I’ve been wrestling with this question a lot lately. How do we know the difference?
In a way, it’s sort of funny that I would conflate these two at all. Self-expression is a way of honoring ourselves, perhaps through art, or through saying what we really think or feel. Self-imposition, on the other hand, is an act of disregard for others. We choose to trespass on their boundaries, to wave our thoughts and feelings in their face, to try to manipulate them to change or to get them to serve our own agenda (even if our agenda is good!).
But somewhere along the line, I managed to connect these two ideas in my head. Somehow I ended up in the tragic mindset that honoring myself was the equivalent of dishonoring others. To some people, that may seem one hundred percent true. I mean, to serve others and show them love, we need to surrender our own agenda, right? We need to stop doing the things we want, think less of ourselves, and honor the needs and desires of other people before ourselves, right?
And I used to think so, too. And on an unconscious level, I think I still believe such things. But I’m gradually beginning to realize that that’s actually not true. We’re all connected. When I dishonor myself, I am dishonoring all of us. When I honor one person, I honor all of humanity.
But surely that’s not true! What about the kings and queens and emperors and dictators, of times both ancient and recent, who heaped honor and glory upon themselves and a select few, much to the detriment of the impoverished common folk and the “undesirables” who got pushed aside?
We don’t understand what honor is. I think that’s our problem.
To honor myself doesn’t mean I’m better than others. It means I’m wholly me. It means I’m wholly wonderful, not solely wonderful. Perhaps wonderful in a way that solely I could be, but not because I’m better than others—just because I’m different, I’m unique, and I’m worth being seen and celebrated for me.
The ancient conquerors and rulers and the present-day seekers of glory in our nations are not honoring themselves at all. Not if they’re seeking to inflate their ego to numb their shame. And that’s most of us on any given day. There is no greater way to dishonor ourselves than to pretend we are “better than,” when in reality we’re beautiful and human and unfathomably “us.” Seeing ourselves as worthy of glory and power is pretty cheap if we’re actually worthy of love.
But most people don’t seem to believe they’re worthy of love. We’re taught from a young age to believe we’re worthy of punishment. And so we impulsively have to cover up our shame by demonstrating to everybody else that we’re worthy of reward. No amount of rewards will ever be enough to quite take the shame away. Numb it a little, maybe. But get rid of it? Heavens, no! Because how can a reward, that you must earn, ever be a good enough substitute for love, which is wholly a gift?
We talk about how some people are “easy to love” and some people are “difficult to love.” Surely, some people make themselves harder for us to love? I don’t know—some countries are harder to ship packages to than others. That doesn’t change the fact that there’s a gift inside.
The reason we see love as a chore, and some people as more “lovable” than others, is because we still think love is ultimately a reward for good behavior, not a gift. As kids, we were trained with the same good-dog-bad-dog methodology used to train our pets. If you do the right thing, you get rewarded with “love,” and if you do the wrong thing, the “love” gets taken away. Maybe we didn’t hear that language explicitly, but it was implicit in the way we were seen and treated each day, whether by our parents, or teachers, or school bullies, or the church, or the culture at large. So we’ve ended up with this inherent sense of being lovable when we’re good, and not so lovable when we aren’t. It’s a lot like the corrupt governments that have kept their people hungry to keep them under control. Love is not just a toy or pleasure of life that we very much want and very much could do without—it’s an important part of our sustenance. We die without it. It’s like food or water. So if it can be given or taken away—if it can be rationed, relocated, stored, dispensed, stolen, controlled, just like food or water—then suddenly we have the ultimate bargaining tool. The ultimate way to get our own way by controlling the one thing nobody can do without.
Thank goodness that such thinking is predicated on a lie. Love can’t be controlled. I can’t point a gun at your head and tell you to love someone more. If anything, you’ll resent them more! And I can’t point a gun at myself and say I need to love others more, or less. It doesn’t work that way.
Or does it? Because if you are going to have a bullet in your head (or a more realistic repercussion, like being shamed by others) if you don’t love someone more, and that causes you to resent the person or people group in question, haven’t we just controlled love? Haven’t we effectively replaced love with resentment in the heart of another?
When love is stifled in such a way—via the shoulds and shouldn’ts and rules and bullets—is it truly controlled? Is it truly replaced, or exterminated? Or is it just—stifled?
Can love be repressed? I think so. I think that’s why the world is such a sad and sorry place. I don’t subscribe to the idea that all human beings are evil at heart until they confess the right doctrine or creed and then they magically get turned into good people (who oddly enough, keep doing bad things just like everybody else). I think instead, we all were born to love. Sin is not our default mode; love is. But we’re not in our default mode. We’re in our repressed, guilt-tripped, shame-ridden, fearful, manipulated mode. The important thing to realize is that living in such a messy mode of existence does not mean that we are devoid of love and goodness in our hearts. We are not depraved monsters unworthy of love or honor until we join the correct club and get “saved” or converted. We are always worthy of love and honor, and deserve the world, because our hearts are beautiful and whole as they are. They are stifled; they are hidden away with walls and dams on all sides. But no human-made dam will last forever. Things decay. Water pressure builds. And someday, it all falls apart and the river of love comes back.
Love is your default mode. Expression is your default mode. The dams and lies and bullets used to coerce you out of your default mode do not change the properties of water. Water is water, whether behind a dam or running freely. Love is love, whether behind sin and shame, or running freely. Love can be “controlled,” but not controlled.
Which leads us back to our original question. What is self-expression, and what is self-imposition? Why do I so often think they’re the same?
