Dear Heidi,

I don’t trust myself to make decisions about my own life.

It’s like I keep wandering into situations that I eventually realize I don’t actually want to be in. Workwise, relationship-wise, it applies to pretty much every area.

I know that I experienced early emotional neglect and this contributes to my challenges. I’ve chosen a lot of things in life from a place of ‘what seems to make sense’ rather than from a place of ‘what do I want’ and ironically this has resulted in a lot of things that neither make sense, nor are what I want.

I say yes to a lot of things by default because I do like how it feels to give other people what they want from me.

It’s sort of like: if someone likes me, my brain automatically goes, “Well they like me, so maybe I’m supposed to like them back.” Or if someone offers me a job, I start trying to make the job make sense in my head: i.e. I think about whether the salary is okay or if the commute is doable and if yes, my brain goes, ‘Sure, I could probably do it.’ I might not have a clear feeling either way but I can come up with enough reasons to say yes.

Then I go ahead with things and it’s only later, once it would be hard or embarrassing to change my mind, that I realize I didn’t actually want the thing. I just didn’t have a reason not to take it. So I end up feeling trapped, and guilty about feeling trapped because I was the one who chose the thing ‘trapping’ me.

It’s like I spend a lot of my life sitting around waiting for something to feel like an obvious ‘Yes,’ and almost nothing does, so I just go along with whatever is happening.

I was watching some of your old Youtube videos where you talk about finding your body’s ‘Yes’s and ‘No’s. This sounds like what I need but I have no idea how to do it.

I keep filling up my life with low-quality slop and then resenting myself for it.

What do you think I should do?

Signed,
Wrong Again

Dear Wrong Again,

I have a friend who teaches a form of meditation called Metta (loving-kindness).

It is where you sit on a mat every day and try to summon up kind, generous feelings towards various people: people you love, people you don’t particularly love, people you’re not even sure you want to wish well, and also yourself.

One day I was taking a slow, meandering hike through the Colorado mountains with this friend, who I will call Tom, and another friend, who I will call Ann.

Ann mused aloud, ‘I’ve always struggled with Metta.’

She explained her challenges and resistances. The ways she would sit down to feel and would encounter only the part of herself that wanted to feel Metta, but couldn’t. It felt like an internal search party more than anything else. Then she would start increasingly feeling defective, sitting there on the mat, wondering why – with a sense of increasing urgency – everyone else seemed capable of accessing this state of being and she was not.

Tom listened patiently to her describing the situation.

He replied: ‘That’s not unusual. It also doesn’t mean you can’t practice Metta. In your meditative practice, you can just spend time with the part of yourself that is searching for it. Or the part that wants to find it but can’t.’

*

Some of us have a hard time separating our desires from their realizations.

I know because I am like this too.

Historically, I have not known if I’m attracted to someone until I have been pretty close to 100% certain that they are attracted to me. Then, I let myself check my own feelings.

I haven’t known whether I’m happy until I’ve been as close to 100% sure as I can be that it’s okay to notice my sadness: then I might tentatively allow myself to question whether something might be off.

This patterning is not uncommon for those of us who experienced early emotional neglect. We internalize that emotions are inconveniences to others and so we figure the right time to acknowledge them is once we (a) have an explicit container for them, and/or (b) once we have already figured out what to do about them.

This strategy eliminates a lot of the messy middle portions of feeling: the parts where we are maybe a yes, maybe a no. Maybe interested, maybe not. Maybe wanting to invest more, maybe wanting to pull back – depending on what we learn when we try out a few different experiments and notice how the results make us feel.

Emotional neglect does not teach us how to hang out in this part of the process. It teaches us that ambivalence is a burden to others. And so the best thing to do when it arises is shove any ‘Maybe’ that we have uncovered into the closest fit category – ‘Yes’ if it vibes more like yes, ‘No’ if it vibes more like no.

Then, we move forward as though this ‘Maybe,’ dressed up in much more definitive clothing, has been the genuine answer all along.

*

It sounds to me like you are not totally out of touch with your emotions, despite what you seem to believe.

You have an internal program that already knows:

When I feel a strong, resounding ‘Yes,’ I will follow it.

When I feel a strong, resounding ‘No,’ I will follow it.

That’s great.

What you’re lacking is a process for getting to those Yes’s and No’s – other than hoping that the events and opportunities of your life show up already crystallized into either form.

Most ‘Yes’s and ‘No’s do not show up crystallized. They first show up as ‘Maybe’s that would like our attention.

The ‘Maybe’s might seem like failures in discernment, but they are not. They are the natural predecessors of it.

*

Think of a ‘Maybe’ as an incomplete set of data. For example: A person likes you! You are not sure whether you like them back.

Perhaps you have a couple of data points. You like the way they look. You like their laugh. You don’t feel fully comfortable around them yet. The conversation doesn’t always flow.

You are probably a competent enough scientist to infer that you need a few more data points to reach a conclusion. But you may be assuming that the only way to get them is through observation: to keep searching yourself for the hidden answer to whether you like this person or you don’t. This might take months – or even years! But perhaps they are standing in front of you, wanting an answer right now. And you are only on your third date.

There is a very important thing to keep in mind here: this is not a static experiment.

One of the variables is you.

*

Emotional neglect can accidentally train us to approach questions like these as though they are solely evaluative: Do I like this? Is this right for me? Is this person interesting? While forgetting that we are active participants in what emerges between us and another person, and in the shape of the relationship we’re forming with them.

A boring person may suddenly become fascinating when they are asked the right questions. A self-conscious person may become an uninhibited one when they arrive in conditions that feel safe.

People are not static. Our relationships with them aren’t either. The same is true of almost anything we find ourselves in relationship to – workplaces, living situations, friendships. We are always participating in the dynamics we are trying to understand, even when we imagine ourselves to be merely observing them.

How things play out is heavily influenced by things like: the questions we ask, the conditions we create, the things we actively make room for, or don’t. It is also influenced by how we advocate for ourselves.

Maybe someone isn’t asking us enough questions. What happens if we tell them we love it when they get curious about us?

Maybe we always feel rushed around someone. What happens if we suggest a slower, more laid-back date?

Maybe we notice ourselves growing passive inside a relationship. What happens if we take charge and started inviting someone into the parts of our lives that we feel confident about and excited by?

None of these experiments are about forcing a ‘Maybe’ to become a ‘Yes.’ They are about allowing the ‘Maybe’ to be a living, breathing exploration instead of a static problem we attempt to solve only through introspection.

*

Let’s talk about the claim we’re not making inside all of this experimentation. The claim is not: everything is right for us.

Some things feel intuitively better the moment they arrive in our lives. The job that naturally highlights our aptitudes. The person we can talk to for hours. Most of us can instantly recognize these things and usually we are not wrong.

Some people and situations may feel something like 70% correct. Even 80% or 90% if we have good luck. But those numbers do not stay static either.

Fifteen years after something felt 90% right – perhaps after we’ve confidently pledged our lives away to someone at the altar – we might wake up one morning and realize that the fit now feels more like 50%. Life keeps shifting. So does our compatibility with what we’ve filled it up with.

*

Choosing correctly, for most of us, requires far more than a one-time act of discernment.

Even after we have chosen well, we have to keep finding out what ‘right’ looks like right now.

We take the 50% that’s dropped from 90 and we start working with it again.

We negotiate someone else’s current needs, wants and desires against our own. We go searching for the points where they intersect, perhaps in places they once did not.

From there, we build. We put our cards on the table, again. We run new experiments we haven’t tried. We introduce more of what makes us feel alive. We notice what can be revived through participation, and what remains wrong no matter how thoughtfully we try to engage it.

*

Loving-kindness does not magically show up for us by sitting on a mat.

A loving relationship doesn’t either. Nor a wildly fulfilling life.

All of these end states require something much more dynamic from us. They require the willingness to stay present with what is not yet there. To become curious about it. To experiment with the conditions around it. To notice what changes when we do.

Sometimes, after enough attention, new shapes begin to take form.

Some of them look more like ‘Yes.’ Some of them more like ‘No.’

But this process is, I believe, the part you have been missing, dear Wrong Again.

You’ve been waiting for your preferences to announce themselves before your life can truly begin.

But your life is beginning all the time.

All it needs is your willing participation.

All my love,
Heidi

I recently re-read Steven Pressfield’s ‘The War Of Art.’ In it, Pressfield encourages the reader to think of Resistance (to one’s creative work) as an actively malevolent force: one that is stalking us, tracking us, clawing its way into our consciousness and wanting us specifically to fail.

This view made sense to me. Not because I think it is correct, but because I believe that it works.

*

I often joke that to flourish creatively, you need to have a crush and an enemy.

