integrity
...and The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self by Martha Beck
It’s midday.
I should be in my empty apartment in Parkhurst, sitting at my desk, on my computer, but I’m driving on the highway. I almost drive into a scooter as I on-ramp, it quickly gets ahead of me but the person turns around motioning angrily at me, hands flaring in the air.
I try to signal back, “I’m sorry.”
I’m unsuccessful though. The person on the scooter is looking ahead now but they’re still hooting, pointing back at me till they eventually take the next off-ramp and disappear.
“I’m sorry!”
“I’m sorry!”
I keep screaming into my windshield, long after the scooter disappears. I’m in tears, and I’m angry.
“I’m not this person,” I carry on shouting.
What person?
The person who cuts off scooters on the road? The person who dodges work to visit her mother whose in town for a few days at her sister’s house?
The person who has a full-on meltdown on a highway?
I get to my sister’s, and I join her and my mother in cooing over my baby niece who’s just three weeks into our story. I'm trying to convince my sister that every time I pick this beautiful baby up, she smiles.
I gobble down a bag of Lay’s, I’m starving. My sister takes pictures of me with the baby.
My jeans are sagging.
When I get a phone call from my new boss, I get a segue into talking about my job with my family.
“Advertising is tough, I had mouth-sores working there,” my sister says. I’m trying to tell them that it’s too hectic and I’m not coping.
My mother says nothing. I think she looks my way occasionally but not when I’m looking at her, like she doesn’t want to make eye-contact.
A couple of days later at the office, I ask the guy who hired me to come into one of the boardrooms with me. Our only conversation since he hired me as my line manager 4 weeks ago.
I tell him I’m leaving. He says he figured, he looks bored out of his mind at this, at me.
“How long have you been here? Two… three weeks?”
It’s actually been five, but I don’t correct him. I just smile.
Smile like I have the whole time I’ve been here, unable to speak, while a million things go through my mind. Smile like I have in all the meetings, when I have no clue what anyone is talking about. Smile like I do when they hire a new intern 3 weeks after me and she acts like my boss. Smile like I do when I’m driving at 7pm to deliver a swimming costume that I bought with my own money to an influencer who lives on the other side of town for an Instagram campaign.
Smile like I do when the internship stipend comes in and it’s not even enough to pay my rent.
I smile when I resign because I feel like I’m finally going to get my breath back.
But it’s the beginning of my fragmentation, and my many faces.
My lying.
My mother’s car is at the gate. It’s 2pm, it’s Thursday, how is she here? She normally comes back on Fridays around 4.
I scramble to clear the dining room table of all my pastels, paper and drawings strewn on it. I’ve been drawing all week, but she can’t know that.
What she needs to know is that I have been sitting in front of my computer, writing blogs for the agency I work for remotely.
Even though I quit 4 weeks ago.
This is my first week out. I’m disoriented as it is with no deliverables expected from my days, the last thing I need is her showing up unexpectedly.
I know I can’t clear the table and move the easel back to my room before she walks in, so I settle for a relatively cleared table and fetching my computer. I sit down as she closes the door.
I browse blog writing jobs on Indeed. I hope it looks like I’m working.
When I left the agency in Johannesburg, I took up an unpaid internship as a printmaker at an arts studio. I blew through my savings of 2 years in 2 months paying rent.
Two months of pretending to my family. Carrying on like I had an income when money was rapidly leaving me.
Frustrated that I couldn’t reconcile doing what I love with my independence.
Being at that arts studio is still the best working experience I’ve had to date. Back then, I thought everything was so great there because I was finally in the right place, doing the right thing. But I understand now that being there on an unpaid basis is probably what produced their lax expectations of me and overall kindness.
Without Capitalism in the frame, almost any working picture can be idyllic.
My days were full of exploring and learning, but the nights were mostly tears and false texts. Barely talking to my mother, my sister carefully circling around my “job.”
When the paranoia really set in, I’d think she could see through me, that maybe my car tracker company had called her and told her my car was now parked in the middle of Johannesburg everyday, alerting her that I was in a danger zone as they often did.
Was she just sitting there, knowing everything, saying nothing?
I didn’t know what hurt more; her knowing I was in a job that was making me highly anxious and not saying anything about it or her knowing I was out of work and had no money but offering no help?