What if self-expression is like love? What if it’s inseparably intertwined with love? Self-expression is like a spring bubbling out of your heart, a river flowing outward and into the world.
But we were lied to. We were taught that love moves the other direction—an outside-to-inside work of self-effort, not an inside-to-outside outpouring of expression. We were taught that love is self-repression. There’s these good works you’re supposed to do, even when you don’t feel like it, even when it’s not on your heart. It’s not about your heart. It’s about “love”—a code word for self-sacrifice. A code word for dishonoring yourself to honor others. Love becomes the dam we build, the reforms we make in our outward lives to try to subdue and rule over the beast on the inside. Love becomes the gun we hold to our very own heads as we tell ourselves that we should try harder to be a better person, thinking that such coercion will make ourselves into the loving people we’re supposed to be. Sometimes if our efforts to build the dam are particularly insufficient, and the river is running particularly strong, our threats are no longer enough. Sometimes we commit suicide. Sometimes we don’t and we surrender to our own love.
The funny thing about self-repression is that it often leads to self-imposition. After all, if it’s okay to point a gun at my head to make myself a better person, how is it much different to do the same to others, especially if it’s for their own “good” (or for mine)?
Many of us get wounded by this self-imposition. There’s all the obvious examples—violence, murder, rape. And there’s all the more “innocent” ones—trespassing on someone’s personal life without being invited, laying expectations on others about what they ought to be doing, being an affront to others simply because they think differently. It’s more or less all over the place.
If you’re anything like me, once you’ve experienced self-imposition in any form, you’re determined not to do the same to others. It feels so rotten! So you try, really, really hard not to be that guy or girl. You don’t want to be an affront to other people. You don’t want to be the one imposing on others. You don’t want to be the one who takes the last piece of cake on the tray. (Okay—maybe you do.) You just try to keep your self out of the picture because the more you express yourself (or even, sometimes, exist and take up space in the room), the more you feel like you’re an imposition. You buy into the idea that maybe the world would be a better place if you completely disappeared altogether so you could stop getting in the way. But if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll see that our efforts to avoid self-imposition have created self-repression instead, and that’s not a good thing at all.
Maybe we wouldn’t buy into this terrible idea so much if we realized that self-imposition has never actually happened in the history of the world. Ever. Huh?!
When people engage in acts of supposed self-imposition (murder, trespassing, eating ALL the cake, etc.), they are not imposing their self upon others at all. They are imposing their non-self. They aren’t living from their heart, or from their true nature. They are living out of their pain, their neediness, and their need for control to numb that neediness. You are NOT your pain! You are NOT your neediness. You are NOT your coping mechanisms. You are NOT your sinful nature. Your sinful nature is NOT your true nature. It’s NOT how God sees you or how any of the people who really count see you. And you are NOT any of the various ways you’ve imposed yourself on others.
Ultimately, so-called self-imposition is actually an expression of our non-self. When we recognize this, it becomes easier to see how self-expression and non-self-expression are quite literally polar opposites. They both involve expression but they involve expression of something altogether different. Likewise, both telling the truth and telling lies have one thing in common—telling. That’s about where similarities cease. So maybe the more important question to ask is not whether I’m imposing myself. Maybe the better question to ask is, “What am I expressing here?” How do we know, in the end, what constitutes an expression of self and what constitutes an expression of non-self?
There’s no easy answers here. This is a question we’ll wrestle with for much of our lives, but I think as we come to know ourselves better it will become more obvious what is coming from where. I think the important thing to realize is that there is no formula to follow. There is no special recipe that will tell you when to speak up and when to stay silent—what is an expression of self and what is coming from the wrong place. After all, we often do speak from a standpoint of great limitation in perspective.
When I even begin to ponder this question, I feel distraught. How could I ever know, for sure? But if I stop to think about it, I realize I’m worried because I fear that this defines who I am. I still believe the age-old lie that if I fail to speak rightly or express myself in the “right way” that I am somehow a bad person. I still conflate myself with my own failures.
Maybe we can find ways to stop doing this. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to happen right away. But it does need to happen, however imperfectly and however agonizingly slow it comes. In short, we really need to heal—and we need to embrace it for the long process that it is. Okay—we don’t have to. But there’s nothing better!
I tend to worry a lot. I get so concerned that I’m saying the wrong thing, or saying the right thing in the wrong way. What if this thing I said to so-and-so was really too much, or that thing I posted to Facebook was inconsiderate? What if I am subtly using guilt-tripping to fuel my own agenda, and slapping it with a “self-expression” or “using my voice” label?
I think that fear really keeps me shackled and I’m sick of it. We’re never going to get this perfect. Or maybe we will someday. I don’t really know. What I do know is that showing as much compassion and value to myself as possible can only be a good thing. Letting myself have a voice is important. It doesn’t really matter who hears it. It just matters that I take steps to honor that voice. Self-expression is important. It’s something that I think all human beings crave on some level.
Let’s let ourselves express ourselves. Self-expression has a different aroma than non-self-expression (or self-imposition), and I think with time we’re going to notice that aroma in our characteristically imprecise way. And that’s great! There’s something incredibly wonderful about saying exactly what we think or feel, as wrong or misinformed as it may be. Sometimes it’s the very best thing we can do at any given moment. Sometimes it’s the only thing we can do. It’s a way to affirm that our own voice has value and that it matters. Because it does matter. It really does.
And let’s express ourselves not just in words, but in writing, and art, and music, and poetry, and whatever creative or non-creative avenue captures our attention. Why? Because it’s beautiful! So why not?
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