Stay In It!

If your mind tends to transform what you love into puzzles, problems, and pain, how do you stay invested in your (big, full, romantic) life?

Prime Metaphor (1938), Jane Graverol

Are you a perfectionist, an overachiever, a sensitive overthinker, or someone who often bounces between doing too much and hiding from everything? If so, chances are that your mind has been trained, from an early age, to work like a tireless factory that changes impressions into stories, stories into problems, problems into puzzles, and puzzles into panic. This means that the longer you’re alive, the more swiftly your mind will move an impression down its speedy conveyor belt and forcibly reshape it into anxiety, fear, and panic.

The story you’ll tell yourself about this process is that it’s focused on solutions, on fixing what’s wrong, on addressing the matter at hand. Strangely, though, most of the impressions you feed into your factory don’t become solvable problems. Beautiful solutions are not flowing out of this factory. Instead, all that appears is more and more panic that has nowhere to go.

If your guiding imperative in life is to push through the panic and get things done, make things happen, keep people happy, keep everything moving forward, then chances are that there are warehouses of panic stacking up under your skin.

You are overwhelmed and exhausted. Your nerves are frayed. But the factory keeps chugging away.

Occasionally, in time of crisis, mourning, or reckoning, you might find yourself sifting through the boxes in your warehouse, opening them up, and examining the panic inside.

“Why did I panic so much over such a small thing?” you’ll ask yourself, over and over. But when your mind is focused on constant forward progress, when you’re propelled by anxiety and fear and the darkness that inevitably rises up around your choices, your losses, and the unnervingly uncertain path ahead, you’re always essentially accumulating new impressions that immediately become problems and puzzles and panics.

In order to shift your perspective and stop accumulating new panics that never dissipate, leaving you frazzled and confused, you have to power down the factory. You have to let your impressions blossom and wither without processing them into anxious storytelling and stressful pollutants.

***

How do you know that your factory is running 24 hours a day? If you walk around telling stories about your problems most of the time, then you’re probably storing the panic of a million small, unsolvable problems under your skin. This was a way of life for me for decades, so I get it. But it might be time to experiment. Watch yourself turn each new impression into a problem. Observe yourself solving puzzles instead of relaxing during your downtime. Imagine closing down your warehouses and factories, and replacing them with parks where you play, breathe, and cultivate gratitude for everything that’s already here, everything you already are, and every beautiful uncertainty that lies ahead.

Your storytelling factory will say “Oh Jesus, I hate this shit, get me out of here! Life is filled with problems and puzzles, that’s just the way it is because people are fucking impossible and the world is a mess and surviving this shitstorm without losing my mind takes all of my strength!”

When you hear angry and desperate sounds, listen to them and respect them. This is a sign of your exhaustion. Maybe you need a break from the industrious and grueling pace you’re keeping right now. Or maybe you just need a vacation from the banging and grinding of your own overworked factory of a mind, which keeps insisting that your entire life will fall apart if you don’t stay vigilant and fix whatever goes wrong next.

Maybe you need to do nothing, say nothing, refuse to react, avoid solving puzzles, resist the urge to interject or intercede. Maybe you need a minute to let this problem wander off, dissolve, or solve itself.

This week, I suddenly started reacting to small events with too many words, too much stress. I was turning impressions into puzzles immediately and becoming panicked. I was diving in and typing too many words about too many different things. This morning I woke up with a headache and I thought: I’m doing too much. I’m on edge. I’m trying to control situations that need to just unfold on their own. Even where my input is necessary, I have to slow down and put each problem into perspective.

I also thought: I need more ways of expressing my gratitude privately, so that I understand how much affection, compassion, and gratitude for myself and others is lurking beneath my panic.

The factory tricks you into believing that life is all about control. But once you shut it down, you can suddenly recognize how often impressions can shift and change. The less fixated on set outcomes you become, the more fluid and flexible the world starts to seem. You loosen your grip on your life. This gives you the calm state of mind that will allow you to notice when unexpected gifts arrive.

***

And when something hurts your feelings (my daughter just left for high school and INSISTED THAT I NOT HUG HER GOODBYE BECAUSE SHE WAS LATE), you take a second and let yourself feel hurt in spite of that fact that it feels irrational and also unusual for you.

One of the real challenges of doing this job is that at the exact moment when I’m describing what feels like a breakthrough or new paradigm, the fates intervene, kicking over my sandcastles and laughing in my face. Refusing to be tripped up by those moments isn’t always a victory, though. Sometimes avoidance is just another way of maintaining too tight a grip, just another method of refusing to let the surprises and pain and uncertainty of reality into my senses.

My biggest insight this year has been that I can experience hurt and discomfort without telling a story (Why am I so thin-skinned to feel this way?), treating the situation like a problem that needs to be solved (I’d better explain to my daughter that I have to hug her before she leaves, even when she’s in a hurry.), or vowing to solve this puzzle by disengaging, feeling less, doing less, caring less (I won’t say goodbye to my daughter in the morning because it obviously annoys her.)

I can sit in the unnerving, uncertain space where I just feel bad. I don’t have to wonder if this is how it will be forever (No more hugs ever, that time is long gone!). I don’t have to figure out an escape from this pain. I can be honest with myself and feel where I am without quickly moving away from my discomfort.

Discomfort is what I’m trying to escape when I fire up my factories. I want every hurt — even the smallest pain, even the vaguest fears — to become puzzles and problems to solve, so I can FINISH THE HARD PARTS and live inside ONLY THE GOOD PARTS.

But there is no finishing the hard parts. The hard parts live inside each human body. The hard parts linger in the air each morning, or leap out to surprise you suddenly. The printer jam is never cleared, the windows are never eternally clean, and human beings behave unpredictably, acting in ways we wish they didn’t, saying things we wish they wouldn’t, ignorant of our needs and desires.

I have a small piece of paper on my desk right now that just says:

STAY IN IT

I got this from Jami Attenberg’s great newsletter Craft Talk.

Stay in It, Always

Her post is about trying to finish creative projects, and how you sometimes have to carry the little problems and puzzles of creative work around with you in order to stay energized and focused and to avoid becoming discouraged or losing the thread.

But I’ve found myself looking at those words in a few different ways this week. STAY IN IT means keep caring, keep investing, keep feeling the pain and discomfort that always comes with a wide open, romantic view of your life. STAY IN IT means keep daring to feel what you’re feeling, with all of the difficulties and contradictions therein. STAY IN IT means let impressions form and dissipate without taking action, without interjecting or explaining or persuading, without trying to control, without protecting yourself, without hiding from how enormous your darkness can seem when you stumble and fall into it unexpectedly.

STAY IN IT. Stay in the darkness for long enough, and you notice that it’s not that bad, actually. This darkness isn’t yours alone, it’s not unique, it’s natural, and the longer you stare directly at it, without shame or any need to control it, the more quickly the dawn arrives.

You don’t need a factory to save you from darkness. You don’t need to tell stories about why this darkness is here or what you need to do about it. You don’t require strategies.

Everything you care about doesn’t have to take the shape of a problem.

Everything you love doesn’t have to transform into a puzzle.

Dare to continue caring, continue loving with all of your heart, continue relishing this romance that is your life, as ragged and wretched as it can be sometimes. This discomfort means you’re in it, you’re truly here, and you’re truly alive.

Tolerate this uncertainty. The hard parts are also the good parts. Stay in it.

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