Purgatory

The siren call of Purgatory is that, there, everything feels changeable, perfectible-- not even the past is set in stone.

The following is basically an unrolled version of this tweetstorm.

There's this weird counterfactual mental state you live in when you don't accept yourself, like you can't catch up to reality and live there until you've perfected yourself. I just found the perfect metaphor for it: Purgatory. In Catholicism, Purgatory is the realm between Heaven and Hell where intermediate-level sinners go to "purge" their sins so they can eventually get to Heaven.

There is this fear of accepting yourself and becoming real before you are perfect, like that will sear the flaws in and make them real. The lure of Purgatory is that, there, everything feels changeable, perfectible-- nothing is set in stone. Reality hurts because it's so blatant and final. Purgatory feels like a world of endless possibility. By denying your current self, you also deny the places where those rejected parts of you touch the real world, leaving you in this in-between world.

But endless possibility means that nothing can actually happen there!

"Living" in Purgatory is not living at all, and the clock does not stop in reality while you refuse to mentally accept that you are in it. To spare yourself the disappointment of being imperfect, you are burning away the precious time you have to be at all.

Purgatory is one of the deadliest siren calls in my mental life. It creates this feeling of life unlived and a huge backlog of undigested, unprocessed events and changes I can never seem to keep up with. It leaves me feeling behind in my own experience. And I really do think it's my reluctance to accept myself as I am at the heart of all this, and that it comes from this belief that I could purge my sins and go to Heaven but only if I hustle and don't get found out and caught as a sinner, like an insect fixed in amber, before I'm purified. It's almost like the trick is to convince myself that, because I'm not mentally caught up with it, the past is not actually done, and, with some hustling over in Purgatory, I can change the result.

We must abandon all hope for a better yesterday. — Anna Salamon

The antidote to Purgatory is realizing that reality is already happening around you. You can bear what's true, and are in fact already bearing it. But this can be painful if we think the person we are now, sins unpurged, will be etched in stone, unredeemable. My favorite mantra to resist the temptation of purgatory is:

It's okay to be me.

I have a low-level buzzing stress all the time that I believe is fear about just existing in my current reality while I mentally have one foot in Purgatory. It's like I'm having uncertainty anxiety about the future about the present, because I'm not mentally caught up yet. Much of my anxiety comes from this backlog of unlived life, and I can leapfrog a lot of it by taking a moment to understand that there is no such delay in reality. I exist right now, as I am-- I already made it.

The past has already occurred. I already was and currently am the person I am. Purgatory promises a suspension of reality, but all it does is lure you away from experiencing your real self and your real life.

It's like I've convinced myself that I'm good enough because these imperfect versions of me aren't my final form. Only the perfect me can fully exist, so I'm in this half-life until I "arrive". So, maybe, via a little mental gymnastics, I actually am perfect and bulletproof despite present indications to the contrary...

I think this dynamic comes from a twisted form of self-love. I know on some level that "it's okay to be me" and I deserve love and acceptance. But instead of seeing that reality is acceptable, I conclude that that means some acceptable better version of me is discoverable and I have to find it. The imaginary, aimed-for "should" world can accidentally become more real in your mind because it's more perfect, more "correct" than the true world. Grokking that I exist right now, fully incarnate exactly as I am, does actually confront that strange notion that an imperfect Holly doesn't have the "right" to exist.

When you embrace the real you, right now, it’s hard to stay in Purgatory.