An enemy is someone who you believe is working against you: trying to sabotage you, hoping you’ll fail.

A crush is someone who you believe you could love/love you: someone who might offer relief from your loneliness, may even be hoping to do so.

Both of these forces exist, are highly motivating and to some extent, hold true to their promises.

There is probably someone out there who would be delighted to love each of us. Maybe someone whose number is already in our phones. Someone with a job, a favorite mug, a preferred side of the bed they’d like us to share.

I would also bet substantial money that there are people out there - equally specific people, with home addresses and first and last names - who would be delighted to see each of us fail. Who may even want to participate in it.

Would I call the latter group of people evil?

At one point in my life, I would not. I would have called this claim wrong and dramatic - skewing reality by mentalizing poorly about intentions.

At this point, I’m not as sure.

*
There are beliefs that are useful long before they are technically correct.

A child who thinks something is chasing them will run harder than a child who merely knows they should hurry.

*

I can see ‘evil’ as a useful shorthand. Thinking of a person or an institution or an entity’s inner organisation as consciously motivated to cause harm helps us to choose our actions wisely in situations where the predictable outcome of a person’s or an institution’s or an entity’s actions do, in fact, end up causing harm. Patterns of harm, even. Predictable ones.

People like to say that the purpose of a system is what it does. But is the property of a system what it does?

This may be an important distinction. Even if it does not seem like it on the surface.

*

I work in the field of psychology. Specifically, I run a Youtube channel. In recent years, my field (of educational psychology Youtube videos) has exploded with content about narcissism.

Titles such as ‘It takes a Super-Empath to Outsmart A Narcissist’ and ‘What’s Up With The Narcissist’s Eyebrows’ garnish millions of views. On one hand, this is genuinely funny. On the other, I believe that the characterization of personality disorders as it currently exists in the public zeitgeist is preventing people from both realizing they may be suffering from one, as well as recognizing that they might be suffering at the hands of someone else who is.

As it so often, unfortunately, goes.

*

When I first entered formal education in the field of psychology, I was seventeen. I thought the whole field was bogus.

‘These things aren’t disorders,’ I thought to myself, learning about OCD, psychosis, generalized anxiety disorder, depression. ‘Me and everyone around me acts like that.’

A decade later, I thought to myself, oh.

*

For much longer than I have been interested in psychology, I have been ambivalent about the concept of evil.

I was raised religious and told I was operating evilly too many times for the word to lodge itself inside of my mind as a serious claim. I was told I was evil when throwing a temper tantrum. Evil when fighting with my brother. Evil when looking at my father the wrong way, with the wrong facial expression, on a day when he was already grumpy.

In these states, I was aware of something simple and obvious: my behavior was not organized, coherently and elegantly, around the end goal of causing harm. For the most part, I was five years old. I was being annoying. I wanted a cookie.

*

Over the years, I’ve met some challenging people. Some of those people have been dangerous. Others consciously sadistic in nature.

I have heard people admit to taking pleasure in the experience of others begging them to be treated with basic dignity, or joy at the thought of causing violence – both physical and sexual in nature.

I have met people who I feel certain would fit the diagnostic criteria for a personality disorder, though I am not personally licensed to diagnose those.

What I have not met are any people who wake up in the mornings and think to themselves, ‘Time to do evil!

Time to torture, for the love of torturing!’

I am sure that there are a select few psychopaths out there who may have this orientation. I suspect that there are far more, deeply troubled individuals who wake up and cause large amounts of pain and frustration in others anyway – under a distorted mental model that sounds much more like ‘They deserve it.’ Or ‘They made me do this.’ Or ‘Actually, what I’m doing is right.’

These are often cognitive distortions. Many may originate from trauma (depending how far we’re willing to trace the origins back). Many of the people who operate from them might happily behave more honestly or more compassionately if their psychological development had allowed them greater conscious access to experiences they had learned to exclude from awareness: dependency, vulnerability, shame, fear and need.

This is an important distinction for a number of reasons.

One, it helps us resist dehumanizing the person who’s caused harm. This matters for accuracy’s sake.

Two, it matters in personal decision-making. We tend to give people a moral pass if we believe that their behavior is not consciously chosen, but is an unconscious outflow of early wounding.

Through this lens, whether we identify a person as ‘evil’ depends less on the inner workings of any particular person and more on how competent we are at tracing their tendencies backwards using pattern recognition.

Low psychological pattern-recognition perceives more evil.

High psychological pattern-recognition perceives less.

Both of these frames are sort of wrong. One of them is functionally useful.

*

Where exactly can we say that malevolence is located if everyone comprising the thing is individually non-malevolent?

This is not a rhetorical question: it has an answer, in a technical sense. We call these things emergent properties: properties that exist at the level of the whole, produced by the way their individual parts interact, despite the quality residing in none of the parts on their own.

A traffic jam is an emergent property. We have cars. We have highways. We have workdays that start at 8am, across a wide range of companies within a given city.

No one car causes a jam, or means to.

Traffic jams go on happening anyway.

*
Sometimes when we are confused about a system’s moral properties, it is because we are accurately perceiving malevolence, but attempting to locate it at the wrong level of organization.

*

Let us think about this one more way.

Imagine a nutrition bar company where nobody wants the customers to develop an addiction. The product manager wants customer engagement. The designer wants a frictionless interface. The executives want quarterly growth. The investor wants increasing returns. Every node in the system has an intelligible, non-sadistic motive. Each employee sleeps soundly at night.

The customers become addicted. The system is optimized for it.

Where is the desire for addiction located?

Nowhere.

And yet, if we want to predict what the system will do next, we may be better served by treating it as though the system wants addicted customers.

Functionally, it does.

*

One of the oldest feelings I am familiar with is the feeling of being held in contempt by someone I love.

The feeling is emotionally disorienting, though I have generally understood, intellectually, that the contempt is not actually about me.

There was the adult who, when I was a child and screamed that I hated him, would scream back that he hated me too.

There was the man in my early thirties who described his fantasy of beating me up. This was part of his philosophy of ‘honest relating.’ He described wanting to see the blood pour from my face, hearing the crack of my nose as he’d break it. He laughed.

There was the man a couple years later who would send me voice notes listing my flaws. Who, when I told him that this felt like bullying, replied, ‘Some people deserve to be bullied. You’re one of them.’

I grew up in a very cold climate. I consciously prefer life on the beach. But when I’m traveling through a country that has winter, some part of me still recognizes it as home.

*

Imagine a person who does not want to hurt others.

Their caregivers shame or reject them for displaying weakness.

Their self-concept organizes around being strong, competent and difficult to injure. Their attachment system continues to motivate them toward closeness.

As an adult, this person forms attachments. Sometimes with people they genuinely love.

When an attachment figure hurts them, several systems activate at once. Their attachment system motivates them to preserve the bond. Their threat system motivates them to avoid experiencing themselves as weak or injured. Contempt offers a potential resolution: the injury can be attributed to a defect in the other person instead. They are weak. Pathetic. Beneath respect.

The relationship is preserved. The person’s self-concept is preserved. The other person is repeatedly degraded.

Where is the malicious desire for the other person’s destruction located?

Nowhere.

And yet. If that person wants to predict what the relational system will do next, they may be better served by treating it as though the desire for the destruction of their dignity were there.

Functionally, it is.

*

At some point in the narcissism phase of the Internet, I think, ‘Contempt is not malicious or evil.

It is an emergent property of complex psychological wounding.

These people are just five, psychologically. They are annoying. They want the adult equivalent of a cookie. They don’t know how to ask for it properly.’

I notice the impact on my life after being close to people who hold me in contempt.

I think to myself, years later, ‘Oh.’

*

The word ‘victim’ is a complicated one to unfold.

Let us examine it through the lens of narcissism. I do not think that those with narcissistic wounds think of themselves as victims solely because they are operating from psychological distortions.

I think their psychological distortions create a genuine form of victimhood, albeit not a particularly sympathizable one.

Imagine sitting in a perfectly safe environment where your life would become infinitely better if you could be honest, ask for help and admit you had been wrong.

Imagine you have a complex structure in your ego that does not even allow you to perceive those things as parts of you — your wrongness, your fallibility, your need.

When needing reassurance, you experience yourself as angry. When needing help, you experience the other person as incompetent for failing to anticipate it. When feeling dependent on someone, you experience them as controlling for having something you need.

Everyone else (so it seems) is supported. Everyone else is in love. Everyone else is calm and happy and not all clenched-up or distressed by the furious comparisons they are compulsively making between themselves and others, while somehow always ending up overlooked, underestimated or misunderstood in some new, unique way.

To be blocked off from parts of what allows us to experience the whole of the human experience honestly and directly is indeed a sad thing.

