'What's the Point?'

Underneath this shame, anger, and despair, there's passion. But you have to abandon your protective intellectual narratives and feel your way forward.

Between Lives (1989), Dorothea Tanning

***If you don’t want to read about suicidal thoughts, you should skip this one.***

Dear Polly,

"What's the point?" That's the question that’s playing non-stop in the back of my mind. For years. Since I was very young I could never understand what is the point of living. The earliest memory I have of suicidal thinking was when I was 7 years old, about to enter first grade. I remember laying in bed the night before my first day of elementary school thinking: I really hope I don’t wake up tomorrow. That silent prayer would accompany me through middle school, high school, all the way to now in my late thirties.

I think I’m what they call a highly (lol barely) functional depressive person. I’ve been in and out of therapy and am currently on anti-depressants. Throughout the years I’ve had various “success” in quieting or ignoring that Voice that kept repeating "What's the point?" I was not an only child, but I never felt at home in my own family. I was a loner and I found art early on; I nicked my sister’s old watercolors and I was hooked. I stayed in my room making little crafts when other children played with others and socialized. There was a time when the act of making something would occupy me for hours and distract me from the Voice. So long as my hands kept busy, so long as my mind and my life kept busy, I could ignore the Voice… but it never stopped.

By the time I hit my early thirties, filling my life with freelancing, art projects, female friendships and relationships no longer worked. I thought it was just the usual burn out. I was living in a big city, working at a start-up during the day and doing freelance illustration on nights and weekends, working 12-14 hour days (because for a time, illustrating children’s books was my dream). By the time I delivered the last piece of artwork for my first picture book to my publisher, I remember feeling… NOTHING. When my book came out, I felt nothing. My friends told me how proud they are of me. It’s a 32-page book with less than 500 words, but it was still a book, published by an actual publisher, and my friends — a very small group of wonderful, supportive, impressive women — were so happy for me… but I felt nothing.

I no longer felt the giddiness and serenity I used to feel when I was making little crafts for myself in my room. This probably doesn’t come as a surprise to many people out there who lost that “spark” when they turned the thing they love into a job. It was devastating at first — realizing that the thing that has gotten me through the loneliest years of my life, no longer spark anything inside of me. But after a while, I came to terms with it.

I started over, found another line of work in a different field. I haven’t been super successful at it, because the industry is filled with much younger, hungrier, talented professionals who are not afraid to work hard and hustle. Whereas the old crow that I am, I no longer have that single-mindedness to advance my career. But I’ve done okay. I’ve worked on projects that I find meaningful and I’ve managed to cobble up enough work from my various fields to be financially okay for the past few years.

I’ve moved away from the big city to a much smaller town, with affordable rent, where I live in a house with a backyard and the peaceful woods and the powerful ocean are so much more accessible. With the encouragement of a therapist, I finally got on anti-depressants, and it helped for a time. It took me a few years, but I’ve found a very small group of casual friends here. And it took me a few disastrous tries, but I’ve started a relationship with a very caring, supportive person. And I even managed to finally finish and publish my second picture book. And once again my friends were so proud of me. One of them told me the book made her cry. Another friend told me that as a same-sex parent, she felt seen when reading the book with her daughter. I was glad they found something in the book they connected to… but once again, I myself felt nothing.

I feel like I’ve made all the changes to my life that I’m able to make, but what I thought was just the usual burnout no longer feels like a “rough patch” but more like a permanent state. I thought once I stopped asking my art to support me financially to live in a very expensive, demanding city, once I got on medication, started paying more attention to my mental and physical health, I thought I might be able to get back to being someone who could occupy myself for hours making things. Even if I’m not outwardly or even financially “successful” in my career, at least I could enjoy the act of making again.

But the truth is, over the past several years, the Voice has been there, it has always been there… no matter how many things in my life have gone “right” (or not), no matter how many beautiful things there are in my life worth celebrating and appreciating. And lately the Voice has gotten so loud and all-consuming that it’s the only thing I can hear. I no longer appreciate the woods, the ocean, the plants I’m growing in my backyard, the friendships, the relationships, and least of all any creative pursuits.

They say showing up is half the battle, but what do you do once you show up? What if you don’t feel inspired by anything you’re doing? What if making marks on the page, shaping ideas into words feels so meaningless and empty? I don’t mean that these things are meaningless to the world, but meaningless to MYSELF? What if everything I put down, anything that comes out feels like going through the motions, all of it feels like a LIE.

