Recently a close friend of mine has been studying a course in which personal experiences and resulting value shifts are translated into the public sphere with words (or narratives) and actions. The course framework is based on a famous quote of Hillel the Elder (sometimes anachronistically known as "Rabbi Hillel") - "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And being only for myself, what am 'I'? And if not now, when?"
The ingenious concept of this course is to process transformative moments of ones development, such as a traumatic childhood experience, into a fully engaged public life. Applying the course's framework to myself, I discovered that I had encapsulated a couple of childhood traumas in such a way as to highlight my own sense of agency. I presume this was to offset a sense of helplessness. However this encapsulation was faulty and needed to be reworked.
My own traumas had created two powerful modes which I will call Captain Justice and Captain WinLove that consistently interrupted my natural process. While these two modes created tremendous skills, they inevitably brought the attendant miseries of fantastical thinking. To rework them, I focused on the causal experiences and re-experienced them as Not My Fight and I'm Good.
None of this is going to make me Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King Jr, but as Rabbi Zusya told his students on his deathbed, "in the coming world, they will not ask me, 'why were you not Moses?' instead, they will ask, 'why were you not Zusya?'" If I can heal the wounds driving unnatural trajectories, then I have a better chance of being me.
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