Tolerating Unknowns Will Make You Stronger

Learning not to flail and fight and flee in the face of big questions opens your heart, mind, and body to a more deeply connected, satisfying existence.

Moments or years hence, having reminisced (1990-1991) by Dorothea Tanning

When you look back at the most fruitful moments of your life years from now, you’ll be surprised to discover how many of them unfolded amid a big loss or a crisis or in the face of a giant unknown.

That’s true because we sometimes have the most access to our passion, love, and delight in being alive at the very moments when it’s the hardest to tolerate our intense feelings. Our feelings are so strong that we have a constant urge to flee, or to find some solution through our intellect, or to dismiss the sources of our despair or uncertainty as unacceptable.

When we say to ourselves, “This feels bad. I need a way to fix this!” that’s the very moment when the most growth and promise lies at our fingertips. But in order to access it, we have to do the opposite of what we want to do. We have to resist the urge to analyze or find a solution or protect ourselves from our emotions.

We have to stop and feel more instead, without changing a thing.

This is when the sky starts to sparkle unexpectedly, and the soaring violins enter, unannounced. This is when we feel how precious it is to be here.

***

Resisting the urge to find a solution or take action is one of the hardest things to do.

Personally, my feelings change often — often enough that it can throw me off-balance. Over the years, I’ve adapted to these unnerving shifts by learning to draw sweeping conclusions quickly, summarizing what changed, what it means, and what I need to do about it. Sometimes my reactions are so rapid that I don’t have time to take in where I am before I start telling stories about what’s happening and what action needs to be taken.

I might even act before I know what I’m dealing with or how I’m feeling. Sometimes this takes the shape of resistance: I decide a feeling or a situation is bad on the spot and start to fight back before I know what’s there. Other times, this takes the shape of discomfort and shame: I am feeling a new way, so something must be wrong.

This is an association so many of us have: I’m experiencing a strong feeling, therefore I’ve made a big mistake or something scary is about to happen.

Our culture’s narratives reinforce these impulses. We’re told repeatedly that strong feelings are pathetic and bad and need to be controlled. The second when we’re presented with an opportunity to explore a new emotional landscape, we’re cut off at the knees with shame, self-doubt, and fear. Exploration and discovery are rendered possible.

We stop feeling and start trying to fix or stop or mute our feelings instead, because for our whole lives we’ve been taught that intense emotions are the enemy, and if we’re awash in them, we’re likely to drown.

What if we floated instead?

***

Once you learn to float — not every time you’re hit with a tidal wave of emotion, but more often than not — you start to notice how the people around you flail and swim against the tide. You notice how strong the fear of drowning can be.

A flood of words replaces questions. An insistence on proclamations and resolutions replaces the open sea, open sky, open air of uncertainty. Instead of relaxing and watching a photograph develop slowly, details filling in here and there, color flooding into the picture, they prefer to announce what the final image will look like. They don’t want to wait and see. They can’t stand to sit with what they don’t know yet.

For some people, it feels safer to make an endless list of guesses while closing their eyes tightly against what’s here. It feels frightening to let other people take up space, to show who they are and what they want. For some, even the smallest acknowledgement that they’re not in control of the future sends them over the nearest cliff, tumbling into an abyss of loneliness and despair.

This is a sign of how complete their illusion of control has become. When someone says the wrong words or suggest an alternative path in their presence, everything turns dark or flinty and defensive. They start arguing instead of listening. They push back, grow dismissive, back away.

For this reason, allowing time and space for mysteries to unfold isn’t just an exercise in groovy Show Up and Be Present, Dude! meditation for many of us. It’s a way of heading off the defensiveness, dismissiveness, alienation, and isolation that often follow when we don’t feel connected to the people around us, when we feel misunderstood, when we keep seizing the narrative and shaping it to our preferences and then pushing back on anyone who challenges that story.

Real connection and intimacy always demand space and time without control, without air-tight stories that can’t be contradicted, without fantastical escapes, without intellectual retreats. To be present for your life and the people in it, you have to constantly stay open to what’s there, even when the picture is blurry and your loved ones aren’t ready to communicate and your circumstances feel slightly unpredictable.

