The Phantom of the Opera is a favorite of mine. I identified, not with Christine, but with the Phantom, with the one who hid pain behind the mask. I didn’t want to see Christine choose a healthy love; I was silently hoping that she would choose the unlovable monster.

I guess it isn’t a surprise that I have always been attracted to wounded men. Ken was the only exception, and I almost missed out on him because of my early inability to see the whole man standing before me, when I was used to only seeing shards. 

Last night I turned on Pandora and one of my favorite songs from The Phantom, ‘All I ask of you’, instantly transported me to my late teens, to the time when I learned to wear a mask to hide my pain, my woundedness, hiding it so well that my actions informed the cells in my body that they didn’t deserve to be happy and embedded the sense that I was unlovable.

Everyone’s story is their own, but I sincerely doubt that mine is unique. Unworthiness is epidemic in our world. It lives, mostly unchecked, inside our minds. We condition ourselves, making the certainty of our unworthiness an unquestionable theme of our lives.

When life hurts and we don’t know what to do with the pain, when we dishonor ourselves by accepting less than what we need, when we settle for anything less than love, we are setting the parameters of our story to one of unworthiness.

While writing a poem years ago I realized that a separate human could never be worthy. It gave me a measure of peace. It wasn’t me; it was the human condition. As with most insights, I thought that was the whole story or that I understood the story it was telling. Blinding flash of insight equaled truth, right?

That release was just an initial drop of oil on a rusty bolt. I still hurt and I still had the need to love. I could see and feel the pain in our world. My empathy was intact which meant I was still human. The disconnection from aliveness was nowhere near complete.

We see what we are capable of seeing. When we are capable of seeing more, there is more to see. We may have seen it a million times before, be we couldn’t actually see it for what it is. When the time comes, our eyes are opened. Where we get into trouble is believing that our current vision is 20-20. It feels like there couldn’t be more to see when compared to what we were capable of seeing before, but each new opening of vision holds within it a measure of blindness.       

All humans, functioning from separation or not, are worthy and unworthy. Which one totally depends on the story we are telling ourselves, how invested we are in it, and the programming running primary at the moment. Nothing and no one is of more or less value, although most human stories tend to separate, to compare and contrast, crafting a plot that nearly ensures that its heroine or hero (the center of the me universe) leans in one direction or another. This continues to be so, even once the entire storybook has been seen for what it is. The story continues to play out, just without personal buy-in.  

One of the stories humans like to tell are tales of unworthiness. Ultimately, the moment we step through the veil that stabilizes the appearances of life and death, those silly head-trips will be seen to be precious vehicles for spirited evolution. Until the moment of ultimate healing (death), we get to experience duality and its associated sorties into storyland.

I never cease to be amazed at all the stories I’ve tucked within my sweet little human, all that was too much for me to feel at the time, all that is still being revealed. Unearthing the human story is just as important as discovering what we actually are, what this actually is. I think it is an unending unfolding, the perpetual expansion of heart, mind and body.

The insight that accompanied my trip down memory lane stunned me, leaving me with the never expected, always present (with genuine insight), for me at least, instantaneous transmission. Timelessly, the entire message was given, and I saw the reason I stayed in bad relationships so long. I was committed to loving the unlovable, to proving that the unlovable were not a lost cause, that they were just waiting to be found, to be truly loved.

I was trying to find myself, the little girl I gave away to unworthiness so many years ago. The unlovable wasn’t the man in my failing relationship, it was me. If I left, if I gave up, I was giving up on myself again. It would be proof of that unlovability.

Staying was an excuse to beat myself up, to reaffirm my unlovability. Leaving was the same damn thing, another excuse, another beating, more confirmation bias built right it. I should leave. Staying is self-betrayal. I shouldn’t have left. I hurt people. I always hurt people … I am unworthy of love.

See how it works, how the separate human sets it up to never be worthy. When we believe we are unlovable, everywhere we look we will find proof that we are right. We literally can’t see anything that proves differently … until something ordinarily incredible happens, and we can.

Until then, we are the proof: friggin’ gushers of negative thoughts, an inability to control them like we are told we should and can, the constant judging even when it’s confined to our heads, the innumerable times we hurt others, intentionally or not, the empty ache that never seems to fill regardless of what life looks like. We must be unworthy. With the full human backdrop, it is impossible to be worthy. Maybe that’s the reason so many abandon their human, why they focus on ascension or the afterlife instead.

Always. Never. Should. We don’t give ourselves a break, not when we are in the midst of self-flagellation, which is basically all the time … but anytime you feel like it, when the moment moves you, give yourself a break by simply noticing.   

God, I love noticing. Noticing, seeing clearly, directly experiencing those moments that take us apart, that dismantle held beliefs, that make what we are doing so obvious that it is unable to hide anymore and its ability to work silently behind the scenes is incapacitated … and once seen, unnecessary any longer. 

 It’s still unfolding. I don’t know where it is taking me. But, if my past is an indicator (it isn’t always), I’ll be writing more soon.

Image: Rossum, Phantom of the Opera