A friend recently ranted to me about all the advice she’d been given about simply letting her issues go and releasing them to the sky like a birthday balloon. How the heck does one actually do this, she wanted to know. Yoga? Therapy? Oprah? Lobotomy?
The truth is that you’re probably never going to be at peace with all aspects of your past. You’ll never feel total acceptance for your parents’ divorce, your brother’s death from leukemia at 19, your ex’s drug addiction, your own sexual assault. These events shaped you and your choices in the moment and in many moments since. You don’t have to make peace with these traumas in order to move on in your life. We all have hotspots in our histories. We all have wounds that no matter how many times we stitch them shut, they just refuse to stay closed. At what point do you decide that you will never resolve your feelings about your grade school bullying in a way that would make Deepak Chopra weep with pride and choose to stop devoting resources to that struggle?
For example, I have a birth defect, which I very rarely if ever talk about. It has resulted in fairly significant degree of hearing impairment and was the impetus for a number of reconstructive (it’s okay if you call ’em “plastic”) surgeries in my childhood, which ultimately delivered less than stellar outcomes. I know this particular circumstance has fed issues I have around trust, rejection, abandonment, disappointing people, etc. I also know that getting caught up in untangling the knotted-up ball of Christmas tree lights that are my feelings around my birth defect is not productive at this point in my life and with my current priorities. Having it sucked. To some degree, it will always suck. I don’t need to embrace it or celebrate it or thank Baby Jesus for giving me this character-building opportunity, because those things may never happen and the time I spend working on getting to that place is time I could spend creating the future I do want. I don’t need to make peace with this congenital quirk, I need to acknowledge the effect it has had on me, recognize how I’ve adapted to it and use this knowledge and understanding to choose a different route from now on. My life and what it has the potential to be isn’t going to wait for me while I embark on a grand time travel journey back to emotional days of yore.
What I’m realizing is that you only need to do enough work to get yourself unstuck and moving ahead. You don’t have to solve the past, you simply have to be okay with understanding that it will likely always be littered with landmines, but you’re committed to learning enough to avoid stepping on them.
The people who seem to have let go of the baggage that once weighed them down may not have made peace with it, but they did choose to move on from it.
I’ve been a brat – an ungrateful wretch, even – and it’s only dawning on me now.
I’m a validation junkie. Land a new client, write a piece that goes viral, get invited to speak on radio or be interviewed in a national newspaper and I’m on cloud nine – at least for 10 minutes. And then the excitement wears off and I go looking for the next thrilling achievement. When people seem impressed by something I’ve done, I struggle with being gracious about it, because there’s always a “yes, but…” involved. There’s always a mean little voice in the back of my end asking me what’s next or telling me that, sure, this golden opportunity is swell and all, but wouldn’t it be better if it were platinum?
This is no way to be. Not only does it mean I live in a permanent state of dissatisfaction, it also makes me a difficult person to be around. It’s like your Size 2 friend who is always complaining about how fat she is. How tedious and annoying is she? I’ve come to realize that my issues with achievement and gratitude are just that – mine. Dumping them on unsuspecting friends and colleagues is not cool. Being dismissive of accomplishments that others might aspire to doesn’t make you relatable or modest, it makes you look like a tone-deaf, uncouth jerk. And it also makes you pretty damn hard on yourself. Instead of taking genuine pride and pleasure in accomplishments that you’ve worked hard to bring about, you’re always looking for the brown spot on the apple, waiting for the other shoe to drop, scared of savoring a moment because a monster might spring out from behind that tree and pop all your balloons and laugh in your face for ever daring to celebrate in the first place. It’s very tiring.
I have a byline at Forbes. I’ve interviewed a famous musician I admire and one of my feminist heroes and am about to interview my favorite movie director. I launched my own business in earnest in March and have gone from reading Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup as part of my old job’s book club to landing The Lean Startup Conference as my client and being on Google Hangouts with Eric. The fact that there’s always more that I want to do and see and be shouldn’t get in the way of appreciating what I’ve already done, seen and been. And, from now on, I’m going to make a real effort to ensure it doesn’t – both for me and for all the great people in my life who have no doubt been silently wishing I’d just chill the $#%^&* out already.
It usually starts with my stomach, which, owing to celiac, gets out of whack very easily anyway, making it difficult to identify I’ve eaten something bad from anxiety with a capital A. All those trips and vacations I thought I’d inadvertently ingested some gluten or all the times I felt gurgly and terrible sitting in my office at 2 PM? A good portion of those were anxiety-driven. Hindsight and all that jazz.