Sometimes we see this in others up close. We recognize it as sad. We think, this means I do not have to protect myself from it.

We are wrong.

*

Imagine you buy a cactus because you like the way it looks.

It is a cute little cactus. You understand conceptually that it has spikes.

One day it begins falling, and you grab it on reflex.

You bleed.

*

If we believe that evil must be intentional for us to protect ourselves against it, we can end up in a number of perilous situations.

We may wake up, over and over, next to the man who will someday break our faces. Laugh sadistically at the sound of our noses going ‘crunch’ under his oversized fist.

We may reproduce with the person who believes that bullying is an acceptable way to treat those he believes are pathetic: who will pass this philosophy onto our children, who will learn to hold themselves in contempt.

We may perceive true vulnerability in these characters, and we may very well be right about what we see. We may perceive their complexity, their flaws. The ways they were not taught to love the parts of themselves that are hurting. The way their psychology organized around this, against their will.

We will see the things about them that are adamantly loveable despite it. Sometimes in agonizing, heartbreaking detail. The way they bring us glasses of water when we’re locked in to work at our desks. The way they like to be spooned through the night, even though they are a hulking six foot two and we are a stocky five four. The way they love us when there is nothing stopping them from it. The way they clean up the kitchen without being asked.

We will make justifications for these people because they are so clearly, so obviously, not evil. Not plotting against us in cold blood. Not cruel to us when they’re able to not be. We will think this means it’s safe to be close.

*

There are some patterns that can ruin our lives.

In relationships that become organized around contempt, attempts at closeness produce injury. Injury produces contempt. Contempt damages the person being held in it. Their attempt to repair the damage creates another opportunity for closeness. And another opportunity for injury.

No participant needs to want the cycle.

The cycle can preserve itself anyway.

*

If we think of good as that which permits life to develop toward its fullest expression, then perhaps evil is, functionally, not only that which causes pain.

Perhaps it is that which reliably diminishes what might otherwise have flourished.

*

One night outside a dive bar in Toronto, my closest friends and I discuss the ways we’d sabotage each other if we were enemies in a state of war.

One group member is highly intelligent. He is cunning, perceptive, sharp. He would make an excellent military intelligence officer. He also has an overflow of empathy.

We agree that for this friend, we would put him in charge of a vulnerable group of people. Task him with keeping them safe.

‘That wouldn’t hurt me,’ he tells us.

We say, ‘No. But it would distract you from being a massive asset elsewhere.’

He takes a long drag of his cigarette.

A little while later, he says, ‘Oh.’

Dear Heidi,

I am afraid that my artwork is going to shit. This is a problem for me because I make my living from art. I am a documentary filmmaker.

I spent the past few years in a relationship with someone who was belittling about what I did. The contempt for it was never overt, per se, but it was chronic and pointed and persistent. He would not watch any of my films. He said he was afraid he wouldn’t like them, and then it would be awkward between us. He would also intermittently bring up other documentary filmmakers he liked and then hold up his hands in mock accusation, ‘Sorry for liking them!’ He would say. As though he wanted my anger in response.

He never came right out and said that my work wasn’t serious enough or sophisticated enough or that these other filmmakers were simply better than me. But it felt distinctly like those were the conclusions he wanted me to draw.

I know better than to take the bait around things like this. My ex had been wildly unsuccessful in his own career and I was able to shake off his disdain for mine as jealousy. But I do have to admit that it got to me. Living with him, I became uncharacteristically self-conscious about my work. I started triple-checking everything I did: wondering if my ideas were good enough, or sophisticated enough, or asking interesting enough questions, like the ones that other (better!) documentary filmmakers were asking. I became embarrassed by work I would not previously have thought to be embarrassed by. For this reason and a few others, my career began declining while we were together.

In the eight months since we’ve been broken up, my creativity has come rushing back (thank God!), and many opportunities have come with it.

Then something happened this month. A film that I got hired to work on – a project I am very excited about – also hired one of my ex’s close friends to be a part of the creative team.

This man, who I’ll call Frank in this letter, is someone I feel confident I can be professional around. He’s good at his job, I’m good at mine. I do not worry we cannot collaborate.

There’s just one problem, which exists entirely inside my own head. Ever since Frank came on board, my work has returned to shit. It’s like I cannot stop seeing every move I make through the lens of my contemptuous ex-boyfriend – a habit I thought I’d shaken after he left my life. But there he is: in my awareness again.

I imagine him and Frank meeting up for beers and mocking all of my ideas after I pitch them in meetings. This kicks off a self-fulfilling cycle where I feel self-conscious during the meetings. In my self-consciousness, I pitch bad ideas. It’s like my brain can suddenly only think of concepts are trite, unsophisticated and dramatic. The kind I imagine my ex would expect of me, but not a more respectable filmmaker. And then I feel embarrassed for having connected myself to them at all.

To compensate, I have revenge fantasies. I picture myself making the world’s greatest documentary, a film so perfect and impressive that the very same filmmakers my ex used to worship would start publicly worshipping me. I get so caught up in wanting this reality that my entire creative field freezes – no idea feels good enough to do that and so I get started on nothing at all.

Please help me - HOW can I get out of this funk? I am driving myself mad inside my mind! I LOVE what I do and have no doubt that I’ll eventually find a way to reconnect with it. I just need to get this asshole’s energy out of my big, beautiful field of awareness.

Signed,

The Artist Formerly Known as Confident

Dear Artist,

I do not think you are embarrassed. I think you are humiliated.

The distinction seems slight, but matters here.

Embarrassment happens when we reveal something true about ourselves in a way we wish we had not. Think: reaching out to shake someone’s hand, miscalculating the timing, and ending up poking them in the stomach by accident. Your intentions were clear and straightforward. They just did not coordinate their arrival into reality effectively.

Humiliation is something different. Humiliation happens when something true about us is assigned a degrading explanation that isn’t true.

Think: someone jutting their hand into your stomach and then insisting that it was you who lurched towards them. Now, you have two people standing in a room with two different explanations for what just happened.

This serves a clear function for the person doing the humiliating. Instead of standing awkwardly in reality – with their hand overextended, responsible for whatever feelings that brings up – they get to hand their shameful feelings over, packaged neatly into a false explanation, for someone else to take on and wear.

Sometimes we refuse these explanations when they’re handed to us. Other times we don’t. Other times we squeeze our experience into ill-fitting identities that stifle us but do not threaten those close to us.

It is a cheap route to securing attachment.

It is also the first step in making bad art.

*

Here are some facts I think we can reasonably agree on, Artist:

(1) You are probably a pretty good filmmaker. If you were not, you would probably not be getting hired to work on so many interesting projects.

(2) Your ex-boyfriend was having some sort of reaction to your filmmaking that didn’t have much to do with your films. I don’t know whether that reaction was envy, insecurity or a secret third thing we’ll never know. What I do know is that people who feel at ease with other people’s successes generally don’t refuse to look at said people’s work while finding myriad ways to remind them of the work they assume they’d like better.

And yet, your system has gotten confused. It has been assigned the humiliating role of Bad Artist and it has learned to play the role with vigour.

The problem is not simply that this role feels bad. The problem is that you have begun responding to it as though it contains useful information.

Embarrassment actually can contain useful information. Humiliation cannot.

Embarrassment is what you might feel if you tried, in complete earnestness - to produce a brilliant film, and then you got it wrong in reasonable ways. Perhaps you asked the wrong question in an interview, used the wrong soundtrack in the trailer or presented a story incorrectly. A level-headed critic would call you out on it. You may feel understandably embarrassed. But the embarrassment would live in reality: it may even contain the seeds of your next great film.

Embarrassment has the capacity to help us tighten the gap between the art we perceive of in our minds and the art we execute in reality.

Humiliation does something else. Humiliation disorganizes us.

When we agree to wear a role that is unflattering and that does not belong to us (in this case, the role of the Bad Artist), we lose access to dignity. Dignity is the capacity to see ourselves as we are. This means seeing not only what we think and what we feel, but also the underlying structures that make those thoughts and feelings make sense.

This matters enormously in making art.

Good ideas do not arrive to most of us inside of structures that already make sense. They show up as images that won’t leave us alone. Or questions we cannot stop asking. Or obsessive sounds or concepts that we turn over and over again in our minds, until we see them from the right angle.

Good ideas, in their earliest forms, do have a tendency to sound dramatic, or sentimental, or trite. It is the work of the dignified artist to help these ideas find their scaffolding. To take their impressions seriously, without immediately assuming they are profound.

We notice something matters to us – why?

And then we stick around long enough to uncover the answer.

