Hello! My Name is Gary.

Hi, I’m Gary. How are you? I’m not very confident. I let my fears control me. I get into destructive and cyclic thought patterns. I imagine negative scenarios in my relationships and interactions with other people. I lose sight of the beauty and wonder of the world around me. I think too much about shit that doesn’t matter. Worst of all I let it get me down.

Gary is my alter ego. He comes from where I was before I started this journey of growth and self discovery and improvement. Me, as I am now, have blossomed forward from Gary. I’m just starting to break out of the chrysalis. Or maybe you can start to see the colour of my wings through what was the green shell around me. In any case I’m no longer that squishy caterpillar slithering about.

Gary was identified by Chris (Raine), who started to recognise me sliding backwards into these old behaviours and patterns of thinking from time to time. We talked about it, and decided to call my alter ego Gary. The reason we called him Gary, is that Gary is my middle name, and I don’t really like it all that much. Which is good, because I don’t like everything that Gary embodies. He embodies my past mistakes, he embodies how I have felt about myself in the past, and he embodies everything that I am striving not to be.

The best thing about Gary is that he embodies a whole set of behaviours that I am trying my hardest to stay away from, and I can recognise this as behaviour as a Gary like behaviour and quash it. On a number of occasions Chris has called me on something, and said, ‘oh, oh, I see a bit of Gary coming out!’ It is an awesome trigger to really snap out of whatever the behaviour was.

The personification of the behaviour I am trying to move away from really helps. I can imagine what Gary looks like. I can imagine how he would behave. So I can imagine him in situations and see how he would behave. Then I can go ok, so that is not what I’m going to do. I’m going to do this here, which is moving me closer to where I want to be, rather than back towards where I came from.

Ken Wilbur talks of objectifying your demons. DeAngelo defines a demon as something that comes up for you that makes you lose control. Gary is a collection of some of my demons. Bastard. But Gary is still a part of me. It is something I had to accept. I can’t destroy him. I can’t take a shotgun and blow his head off. That is still murder. It will most likely result in an imbalance in my life, and that is destructive.

The next challenge for me is to figure out how I can use Gary constructively. I’ve put a leash on him, but I need to recognise when I can use parts of Gary. Then I can whistle and call him out, and use that part of me for what it is supposed to be used for.

~ by simonlawry on July 13, 2009.