‘I’m a Big Baby!’

You're not keeping your baby safe.

Dream (1974), Jane Graverol

Hi Polly!

I'm a big baby, and I know that. I'm a baby in lots of ways: I'm literally young and I have the world around and in front of me. I'm scared of the world around and in front of me. I have big feelings and — I'd like to think — an even bigger heart. I let myself be ruled by my big feelings. This isn't really what I want to say, but I think that part is still important to say anyway, because reading your column has made me feel normal about that part. About being a baby, I mean. I am a proud baby!

The problem is that I don't know how to deal with people who have hurt my big baby self. It's like I ricochet between two extremes. There's a side that is filled with white hot anger and resentment and betrayal (I like to picture this side as a righteous angel wielding a flaming sword, but more likely it is simply more like a rabid dog) and on the other side is love: delusional, forgetful, irrational love. Love that wants to forgive and forget to the point that it causes me strife, worries my friends, leads me astray (back into the arms of people who have hurt me).

It's not like either one of these extremes help, Polly, and it's not like they help me heal. To an extent, the anger keeps me on track, and to the same extent, the love keeps me sane (because I want to believe people are good, and I want to have love for everyone; this is a part of who I am, of my big baby self, and I love loving people). But when I let either of these extremes rule me, I turn into the worst version of myself. Only I don't "let" either extreme rule me. It just happens. And it takes over.

I want to be loving without being delusional and dependent and irrational. I want to be angry about what has happened to me without it destroying my love and my joy. Or maybe I am no longer supposed to be angry at all, because I have already been angry? And my anger no longer feels productive or righteous, and it only feels heavy and empty. In which case, how do I move forward?

How do I move forward with love and with joy without being blinded by it (rose-tinted glasses and all)? I'm tired of being ruled by these extremes, like my body is just a puppet controlled by my big baby self. (Even if that's exactly what it is.) How do I stay hopeful about the goodness in the world and in other people when I've been hurt — badly — before?

I want to love, Polly, but I also want to hold people responsible.

Sincerely,

Big Puppet Baby

Dear Big Puppet Baby,

Passion is beautiful. Love and sadness and anger are thrilling dimensions of feeling fully alive. But if you’re letting your big baby wander through war zones, crawl across train tracks, and meander into burning buildings, you aren’t honoring how pure, fragile, enthusiastic, or fearful your baby is.

I know you believe that you’re letting all of your emotions rise to the surface and that should be a good thing. From my observations, you’re very in touch with your most combustive, propulsive emotions: lust, adoration, anger, contempt. But you don’t seem all that in touch with the emotions that might pull you back from the brink of disaster: hesitation, fear, ambivalence, suspicion. These aren’t negative sensations that limit your love. They often spring from accurate observations of reality. So even though you believe that you’re trusting your emotions and your gut and you don’t want to stop doing that, if you truly listened to your gut, you would give yourself more time to observe and reflect before you either dash in or proclaim something a huge mistake.

Instead, you’ve started telling black-and-white, moralistic stories about your emotions, with just two emotions, LOVE and ANGER, signaling to you who is GOOD and who is BAD. When an event or person makes an impression on you, you don’t attune yourself to the full rainbow of your emotions and sensations – uncertainty, hopefulness, sadness, regret, confusion, worry. You tell a preemptive story that’s allowed only one outcome: “I feel love so this person is good and pure!” “I feel angry so this person is bad and wronged me!”

From this verdict-oriented, extreme perspective — which probably began as a way to protect you from harm, but has transformed into something that hurts you — you aren’t open to more nuanced signs and more cautious or moderate actions. Even though your emotions are overflowing, the truth is that you’re working from a faulty intellectual premise — People are good or bad, deserving of love or destined to hurt/ destroy me. You want to stand up for your pure, emotional self so you let your baby wander into a burning house. And when your baby comes back with severe burns, you can’t handle the shame of having made a mistake, so you announce that the burning house must have legs, it must be preying on innocent babies, it must be a rapacious dragon disguised as a house.

Inside your mind, in the folds of your storytelling about the world, everything that hurts you has to be declared BAD or else YOU ARE BAD.

That’s shame. Shame fuels the construction of these black-and-white perspectives, and reduces all more subtle and helpful and nuanced emotions to love and hate, enthusiastic embrace and punishment, enmeshment and permanent rejection and disavowal.