I was lying to keep them out, but I really wanted them in; in both scenarios.
Employed, I needed help. Unemployed, I needed help.
Things were not okay. I was not okay.
I wanted to cry out, and get help.
In her newer book, The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self, 2021, Martha Beck unravels the tight coil of self-contradiction that leads to a life lived outside of integrity.
The spiral that doesn’t let you stand tall. The fragmentation that keeps you in horizontal disjunctures with no hope of elongation or fruition.
The first step, she says, is admitting that you’re lost, and crying out for help. Even if it’s quietly, to yourself:
My life isn't perfect.
I don't like the way things are going.
I don't feel good.
I'm sad.
I'm angry.
I'm scared.
I'm not at peace.
I can't find my people.
I'm not sure where to go.
I don't know what to do.
I need help.This is not conceding to some reckless defeat. It’s also not a public defacing of your character.
It’s an admission of being lost, of getting it wrong.
Why? Because we’re human.
Capable of not getting things right the first time around, because, as Rob Bell says, we’ve never done this before. We’ve never been ourselves at this time, in this context, before.
Admitting to being out of integrity is not saying you’ve been a liar or a cheat; a person with no morals or values.
It’s saying you’ve scattered pieces of yourself in disparate places, and you’re helplessly suspended in multiple in-between spaces.
It’s saying, “I am walking everywhere and nowhere all at once, I need a reset.”
I need to reassemble and unify, and be whole again, because that’s where I started.
We all start in wholeness.
The place where we are whole is beyond childhood, even beyond infancy. When we first enter the world, we are already negotiating matters of integrity, in our littleness, fragmentation has already started.
In the world I came into, with the emotional inheritance I was given (which you can read more about in last week’s post) I have had to pay with my integrity. I have not been able to function and be honest at the same time.
I can forgive myself, easily, because the trade-off with my integrity happened before I could even speak.
I didn’t know what it was, or its value.
What looked shinier to me was the praise I got when I minimised myself.
It was more rewarding to be be patted for being perfect, and allowing everyone around me to carry on with everything else and forget about me.
My heart swelled when people praised me for coming back from school to myself, and living alone while my mother went to work.
I felt like a hero when people thought I wasn’t scared to sleep in my house alone every night. Waiting until my mother left before I cried so she wouldn’t feel bad for leaving me.
I muscled through fears that are still with me even now, at 24. It’s funny how it doesn’t work like exercising; I haven’t become less afraid or used to being alone the more I’ve been alone.
As I come back to integrity, I’m learning to cry out, instead of hiding behind a broken smile.
I’m dealing with a new monster; the hopelessness that comes when I cry, asking for help, and get ignored. The heartbreak of being implicitly told that my weakness is not welcome.
That there is no dialect to address it.
I have to learn how to deal with my mother’s hoarse singing forcefully trying to block out the sound of my crying.
Even though it is no longer valuable to me to be good, to not be sad or angry. Even though it is no longer possible for me to say I’m not struggling when I am, to say I’m coping when I’m not.
But it used to be.
I tripped, and scraped at least two layers of skin off a patch of my knee. Someone gave me a cloth bandage to cover it.
“Remember that wound you had?”
My sister says one day while we’re sitting on her couch, watching TV.
“That wound you had on your knee when you were in Grade 1. You wore a bandage around your whole knee and wouldn’t take it off until the wound stank. I still remember that smell.”
“It took so long to heal, I thought it never would.”
There’s always a reward, even for the most dysfunctional of things.
Being out of integrity has unique rewards for each of us.
I see now, that what I knew without language as a child, is it would hurt more to cry out and get no attention than to just live with the things that hurt me. It hurt less to limp for weeks and pretend like nothing was wrong than ask for help that would never come, revealing the truth that I was neglected.
My body has been re-enacting this story over and over.
Lying about the jobs I've quit because, rather than express to my family that I’m in a career-crisis and have them look away or tell me how much they hate their own jobs too…
I’d rather pretend like I’m working, and everything is fine. I’d rather fabricate work-scenarios when I get together with my sister, and agree with her when she says I can move to my next salary bracket when I’ve “gathered enough experience.” Rather that than tell her I hate Marketing, and I want to do something different. Even though I don’t know what.
