No one puts Baby in a corner part 1 and part 2

Part 1

Kill your darlings. Easier said then done. We get so attached to our own ideas that they become like our Babies, our darlings, something we stop seeing objectively and something we attach our sense of self and worth to.

If someone disagrees or points at the flaws of our thoughts and ideas we immediately get defensive and we become Patrick Swayze's character Johnny in that fight scene in Dirty Dancing (that's not where he says the iconic line but that's where he gets aggro and punches the waiter idiot).

Nobody puts Baby in the corner! When it happens we put the fight scene together with the iconic line and we unleash the angry Johnny Swayze Tazmaniac Devil Ego Demon, and we attack and we punch and we aim for the knock out, completely missing the point of the movie (what a fun movie btw) instead of listening impartially and maybe learning something about our thoughts/ideas/work that we didn't see cause we are too close to them, something that could shed a new light on them and expand our view, make our idea grow, evolve and improve. Confused yet? Good!

In real life it is actually admirable when someone employs the same pugnacious attitude and sticks for people they hold dear. In fact, I wish I was like Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing. A sexy man, desired by women, living a life of adventure, a free spirit who does what he loves for a living and is good at it, has a solid community of friends and like-minded people, his loyal tribe, who is exciting to be around and bravely steps up to stand for what he believes in and to defend the ones he cares about. Get it? No? Good, me neither! Read on.

That is fucking Ace! When it comes to ideas and thoughts and art and work projects however...that is not an attitude conducive to greatness, let alone peace of mind. Both the envy of someone else's perceived qualities and a defensive attitude. Unless obviously we are onto something genius that could change the world monumentally for the better and people don't get it, in that case it is the right thing to fight for it, but I guess in that case your energy would be fundamentally different and the intent would be pure and the reason sound...maybe, I don't know, I am riffing.

Anyhow, usually it is not wise or useful to get defensive about our thoughts and ideas, because they can easily be wrong, or even if they are correct, rarely they are life changing and world altering, so in the spirit of sanity, it still isn't a good idea to get all uptight about them.

Now, there's a rub, I get very defensive about what I think and feel, I also usually don't have the verbal ability to think on my feet quickly enough to be effective in defending my thoughts and, if that wasn't enough, to top it all up, I can't even dance like Swayze Johnny!!! I can't seduce like him, I don't have as much style as him, I am not as athletic and confident as he is and I am not so sure I'd be able to stand my ground and step up to successfully defend the ones I love with such instinctual grit and defiance, if I needed to. And the ridiculous thing is that somehow, somewhere in my mind, the two things are linked, the standing up for what is right and feeling the need to defend any given idea I have that gets challenged. Crazy town.

Hence, obviously, when it comes to ideas, thoughts, sketches, drawings, drafts of music pieces, mental positions on philosophical views or political subjects, I go all sensitive and ready to battle anyone who dares to challenge. (Just to be clear, I don't mean I go punching people, I just get kind of argumentative)

I cannot even let go of my own ideas and thoughts when confronted with my own doubt about them. Too precious, too enamoured, too worried that another idea will never come by again, that if I let go of a certain opinion I'll undermine my sense of self worth.

All this bothers me. All this blocks me when trying to create. All this keeps me static, unmoving, swamped in a sticky and muddy mentality of fear and scarcity. That ain't life! Life moves, flows, mutates! It might seem like things are always the same, but they are ever so slightly shifting and adapting all the time to the dialogue between the components that make it.

Fascinating!

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all...and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought... (Hamlet, To be or not to be, William Shakespeare)

Attached to all, committed to nothing. This calls for a shift in perspective.

(You could stop reading now, but I feel the need to expand on all of the above and go into it from other angles. I like to repeat the same concept in different ways, get down and dirty with it, examine it, twist it and turn it around to make it sink a little further in. If you are curious, read on...)

Part 2

Is this mental rigidity and intellectual aggressiveness, that gives us the illusion of prowess and pride and strength in thought, something that in reality erodes our real life and deprives us of joy and courage?

I don't know, but one thing I know. That Patrick Swayze Johnny kind of courage and charm might be buried under muddy waters of thought created by attachment to my "idea Babies", but it is also the case that all of that inner Swayze Johnny quality is indeed present somewhere deep inside me.

