Are You Feeling Flat and Numb?

If so, what will help?

Squirrel Plate (2025) by Heather Havrilesky

I’ve been making pottery for three years now. Sometime during the second year, I realized that my clay was never completely centered. This won’t surprise anyone who’s taught me anything — I am very stubborn in my insistence that I LEARN NOTHING. Yes, I will open my eyes wider and appear to be listening. But internally, there’s some part of me that associates learning with BEING DOMINATED.

Ridiculous! I wouldn’t even have known this or named it, if I hadn’t stuck with my pottery habit for so long. It’s pretty unusual to commit to something while also committing to the opposite of the thing. But when I look back at my life, I see this tendency arise over and over again. I cradle an essential ambivalence in my arms like it’s my little baby that will never ever leave me. My fussy baby protects me from having to fully commit, having to be defined by a thing, having to be a part of a community, having to surrender to all of the eccentricities and absurdities of that hobby or practice.

CLAY is a real thing here in North Carolina, too. The soil is red clay in many parts of the state. Some of the pottery greats lived here, nurtured by the pottery greats of other nations. Notice how I am not sharing the details. I DON’T KNOW THEM. I have remained absolutely RECALCITRANT in my refusal to know a thing about North Carolina pottery, because everyone around me can’t stop name-dropping the GOATs, how they studied with them, assisted them, own one of their plates. I moved 3k miles away from Beverly Hills FOR THIS?!!!

But my resistance to fully learning and embracing pottery is bigger than any of this. It’s not about any vibe or any teacher. It’s not even about how hard pottery can be (it’s hard) even after you think you know wtf you’re doing (you don’t).

My emotional position in most areas is self-protective.

I don’t want to invest. I don’t want to show that I care, because that’s humiliating. I know I’ve written about this a lot. But it goes beyond what I’ve written, I’ve realized lately. Even though I believe that ambivalence is natural and I want to stand up for it, even though I think everyone should learn their own special, slow way and stay committed to any practice that they can sense (in spite of their absolute lack of skills or talent or even passion) is bringing more LIFE to their life, sometimes it seems safest to be HALF-ASSED.

This isn’t just about caring too much. It’s also about vulnerability. It’s about not wanting to ride on the violent waves of enjoying what you love and then feeling afraid of what you love, afraid that you’re shitty at it, scared that you’re not good enough, fearful that you might not enjoy it today. It’s about not wanting to drown, but it’s also about not wanting to HAVE SHIFTING MOODS AT ALL.

Ambivalence can also be about not wanting to identify with what you do, to avoid depending on it. It’s about not letting any one thing become very powerful in your life, because what if you can’t do it suddenly? What if you’re an idiot for doing it at all? What if the other people who do it drive you crazy?

Ambivalence is often a defense against overinvesting and overcommitting, sure. But it’s also a strategy for protecting yourself from the raw joy and corresponding deep disappointment of TRULY LOVING SOMETHING WITH ALL OF YOUR HEART.

***

When I look back at the past three-plus years of making pottery, what I see is someone who loudly claims to want MORE while always insisting on LESS: I’m not really a potter. I am just relaxing. I am bad at this. I don’t like to learn things. Some of these are jokes. But above all, what’s here is CONTROL.

My most essential position for the past three years has been:

I WILL REMAIN IN CONTROL.

Ambivalence offers control. Ambivalence is a defense against passion, which is frightening. Feeling conflicted, pretending you’re not invested, making jokes: These are ways of refusing the DRAMA OF BEING ALIVE RIGHT NOW.

We might believe that we’re looking for more feeling. We might believe that we are pro-emotion, pro-passion, pro-sensation. But when we look at our actual lives, we may witness the many ways we protect ourselves, shield ourselves, defend ourselves, numb ourselves, avoid trouble, circumnavigate drama and sadness and negativity and also uncertainty and real engagement. What we see is a grab for control, which necessitates an avoidance of emotional intensity.

But when we release our grip on control and resolve to remain present to the uncertainty of life, that intensity and passion and deep love for existence comes flooding back.

That intensity is there either way. The fear and lack of control is a reality, no matter how many defenses you have. You can invest or not invest, keep life at arm’s length or dive in, fall madly in love or sidestep love, avoid creative pursuits or sink into dangerously difficult artistic enterprises, and your essential position, your essential TERROR, will remain the same.

Your position? You are invested. You care. You want what you want. Your desires are oversized. You want too much. And you are very afraid.

