I don’t know if you’ve ever had an epiphany. I have a couple a year, and every time I have one, I’m struck by the simultaneous sense of awe at the magnitude of the realization I’ve just had, and at the seemingly impossible, coincident fact of the banality and familiarity of the epiphany.
An example from yesterday. It dawned on me that what I feel in the face of all the various women with whom I no longer have relationships is shame, a deeply felt shameful sense that somehow the fact of our no longer having a relationship must mean that I am on some profound, deep level, bad, undeserving, unworthy, that the end of the relationship necessarily indicates my badness. Is evidence of it, is the function of it, is conclusive proof of it.
I’ve written hundreds of times about how I use women to revisit the abandonment I experienced by my mother, about how when poison stood me up in August of 2009, I relived my mother’s abandonment of me in 1973. And while on some level I think I knew what I’m saying here, I also didn’t know it. I didn’t get that the feeling I was reliving was not just a cold sense of fear and loss, but also of shame, of responsibility. I think that latter part had previously been lost on me, at least consciously, such that when I had this epiphany yesterday, it felt genuinely like news, even though if I look back over this blog, over all the entries I’ve written about similar such feelings and experiences, it’s clear that this is not really news to me. And yet, somehow, it is.
It is, and it’s not.
That is how epiphanies work for me.