Book Anthology: The Beauty of Authenticity

Chapter: “Humiliation: A Potent Sniffing Salt” by Abby Havermann

The women who share their stories in this book are extraordinary. They have made significant shifts in the way they show up and their ways of thinking. They ve developed and share practices, mantras, and techniques to live as the authentic spiritual beings they are. These women have empowered themselves through self-discovery, deep introspection, mindfulness, and self-love. Their transformations are nothing short of miraculous, and they speak to the undying vibrancy and love that exists in each of us.

Abby’s Story from The Beauty of Authenticity: Embracing Your Truth to Live a Life of Meaning, Purpose, and Grace, compiled by Sue Urda © 2019

It’s hard to write about authenticity when you feel like a fraud. Since I was a small child, I’ve called it as I see it. At seven, I told my mom that my father was an alcoholic. At ten, I spouted off to my grandmother about how her friends were like bagels without cream cheese, boring me into a stupor. I’ve never had any use for small talk and the moment I think I’ve entered “Pleasantville” in any conversation, I take the first bus out.

I’ve written volumes about hard lessons learned, told those stories on stages, and taught classes, splaying myself for all to see. My message is how I eventually learned to hear my own voice and live a more authentic life. I’ve mapped out how all of that has made me a better mother and wife, how I now seem to set boundaries effortlessly instead of throwing up rigid walls or letting people walk all over me like I used to. I’d had dramatic transformation. I’ve been told it’s inspiring.

So when I decided to participate in this anthology, I thought, no problem. First, I pulled out the story of the number one defining moment in my life, the moment I first realized how loud the toxic voice in my head was. It’s a great story: there I was, a practicing couple’s therapist, arrested for domestic violence (specifically, for slapping my drug-addicted husband.  People love to hear about other people’s pain, and I always feel better when, if nothing else, I can validate someone else’s experience of shame with my own Jerry Springer life.

My arrest occurred the day before I was planning to take my two-year-old and leave my husband for good, but rather than spending the day packing, I was cuffed in the mid-morning light with neighbors peering through their curtains, no doubt questioning any relationship advice I had ever given them.

There was the strip search, the moment I learned I’d be staying the night, and the crowning mortification: the attorney my dad sent to the jail to see me was exactly my age and from my home town (which, by the way, was across the country). Oh, all the people we knew in common!

The climax of this story has me lying on a hard slab of plastic in the middle of an overcrowded jail cell with four bunk beds filled by eight other women. It was there that I allowed my intuitive voice out of the soundproof box where it had lived nearly since it was born. Mostly, I ruminated on why I ever married John* in the first place.  He wasn’t ambitious, he wasn’t social, he was too old for me and I wasn’t sure I had ever been attracted to him. Then, out of nowhere this toxic voice came hurling up to my frontal lobe from the back of my skull and said, “Well, who else was going to love you?”

For the first time I understood that I had been following this voice around like the Pied Piper for nearly thirty years. Decent story, right? I tried to end the essay with, “That liar put me in jail, and I knew I’d never listen to my toxic voice again.” That’s how I always tell the story on stage. But this time, the ending fell flat. I gave it to an editor friend who suggested I revisit the first lines to get closer to my thesis: how I stopped listening to my toxic voice. Nothing. I meditated. I wrote it twelve different ways. I stepped away from it. I came back to it. Nothing worked.

I decided this must be the wrong story. I needed to write a different one. This time I picked when I came to Jesus (not really, I’m Jewish, but you get the point) and in a conflagration of humiliation, admitted to myself I cared more about what other people thought of me than being honest with myself. Now that was an awesome story. My husband caught on fire at my professional holiday party by leaning against a candle in a window. He was on so much Oxycontin that he didn’t feel it. Everyone else was also unaware until another guest saw him go aflame from the outside walkway, burst inside and tackled John to the ground.

What I find juiciest about that story is the envy that was seeping from my pores when we arrived at the hosts’ large Denver Tudor home. The entire first floor was covered with a white carpet one could only compare to a cloud. It was more expensive than my and John’s cars combined and more comfortable than our bed. I desperately wanted to impress this woman so she would send me referrals, and by the end of the night her carpet had a four-by-four dusty gray stain – the proverbial elephant in the room, miming my disaster of a marriage. 

The stain would have confined to a few black streaks, had I not gotten on all fours in my skirt and heels and stockings and tried to rub it out with a wet rag, while the other guests continued sipping their drinks and tasting slabs of salami from the antipasto on the table just above me. My efforts had only made the carpet worse, not unlike how I had made myself infinitely more miserable in my marriage by trying to cover for and control my husband’s behavior and addiction.