We lose access to dignity when we begin organizing our art not around our own perceptions but around the perceptions of the Contemptuous Spectator Who Exists Inside Our Minds. Some of us grow up with these spectators - they take on the voice of our critical, unsatisfied parent, or the teacher who hated our art. Others develop them later - through unfortunate relationship experiences or professional critics who take glee in misrepresenting our intentions.

But when we start operating and seeing our artwork not through our own eyes but through the eyes of this Contemptuous Spectator, the work becomes dead on arrival. We start judging our ideas too early, sticking with them too briefly, neglecting to help them honestly find their footing in reality, or advocate for their own realization.

We assume that if they do not show up fully formed - if their significance is not immediately obvious to us - the ideas lack substance altogether.

I believe this is what’s happening to you in these meetings, Former Artist. You are not suddenly having worse ideas because Frank is in the room. You are losing access to the patient, faithful process through which you would normally take an ordinary, half-formed idea and stick with it until it is realized.

And then suddenly, there you are again: the Bad Artist. The role you have been handed to play.

*

A reasonable counter-response to humiliation is, as you have already mentioned, narcissism. It’s one that many of us begin reaching for when the humiliation has gone on for long enough.

Without the structure of dignity available to cohere our artwork, we cohere ourselves around the commitment to remove anything possibly contemptible from it. This seems to be the only way out.

And so we turn away from sensate experience - from the curious, mysterious origins of creative expression - and we begin constructing an idealized image of art that was never once pathetic. Art that never had to bear any embarrassment. Or any scrutiny, or judgement. We take up a passionate love affair with this kind of creative expression – the kind that does not exist in reality. And so we fail to produce much art at all.

You have already described this fantasy to me, Artist. You want to make the world’s best documentary – one that shatters records, exceeds expectations and forces the filmmakers your ex-boyfriend admired to admire you in turn. You want to produce something so beautiful that nobody would have any case for claiming you to be a Bad Artist ever again.

It is an understandable fantasy. It’s also an impossible assignment to give to a piece of art.

Because it would not be asking your next film to be good. It would be asking it to go backwards in time and resolve the humiliation you endured inside of your last romantic relationship. To prove the role that you were handed by a different, more insecure artist was never really yours to hold at all. To make your internal Contemptuous Spectator re-evaluate things, and hand you a pass to move freely in the creative world once again.

No piece of art can do this for you. Even a record-shattering piece of art.

No piece of art can do this because it’s not how reality works. We do not restore our dignity by jumping through the obstacle courses set up for us by Contempt, and proving ourselves worthy of respect. We restore our dignity by rejecting Contempt’s frame.

*

There is a process for returning to dignity. It is a process you already know. First off, we meet ourselves with curiosity – in the precise places Contempt would abandon us. We listen to ourselves and our ideas. We give our trite and silly whims our attention.

We expose our ideas to potential embarrassment. We do this in service of the ideas, if we are professional artists. We keep our feet planted on the ground and try in earnest to find their best expression. We try them in the first draft, then the second. We try them at the offie and then at home. We try them first thing in the morning and we try them three hours past midnight, when they strike us as we’re falling asleep. We try to work out our ideas on long walks. We try to work them out in meetings, in front of Frank. We do not worry if he takes them to happy hour. Let him distract himself from making good art.

We reclaim the dignity of our ideas by realizing one central fact: there is a reason you became a successful filmmaker, dear Artist Formerly Known, and your ex-boyfriend did not. You take your ideas seriously. At every stage of their becoming.

This does not mean, of course, that every idea will be good.

Some will embarrass you. Some will turn out to be trite. Some will survive three drafts and then refuse to evolve one moment further. This is not a problem, or proof of your inadequacy. This is the process of real work. The creative sticks around and finds out the answer either way.

So, I don’t think your actual task is to become the Artist Formerly Known as Confident again. Confidence is too flimsy a thing to build an artistic practice around. Your task is to return to being an artist who is honest.

Walk into the meeting. Say the thing that might still need fleshing out. Let Frank think whatever Frank wants to think. And then go home and keep on working.

Your ideas do not need to arrive with a defence of their right to exist in the world, Artist.

Neither do you.

All my love,

Heidi

Dear readers,

I am experimenting over the coming days with some new forms of writing that I’ve never tried out. Today is a Cheryl Strayed-inspired advice column, with a question gathered from a survey I sent out over a year ago.

If you like it, let me know! And I’ll play with more advice-y stuff.

Otherwise, stay tuned for more experiments.

Dear Heidi,

I have spent the past five years building what I thought was a healthy relationship with a man who ended up proposing to me.

A few months later, he started acting weird. We were both under a lot of stress between work and wedding planning and at first I thought it was a phase. But the phase kept going. And then, on the evening before Valentine’s day, he sat me down and told me he was leaving me for another woman.

It was someone he has worked with for a long time. The woman is eight years younger than me. She has way bigger boobs. She’s super into fishing, which is a sport he always loved but said he ‘preferred to do with his buddies’ (fucking liar).

I have no idea how long they were seeing each other behind my back. I am not sure I want to know. I didn’t even get to kick him out. He just left. Like the five years him and I had together were absolutely nothing.

And here’s the part I couldn’t make up if I tried: Two weeks after he moved out to be with her, I found out I was pregnant. I had no idea what to do. I booked an appointment at an abortion clinic and then couldn’t make myself go. I thought about showing up at his door and shaming him into coming back, but I didn’t. I thought about raising the kid on my own and never letting them know their father. In the middle of all of the decision paralysis, I miscarried. Now it is three months later and I feel paralyzed it all - the child I lost and the relationship that imploded and the future I had planned out for myself that is suddenly all gone. His fucking fishing rod is still in my garage.

I cannot figure out how this happened. I don’t want to act too cocky, but I think I’m a catch. I’m successful and attractive and enthusiastic about my work and my life. I don’t think I have attachment issues or feel like I’m hard to be with. We’ve been through our ups and downs as a couple, but there were always more ups than downs.

I just cannot wrap my head around any of it.

I have been angry about it and depressed about it and re-frame-y about it but I just can’t find the meaning in it. My friends and family are all ‘everything happens for a reason’ people but I cannot, CANNOT find the reason. It just sucks. All day, every day. Where the fuck is the justice in this? What could I possibly be being called to learn or do? What is the point? WHAT DID I DO WRONG TO DESERVE THIS?

I’m sorry for yelling. It’s not at you. It’s at God, or the Universe, or something. I’m so sick of this being my life.

How in the FUCK am I supposed to make sense of this?

Sincerely,

Dark Night Of The Soul

Dear Dark Night Of The Soul,

On the eighth day of February in the middle of the best winter of my life, I went to the doctor with a cluster of mysterious symptoms, and the doctor found a lump in my breast.

The doctor sent me to a clinic. The clinic sent me to a machine that pinched my breasts in a particularly painful way. The machine operator sent me home to wait on the results.

When I got home, I called the man I was in love with, who lived in a different place. He expressed heartfelt concern and asked about when I’d get the results. He reminded me of the upcoming trip we had planned and reminisced about our first kiss one year prior. He told me he loved me and would call me tomorrow. And then we hung up the phone, and I never heard from him again in my life.

During my period of mourning the relationship, which consisted of some of the most bewildering emotions I had ever encountered, my test results came back from the doctor. They were negative. I had a cyst and a respiratory infection.

I worked hard to not become bitter about the breakup. For the most part, the work paid off. I did not pour over the statistics about men leaving women during health scares and write outraged posts about misogyny. I did not show up at this man’s front door and force the confrontation he would not have to my face. I checked in with his best friend’s wife to confirm he had not died in a car crash. He hadn’t. And so, that was that.

I threw myself into my job, which I loved, and my friendships, which were lifelines. I figured there was some lesson for me in the experience, and I would hold tight until it became clear. Most of life, I’d learned, worked out that way.

But the thing about that year was that it didn’t. A couple months later, someone I loved became sick. My energy organized around travelling back and forth between a city I did not live in to care for a person I could not imagine losing. In the midst of this happening, my closest friendship fell apart. And with it, my living situation.

During this year of my life, any perceptions I had been harbouring about good and bad or right and wrong dissolved, as they related to my personal karma. The kicker was the sheer incongruence.

The year had arrived during the victory lap of a long ‘getting my shit together’ arc. I’d spent years prior pouring myself into self-development programs: learning to hold space, show up honestly, have hard conversations and attach to people securely. I’d become a more honest, grounded, compassionate, hard-working and trust-worthy version of myself. My out-of-control partying had stopped. My over-developed ego had been humbled. Why would all of this happen to me now? How could all of this happen to me now?