And here I am again, just as I was when I was 7 years old, once again asking myself “What’s the point?” and desperately hoping (and because I’m an adult with access to the internet now, starting to casually look into the available options to ensure) that I wouldn’t wake up tomorrow. When I was younger I was able to tell myself that it will get better, that it won’t always be like this, that there are things to look forward to. But three decades later, after moving to a different country, to different cities, after moving through different careers, different creative pursuits, different “accomplishments,” different relationships… I am just back where I have always been. So, what’s the point?

Stuck

Dear Stuck,

I know it feels like you’re back where you started, but you aren’t. You’ve gained all kinds of methods and skills and emotional insights along the way. Underneath your current obsessive focus on THE POINT, you’re stronger, more open, and more inspired than you’ve ever been. The problem is that you can’t feel it.

You had a feeling of intense despair when you were seven years old. I don’t know where that sadness came from. Beyond reporting that you didn’t fit in with your family, you don’t tell me much. All I know is that you attached meaning to that anguish: “I feel this way because there’s no point to being alive.”

This conclusion seems rational if you were raised to choose thoughts over feelings, logic over sensations, skepticism over faith. But it’s also the conclusion of a kid whose world offered very few examples of meaning, connection, and joy that felt authentic and hard-earned. You didn’t see deep, soulful love unfolding around you in ways that made it seem attainable. You might’ve witnessed joy, but it was a joy that didn’t belong to you.

And more than anything else, you had a sense that you didn’t deserve anything good. You had a deep suspicion that YOU were the problem, and this suspicion caused you so much pain and agony and shame that you had to constantly move away from that feeling. What you call the Voice is just your intellect’s attempt to flee from this tidal wave of shame and grief. The Voice makes the tidal wave of feeling evaporate, leaving a void of feeling behind like a desert littered with dying sea creatures.

In the desert, at least there is no shame. The problem isn’t you. The problem is that life has no meaning, there is no point, and nothing adds up at all.

The statement “There is no point” is intellectual. It’s not a feeling. There’s a bigger, more potent feeling that’s actually being ignored or blocked or suppressed behind that statement. The bigger feeling is the guilt and shame of being who you are, of having more emotions than you can handle and not knowing where to put them. But it’s confusing, because eventually that guilt and shame attaches itself to not being able to feel enough — enough joy and also enough stakes, enough sadness and also enough hope. Underneath your “What’s the point?” questioning, there are intense feelings of self-hatred, rage, fear, and humiliation.

When someone insists “I have always felt this way. I have always felt like there is no point.” -or- “I’m in the exact same place I was when I started.” -or- “Things always go wrong for me in the exact same way and there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it”? Those statements are defenses, not against THE UNBEARABLE POINTLESSNESS OF IT ALL but against the extreme sensations of self-hatred and humiliation they don’t want to examine and feel their way through.

That’s not just understandable and relatable and forgivable, it’s a big piece of what we all do everyday without knowing it, just to survive. Refusing to feel our feelings is so automatic that we return to that default repeatedly. And sometimes as we grow older, we require increasingly determined and extreme efforts to dig through our rational and also nihilistic noises and voices in order to locate our optimism and passion underneath.

What’s tricky is that it rarely works to THINK your way through these obstacles to emotion. You have to FEEL your way there, and that means swimming through a tidal wave of fear and anger and shame and dread along the way.

Your story about creating a children’s book and then feeling no pride and satisfaction in the book is a hint at the shame and fear involved here. At a core level, you aren’t allowed to feel pride and satisfaction. My guess is that there has been someone extremely influential in your life who decided that you had too much pride, too much satisfaction, too much joy. And the (possibly unspoken) message you ingested from this person was that you were disgusting when you felt pride, you were unlovable when you were satisfied, and your joy was offensive to others.

Based on how buried and terrifying these feelings (and all feelings) are for you, I’m going to guess that there were very few words or expressions from this person. It was more like a bad vibe you couldn’t put your finger on. My guess is that you can’t process this troubled relationship completely because it makes you feel sick and crazy just thinking about this person. You refuse to understand them. You’re furious at them. But your conscious, adult mind won’t let you go there fully, so you’ve never had a real opportunity to hash it all out, and you long ago gave up anyway.