I had gotten to the bottom of that story with just enough words left for a neat explanation of how my life transformed after that night and how I now live my life with full and constant integrity, being true to myself, blah blah blah. Only, first of all, my life didn’t transform after that night. In fact, it was six weeks after that night that I found myself on the floor of that jail cell begging the Universe for mercy, seriously questioning if Jesus may in fact be able to help me (just kidding, Nana).

Now the deadline for this essay is approaching and I couldn’t understand why these stories weren’t serving the purpose they always have, exemplifying how I stepped into myself, teaching the importance of identifying and adjusting the volume on our intuitive and toxic voices. These stories had led to a rebirth — my divorce, remarriage, a new career as a financial consultant, finding myself. Yet, every time I tried to tie them up into a tight moral, they unraveled like yarn stuck to a cat’s claw.

Then today it hit me. It all came back to Lydia, a new prospect I had met with two weeks ago.  I immediately loved Lydia — smart, funny, independent, a fabulous foreign accent. Even better, I knew I had what she needed; I knew I could be of value to her. I laid out a financial plan that could protect her money and ensure she’d have enough for the rest of her life. It was very exciting (if you get excited about that sort of thing). I feared she was vulnerable to making less-than-ideal investment choices, for what I felt were the wrong reasons, not to mention falling prey to someone who didn’t have her best interests at heart. There are so many shady people in my business.

But. I also got excited about taking her on as a new client. I got excited about the sale. I went too fast in the meeting, hoping to “close,” and I confused and overwhelmed her with information. Not only did I not close; she might cancel her next appointment, possibly leaving her retirement at risk. This sent me spiraling.

For the last two weeks I’ve been marinating in shame, or rather shame is marinating my insides. My gut is bathing in it like the flank steak soaking in teriyaki sauce in my fridge. On the days I wake up and my gut feels empty and pure I whisper a silent prayer of gratitude to the Universe, but I tread lightly because I know the toxic feeling could be just around the corner, waiting to return. An attack like this never confines itself to one space, either. It leaks. When the phone rings at work I say out loud, “Oh shit,” because my first assumption is someone is mad at me, I’ve screwed something up, a client wants to fire me.

I thought I had beat it. My life has been altered by the very stories I planned to share in this essay. I upgraded my husband two-thousand-fold. I worked on my nagging and critical nature to the extent that my sixteen-year-old now confides in me almost daily and actually seems to value my input. I am walking through the devastation of my eight-year-old’s recently diagnosed neuromuscular disorder with an amount of grace, faith and level headedness I didn’t know I had in me. I am running a successful business, the second business I have built, and have the luxury of only working with people I love. All of this is because of the miles I’ve run (and in some cases, limped), and the lessons I learned. Because I dared to be awakened, show up in my life and change course.

So why is this essay so hard to write? Here’s why: the story of going to jail is about turning down the volume on my toxic voice, an epiphany that fundamentally changed my life. Unfortunately, I’ve been listening to that very voice nonstop since I met with Lydia.

The fire story is about being exposed, trying to look great when all Hell's breaking loose. But I’ve been slinking around singing my old childhood tune, “Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, might as well eat worms,” for two weeks, so it’s no wonder I couldn’t write a neat, pretty ending about how now all is well. Once again I had deceived myself (and was trying to deceive you), while secretly soaking in self-loathing.

I come full circle. Authenticity to me is about my willingness to be awake to my success and my struggle. It’s about daring to show up in the world as I am, on days when I feel inspired and proud, and on days like today when I have to cop to the shitstorm brewing inside me. Forty-eight seems way too old to be weathering days like this. I thought I’d be done punishing myself by now. Dare I tell you that I am still capable of comparing my insides to others’ outsides and despairing my way into a bottle of wine and way too much chocolate? 

Shame is a reaction I have to showing up in the world. I can have it as easily when I am successful as I can when I’m a failure. When the first occurs I think to myself “Who do you think you are?” When I fail, I tell myself “What did you expect?” And when I crawl under a rock, I experience a different kind of shame — I am not living my life’s purpose, I am not doing what I was put here to do. So dedicating myself to binge-watching Netflix and never risking being seen isn’t an option either.

This is my truth. I made a mistake. My desire to close a deal got in the way of my greater good, it got in the way of my mission. I hate admitting that. I hate being human. I would like to say I am one-hundred percent altruistic, all the time. I’d like to say I never fall prey to the twinge of competition, or the hollering of my ego. I’d like to tell you I never lose it on my kids or bribe my husband with sexual favors. But to say all that would be inauthentic. Instead I will say that my capacity for self-compassion is expanding. Everything the Universe puts in my path (in this case, this essay), is an opportunity for me to awaken, to accept and share myself as I am. It’s both painful and transcendent. Mostly, it’s just what it is to be me.

* His name has been changed to protect his privacy.