I repeated these questions as I struggled at work and watched my income drop. As I struggled with apartment hunting – ultimately landing in a place that I liked 3x less, while paying 3x as much for rent. I repeated the questions as I struggled to stabilize my mental and physical health in the wake of what was happening around me, as I walked myself straight into a brand new relationship that would go on to become the most insidiously toxic one I had encountered.

My life, quite simply, went to shit. It went to shit and then it kept on going.

Most days, I took myself out on walks. On the walks I tried to stabilize myself. I tried to think positively, find the lessons, get clarity but most of the time this would devolve into me posing the same, unrelenting question to the God or the Universe or whoever the fuck might be out there listening: Why am I suffering?

Why am I suffering?

Why am I suffering?

This became a refrain I could not seem to rid myself of. It was a rhetorical question, not a real one, though I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that at the time. I think some part of me assumed that if I posed it, loudly and frequently enough, the HR department in heaven would realize they’d made an error and send someone down to correct it.

‘This woman keeps wondering why she’s suffering,’ one well-coiffed HR professional would say to another.

‘Oh dear,’ her coworker would reply. His brow would furrow and he would glance down at his clipboard with concern. ‘Let me double check and make sure she deserves to suffer.’ Then this man - who I imagined to have a smart haircut and a crisp, blue-striped dress shirt - would go back to his computer, pull up my file and notice that in fact, I had been on my best behavior as of late. I hadn’t kicked any animals or broken up any homes. I had paid my taxes on time. My therapist coded my attachment style as secure. Heck, I hadn’t even done an illegal drug or drank to excess in years.

Then, he would print off a ‘Cease and Desist’ form - clean and well-ordered with his signature curling around the bottom, and he would send it to the Department Of Unjust Suffering. Once they received it, they would swiftly put things right.

Unfortunately, my pleas never made it to Heaven’s HR department. Instead they just stayed inside my mind, swirling around like dead leaves caught up in a tornado.

WhyamIsuffering, whyamIsuffering, whyamIsuffering

On and on it went.

The suffering, it seemed, did not care whether or not I understood it. It did not care whether I found any meaning in it. It did not care if I was making an inhospitable and abusive home for it inside of my mind: it just carried on happening to me. It turns out that’s how suffering works.

And so eventually, life did what it always does when we cannot solve it: it kept moving anyway. I went to work. I came home. I paid three times too much for my apartment. I went on walks and saw friends and argued with my partner and went to sleep and woke up the next morning and did it all again. The question came with me, but increasingly, I began to suspect there might not be anyone coming to answer it.

Months later, something occurred to me. I was sitting on my uncomfortable couch, drinking a mug filled with lukewarm coffee, when a thought dropped out of the sky and into my brain: a thought so simple yet so true that I had to halt everything to attend to it. The thought was: some women’s partners had left them during a cancer scare and then it turned out they actually had cancer.

Some of those women had families to support, mouths to feed. For them, the period I had moved through the winter before was not a blip in the timeline of their lives but an ongoing, treacherous reality. One they would have to spend the potentially limited time they had left alive reorganizing themselves around.

The enormity of this thought floored me. The prospect of having to get up each morning, care for their children, head to the hospital and receive chemotherapy or radiation, all while grappling with the same dark hole of loss that I had had to grapple with, made my situation look like a pea sitting next to a mountain.

The moral here, just to be clear, is not ‘take solace in the fact that people have things worse.’ That is a stupid moral that nobody should ever live by. The moral that I really had to question is why it made clean sense to me that other people had to bear the same burden as I did ten times over, yet I was floored that some lesser version of it had happened to me.

What I came up with - once I really committed myself to the digging - was that my world had a series of carefully constructed rules I had invented for myself. Rules about what would happen to you in life if you were a good person versus a bad one. If you worked hard and shared your feelings honestly and kept an eye out for the narcissistic patterns of thinking and feeling that crop up in all of our minds at some point and stay humble and earnest and kind, versus if you lied and cheated and took advantage of people and abandoned them when they maybe had cancer.

I had rules about who bad things should happen to and who they shouldn’t. Who whole seasons or cascades of tragedy ought to befall and who ought to be spared of them. I didn’t want to admit these thought patterns to myself, but there they were.

And as I read through your own letter, Dark Night, I cannot help but suspect that you have some rules in place yourself. Rules about what it means if you keep yourself fit and successful and enthusiastic about your life and relationships. Rules you thought would save you that instead turned around and failed you when you needed them most. I am sorry about this happening to you. I am also not surprised that it did.

There is a point in life where personal responsibility breaks down and pure, dumb, luck takes over. Unfortunately, you have arrived at this intersection. All of us have to eventually.

When we arrive here, there are a few different directions we could take: one is we can latch onto the simplest explanation of what has happened to us. This is often the one steeped in generalities and stereotypes about the type of people who do X, Y or Z. How many men, for example, leave their partners for younger women or abandon them during times of ill health. We can carve out stories for ourselves that make sense of the world in broad, cynical strokes and carry on with our egos intact. I understand the appeal of this route. I really do.

Another option is getting obsessed with the precise cause-and-effect. Instead of grouping things into generalities, we can zoom in on each singular data point. Was there a glance we ignored three months ago that was hinting at our partner’s mounting discontent? Was there a conversation we handled poorly with the roommate who stopped wanting to live with us? Was there some secret interpersonal crime we committed, without knowing that the thing was a crime, and if we find it and repent for our sin, can we prevent it from ever happening again? This allows us to grasp onto some semblance of control. I understand the appeal of this route too.

But there is also a secret third way. The secret third way is the one I suspect you are searching for, Dear Dark Night, since you have neglected to take either of the first, more traversable two.

The third way is dropping to our knees.

This is what I had to do, the year that everything I loved in my life picked up their bags and climbed out the window in the night. I had to face the hard, rhetorical questions, and actually go searching for their answers: Who was I to not have life absolutely bowl me over with pain? I was no one. There was not one single reason why I should be dealt a fair hand in life when other people got dealt shitty ones.

Why am I suffering? I asked, and at last the next question came out of it: Who do I think I am not to?

It was pure, unadulterated good luck that had taken me this far. Now the opposite type had come along.

This is unfortunately true for you too, Dark Night.

You asked what you are being called to do. I can’t tell you but I can take a guess: my guess is that you are being called to dissolve some of the imaginary rules that have served you for this far in life, and to find the thing that is truer underneath them. This is always the business of the dark night of the soul: to shake the foundations of our lives so completely that we have no choice but to rebuild them from scratch.

There is no simple or clear cut reason why this terrible thing has happened to you and not somebody else. But I wonder if maybe, just maybe, it had, in fact, happened to somebody else, your brain would have found a way to justify it. If it may have assumed - in that way we all assume things that make us a little bit uncomfortable to admit - that that person must have committed some karmic wrong and brought their circumstances upon themselves indirectly in some way. That such a thing would not - could not - ever happen to you.

After this period, my guess is that you will not assume things like that anymore. That you will see suffering and injustice and sickness in the world and there will be a part of your heart that is wide-open to it - looking at it - in a way that it was not before. That openness will make you both a kinder and a smarter human being. It will change what you have to give the world.

Of course, this whole process is going to suck immensely. It is part of a whole incomprehensible lineage of sucky things that happen to good people in life, all of the time, every single day. They happen to successful people and unsuccessful people. Fit people and out-of-shape people. Open, engaged, fuck-yes-to-my-life kind of people and cynical, withdrawn, everything-is-going-to-hell kind of people.

There is no karmic court of law governing the whole debacle. There is no Department Of Unjust Suffering. There’s just suffering, and some of us get a lot of it in life and some of us get a little of it and if you extend the timeline long enough, most of us get a healthy mix of both. To be human and to love anything or anyone at all is to be so unfathomably vulnerable that we have to spend most of our waking hours casting the whole situation out of our minds. It’s so easy to forget our fragility. Until it isn’t.

You may have done absolutely nothing wrong to bring this onto yourself, Dark Night. But it happened to you anyway. And because it happened, there are some things that you are going to have to do. You are going to have to grieve the would-be baby that you did not have, and the would-be husband that you did not marry. You are going to have to sort through the items you bought together and decide what you will keep, what you’ll throw out, and what you will put into an overpriced storage locker to make decisions about in a future season: one where you’re more resourced than you are now, and might someday want to use the plates you picked out together.

You are going to have to move through the anger. Through the rage at the fishing trips, the abandoned dreams, the woman with very large breasts and the abandonment by someone you trusted.

You are going to have to let your life reorganize, slowly, around this terrible, brutally unfair thing.

And then you are going to have to meet the next version of yourself. I can hear this version of you peeking out of the margins in your letter. ‘I’m so sick of this being your life,’ you said. Except this isn’t your life. This period of revolting and pleading and railing against God is you resisting your life. You will eventually grow tired of the resistance.

