Six days ago, I got served. 

No, not a delicious meal at a fancy restaurant, but a legal document indicating I am being sued for $150,000 for a minor fender-bender I was in more than a year ago.

So here’s a thing: the etymology of the word “served” is “ordered to be punished or transported; beaten.” And wouldn’t you know, this is precisely what I proceeded to do to myself. I took that legal document as a personal judgement, punched myself in the heart and took the fast train to complete, emotional meltdown.

• I’m a bad driver and a bad person
• No one is a bigger loser than I am
• I can’t get my financial shit together because I’m stupid (a random self-hating thought based on the $150K? I dunno but it was there)
• I’m totally guilty and on fire with shame, as I should be.
• I deserve all the terrible things I’ve got coming
• Every horrible, mean name or put down anyone has ever said to me or about me is God’s truth
• No one is ever going to love me because I’m unlovable – and besides
• I don’t deserve love anyway. That’s for good people.

Just so we’re all on the same page about how crazy this is, I rolled into a woman at a stop light. No, she wasn’t in a crosswalk. She was in a Subaru.

Latent, unresolved insecurity, self-worth issues and a distorted sense of reality, much?

You’ve no doubt heard of “Imposter Syndrome.” It’s the concept whereby successful individuals have an inability to internalize their accomplishments thus living in persistent fear of being exposed as a fraud.  Yeah, so I have that for my life. I go around acting like I know stuff and kinda/sorta have my shit together, except I know for real what a white-hot mess I am on the inside – and I fear being outed more or less constantly.

Lots of the time my interior life feels like a just-barely-holding-it-together MacGuyver project: “With these toothpicks and this bit of chewing gum, I’m going to build a heat seeking missile…” The struggle to avoid emotional collapse and continue doing life with some modicum of control and good sense is real. Some days it’s work not to slide off my chair, raise the white flag and let life just roll over me.  

It’s during these times too when everyone seems to be doing life so much better. And easier.  And smarter. Of course I know that everyone is struggling with their own private hell, blah, blah, blah, but in this less-than-enlightened moment I’m not getting ANY of that. In this moment I’m measuring myself against the apparent norm and consumed with my own inadequacy.

Yeah OK, comparison is the devil, but how do you not? We learn how to do stuff by watching others do it. I watch how others do life to learn how to do it better myself and I’ve got to tell you, most of the time I feel like I’m between notes. Carrie: The Jazz Variations.

The brilliant psychologist Gabor Mate talks about the “Myth of Normal.” From working with thousands of people over decades, his experience is that there’s no such thing as a normal/abnormal divide, but rather we’re all on a continuum where mental distress is either more or less present in each of us.  Put another way, every one of us is a little bit crazy/neurotic/ depressed/anxious/emotionally messy/you-name-it.

I take comfort in the idea that everyone is walking some slack-line of emotional stability and security, the abyss forever below. In my case, it’s dealing with my fear and insecurity shouting, “you can’t… you aren’t…you don’t… “ while I'm trying to guage my next step that’s the real challenge. Which is to say, it’s a major distraction that often has me either on life-repeat or stalled entirely.

How do you get out of (and finally finish) an old story you tell yourself – about yourself? New-agey thinkers will tell you that love is the antidote to fear. Ohmigod! What the hell does that even mean in practice? How do you conjure love when you’re emotionally panicked? When psychological death feels imminent?  When you’re self-loathing incarnate?

A good sign I'm being triggered by an old story and not living in the moment is when I'm fine one minute and an emotional wreck the next.  Upon being served, I slipped down a shame-hole so suddenly and completely that it gave me pause: Whoa. What’s really going on here?

If we choose it, these moments are an invitation. I know: crazy talk, but stay with me.

My instinct says that to escape an old story (or to escape anything, really), I should run. In my case this means I eat too much, drink too much or get too busy. The goal is to get as numb as possible and avoid feeling all the crappy feels, however I can. (Think Devo's Whip It here: "Stuff it! Stuff it good!")

Irony says the only way to escape an old story is to face – and feel – it. Consider the emotional free-fall, the triggering moment a dare: it’s daring you – inviting you - to be curious instead of automatically going to the I’m-a-bad-person place, as if it’s true.

Ask questions!! Yes, to yourself. Yes, about yourself.  THIS is how you get out of an old story! With luck you can unearth some of that New-Agey love from beneath the pile, but for me at least, I sure as hell can’t start there.

Were my thoughts or feelings in response to being served valid? Did objective reality support any of them? Was my first thought, “Huh. This lady is totally trying to shake-down my insurance company?”

No.

I mean really, I’m a bad person and don’t deserve love…?

We’re all in this big puppy-pile of life together. We all live somewhere on the more-or-less crazy continuum. We’re all struggling to keep the internal Jenga tower from crashing while thinking everyone else has it so much more in balance. And Oh. My. God. We ALL suffer from chronic insecurity and compromised self-worth. Somewhere in our lives - professionally, financially, romantically, physically - we ALL FEEL LESS THAN.  Its universality makes me think it’s simply part of the human condition, and I take some comfort in that, actually.

Brene Brown writes in Rising Strong that “the most difficult part of our stories is what we bring to them - what we make up about who we are and how we are perceived by others…what makes the story so painful is what we tell ourselves about our own self-worth and value.”

Is it just me, or did she just drop the mic?

Of course I don’t need to do a thing with respect to the lawsuit – it’s entirely between Shake-Down Lady and my insurance company. Being served was mostly a communications exercise, as far as I can tell.  And a gift. Because I learned that the same curiosity that killed the cat, can kill the crazy too. 

Question yourself. Start a new, better chapter in the lies - I mean stories - your fear whispers to you. Trust in happier endings. I'm here to tell you, you can too.