But the thing about presenting one face, while having another, is that it’s a corrosive chemistry.
Inevitably, one becomes weaker.
"Does it make sense to send a devil to catch a devil, to use Satan to get rid of Satan? A constantly squabbling family disintegrates. If Satan were fighting Satan, there soon wouldn't be any Satan left. Do you think it's possible in broad daylight to enter the house of an awake, able-bodied man, and walk off with his possessions unless you tie him up first? Tie him up, though, and you can clean him out."
I’ve been right here, at unceasing war with myself these last 2 years.
I saw my picture in my local newspaper when I matriculated in 2016.
The top student in my school, somewhere in the top five of my region…or district.
It made me sick to see it.
“I’m sorry I’ve failed you” I said to this girl smiling tentatively, and gracefully, beyond the camera, holding the “Best All-Rounder” trophy lightly against her chest.
I concluded that she just got up and left me after we graduated with distinction from university.
I thought she might have grown weary of my heaviness and moved on to lighter bodies.
But actually, she didn’t leave me. I lost her when I lost my integrity, like losing a friend in a mall.
She’s the able-bodied man in the Jesus piece. I tied her up, and set her up to be pillaged.
How?
By becoming her rival.
I went to war with her, with myself, and we’ve been disintegrating ever since.
Ever since I agreed that my own passions and interests were not a real way of making a living and I would be lucky if I could get a job anywhere.
Ever since I denied her audacity to study Fine Art and laughed at her for really throwing herself into it.
When I said she was childish and needed to become an adult, in the real grown-up world, I tied both of us to a post.
And we’ve been stripped, and whipped, and bowed down.
Martha beck lists “symptoms” of being split within yourself in The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self, 2021.
She says you’re at war with yourself when:
nothing you do feels like it has any purpose. I have resented writing social media posts, and blogging about hotels. Baffled that it feels SO hard, and inconsequential. I’ve done it all badly, further kicking myself down because I know I’m capable of so much more.
you’re constantly panicking, anxious and traversing other depressive states. I’ve gradually, these last 2 years, ended all my friendships and stopped talking to everyone I know.
your body gives out. My menstrual cramps are always the tell-tale. A cycle ago, they were so bad I couldn’t sit or stand, crouched in a ball in my bed for a whole 4 days.
any relationships you try to build crumble. It felt like a kick in the stomach when a manager or colleague gave me work to do, I couldn’t get along with anyone I worked with. They were just giving me more meaningless work and I hated their callousness. Hopeless.
career failure. The last one Martha Beck lists, the first wake-up call for me.
I’ve been thinking that I’m struggling because I haven’t found the “perfect job,” but actually, I’ve just been pursuing ways of making a living that are inherently insufferable to me.
Convincing myself that I want them because it’s where I was told I should fit.
When you pursue a career that pulls you away from your true self, your talent and your enthusiasm will quit on you like a bored intern. Every task will feel as distasteful as poisoned food, and leave you just as weak. (Beck, 2021).
I’ve been on survival mode, believing that it was the new, and only me.
The final me.
Caught in self-contradictory ideals, and not unified within myself.
Not in integrity, and not whole, like an integer.
A thing complete in itself.
The pursuit of integrity is not a denial of the inherent multiplicity of being human. Self, like all things, is various, to the point of being intoxicating, as one Louis MacNeice so eloquently puts it:
World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness of things being various
I have no aversion to the different ways that I can show up, the many shades, facets and textures of who I am.
I love, and welcome them all.
But I want each one to show up FULLY.
I don’t want to have one face that sticks and never changes over time. I want to see all that I can be. But wherever my face shows up, whatever type of face it is then, I want it to be unwavering, and full.
I want it to be complete, and unified; in complete agreement with itself, because that makes a difference. A big one.
That, for me, feels like integrity. Not a perpetual uniformity of self, personality, interests, passions and career…but a wholeness and unification that undergirds all seasons of change.
A thing, shape-shifting and morphing, but always whole in itself.
What if we weren’t carrying fragmented pieces of ourselves, trying to figure out what to bring where and how to hide the remnants?
What if we tried the way of integrity?
It’s a staggering prospect, and I’m not even sure it’s possible friend. But try to get a hold of The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self, 2021, if you can.
For the sake of trying.
Yours,
Siphumelele