And then there will be something else.

For you, I have no idea what that will be. I don’t know who you will love in the future, or who you won’t. I don’t know what you’ll gain over the next couple of years, or lose, I don’t know which strange and beautiful things will end up growing in the places where you currently see nothing but confusion. I don’t know whether you will someday look back on this period and feel grateful for it. I hope that you do not feel obligated to.

Not everything bad that happens needs to reveal itself as secretly good in the end.

Some things are just terrible. Some losses stay lost. Some people hurt us and go on happily with their lives. Some questions never produce answers proportional to the pain that first made us ask them.

And still, there is always a next.

There will be mornings when you wake up and think about him three minutes later than you usually do. There will be afternoons when you forget to think about him at all. There will be people you haven’t met yet and places you haven’t been to and problems you cannot imagine having that will fill up your time and attention. Until eventually, almost insultingly slowly, your life will become your life again.

You may never understand why any of this happened. Or, one day, maybe you will.

You may never hear from this man again. Or, he may call you next Tuesday.

You may go on to have three children, or you may end up having none at all.

You may someday find a story that wraps this whole period up neatly, or you may spend the rest of your life occasionally turning it over in your hands, still unable to make the pieces fit.

None of those things are available for you to know yet. They remain out of your existential grasp.

But at some point in the meantime, Dark Night, you do have to decide what to do with the fishing rod.

I recommend snapping it in half.

All my love (and sympathy),
Heidi

If one were on a constant, steady dose of painkillers (but unaware of this fact), it would be easy to develop a superiority complex about one’s resilience. The average person, walking around complaining about muscle soreness and headaches on a near-daily basis, might seem weak and overdramatic. Sure you feel those things occasionally, but certainly not from the activities others are claiming their pain stems from. And certainly not to the same extent.

This is also what it feels like to have one’s emotional pain receptors dulled. To be avoidant is, in many ways, to be walking around the world confused about why everyone else is feeling so affected by the regular trials of living, which simply don’t register to you (at least not as often or to the same extent). Sure you’d feel sad if someone you love died or if some major trauma occurred - you’re not a sociopath, after all - but day-to-day life just doesn’t feel all that unmanageable to you. You’re not sure what all the distress is about.

Healing from avoidant attachment is akin to weaning oneself off the advil.

It takes a very long time to resensitize oneself to everyday living: to the regular pains and vulnerabilities that arise within it. At first this might seem like a pointless task: why make life more difficult than it has to be? And yet the more the desire to have healthy, reciprocal relationships sinks into one’s bones, the more it becomes clear: life is that difficult, actually. And other people - healthy people, who we might want to form intimate connections with - feel the difficulty all of the time. It’s the reason their worlds are more colorful.

The daily aches and pains of our emotional system serve a purpose. They’re there to alert us to our ‘No’s while the ‘No’s are still subtle. Before they blossom into full-scale depressive episodes or irreparable relational rifts. Paying attention to them - the better we get at doing so - can start to feel like we are being handed a cheat code. We can course-correct before things get terrible. We can find out how to make the good stuff last.

And yet, hyper-attunment to them has its own failure mode.

An interesting question I find myself sitting with lately, after years of intentional sensitization work, is the question of whether I’ve become too soft. Emotions stop me now, in ways that they never used to. I sleep for ten hours when depressed. I cry openly every time I’m hurt. It feels in some ways as though I’ve become so attuned, so interested in, every passing ache and pain my system presents me with that I can forget my system is also wired for doing things - for standing up, facing challenges and making change. This is not a problem when the conditions of my life are good, as they were for a solid few years. Work was enjoyable, so I produced it. My relationships were nourishing, so I persisted at them.

But a unique problem I’ve been finding myself facing this year is what to do with a sensitized system and an abundance of genuine pain.

I’ve had a lot of things go wrong in the past several months. Things even my avoidant self would have conceded are dogshit (and then dissociated from, in order to keep up with my daily demands).

I don’t want to disconnect from my pain. I imagine there is signal within it. But it strikes me that just as the average person does sometimes take advil to cope with an abundance of muscle soreness, securely attached people must also occasionally compartmentalize or dissociate from their emotional pain in order to keep their lives from going off the rails while they adjust to the damage.

And so the inquiry I find myself left with is: What is the appropriate amount of growing pain to let ourselves feel? How long should we linger on our symptoms before deciding that it’s time to stand up and keep moving despite them?

When conditioning our muscles, we need discernment about whether the muscle pain we’re feeling is regular soreness or an injury accrued from bad form. Emotionally, we need something similar: discernment around whether our pain is an appropriate reflection of our circumstances or an indication that we are carrying it wrong.

And the longer I sit with this inquiry, the more I suspect something new: That the answer to ‘What does a secure person do with an abundance of emotional pain’ does not have only two answers. It is not only ‘Numb out’ or ‘Admit defeat.’ I am thinking there is a secret third option I haven’t been aware of and it’s one I’m being increasingly called to realize.

The third option is letting pain change you.

Picking up a new weight in the gym requires an attunement to the weight itself but also a willingness to adapt our form in order to safely lift it.

In the same vein, trying to approach the new problems of our lives with the same attitude we’ve used in the past (whether that’s dissociation, hyper-fixation or any other childhood tactic) is going to give us repetitive emotional strain injuries. Our systems will ache and splinter under the weight of what we do not yet have the capacity to support.

We need to attune to these pains for long enough to pinpoint where they are. But then we need to learn to flexibly change form. If we don’t, we get stuck in patterns of either enduring and dissociating from the pain (causing much bigger injuries down the line) or languishing over it endlessly (making ourselves steadily weaker over time).

People with secure attachment systems are like good emotional weight-trainers. They don’t shy away from pain, but they don’t withstand it longer than necessary either. They work flexibly and interdependently within the conditions they’ve been dealt.

Our environments are adaptable things, after all, but so are our self-concepts. It’s healthy for them to update. They need to be able to change form.

Lately, I’ve been noticing that a lot of the things that have felt distinctly and simply like ‘Me’ for several decades of my life don’t feel so much like me anymore.

Forming relationships with people around avoidant, hyper-intellectual ideals doesn’t feel so much like ‘me’ anymore. Structuring my life around a series of high-powered goals doesn’t feel so much like ‘me’ anymore. Finding my identity in running away from anything I deem ‘beneath’ me to attend to doesn’t feel so much like ‘me’ anymore; doesn’t feel like the person I’m becoming.

The person I’m becoming is still struggling to get her form down right. But she’s experimenting. She’s listening to the feedback of her environment. She’s trying.

And so the answer to my own inquiry becomes clearer the longer I sit with the question: How long do we hold onto the pain? Until we hear it and receive its message clearly. Then, it’s time to try something new: some new way of arranging our lives, channeling our energy, expressing ourselves.

We find new ways of asking for connection, ones that balance out reason with feeling. We find new goals to set our ambitions on: ones that are lofty but deeply aligned. We find ways to persist through confusion, without losing ourselves in the rubble. We do this over and over again, until we find the form that best suits our conditions.

To be securely attached, it turns out, does not mean to grow hopeless and stagnant in the face of adversity. Rather, it means to be engaged in the never-ending process of humbling ourselves enough to be changed. While rising persistently enough to new challenges to watch ourselves grow steadily more agile, and strong.

It wasn’t a spiritual experience. It wasn’t meant to be. On a video call with my therapist near the end of the summer, I told him I needed a very long break. He asked, “Can you afford to take one?” I said, “I think I can’t afford not to.”

And so I flew to France thee next week and started my trek across Spain. Most days I walked with headphones in. I didn’t stop at churches or make lifelong friends. I didn’t take on the identity of ‘pilgrim’ or dream of how the experience would change me. Mostly I relished in the lack of daily choices. I would wake up each morning, put my hiking shoes on and go for a walk. When I was too tired to keep walking, I would find somewhere to sleep. I repeated this for weeks on end.

Around the fourth week of my trek, something frustrating happened: I had to do a task. The University I was registered to begin a Masters Degree at the following month was getting some administrative lines crossed around my registration. There were suddenly a whole bunch of people I had to call and things I would have to sort out.

The thought of making a mere phone call exhausted me. So I made a deal with myself: Every day, I would hike for 4 - 6 hours. During that time, I would turn my phone onto airplane mode and disconnect completely from the outside world.

At the end of the hiking day, I would do exactly one task. I would call one person or make one wire transfer. Then I would turn my phone back onto airplane mode, get something for dinner, and go to sleep.

I repeated this process for a week. And the administrative mess sorted itself out.