I know that’s a LOT of interpretation on my part. I’m feeling around in the dark because you started intellectualizing your feelings at a young age, and you never felt completely safe going back into a feeling state. If you have no conscious memory of such a troubled, ambivalent presence in your life, I would guess that you have trauma in your early life that you’re not completely aware of or haven’t dug into.

The reason I’m walking out on this limb when it would be MUUUUUCH easier to just wax poetic about how beautiful and irreplaceable life can be is this: I need you to take into your consciousness and into your body’s experience of the world the possibility that the most transformative path forward will begin with abandoning your lifelong philosophy and defense against fear and dread, your mantra, which worked when you were young and is now eating you alive.

How did “What is the point?” work for you as a kid? It protected you from the much more frightening feeling of fear that revolved around your trauma or your extremely unnerving sense that the people who said they were on your side were not on your side at all.

Now the only meaning that’s discernible in your letter comes from people who are fully on your side, without a doubt. They are well-vetted and you believe in their love. This is one of your finest accomplishments, and it shows.

But that doesn’t mean you can feel it.

My supposition is that you can’t feel much of anything, and this is the core issue that leads to the relatively uninformative noise made by the words “What is the point?” “What’s the point?” heightens your despair at this moment in your life, but it also prevents you from diving into THE POINT of what’s the point, which is to block you from your own sensations.

Other people can be appreciated intellectually for having your back, and for being people who feel things for you, who take pride in your work, who are proud of you and love you. But your actual work — all of it, your creative work and also the enormous amount of work you did to arrive here, which is very different from where you were at age seven — doesn’t bring you pride or joy or any sensations at all. You look for feeling and it’s not there. And in order to protect yourself from the feeling that you are worthless and undeserving of feelings themselves, you explain that you’ve always been this way, it’s not really you’re fault, you’ve always KNOWN THE OBJECTIVE TRUTH, which is that there is no point.

Now, is there an actual point? I sometimes think there is, and I sometimes think there isn’t. Does there have to be a point? On bad days, I would prefer that there be a point. But on good days, the point feels utterly irrelevant. As long as there are fish and butternut squash and colorful stones and dogs with interesting personalities and tall trees that sway in the wind before a thunderstorm, there are paths to calm and peace and joy and truth. I don’t necessarily have to feel the importance of butternut squash, I just have to keep my faith in the fact that feelings rush in and they leave, and patience and courage are required to endure the ebb and flow. Faith in small wonders — in connection, in letting the moment breathe and show you what it has to offer — is everything, and the point is beside the point.

If you could feel more, you would feel worse and better, and if you kept tolerating your shame and self-hatred and despair and grief over everything you’ve been through, you might slowly start to FEEL how far you’ve come to get here. You might slowly start to understand, inside your bones, that just arriving at this strange moment when everything feels emptied out is part of the point. You might wake up to the knowledge, which is accompanied by a mix of intense sensations, that you are here to question everything, to bend and twist everything, to feel distant from everything, and to crawl, on your hands and knees, back to some fixed point where you can feeeeeeel why you bother.

That’s why I’m here. That’s why I suffer. My job is to get knocked down by big waves, and crawl back to the shore. My job is to believe in getting knocked down, and to believe in crawling. My job is to relocate my faith in existence, over and over again. To feel my way through despair, patiently, waiting for what this world will show me next.

And when you arrive at that place where you can FEEL again, and shame isn’t blocking out all of your senses, that’s when you can feel pride in the fact that you bothered. You can feel joy at knowing how sad you’ve always been, underneath your numbness. You can feel peace from understanding, inside your cells, how much you’ve always hated yourself and your feelings and your fears and what you view as your fatal flaws.

You will feel heavier and lighter, when you dare to surrender to feeling itself. You will let waves of feeling wash over you and you’ll worry about drowning, maybe because of trauma or maybe because someone wanted you to drown. It’s terrifying to feel that much, but you’ll keep going back and feeling more and more, and something will break loose and float away forever, and something else will sink to the bottom of the ocean, and you’ll understand who you are for the first time.

It will feel familiar, but it will also feel new. When you feel it, your challenge is to keep your mind from writing it off as the same old stupid delusion you used to cling to when you made crafts in your room. Your challenge is to quiet your mind and let your heart tell you the truth.

