Field Notes #16
Objects in the Mirror
Alongside this Field Note is the other half of #15. That one was about choosing modesty for comfort. This is the harder case, because the person doing it isn’t lying—they are describing their felt experience accurately, and their felt experience is wrong.
WHEN THE MIRROR LIES
We geolocate ourselves somewhere and believe it. Not being modest. Describing a felt reality — which turns out to be a distortion from the past appearing closer than it is. Objects in the mirror can appear closer than they are. What if the thing you are certain about is the distortion?
I Still Feel Stupid
The cover is a wing mirror in traffic, and the soundtrack is Meat Loaf.
Mine is intelligence. Clients who watch me dual-process — carrying a heavy cognitive load while reading the room somatically at the same time — find it remarkable, and it is remarkable. I will not pretend otherwise. And I do not feel it is true. I carry a script from childhood that says I am stupid: the ugly duckling whose mind did not fit the burnt-out spaces I grew up in, told explicitly and violently what was wrong with him. I left school at sixteen.
For years, when highly credentialed people could not keep up with me, I assumed malice. They are not trying. They are not taking me seriously. If I am running as hard as I can just to keep pace, and I am the stupid one, then you had better hurry up. Then an American with advanced degrees asked me, completely seriously, to slow down, and I asked him why he thought I had a dial.
Be clear on what this is, and on what to do with it:
A distorted script, not a traumatized one. An owie, not an injury.
It does not go away. To this day, against overwhelming evidence, I feel stupid.
It has a cost. It makes me reluctant to change lanes at all. Who am I to do this program?
The rule is to triangulate. Trust other people's experience of you, and treat their assessment as honest rather than nice.
The reason I raise this in the subconscious and somatic layers, rather than saving it for My Mastery, is so that when you hear yourself say I swear I'm not being modest, you have somewhere to put it.
"I'm not actually stupid, but it always appears that way — which means I can get reluctant to change lanes." — Robert (Sherpa) Millar
By the end of this, you will have a test. When the mirror stops working, turn round and look out of the back window before you change lanes.
————————————————
Field Note Card: Fifteen minutes, one take, black and white. Sixteenth of the seventeen method primers, and married to #15. Prescribed as the fourth of four for My Life (1 · 10 · 11 · 16), and pointed at from inside the program.
To continue through the library, click Field Notes #17 below.
To return to the library, click here: Field Notes — Just Now
To schedule an Exploratory call, please go to Contact at the top of the screen.
If what surfaces is a traumatized script rather than a distorted one, stop and go see a therapist. That is not a caveat; it is the instruction.
– Robert (Sherpa) Millar | Just Now
