Outside looking in; inside looking out

Last night, I experienced something utterly novel: I surrounded myself with friends of my choosing -- only one of those invited chose not to attend -- and I asked them to engage in a ritual with me. There was something I wanted to do that I thought they might help me accomplish. But in the end, something totally unexpected happened.

My biological family has long been a source of psychological pain for me. My sister has referred to the whole clan as "a loose confederation of unaffiliated gypsies." I could parse this whole matter in psychological terms and talk about my problems with attachment, the way in which I learned to expect the worst from people, the various traumas that occurred along my developmental path.

But I will just put it this way: "Family" has always been a dirty word, the dirtiest of the F-words.

Yet there has long been within me a powerful yearning for the sense of belonging that I believe -- that I assume -- occurs in families that function better. In other words, I wanted a family in which love exits. And I did not grow up in one of those.

That yearning created a problem for me. The presence of these other people, biologically related to me, in my life for all these years kept me thinking they might change. I had expectations of them displaying with love and respect, of acting like they gave a damn, of engaging in selfless acts for one another. But if my brother's death illustrated anything to me, it was that these things were not going to happen.

Nevertheless, I had a hard time releasing the expectations because they were so intimately linked to my desire. I thought it reasonable to expect a mother to love her daughter, rather then persistently engaging in a litany of disapproval and disappointment. My mother has insisted she's not to "blame" for the way I turned out -- that someone else (probably my dad) is responsible for the immense fuck-up that is me.

But you know what? I am not a person for whom someone needs to be BLAMED. All things considered, I turned out quite nicely. I have deep veins of neuroticism and I am undeniably fussy at times, but I am also a decent person. So I don't know why a mother would be looking for someone else to blame for the likes of me, but mine is.

And everyone else in my family is passionately disinterested in one another.

So last night at sunset, in a ritual on a panoramic hilltop here in fair Stumptown, I gathered with The Good Witch and these friends I've made in school -- S2, The Debutante, Dr. M and Bubba -- and I released the expectations I've been holding onto with regards to my biological family. I made little paper effigies of each of them, decorated with words and images, and I burned them in a small cauldron The Good Witch brought along for the ceremony.

Only once was our ritual interrupted. Two male security guards walked up, stared at the smouldering embers in the little cauldron, which was perhaps 10 inches in diameter, and asked, "Uh, what are you doing?"

TGW and The Deb explained we were conducting a ritual, letting go of some old pain by (safely) burning some things. The guards stood there, mute, and stared at our little fire. The Deb said, "It's nothing religious," to which one replied, "That's not our concern." But they never stated a particular concern and continued to stand there hemming and hawing at us. Finally, The Deb, who's all of 26 and bears a resemblance to actress Andie McDowell, turned around, faced them directly and said, "We're just old women talking about our feelings."

If ever there were words that could make men leave a group of ladies alone, those uttered by The Deb may be powerful enough to warrent a patent. The guards turned and walked away, speechless.

So I burned all my little effigies but one. The one I made of my youngest brother, with whom I had a close bond but is now dead, did not manage to catch fire even after I poked it in the embers a bit. The hesitation of the fire prompted my friends to suggest I not try too hard to make it burn, especially when all the others had been quickly engulfed. (Granted, the embers were waning when I tossed him onto the flames.) But I decided to consider it an omen and removed him. There are two places on the figure where flames started but extinguished themselves, leaving small scars.

"You already burned his book," Dr. M said of some writing I had done about my brother's prolonged death from a brain injury. "He wasn't going to let you burn him, too."

That concluded, several in attendance around that small fire, threw on paper figures they chose to represent their own release of matters personal to them but felt in common by most of us.

As the last ruby-orange drained from the sky, we turned and went to our cars and drove down to the twinkling city below, beneath the rising of a bright and nearly full moon. We met again at my home, and a second part of the ritual commenced.

Act Two was kick-started by champagne and food -- lots of little hors d'ouvres and some spicy chili The Deb cooked up -- and rounded out with wine and discussion. It was the amiable chit-chat that always accompanies this circle of friends: school, relationships, psychology, a touch of politics, a bit of pop culture, discussion of Bubba's sex life....