This is why intimacy can be so hard for people who over-intellectualize as a result of insecure attachment — people who often feel needy and neurotic in the face of unknowns or conflicts, or distant and neurotic, or alternately needy and distant. Because intimacy demands that we make space for intense emotions, allow room for unknowns while those strong feelings are in play, and refuse the culture’s stories about why those feelings mean that we are weak, pathetic, and bound for humiliation and despair.

Next-level intimacy and radical honesty in particular, which necessarily unfold most beautifully against a landscape of honoring the other person’s true desires and allowing the other person’s flawed humanity room to play, require patience and time and a steady refusal to allow shame and control to suck the life out of each vulnerable moment of connection.

***

This difficult-to-reach space is made more accessible when you cultivate the same intimacy and radical honesty with yourself. When you sit with yourself and allow room for giant question marks to float around you — and you listen to your doubts, notice your shame at feeling so much, and see how actively you fear humiliation or abandonment or disapproval or even passion or heartfelt connection — you slowly repair your heart.

Sometimes just feeling how afraid you are is enough. If you’re working hard to solve some emotional puzzle or fix someone else or get something from someone, if you’re struggling to seem more robust or beautiful or important than you are, if you’re debating or retreating into fantasy or constructing a world where you alone are right and everyone else, damn them, is dead wrong, these are signs that your fear is ruling you.

You’re panicking. You don’t want to drown. You don’t believe that you can float. When someone says, “Just lie on your back and float!”

You say, “No, I’ve never been able to do that. I WILL SINK AND DIE.”

Sometimes hasty stories and analyses and endless emails and panicked calls to close friends can be a way of connecting and saving yourself from despair. But other times, this kind of intellectualizing can be a way of treading water. When you land in that state, you often want to draw a conclusion and take action based on that conclusion. You want to form a hypothesis, prove it immediately, and move on, usually by shutting down your heart and your body in an attempt to stay safe from unknowns.

Instead, try lying on your back on the floor and saying to yourself:

I’m feeling way too much right now. I feel like I’m going to lose. I feel like I care too much. I feel like I’m going to get left behind.

I feel like I don’t matter enough. I feel like I never will. I feel like no one cares. I feel like no one will ever see me clearly.

I feel like the one glimpse of love I’ve had was an illusion all along.

I feel like no one will ever truly be on my side.

I feel like I’ll only let other people down. I feel inadequate. I feel tired. I feel like the most fucked up person on the planet.

Even if you can’t lie on the floor because you’re in an office or at school or on the subway or sitting at a café or riding your white horse home to your castle (I hope this is you!), you can still make some room for the core feelings that are fueling your jitteriness and anxiety in this moment.

It’s strange how relaxing it can be, just to acknowledge your despair.

You’ll know you’ve stumbled on what’s acting on you when your body loosens up, settles, unfurls, and your mind slows down, and you eyes travel to the nearest window and you take a deep breath.

In that moment when you’ve finally let go of control, I want you to understand one thing: Everything you care about so badly it hurts will be improved by admitting to yourself how much you care — regularly, repeatedly — while also acknowledging that you can’t control every outcome. Your ability to surrender to your love and passion and sadness and uncertainty is so much better than control. Because the more you feel and the less you tell rigid stories around that feeling, the more connected and grounded you’ll feel. Surrender intensifies love and passion and joy. Surrender builds self-trust and patience.

Simply surrendering to what is real in this moment is your smoothest path to flourishing.

Simply acknowledging the fragile feelings that come with big unknowns is enough.

This is where everything good begins. Stop fixing yourself and surrender to reality. It’s springtime. The trees are budding everywhere. You are full of sweetness and brilliance and light. Don’t roll your eyes, motherfucker. Dare to believe it. Don’t be cynical about how awake and alive and fragile you are. Dare to feel it.

This world is all yours, even here, even now. You are buoyant. You are bright. Give this world all of your love.

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Thanks for reading Ask Polly. You landed here today for a reason. Dare to trust what you feel inside your cells in this moment. Bring it with you everywhere today, and watch how your spark spreads to the people around you. Send your letters to askpolly@protonmail.com.