This was a surprising discovery to me: that life could be handled meticulously yet competently, one task at a time. My regular MO when depression hit was promising myself, day after useless day, that I would turn my entire life around tomorrow. Tomorrow I would get back to everyone I had been ghosting, catch up on months worth of work (and then some), clean up any administrative messes I had let slide through negligence and of course, get my health back in order.

Every day that this would not happen was another day added to the merry-go-round of disappointment. My expectations were like a an all-you-can-eat buffet for the ravenous beast of my depression: a sequence of impossible standards perpetually laid out to go unmet, strengthening my self-hatred by the hour.

I’d had no idea there was an ‘eject’ button.

Hiking for several hours a day and dealing with one task at a time didn’t make me happy, per se. But it made my life feel manageable. And manageable, it turned out, was a beautiful interim step out of depression.

I wish this was a story about how much better things got after the year 2021, but it isn’t.

2022 was a dumpster fire. 2023 was much better. 2024 was a year I started out thinking “I’m finally getting my life in order,” only to watch most of the things I cared deeply for slip through my fingers by the time autumn rolled around. Depression has visited me many times since the year 2021 but since then, I’ve had a new tool for dealing with it.

I like to think, these days, of depression as life on ‘Low Power’ mode.

My love of hiking predisposes me to getting nerdy about which watches are best for fitness tracking and the answer is indisputably Garmin. (This is not an ad for Garmin, though if they would like to sponsor me I’m all ears). My Garmin watch lasts for approximately 9 days without charging and around the 8th day, it always asks me the same question: ‘Battery is running low. Would you like to put watch on Low Power mode?’

I wish depression were exactly like a Garmin watch. I wish that during the seasons of things falling apart, I could plug my spirit into an electrical socket, get a hefty 8 hour sleep and wake up with a freshly-charged outlook. But it doesn’t work like that. Life tends to offer us, at best, the option to switch to ‘low power’ mode. And this is sometimes the best available route forward.

On low power mode, I adjust the expectations of my life to meet the level of my capabilities, instead of the other way around. One thing must get done each day, and one thing only. This can be an important email I have to send, an administrative task I need to complete or a workout that will help me sleep at night. Once the one thing is done, I am off the hook for the rest of the day. I can turn my phone onto airplane mode and walk circles around my city if I’d like to. I can buy a fiction book and read it in the bathtub until my toes prune. I can lie in bed staring at the ceiling for twenty-three hours (or sixteen, if the one thing I had to do that day was go to work).

The ‘one thing a day’ principle is ridiculously simple advice and yet it’s the best thing I’ve found to date for crawling out of periods of depression. When I take the seemingly never-ending list of things I absolutely must do to get back on track and refuse to pretend that I will have the energy to get them all done at once, it gives me the chance to catch my breath again. When my breath is caught, I can hear the quiet whispers of my wisdom. And in the depths of depression, they usually have the most salient things to let me know.

This season, I am living life on low power mode.

Today I handed in a workshop proposal two weeks late. Yesterday I took a new headshot. Tomorrow I will probably film a Youtube video and another day soon I will edit it.

I am of course in a unique situation in that I do not have a 9 - 5 job, or children to keep alive. In a literal sense I can boil my life down to one task a day and have it mostly work out, with only minimal panic accumulating. (On the other hand, the lack of hard external commitments can be fuel for depression in and of itself. So it’s all relative.)

But this piece of writing is the consequence of only one thing getting done today. Finishing the one task on my plate by 2pm gave me time to stare out my window for the afternoon. Staring out my window for the afternoon led me to a state of deep silence within myself. From the silence, writing wanted to emerge. And so here we are.

This is the magical wisdom of depression, which I only find when I make space for it. There is always some sort of medicine, whether it is movement or connection or a tentative creative experiment, that emerges when I at last carve out the space for intentional nothingness. In this way, life on low power mode can become beautiful.

The very little charge we have left stops devoting itself to emails and phone calls and alerts. A stoic part of us knows this is not that important, that it’s never been.

In the silence, we start to hear the subtle tick-tock of our lives passing us by in the background. We keep the time. And eventually, cautiously, we learn the steps to whichever dance comes next.

It is no surprise to me - or to anyone else who knows me - that the money in question will not be leaving my bank account (at least not until it’s time to pay my taxes). There was never a world where I’d be wiring this person ten thousand dollars come midnight because there was never a world where I didn’t complete three pieces of writing today.

It is, in fact, quite easy to publish three pieces of subpar work. And of course, I knew this all along.

I knew the bar I was setting for myself was too high and that the panic would likely dysregulate me come midday (it did). I knew the setup for the occasion was not conducive to deep, thought-provoking work and what I published would likely be unsatisfying (it was). I knew there were a plethora of other experiments I could design for myself (and use my enthusiastic friend group to join me in) that could elicit decent, interesting work and yet this is the one I picked anyway: the one that would almost necessarily produce crap.

One has to wonder about my subconscious motivations here.

And so I will be using this post to explore them.

There seems to be some part of me that was wanting to produce bad work today. A part of me that in fact thought bad work was so important to produce that it rented out an entire boardroom and gathered a whole group of people to join me on the mission.

This is arguably my long-standing failure mode: I jump quickly and impulsively into action. I don’t always think about the ‘why.’

And yet, I almost never regret this staying-in-motion. This knee-jerk part of me that acts up most strongly when depression begins rearing its head and threatening to eat my mind whole. What if I just took some silly action, in some random direction, and stayed on board to see through what happened next?

This outlook has led me down some unsavory paths in the past. But I believe it has also saved me from the far worse fate of wasting my life.

We tend to think of bad or subpar work in relation to the greater work that we imagine we are capable of. This is what paralyzes us with self-doubt and keeps us petrified of being seen. But this is the wrong way to look at things, mostly. The better thing to compare subpar work to is no work at all.

Is there a single seed absolutely anywhere, in anything we’re doing, that might be sown? Is there a friction our action is creating that might end up driving us even-slightly forward? Is there a signal of hope we’re accidentally emitting that might get picked up by anybody else around us, who might use it to fuel their own growth?

If so, is it not worth it to move in that direction?

Is it not better than sitting around at home, plugging away on some less inspiring task and wondering what we’ll one day create?

Perhaps the part of myself that forced this day into existence knew - in a place I could not consciously access - that I would never throw myself into motion if I were waiting for the conditions to be perfect. And so I had to force my own hand into producing imperfection. To feel the pain and humiliation of publishing pieces long before they felt ready, and learning that those feelings would not kill me.

But the alternative of inertia might.

As we brought our boardroom of silly and ambitious people to a close this afternoon, a friend of mine remarked that she felt humbled by the task she’d taken on. This word resonated for me deeply.

When I ask myself the question ‘who do I think I am to commit myself to subpar work,’ the reflexive answer that arrives to me is: who do I think I am not to?

If my options are to do bad work or do to nothing, I suppose I will keep doing bad work. Keep offering whatever I’ve got. Keep myself wheeling, in motion, in hopes of learning or of picking up something meaningful en route.

The battle is not between good work and bad work, most days. It’s between bad work and wasting our potential.

And so we put pen to paper. Or whatever it is that we do. We humble ourselves enough to do it badly, every now and then, in service of the greater work we’re capable of.

We do not wire our enemies $10,000. We just think about the next iteration.

And we try it. Then we try it again.

For the majority of my life I’ve erred on the ‘toxically positive’ side of the cynical - idealist spectrum. This has largely proved to be the more pleasurable side of the continuum to reside on, as well as the more profitable one. 

But over the past few years, I’ve noticed a new pattern emerging in my consciousness, which takes the loose following shape: the more seriously I have begun taking my life, the more cynical I have become. This seems non-random. In fact, it seems to be the direct consequence of getting in  touch with my desires and beginning to expect real things out of myself, other people and my life. 

For my own notes, I will attempt to break this down as simply as possible: 

• Coming alive (combatting depression/maturing/growing up and owning one’s shit) means getting in touch with desire. Desire is the energy of wanting, but not yet having. It pushes us forward.
  

• To be in right relationship with desire means to hold it well. If held too loosely, desire takes us nowhere. If held too tightly, desire narrows our attention until we can see nothing but the specific path forward that we have imagined for obtaining what we want.
  

• Cynicism is a frequent consequence of desire being held too tightly. It is not about believing that Life, the Universe and Everything is doomed. Rather, cynicism is about narrowing our attention so intensely on one specific thing (or one specific path towards a thing) that it begins to feel as though that one thing is Life, the Universe and Everything. When that thing (or the path towards it) becomes doomed, it feels as though everything is doomed.
  