The Good Witch, herself a long-ago graduate of the school the rest of us attend, had been interested for some time in meeting my friends. She'd met S2 once, but she was curious about the others. Upon leaving, she told me how lovely she thought all of them to be, how I had picked my friends well.

I already knew they were a great collection of people. I have an individual relationship with each of them, but they are all people with whom I share different aspects of my thoughts rather openly. I would say they all know me rather well.

But in the ritualistic part of Act Two, they collectively -- along with the assistance of my out-of-state friends JellyGirl, The Asian, Shall Be Revered and The Mountain Girl -- painted a picture of me that was one with which I have not been well-acquainted.

Two weeks ago, I was having a chat with The Deb when she said that she believed other people's perceptions of us probably play a greater role in the relationships we have than our own self-concept. Of course, our self-concept influences how other people perceive us, so it's totally recursive.

But her point was well made: We often feel things within ourselves that we think must be apparent to others but are not. She shared with me one of the ways in whch she experiences that dissonance. And I told her how I believe the common perception of me as "strong" sometimes gets in the way of people realizing I need or want some TLC at times.

The second part of the ritual was designed for people to share their wishes for my future, my "new beginning," if you will, in light of releasing my family. I asked all these people to participate because they represent various parts of my "community," a term The Deb uses as for what others might call a family of choice or a posse or any number of terms that signify sources of love and support in a person's life.

I had no idea what my friends would say. I figured some might wish me a long and healthy life, others might say they hope I find the love I want and deserve, perhaps one or two might wish I would develop a greater (any, really) sense of spirituality. But when it boiled down to it, I had no clue.

(As Dr. M later noted, it wouldn't be terribly surprising for something like this to go awry, to turn into "an intervention," to become a bad comedy skit. Not with my friends, of course. But perhaps with someone else's.)

Those friends in attendance started out by reading some e-mails sent to me by the folks out-of-state. Their wishes ranged from blessings of love to a steamy sex life for my still-virginal bed. One told the group that I snore (which I don't!). Another wrote a stunning essay about the nature of our spirits and her hope that I don't unnecessary fight the currents of life. It was, collectively, beautiful and funny and sweet, and I learned I have a habit of sharing poetry with people that goes back quite a ways.

Then, one-by-one, my friends in attendance told me their wishes. But in each case, there was some description of their sense of me, of some personality trait or quirk that came to their attention. Some used words that have special meaning to me -- such as "loyalty" and "kindness" -- because they represent things I believe about myself but think often go unnoticed. Others used words foreign to my self-concept: "charisma" and "beautiful" come to mind.

In each telling, a picture of myself emerged that grew more and more astounding to me, that I'm still grappling with because it is so ... different. I had this sense, suddenly, of how difficult it is to understand the first thing about how other people perceive us. We just *think* we know.

We have far too many filters, too many defenses, too little objectivity to see ourselves as othes see us. Even if we videotaped ourselves and analyzed the footage, we would never be able to adequately separate what we saw from what we knew we were feeling at the time. Our history, our experiences, the things other people tell us, the things we tell ourselves: It all colors our perspective and prevents us from seeing what others do.

I recall reading a while back about a mirror that allows us to see ourselves as others see us. There's no reversal of image because the mirror is reflecting the image of other mirrored reflections of ourselves. It's said to be a captivating experience, that people who look into the mirror tend to stare at themselves for long periods of time.

I've been wanting to look into such a mirror, to see how I appear to others.

Last night, most unexpectedly, my wish was granted. My friends, with their words, their songs and their hugs and kisses, showed me an image of myself so lovingly painted, so full of character, so imbued with light and warmth, that I was stunned by the beauty of it. I knew it was I who they described. I could see the truth in their reflection, but the whole image was much kinder and more forgiving of my flaws than I could ever manage for myself. With such a mirror before me, I wanted to stare and stare and stare at it.

And then I wished they could all see themselves as I see them. Because they are all so very beautiful, too.