One thing that I try very hard to repeat around here, even when I’m celebrating the pure, adorable, passionate, delights of THE BIG BABY INSIDE ALL OF US, is that we are all fumbling idiots who make huge mistakes and do most things wrong fifty to fifty million times before we finally find our way down some reasonable path. And then we fuck up again, get lost again, lose the thread again. And no matter where we are on any path, we deserve love and forgiveness. We don’t have to be ashamed of just wanting to feel good, just wanting to know more, just wanting to experience allllllll of our emotions and have adventures and bond with other confused babies.

When you lose that piece of the puzzle and you start to equate HURT with some clear moralistic system of labeling people, places, and things, you enter a rigid state that will slowly kill your baby’s joy. Even though it might feel like you’re keeping your baby safe from the shame of having intense emotions and wanting to explore and caring waaaaay too much about everything, what you’re actually doing is giving your baby freedom to fumble through a big trunk full of automatic weapons and then making your storytelling brain responsible for what happens next.

Your storytelling brain is straining to add up the facts and come up with some clear moral that will keep the baby safe, but the moral isn’t allowed to be “Babies shouldn’t be free to open big trunks that aren’t locked” because then you feel ashamed of yourself for letting that happen. So instead it becomes “Bad humans leave weapons strewn about hoping to incite chaos and spill blood.”

Again, shame is the fuel for this kind of storytelling. Shame tells you that it’s not okay to make any mistakes. Shame says the baby is always right, no matter what happens. Shame says that if you put gentle boundaries around what your baby is allowed to do, you’re stifling your baby’s joy. Shame says that anyone who hurts your baby is evil.

This path is very exhausting and it will make you increasingly neurotic and unhappy. Forcing your storytelling brain to “fix” the things your emotions lead you into is unsustainable because your storytelling will have to identify heroes and villains in order to keep you safe from your own shame. You will spend hours obsessively analyzing what’s wrong about person x or person y. You will lose sleep agonizing over how you got tricked.

But your body, your emotions, your heart, your spirit all wanted to keep you safe from harm and hurt. Your shame squelched these more subtle signals from inside you, because your shame wanted the baby to be right, always pure and right, which is the easiest and simplest solution, the best way out of feeling guilty or embarrassed or weird about who you are.

Now let me be very clear with you: It is VERY HARD not to feel guilty or embarrassed or weird about who you are at every single age and stage in life, no matter who you are, what you have going for you, how you look, how you feel, and how the world around you looks, feels, sounds, and treats you. We live in a world constructed by shame, inhabited by people who are ruled by shame. Go read the Hamptons issue of New York magazine if you doubt me. You don’t do the stupid shit that those people do without being deeply ashamed of what you are.

As a result of the shame that circulates in all environments, everywhere, always, it can be incredibly difficult to understand which part of you is trustworthy and which part of you is humiliating and reckless. It is absolutely natural and normal to choose one idea, one concept, one piece of the larger puzzle and announce THAT’S IT, I AM BIG BABY, I LET BIG BABY ROAM!

One of the big flaws of this column is that I’m forced to lay out lessons about the dangers of shame and self-hatred and warped storytelling BY TELLING STORIES! Now obviously I am the biggest baby and the most stubborn, punitive storyteller of all time, thanks to my own history of shame and moralism and relentless analysis. But after years of diving into these issues, what I’ve discovered is that as long as you’re paralyzed by fear of vulnerability, as long as you suspect that everyone who dislikes you is right, as long as you’re terrified of your own desires and needs and huge dreams, then your stringent, self-protective, shame-driven, intellectual defense mechanisms will be at the wheel.

Instead of letting your neurotic mind take over, the answer is to love THE WHOLE COMPLICATED BABY, not just the effusive, in-love baby and the angry, enraged, rejected baby. Letting the baby wander back into a hammer-throwing joint just because the baby enjoyed throwing hammers for a second there is NOT loving the baby. Loving the baby is listening to the baby when the baby hesitates.

That means you have to address your shame. Addressing your shame includes noticing how often it enters your senses — when you feel like you’re either good or bad and nothing in between, when you feel like making mistakes means you’re bad, when you feel like being rejected means someone else is bad. Shame says that vulnerability or fear are signs that someone is doing something bad to you.

But shame is wrong. Pain is normal and inevitable when you’re open and exploring. Fear is a part of being alive and full. Feeling vulnerable is an everyday occurrence that does not need to be corrected, analyzed, or avoided. Having desires that are bigger than you can stand and dreams that might never come true are a sign that you’re fully awake and aware of your own sensations and needs.

