efron) share how they each feel constrained by the characters they don with their friends and family members. “Everyone wants to be your friend,” says Gabriella. Troy responds, “Unless we lose.” He continues: “My dad’s friends are always saying, ‘Your son is the basketball guy, you must be so proud.‘ Sometimes I don’t want to be the ‘basketball guy.’ I just want to be a guy.” When I first watched this as a pre-teen, I could strongly relate. I wanted to be more than this or that, I wanted to be all of it, everything. I still do.

Here’s the line that always stuck with me:

“You know how in kindergarten, how you’d meet a kid and know nothing about about them, then ten seconds later you were playing like you were best friends, because you didn’t have to be anyone but yourself?”

My birthday is this week, and I decided to celebrate it at our local Lifestyle Club yesterday. A newbie couple we invited to join us in our section told us it was their second time there, but they already felt “at home.” “I can be my real self here,” said the man in the couple. This is our experience too. All night we danced and flirted and celebrated with our friends, people who we feel at home with, natural, and with whom we feel we can be our true selves. I realized on the car ride home, I hardly know any of their last names. I only know what one or two of them do for work. And yet, I’ve never elsewhere felt so loved for the real me. Swinging is like kindergarten.

“A friend is someone with whom I can be sincere,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. Even though I thought I had friends, being in the Lifestyle makes my Vanilla friendships look shabby.

At the club, all the identities we typically carry fall away. It doesn’t matter what you do for work, how educated you are, or whether you are a cats or dogs person. The things you typically like or biographical details–things about you–don’t matter as much. It becomes easy to see that those identities are layered on, on top of, who we really are. Sure, it may be nice to connect with someone who also loves to read the same kind of books as me, or has the same political bent, but what I learn at the club is that connections made on those bases are far more shallow than those made honestly on an energetic basis. Those other methods of connection are superfluous, inaccurate and unnecessary; although they may provide a lifeline to the cord of who we truly are, they may also mislead us where that cord is sullied by the expectations of others or linked to who we’ve been in the past. Things about you are not you. It’s easier and more pure to connect because we don’t have to be anything other than our true selves.

“I remember when we first met Honey two years ago,” a friend relays to my husband, sitting on his lap. “She was so shy. Now she’s the most confident woman on the dance floor.”

This change is common for people who swing.

I once heard someone argue that shyness is not an inherent personality trait. It is fearfulness, and it is learned. That feels right to me: all my life, people have called me shy, only to get to know me and realize I’m not shy at all. I’d chalk it up to whether or not I felt safe: when I felt unsafe, I was shy; when I felt safe, I was outgoing. I suppose the same is true today. Lifestyle settings are the safest social spaces I’ve ever experienced, and so in them I am more confident and outgoing than I’ve ever been.

Lately I’ve been feeling frustrated because I feel like a different person at the club: there I am vibrant, confident, full of life and love and friendly, good-naturedness. Meanwhile, when I am in Vanilla social settings I shrink, often feeling scared, shy, insecure, and, occasionally, full of loathing. I expressed to a Vanilla friend that it is my goal to be fun to be around all the time (like I am at the club). She responded, “It sounds like you want a persona.” I’ve been thinking a lot about whether that feels accurate to me. “Do you feel like you when you are there, or someone else?” She asked. Good question.

John Lennon and Paul McCarthy were once asked about their creative process in a joint interview. In response, they both shifted in their seats, laughed, and moved on. “They know that the them that creates is not the same them that sits in the chair being interviewed, and they know to protect that part.” (Steven Pressfield, The War of Art).

I think, as I responded to my friend in the moment, it’s both. I feel like me at the club. But the me who is there is not the same me as the one who cooks dinner, or the one who goes to dance class, or the me who reads in blissful solitude on a warm fall day. They are all me, but the me at the club feels like the me-ist me. But she does not exist all the time. Or does she? Perhaps these other parts of me know, as John and Paul did, how to protect that part.

But I want to be her all the time! Why is it so hard? I feel pouty about this. Mr. Honey believes I’m doing a good job “becoming” the me I am at the club in every setting. Becoming. How can I simultaneously be becoming something that I sometimes am?

I’ve been dipping my toes back into relativity theory, and I think the answer has something to do with the myth of causality. For causality to exist time must be linear; but relativity theory instructs us to think of time as simultaneous; as Einstein puts it, “Past, present and future, all occur simultaneously.” I’ve been trying this out as thinking of time more like a place, or a space, rather than a series of events. Places, unlike events, can be revisited; they go on existing even when you are not in them. Time, I think, is like that too. In this way, I am the person at the club (I occupy her in that place); and I am simultaneously not the person at the club (when I do not occupy that place).

By now you’re probably thinking I’m off the deep end. Stick with me.

I keep thinking I can create this person I am in the club in other time-places, but that belief is based in error. Just as it is an error to believe a striking a match causes fire–it’s more accurate to say there is a conjunction of two conditions that results in fire–I do not do anything to be that person. I am that person, when certain conditions are met. (See Fredrick Pohl, Starburst 64). My role is to seek out those conjunctive conditions, those time-places. I exist there. When I am not feeling the me-ist, I can acknowledge I am not in that time-place.

Arnold Schwarzenegger said: “Create a vision of who you want to be, and then live into that picture as if it were already true.” In a way, that’s time traveling. Marilyn Monroe was purportedly able to “turn it on” i.e. become Marilyn at will. That’s time traveling too.

Why does this matter? Well, one method (doing, trying, manipulating) feels bad, and the other (traveling) feels good. One method works, and one method does not work. There is no making me the most me through linearity (doing things). I bring the me-ist me into the now by traveling (whether through time or space) to places where I am the most me. I finally understand what the law of attraction is about–why it’s important to feel how you want to feel when you’ve manifested what you want. That feeling is time traveling. Just like when we feel low, or sad, often we have time-traveled to a time-place in which we felt that way before, when I want to feel the most me, I need to (time) travel to that place as well.

What a hack! Happy travels to you as you connect with the you-ist you.

Love, Honey