Threshold of Revelation
Prior: Your husband's a homo.
Harper: Oh, ridiculous! Really?
Prior: Threshold of revelation.
Harper: Well, I don't like your revelations. I don't think you intuit well at all. Joe's a very normal man. Oh god. Oh god. Do homos take, like, lots of long walks?
Prior: Yes, we do. In stretch pants with lavender coifs. I just looked at you and there was—
Harper: A sort of blue streak of recognition—
Prior: Yes!
Harper: Like you knew me incredibly well.
Prior: Yes.
Harper: Yes. I have to go now, get back. something just...fell apart. Oh god. I feel so sad.
Prior: I know. I'm sorry. I usually say, “fuck the truth,” but mostly the truth fucks you.
Every single year I watch Angels in America, A Gay Fantasia on this last Thursday of November with Tara. It's one of my favorite traditions.
This year my experience of watching it is loudly shaped by our collective sickness. Our collective mortality. Our collective trauma. The scene above encapsulates the relationship between trauma and honesty that I can't stop thinking about in 2020.
Staying in conversation with ourselves is hard. It's even harder when lots of people are relying on you to push through.
In order to create our outcomes¹, we often ignore things. We ignore feelings indicating our values are not being lived. We ignore the discomfort we feel when our motivations no longer excite us. We ignore the whisper of recognition, hinting that we are following a path forged by someone else.
And at some point your heart moved on, but you haven't recognized it yet. When this happens, we can feel like we're wandering the halls of a drab existence. All the doors look the same. All the lights are unflattering. All the things we used to know deeply feel a tad bit shallow or downright wrong. We live in the house we built for a younger version of self, but we have changed.
This is the threshold of revelation.
Then trauma happens. Something occurs in our life that forces us to look at our values, our heart. We find the courage to be rudely honest with ourselves. And here we are, together, in the protracted trauma of our year.
I can confidently tell many of you that 2021 will be an exercise in looking directly into the face of your reality. You already know this. Your heart knows this even if you haven't explicitly voiced this knowing. We are all feeling the pull to drop illusions. We are all feeling the pull to engage with ourselves with deep heartfelt honesty. We are all being called individually to recognize what our hearts already know to be true.
What thresholds have you already passed over? What do you have to let go of in order to pass over the next one?
Your clarity, creativity, courage, curiosity, confidence, and compassion are all waiting for you.
⒈ After all, there is an outcome around the corner that will allow us to have more space, right? And we're working towards something bigger than us, right? And one of my favorites: we're making the world better, right?