It is in all of us, all the time, as pure formless potential, always available and ready to kick in. It comes with the package, it is in the factory settings of being a human, it is just pinned down into submission and neutralized by heavy layers of sediments...basically crap.

The question is: under what kind of crap is it buried under and how to uncrap it?

Crap is usually in its origin not crap, but useful psychological mechanisms that linger past their time of usefulness. Because of that, they become rotten and suffocating and abusing to the host (our selves). It is other people's voices penetrating in too deep and staying there after their feedback function is finished. It is traumas, expired memories, distorted perceptions adopted as true, mechanisms of order becoming tyranny, impulses of freedom becoming chaos and all together persisting there with nothing telling them that their work day is over, their job is done and that it is time for them to move on, keep the river flowing, so to speak. So they stay, accumulate, get crusty, rigid, overpowering, stale... and become crap.

The Baby from the title is not an external individual and maybe not even our thoughts per se, but instead, it is our inner child perhaps. And oh boy oh boy has our inner child spent a lot of time in the corner.

For me, I notice more and more how I react to people challenging what I say, I have these nervous twitches, these spiky replies I give whenever someone doesn't understand what I just said (as if it was obvious, always, what I mean) or disagrees with me and all sorts of conversational situations, in which I really notice my over-sensitivity.

I literally feel like my inner child is being put in the corner even when it isn't and my internal Patrick Swayze (the other half of my ego I suppose) goes into "No one puts baby in the corner" mode. Which is confusing, because as I mentioned before, the inner Swayze is that confident, brave part of you, covered by years of psychological crap. Maybe Baby and Johnny Swayze are the same unit, two horses carrying the same coach, or maybe you inner Swayze has a high mode and a low mode, and when it is in the low mode it can't see things clearly and goes all over-reactive. Inner Swayze's energy is a good one, but it also depends on where it is aimed and what triggers it, if Swayze Johnny thinks Baby is in danger, even if Baby isn't, things can get confusing.

I realize it is a symptom of something deep going on, some unresolved sense of inadequacy that pushes me to constantly have to be defensive.

The funny thing is that I constantly criticise other people for behaving that way and then, as soon as I am in a tiny bit of pressure, I turn around and do the same. We are funny things us humans, we are.

I recently experienced a kind of enlightenment episode in which I felt like I suddenly remembered who I am, re-encountered the real me that has been absent and hidden in a confused fog of all sorts of ideas, concepts doubts and second-guessing for ages. I know now who I was and am, who is me, and it is a freeing sensation...but more on that in another story. The way this correlates to Baby, Patrick Johnny Swayze and being overly defensive with my thoughts and ideas, is that I believe this could be the beginning of a totally new life, in which my inner child won't feel diminished and threatened all the time by silly things and I'll be able to bloom into the man I always wanted to be without having to waste my energy into defending my ego/Baby from superficial wounds.

Self awareness is indeed a force for good.

The reality of it, at the end of the day, is that in order to unleash my inner Patrick Swayze I need to unleash my self, unchain it, relinquish it from the impetus to give importance to other people's opinions and stop being so in love with my own voice and thoughts and words...who cares!!!

No one puts Baby in the corner really, I do. Whether it is because other people's voices are bullying me in my own head or because of something else, even if it might not be my fault, as Mark Manson says, it is my own responsibility to garner the ability to respond constructively to those voices (responsibility=response ability).

Who's to say that my thoughts are even all that mine, my good thoughts and my bad thoughts alike might very well be replays of stuff other people implanted there when I was a kid or some idea from two years ago when I was working in that place or from last month when I saw that documentary, or yesterday evening when I watched that movie.

If I stop judging my self and others and giving too much importance to ego games, Baby will be free and so will I. Also everyone talking to me will be free because they won't have to worry about upsetting me because of something they say that, for some reason, triggers my Swayze Johnny Nut.

Now, the day I'll be able to be that kind of free, I could be sure that my ego is not going to make me spend all of my attention on self-preservation, but it is going to stay quiet while I live my life fully, really connecting to the people around me and, always in the right context, when appropriate, I'll be able to unleash artfully the inner Swayze where it belongs, out there in the ballroom of life, being sexy, strong, brave, dancing to the rhythm of life and protecting his loved ones with grace and confidence.

Because no one puts Baby in a corner, no sir!

Kajo