Here’s the truth: You’re a survivor, an inventor, an improviser, and an effusive, teary-eyed lover of life. Underneath the lead blanket of “What’s the point?” there’s a wild horse that wants to run for miles. Underneath the low cloud ceiling of shame and fear, there’s a rocket ship aimed at Venus, fired up and ready for adventure.

Your numbness needs to be conquered, physically and mentally and emotionally. I would try a brand new way of living that includes a physical challenge (weight lifting?), a mental challenge (read something impossibly difficult slowly and patiently?), a psychological challenge (double up on therapy with the intention of feeling as much as you humanly can and dropping all preconceived notions and narratives of who you are at the door?) and a spiritual challenge (meditate while surrendering to meaninglessness while welcoming big flashes of insight and beauty from the ether to break through the darkness?).

This is not distraction. It’s not keeping busy. These challenges are LIFE ITSELF. When you surrender to them, and let them shape you, and remain curious about what mysterious, subconscious benefits they might offer you, you surrender to EVERYTHING YOU DON’T KNOW YET.

That’s your primary job right now. Surrender. Giving yourself fully to mysteries you might never understand. Quieting your rational mind, and ignoring the Voice, so that your heart and soul and body can dance with the unknown. That’s what always made you different: You were built to thrive on uncertainty and mystery. The Voice is a lie designed to block you from your truest source of power.

Someone didn’t want you to be as powerful as you are. I know that sounds nuts. Try it on for size and see if it feels right. And if it does, commit to noticing all the ways that you protect yourself from your own power, hide from your power, shrink from your destiny as an effusive soul who eats confusion and grief for breakfast and grows stronger by the hour.

You’ve unknowingly built up this shadow faith in the Voice, and now it’s time to see that you don’t require its protection anymore. You are overprotected by your intellect. You’re strong enough now to face the overwhelming shame and self-hatred you experience over the things you were never allowed to feel. I believe that you’ll even end up making art and feeling it again, it’s just that the stakes need to be much higher now. Maybe the stakes of children’s books didn’t feel high enough. Maybe those were baby steps towards what you really believe in and love the most.

That’s the absurd paradox of thinking that everything is pointless. It masks a feeling that nothing is pointless, that everything is too weighty and heavy and gigantic to bear, and that color and darkness and weight MUST find a way into your life, and be processed, and be celebrated, for anything to feel worthy of your efforts. You want to make art that is big enough to capture the universe inside you that you’ve been denying for so many years. You want to make art that embodies all of the feelings you buried so deep that you believed they amounted to a flat, empty riddle that asks “What’s the point?”

Right now, you’re hiding in a closet in the basement of the Sistine Chapel, and you’ve never seen anything but the inside of the closet in the basement.

It's time to open the door and look around.

Expect to feel too much. Expect to hate it. Expect to feel disgusting and useless and small and crumpled. Expect to learn how much you hate yourself.

The more you feel, the more chances you’ll have to imagine a different physical and emotional sensation: Faith. It will come and go. You’ll be filled with a conviction that you’re a real artist and you always have been one, it’s just that you wanted to express emotions that you weren’t permitted to feel. And then that conviction will leave you.

That’s how it feels to be alive. That’s why everyone who tries to create anything that’s big enough to honor the enormity of this world suffers at some level: because it takes everything to show up for everything.

It is humbling. You will crawl. You will have to be patient. You’ll have to quiet your mind over and over, and trust your body and your heart instead. But eventually, you’ll rediscover the ocean. You’ll rediscover sex. You’ll relocate your original voice and your vibe and the fact that your humor and your rage and your angst actually do matter.

You’ll wake up and you’ll see how far you’ve traveled to get here, and you’ll see how many more miles lie ahead, and you’ll notice that you’re in no hurry at all to travel forward, and you’re no longer in pain when you look back. You’ll wake up and you’ll feel electric and turned on and wicked and full of longing and you’ll feel

PROUD.

Surrender to the truth. You are ashamed of what you are. You’ve always been deeply ashamed. You told yourself that you conquered this shame a long time ago. That was a story. But this realization isn’t sad. It’s incredible, like watching this desert flooded by a massive tidal wave that brings all of these gasping, dying sea creatures back to life.

Feel your shame. It won’t be here for long, you know why? Because you’ve come a long fucking way already, and you know some things. You’re wiser and stronger than you realize. You’re more full and more powerful and angrier and more loving than you realize. It’s time to feel everything. It’s time to be everything you are.

Polly

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