When you listen closely and love your baby completely, without shame, and keep your baby safe from harm when your baby is uncertain, it will sound more like this: “I feel hopeful but hesitant, so I’ll take a minute to reflect on that.” “I feel worried and contemplative, so I will write down my thoughts.” “I feel hurt, so I will be patient with this hurt and see what it tells me about where I am.”

One thing people often misunderstand about babies is this: Babies need a lot of quiet time. They don’t want people playing happy songs and shaking toys in their faces around the clock. Everyone thinks babies want constant talk and stimulation. You can see it in online videos, where parents fire nonstop questions at their toddlers and their toddlers keep looking tired, like “I just answered a question, now I’m still thinking about that fucking question and you want more out of me?!!” Parents often don’t respect their kids’ slow processing, their need for down time, their desire for silence and rest, their drive to just float and observe and reflect.

Give your baby more respect, more space, more silence. Let your baby decide slowly. Stop forming quick morals and lessons from your experiences. Learn to hesitate when you’re not sure. Give yourself the right to say no simply because you just don’t know yet.

You’ve granted yourself the right to say yes when you’re excited and no when you’re pissed off or hurt. Now give yourself the right to take your time, to say maybe but not now, to go away and come back, to miss the window of opportunity, to think it over a little longer. Give yourself the right to hang back, to make zero impacts on other people, to underwhelm, to observe in silence, to feel everything while impressing no one.

And when your baby is overwhelmed, keep the storyteller out of the picture. Don’t solve puzzles. Don’t fix so-called negative emotions. Tell yourself: “No matter why this happened or where it leads next, I have a right to just be right here, in an uncertain state, feeling upset or off-balance, noticing my hurt and also noticing my shame, noticing that I’m embarrassed by simple sensations, noticing that I don’t want to let myself take in other people’s views of me, because that would be too vulnerable.”

You might not want any information or feedback from other people, ever. That’s a side effect of that black-and-white storytelling and a side effect of shame: You have very porous boundaries so you develop incredibly solid, rigid, impenetrable stories to protect yourself because everywhere you go, you receive too much information, you know too much, you feel everything, you’re sensitive. You love the world so much as a big baby, but you feel like you have to reject the world over and over or you’ll get hurt.

Letting information or feedback in, to you, means feeling rejected and small and hurt by others. That’s your shame talking, telling you that your job is to “fix” anything that anyone dislikes. Instead, you can simply slow down and notice things without taking action or analyzing why other people seem to feel the way they do. You can simply watch and consider and reflect on what reality looks like and how that affects what you value and treasure – if it does.

The beauty of big babies is that we are constantly learning, but we need protection. We need to care for and respect our own limits. You can’t just drop your baby off at Disneyland and drive away. You can’t just abandon yourself to one babyish concept —that a loving person will love you forever and a rejecting person is bad and should be rejected forever — and then force your mind to sort through all of the people around you like they’re simple machines.

Even your big baby is smarter than that. Your big baby notices when people are complicated or hesitant or reckless. Your big baby knows when to hang back and watch and learn more. She has compassion for people and she also has enough compassion for herself that she can forgive her own mistakes. Listen to your baby and respect your baby’s full range of moods.

Your body, heart, and spirit also have knowledge that they want to share with you —when you’re quiet, when you’re sad, when you’re alone, when your imagination is wandering through the wilderness. You need a lot of different kinds of nuanced understanding of the world in order to grow into a full, rich, satisfied, delighted, and sometimes still confused and angry adult. You need a lot of patience with yourself and others. Instead of always forcing your intellect to find the MORAL to every emotional situation, so that you’ll always be safe from harm, you need to accept that you are simply flawed, uncertain, and vulnerable and you are crawling your way forward, every day. So is everyone else.

Practice patience. Stay attuned to what you need. Cultivate compassion. Feel your fear and respect it. Be a flawed, slow, silent, hesitant being, out in the open. Notice your shame but don’t do its bidding. Listen to your spirit’s wisdom instead. Open yourself to the full rainbow of your sensations.

You are more than just a big baby. Don’t overthink your anger or create permanent legislation from it. Accept anger and pain and notice it and let it exist. Keep digging for more self-knowledge and more self-respect.

You are more brilliant than you realize, and more satisfied and full and thrilled and relaxed than your busy mind realizes. Honor everything that you are.

Polly

---

Thanks for reading Ask Polly! Send your letters to askpolly@protonmail.com. Ask Polly publishes 1-2x a week for paid subscribers. Your subscriptions are deeply appreciated!