Your defenses might keep your life nice and flat and predictable, but they don’t change the intense, passionate, terrified, ecstatic human underneath your choices.

***

This brings me to the squirrel plate I made sometime last year, the one pictured at the start of this column. Life was difficult last year. We were living with my mother and even though I had fed myself a real fantasy about how perfect it would be, I ended up feeling shut down and creatively blocked. Yes, people told me that this was inevitable. But remember how I love to avoid learning at all costs?

I am foolish or I wouldn’t write this column about how to live. My bumbling nature, not my wisdom, is what keeps this motherfucker SINGING!

But look at that plate. It’s one of maybe ten pieces of pottery I’ve made that’s up to my standards. And let me just admit that I love it to an irrational degree. Thanks to that one squirrel, I started carving squirrels into everything. None of them are as good, to me at least. I love the smearing. I love how it looks like the squirrel is tip-toeing somewhere, being sneaky. I love the flowers.

No one else gives a fuck about this squirrel, to be clear.

I can barely allow myself to care about pottery, but somehow I can care about this squirrel. This squirrel meets my standards. I don’t mind if other people can’t see it. I love believing in something like this, without fear or self-consciousness, without shame or apology. I love to love what I love with this kind of conviction.

Hilariously, the people I have historically made fun of the most, inside my head, are people who love what they love with the least shame and fear. I give a free pass to old people and children and also youngish adults who are experimenting, but I truly love to keep middle-aged people with hobbies on blast inside the vicious hellfire of my mind. Pretentious white women who call themselves “potters” used to make me rolllllll my eyes so hard, inside the sick and twisted fiery furnace of my mercilessly judgy brain.

Why? Because it me, motherfucker. IT ME. I am passionate about the most absurd things. I am fully invested in pottery whether I want to be or not. I was invested after my first class. I’ve always loved it desperately. It’s not rational. It’s expensive and stupid. As my friend Jessica (a great pottery teacher fyi) likes to say, “Pottery doesn’t solve problems. Pottery creates more problems.”

There’s an energy that comes from surrendering to the tumultuous seas of your passions while also giving a free pass to the fire and brimstone inside your brain that says your passions are fucking dorky and embarrassing. There’s an intensity to feeling your very strong and ferocious feelings for the ups and downs of life while also noticing how terrified you are of feeling ALL of it, the highs and the lows, the connection and the revulsion, the pride and the unrelenting shame.

We all have so much to gain from seeing how often we recoil from what we are, what we care about, what we love, when we witness it in someone else. Right now, I’m looking back at all of the ways I’ve removed myself from contention, from competition, from what I’ve perceived as the narcissistic stylings of other writers. It’s not like ALL of my observations are inaccurate! But that hellfire in my brain is fueled by fear: I don’t want to be like them. I don’t want to fully invest. I want to remain invisible. I don’t want to join any community.

I don’t want to feel vulnerable.

Most of our stories keep us safe from what we fear. That’s why doing the exact opposite of what we do to stay safe — feeling our fear, attuning to reality, noticing that we’re a lot like the people we MOST want to avoid becoming, admitting that we’re not in control — can feel irrationally, nonsensically GOOD.

I have to show my WHOLE ASS to do this job. That’s why I do it. It’s good for me to feel my fear. It’s probably why I make pottery, too. I love to try and sometimes succeed and sometimes fail. Vulnerability to failure is part of the appeal. Pride in dumb and silly and small and useless things is also part of it.

I am released into the uncertainty of the present when I invest in what’s small and dumb and embarrassing. I like it. I want to make more dangerously dumb, daringly absurd things from here on out.

So my advice for feeling more alive, more present, and more aware today is this: Ask yourself what stories you tell to stay safe from uncertainty, from investment, from sensation, from the full range of your moods and emotions. What do you fear you will become, if you aren’t safe? Try on the opposite stance. Surrender to the things you fear the most. How does that feel? Do any buried desires arise there? Do you simply feel more alive when you let these taboo emotions into your body?

The goal isn’t to fix or change anything. The goal is to simply understand how you resist life itself, how you back away from passion, how you protect yourself from things that aren’t dangerous at all — they’re only dangerous inside the merciless hellfire of your vicious mind.

Forgive yourself for everything you are. Then start loving how odd, how complex, how interesting, how ever-changing you are. It’s a wild ride. Get on board.

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