• This is why cynical people can be so annoying. Their unconscious has not been made conscious and so things are constantly getting lost in translation. When you have a conversation with a cynical person they will say something like ‘I’ll never find a girlfriend!’ And you’ll say ‘Of course you will! You’re an interesting person with very straight teeth!’  - Not realizing that to you, ‘finding a girlfriend’ means finding a girl who would be happy to date them but to them, finding a girlfriend might mean finding a woman who will magically heal all their childhood trauma. And so every time they meet a girl who is interested in them but she does not magically heal their attachment wounds by the second date, they will write this person off as ‘not girlfriend material.’ They will continue to do this - and continue to insist that they will never find a girlfriend - unless and until they update their definition of ‘girlfriend’ to include women without magical powers. In the interim, it will be very difficult for them to have a conversation about the topic that makes any sense.
  

• This is sort of how we all are when we have an unconscious ideal that we cannot name.
  

• Cynicism can actually be a helpful signal that it’s time to pull an unconscious ideal into our awareness and mourn the parts of it that we are now realizing do not translate to reality. It is a sign that we are trying and failing, which means we are actually getting closer to the realization of our desires than we ever have before. We are bumping up against what does not work when we attempt to put it into practice.
  

• In this way, cynicism - when worked with consciously - can help us grow up.
  

• To be young is, in part, to want things from the world that we cannot articulate. And so we go around making half-formed demands of life, the Universe and other people in hopes that wise elders will come along to put our desires into words for us and help us find the best way to move toward them.
  

• A big part of growing up is learning to put our desires (the ones we hold deeply and unconsciously) into words for ourselves and pursuing them consciously.
  

• Or letting them die, if and when that makes more sense.
  

• I think this is what George Carlin meant when he said “Inside every cynical person is a disappointed idealist.”
  

• Ideals do not have to be grand. In fact, they are often very subtle, and hidden inside of premises that otherwise seem reasonable.
  

• For example, I once became very depressed because I thought that earning secure attachment meant my existing relationships would all get better. It turned out that was mostly untrue. The more secure I became, the more the relationships that I formed from a place of deep insecurity began suffering and failing. I thought, ‘Okay everything is doomed. Earning secure attachment does not mean I will have healthy relationships.’
  
  This was true, in a narrow sense. Secure attachment could not magically fix relationships with people who didn’t want to have honest and intimate connections with me. This was an ideal I had been holding unconsciously - that secure attachment would give me magical powers.
  
  But, I could expand my awareness toward the world of people I did not know yet, who did want to have those types of relationships. It turned out my skill set was a good match for that world.
  

• I just had to mourn the thing that I wanted to happen first.
  

• And so now there is a different question I try to ask myself when I feel myself growing cynical. I do not argue with my cynicism. I do not tell it it is wrong or to think more positively. I ask myself, ‘What am I narrowly right about, which I am mistaking for the whole truth?’
  

• This usually helps me locate an ideal that it is time to mourn. When I do that, there is an expanded awareness on the other side.
  

• Cynicism invites us to examine the basic premises of the questions we’ve been living with unconsciously for a long, long time. When we do that, we can start asking better questions. Ones that fall in line with the realities we could actually inhabit.
  

• It is a growing up process, engaging with cynicism. If we allow it to be.
  

• Cynicism is the child inside of us who has gotten stuck, calling out for a wise village elder to help them see the bigger picture and find their way.
  

• We can answer the call.
  

• We can teach ourselves to let the old ideals die and look around for what’s left in their absence.
  

• It’s a scary and excruciating way to grow ourselves up.
  

• It works a lot better than the alternative.

I picked up the idea from a retreat I attended in the spring with Cheryl Strayed, my long-time literary hero. On the final morning of a three-day retreat - one where I had found myself infuriatingly blocked on writing anything - she off-handedly mentioned a challenge her friend Jami Attenberg ran each summer (Here us the link:)

CRAFT TALK

CRAFT TALK is a weekly newsletter about writing, creativity and productivity from author Jami Attenberg. This is also the home of #1000wordsofsummer, where, once a year, we write 1000 words a day together for two weeks straight. (In 2024 it begins 6/1!)

By Jami Attenberg

The goal is to write one thousand words each day. That’s it. 

At the mention of the challenge, something unexpected inside me woke up. A ‘Yes’ rippled its way through my system. I wanted do this, for some reason. Something would surely come out of it. 

I will try not to bore you (too extensively) with the pitfalls of writing as a craft, but it is a well-worn adage that to get to the good stuff, you first have to clear out all of the garbage. I figured this would take me two to three days at most. Surely, I reasoned, there was not ninety thousand plus words of garbage inside of me. 

It turns out yes, there was. 

Every day of the summer, I sat down diligently in front of my laptop and put words to screen. I wrote about toxic shame, complex PTSD, attachment healing and relational wounds. I rehashed concepts I’d published videos about on Youtube and spoke with literary agents about the book that would best fit my brand. 

Some of the writing shifted things inside of my system. Most of it ostensibly did not. 

Sitting down in front of my computer on the average day felt like sifting through a pile of dead things: challenges and pains that had long since expired in my system, but could package themselves into digestible lessons if I asked them to.

I adhered, diligently, to these dead things, while my existing life fell apart around me. I wrote in the ER waiting room as my mother underwent open-heart surgery. I wrote from an empty apartment the night my closest friend moved out of the home we’d shared for years. I wrote through pounding hangovers as I processed the end of the first romantic relationship that I’d hoped, in good faith, would last the rest of my life. I wrote on airplanes, buses and trains as life shuffled me from one sudden emergency to the next. 

There were very few constants this past summer. But there was always one thousand words. 

Writing quickly become the most reliable thing I did each day but it was also a joyless pursuit. I knew how to put words to a page but nothing struck me as worth hitting ‘Publish’ on. The deep ‘Yes’ inside of me - the one that had swelled up that final day of Cheryl Strayed’s retreat - was demanding something more from me: it was asking me to find my beating heart inside the work.

This proved to be the harder thing to do. 

For years I have capitalized on my ability to package up pain and trauma neatly. On my very-public Youtube channel, I speak openly about how I’ve made sense of past confusions and found language for what was once incomprehensible pain. This  type of sharing is useful, and important to me. But it is also an invulnerable act. Teaching from a closed wound serves others. Writing from an open one serves me. 

And so I have come here today to serve myself. 

As I sit here writing this, I am surrounded by five of my closest friends. I have rented out a boardroom in a building I like to work out of and set up a challenge for each of us each to put our money where our mouth is when it comes to the projects we’d like to finish most. One friend has to finish a blog post, or lock himself out of his favourite phone game for a month. Another must complete a series of thoughtful LinkedIn posts, or shove his mouth full of blueberries and post that as his status instead. I have decided to wire a person who broke my heart ten thousand dollars by the end of the day if I do not publish three pieces of writing by midnight. 

The term ‘enemy’ in this title is written both in jest and from a place of deep pain. Enemy as in, the person who shares the majority of the memories that actually matter to me from the past fifteen years of my life. Enemy as in, the person whose laughter is the sound I miss more than anything on earth. Enemy as in, the person whose absence is likely pulling me towards the spiritual lesson I need to learn most next. 

And so this challenge is a spiritual pivot. 

Producing work, to me, has long-since been a way of earning money and teaching from a place of past wounds. Writing honestly is something else.

Writing is the act of revealing oneself to the world. Of deciding that what is inside of one’s mind at this exact moment is true enough, real enough, human enough, to be represented in actual words. This has been the hardest thing for me to accept during this season and so it is the thing I am forcing into my own awareness: now is not the time to give back. Now is the time to grieve. 

One of my long-time favourite adages about writing comes from Hemingway: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” 

And so, here is the truest sentence I have inside of me right now: This year has been a season of remarkable loss. 

Loss I don’t know quite how to make sense of or help myself through. Loss I want to avoid by claiming authority over and pretending I am above having to move through. Loss I cannot ignore or bargain or rage my way out of. But I can start by putting my attention on it. 

What is the shape of this loss, and the flavour? How do I live with it? How will I carry it around? These are the questions normal living shoves out of our awareness but writing demands from us ruthlessly. 

Through writing - the two pieces that follow this one and hopefully many more to come - I vow to keep my own attention where it matters. Not on what I want to dole out or give away but what I want to get deeply acquainted with inside myself.

My only condition for the work - for all of the work that follows - is that it has to be true. It cannot be work focused or goal-oriented or otherwise self-evasive. It has to be motivated by the desire to touch the sharpest edges of my life and give myself a safe place to bleed. 

And so, onward we go.

I could wax poetic for ages in an attempt to avoid publication. But I have spent a whole summer on this nonsense. Today I do not want to wire my enemy ten thousand dollars, so I’ll paste these words into a substack post. And I’ll call it an imperfect start. 

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