I’m driving home from a work event late on a Sunday night. The air is the rare perfect cool that it gets in Texas now, before the heat rises up off the grass like a shimmering wave, until we almost swim through it. I roll down the windows and I think about how often I am self-conscious.
At first I think philosophically. It’s almost impossible to not think about ourselves, to walk around knowing where we are in space or how our hands and feet move. Even while our brains do thousands of invisible tasks, cuing my fingers to type, and the words to flow, even now, aren’t I self-conscious?
But I mean something different. An image comes to mind. I am early in college, my head bent over my books on the sunny side of the dining hall, late at night. Here is the corner table where I’m almost hidden by a bird of paradise plant, grown almost as tall about the two story windows. I’m writing something, a paper on Aquinas, I think, and someone calls my name. I start like a rabbit sensing danger. Who said my name? Who noticed me here, and how do I look, and what is my hair doing, and is that person the boy I’ve been longing to notice me (it isn’t) and what do they think of me here?
The fact of being noticed by itself doesn’t always frighten me. Sometimes there is a delighted pride, nervously standing up to receive a prize or hearing my name connected with that sweet list of achievements that not so long ago, I believe was the sum of my very self. But lingering under the noticing is the fear - just there, do you see it? - fear that what someone will see will be disappointing. Only as good as the prize that day. Only as good as the achievements that year. Only as beautiful as the person who just said it.
I carry this habit with me, and this weekend I felt it rising close to the surface. I rode more than usual, and I was riding in the presence of more people. People who are good riders. People who can see everything about me on that horse, the things I can do, the things I can’t. There she is, that fear again. What they will see will be disappointing. What they will see is all that I am not.
So this is the way of self-consciousness: to move with that fear moving alongside me. This is the way of anxiety, of always being just a second, just a tiny, infinitesimal moment, from failure, which is intolerable. This is the way of always spending every drop of energy on anticipating the ways I could disappoint someone and forcing myself to work those ways out of existence.
Of course, as it should be, it is the horses who suggested another way to me. Because the horses do not ask for my perfection. I rode this weekend the most advanced horse I’ve ever ridden. She didn’t require any more of me than I could give her. And while I measured myself against what the better riders can do, she didn’t. She just met me where I was. She loved me there, even when I didn’t.
Thus, the other way opens: to be self-aware, but unselfconscious. To be in my body, but not anxious about it. To love her as fully as the horses do, who are never fooled into thinking you’re anything but what you are - which was who they were loving all along.
The way of awareness is the way of greeting my body in gratitude first, and not fear. In this way, I do not look out to see first how others see me. I look in, to see what is there. I name that first, and then - and only then - I let that self, who is there, of whom I am aware, but not anxious, be known.
The way of self-consciousness and the way of self-awareness seem to run so near to each other that I cannot always tell which I’m stepping onto. But the fruit of each one is so different - peace in one and fear in the other, quiet in one, and shouting in the other. In one I am a startled rabbit, hyper-aware of all sounds as possible dangers. In the other I am a discerner of true and false dangers, a guardian dog who knows what he tends, and tends it well.
I seem to live in metaphors these days, they swarm around me. I don’t know how to end, but I know that this is true: I long to be self-aware and unselfconscious, to befriend my own body the way the horses befriend me, without regard to whether I am as good as anyone else or whether I can do what anyone else can.
Make me a discerner of my self, O God. Befriend me, and teach me to do the same.