Get Curious
During Catholic school, whenever the season of Lent rolled around, my friends and I would have the same discussion about what we were giving up or sacrificing for 40 days. While my friends laid down chocolate or TV or listened to the Top 10 at 10 pm on Friday nights, my Lenten practice was the same every year until my sophomore year of high school: for 40 days, I tried to be nice to MB.
MB notoriously got on my last nerve. Danced on my last nerve. Did swan dives off of it? MB pushed my buttons, and every single time, I reacted — except for the 40 days of the year leading up to Easter, when instead of trying to mend our relationship, I just ignored her and declared it a sacrifice and a spiritual win.
I remember my Dad asking me my sophomore year, as I declared my “niceness” intentions yet again, if I was curious about what it was in MB that I saw in myself. “Curiosity is a catalyst for transformation, Sugar.” (My dad called me Sugar.) I think I responded by turning up Madonna on the car radio a little louder, but that question landed hard in my heart and gut. Was there something there? Did I see a little me in MB? I did not have the capacity at 15 years old to take those thoughts any further, and I spent that Lent doing what I had done every year before.
MB’s family moved at the end of the year, and so ended my tradition of 40 days of passive aggression.
I’ve been thinking about MB lately and how I wish I could offer her and myself deeper work than a forced smile in the hallway and telling everyone how exceptional I was at Lent. Time, life, experience, wisdom, prefrontal cortex development. They all contribute to that. But so does sobriety and the gift of curiosity.
Removing alcohol from my life has given me access to the shadowy parts of myself that I tried to suppress and hide for so long. Believe me, this is not why I wanted to get sober. I wanted to ditch booze because I was tired of hating myself and how I felt every time I drank. But over time, without a numbing agent, there is space for me to investigate the emotions and reactions I observe within myself.
It is in this space that curiosity becomes a synonym for compassion. Where I would berate myself with a list of flaws and failings after an experience of rage or jealousy, I can gently ask myself questions, dig deeper, wonder, pause, reflect, and respond. Where my drinking kept the emotions I perceived as dark turned inward, causing harm to others and myself, sobriety offers an unearthing and the spaciousness to bring my shadows into the light.
As my sober muscles get stronger and stronger, this is the work I commit to more and more. Curiosity leads me to empathy, understanding, radical honesty, and the cultivation of authenticity.
Curiosity leads me to the deep work of paying attention, mercy, and healing. Curiosity is a catalyst for transformation.
Curiosity leads me home.