Beamer

Last week I walked into the Sacramento Tesla service center with a broken seat. The service rep offered a loaner. What kind did I want?

I have a Model Y. I said another Model Y would be fine. The boys have space with it.

She didn't nod.

“Or we can do a Model 3, if that's all you have. We can make it work.”

She looked at me with a coy little grin.

“Or a Cybertruck?”

I said it goofily. Innocently. Excitedly. The word arrived on its own. She started nodding, like I'd figured out the answer. They had one. Brand new. They hadn't loaned it out yet.

I convinced myself to do it because the boys would love it. That was the justification. There was more to it. The truth is something in me wanted to drive it. I didn't know that in advance, because for years I'd been projecting my own disdain for douchebags onto the truck. I didn't want to be perceived as one. So the desire lived underneath, where I couldn't see it.

Some context, in case you're reading this from somewhere else.

I live in Davis, California. A small college town in the Sacramento Valley that prides itself on being progressive and friendly.

Driving a Cybertruck in Davis goes over about as well as you'd expect.

People here hate Elon. They'll tell you. There are also, I'd guess, more Teslas per capita in Davis than almost anywhere outside the Bay Area. The town is full of his cars. They just pretend they aren't his.

People have been mean-spirited to me. Not aggressive. Cold. Glares at crosswalks. A tightened mouth at the farmers market. An “oh, how could you” look I'm not used to in this town. The assumption, as best I can tell, is that I'm wealthy and disregarding and one of them.

The Cybertruck isn't mine. It's a free loaner. Tesla gave it to me while my actual car is in the shop. My actual car is a used 2021 Model Y with 75,000 miles on it. Roughly a $20,000 vehicle. The truck is glass and metal and plastic. I'm a human sitting inside it. The rest is projection.

Projection is what you do when you can't look at something in yourself. You take it and put it on someone else. The truck is just the wall it lands on.

Or maybe I'm projecting now. Maybe nobody's glaring at anything. Maybe I'm reading disdain into faces that are just faces, because I've already told myself a story about who sees me and how. That's how projection works. It doesn't care who's doing the casting. It only knows light is going somewhere.

I get it. I've been that guy.

Cybertrucks have been on the road a couple of years. For most of that time, every time one rolled past me I thought the same things. Little dick syndrome. Daddy issues. Compensation. Look-at-me. I judged those drivers harder than I've ever judged anyone. I didn't have to meet them. The truck did the telling.

Then I drove one for ten days.

It is an engineering masterpiece. I'm not being contrarian. Most of what makes the truck good isn't on the spec sheet. It's smooth. Quiet. Strong. Safe. Powerful. You feel it in everything the truck does. Somebody made this because they wanted to make it, not because the market demanded it. That's rare. That's the signature of care.

Which means the story I'd been telling myself about the drivers was never really about the drivers.

It was about me.

Jung had a word for this. Shadow. The parts of yourself you can't admit, so you find them in other people and hate them there. What we can't claim, we condemn.

Robert A. Johnson wrote Owning Your Own Shadow. His argument is that every quality you were told was unacceptable goes into a bag you drag behind you. Over a lifetime the bag gets heavy. And when you meet someone who lets one of those qualities show, you find yourself strangely gripped. Sometimes you hate them. Sometimes you idolize them. Either way, what you're seeing is your own disowned material, blinking back at you in a human face.

His name for the disowned good is golden shadow. The qualities you can't claim in yourself that you find luminous in other people. The ones you put on a pedestal. The ones you tell yourself you don't have.

Projection isn't the problem. Projection is the mechanism. You will always project. The question is whether you're conscious of what you're casting, and what kind of light you're casting with.

In Human Design, I'm a Projector. A Projector's gift is seeing other people clearly and reflecting them back to themselves. Not to drive the action. To read the room.

A projector is also a device that beams. The German word for it is Beamer. A loanword from English, but a more logical one, because that's what a projector does. It beams.

I aspire to beam golden shadow. When I'm conscious and in my highest self, I see people at their best and reflect it back. Not flattery. Recognition.

I don't always hit it. Sometimes I beam dark. Sometimes I cast fear or judgment or my own disowned piece right onto someone else, and I don't see I'm doing it until much later. The device will beam whatever film you put in it. The work is choosing the film.

If I can cast gold onto you, Davis can cast dark onto me. The mechanism is the same. Only the film is different.

Everyone who hates Elon wants to be Elon.

Not the man. The position. The reach. The resources to build whatever occurs to you on a Tuesday and have it exist in the world by Friday. Every day under capitalism is an attempt to accumulate more of what he has. The hatred isn't against power. The hatred is against the guy who has the thing we're all chasing and won't pretend he isn't.

The Cybertruck is his most iconic object. So the truck becomes the thing. The projection lands on the vehicle, because the vehicle is easier to glare at than the unclaimed hunger inside the glarer.

I was one of those people. Until I sat in the driver's seat and noticed the seat was really well designed.

So here's what I've planted on this New Moon. What I want to grow through this Flower Moon.

Claim it.

Whatever you're projecting, pull it back and look at it. The disdain, the envy, the scorn, the admiration you won't own. All of it. The thing you can't stop judging is a thing you haven't claimed. The person you can't stop admiring is a person you haven't let yourself become.

Drive the truck you want to drive. Say the thing you've been waiting for someone else to say. Build the company. Wear the coat. Own the hunger.

Once you've claimed your own shadow, the gold and the dark, you can hold a cleaner mirror for somebody else's.

I'm planting a world where we beam each other's gold back.