When you’re self-employed, you can’t afford to let the anxiety (or the flu or a migraine) win, I’ve figured out. Letting it have its way with you means that you aren’t doing work and not doing work means you’re letting down clients and you aren’t bringing in money and not bringing in money means you aren’t paying the bills and the whole thing just spirals until you imagine living in a cardboard box under a freeway overpass, which makes you even more anxious. I’m in good company, though. Almost 50% of women, even those who are well-off, fear becoming bag ladies in their old age. In my case, I also get resentful – resentful about people who have the freedom to be anxious or flu-ridden or just plain under the weather without piling on paranoia about torpedoing their livelihood in the process. Yes, I made my own bed and now I’m kvetching because I don’t have the time to lie in it.
The last couple of days have been rough. I found myself thinking that one of my clients was going to fire me. Never mind that I had been turning in good work, meeting deadlines, assuming additional responsibilities, or that they had nothing but positive feedback for my efforts. Never mind that ordinarily I’m about as likely to doubt my innate awesomeness as I am to believe the world is flat. Nope, the ol’ reptile brain roused itself awake long enough to hiss, “They think you suck. They’re going to tell you that you’re a disappointment and let you go.” The reptile brain knows that failure, letting others down and being rejected are red-button triggers for me, so it went ahead and pushed all of them at once. Of course I didn’t get fired, but by then I was too anxious to even feel relieved.
Sometimes, walks help. Sometimes, frozen yogurt or a brief teary interlude, but mostly I just try to remind myself that the best way to feel less anxious is to do something over which I have control. And guess what? Work happens to be that thing. So, I work through it because I don’t have a choice, but also because bringing some competence and order to bear on my world lowers my raging cortisol levels bit by bit. And I remind myself that everyone who chooses to tie their financial security directly and exclusively to the contents of their head and their ability to sell that to rest of the world day after day after day deals with the same thing.
It doesn’t matter why he didn’t call after what you thought was an awesome date. It doesn’t matter why you didn’t get that job even after nailing the interview. It doesn’t matter why the Rite-Aid cashier rolled her eyes at you. The reasons why do not matter.
It’s utterly liberating to contemplate. Someone did or said (or didn’t do or didn’t say) something. An event happened. This is all you know. This is all you need to know. You don’t need to fill in the empty space with “truth” or speculation or justification. It doesn’t need to be filled. The fact is that the information you are so desperate to know that you create and tell yourself a version of it your head just to keep calm and carry on won’t change anything. You still don’t get a second date or a job or a smile at the checkout.
But how can you get better? Avoid making the same mistakes? Improve your performance? You don’t need more information to do any of that. Because what you’re really asking when you pose those questions is How can I give someone else more of what they want? How can I be more of what they want? And those are the wrong damn questions to pose.
Recently, someone asked me if I wanted to talk, someone I hadn’t talked to in a long time and missed. And I started second-guessing the offer immediately. Maybe this person is just being polite, or feels obligated or is trying to do the “right” thing and maybe this person is hoping I’ll say no. But I didn’t have any of that information and I couldn’t reasonably get it. All I had was my need and an offer that would fill that need. All that was unequivocally true and verifiable was that someone had typed the words on the screen and that I had sufficient literacy to read them and understand the content of the sentence. The intent, the authenticity, the context were all out of my hands. So, I said yes. I read no more or less into those words than their dictionary meanings and I accepted the offer. And it felt really good to talk. And I felt calmer and happier and just all-around better after it. I didn’t watch the clock or try to talk only about happy things or edit myself in order to make sure the person didn’t regret extending the offer.
As a journalist, it’s very difficult not to think in stories. I’m trained to take three or four bits of info and create a whole narrative out of them, but that instinct doesn’t serve me well outside of work. There are things we can’t know, won’t know, shouldn’t know. Understanding that sometimes all we get is the words on the screen, the eye roll, the radio silence is both difficult to accept and amazingly freeing to embrace.
What you don’t know won’t kill you.
One thing I am learning is how very hard people are to kill. On one hand, our fragile little bodies can be crushed like soda crackers, but on the other, all of the feelings that we’re so sure signal the end for us never really do.
We spend so much time and effort doing absolutely everything we can to avoid these feelings and states of being because they seem to be unsurvivable, but they actually aren’t. They feel terrible and maybe interminably, but they’re not fatal. Feeling them will not kill you. And after you feel them once, you realize this and you are heartened – maybe not a lot, maybe only 3.8%, but you are heartened. You remember the not dying thing the next time the feeling happens and maybe you come out of that spell 8.1% heartened. Maybe you never reach a point where you’re like those people who can notice a bug on their shirt and calmly flick it away instead of ripping the shirt off, stomping up and down on it and then running to take a shower, but eventually your brain and heart embrace the this-won’t-kill-me idea and when you start feeling something terrible, one or both of them respond with, “Oh, that gross old feeling again? Well, whatever. Guess I’ll eat some Cadbury Mini Eggs while sitting around in my underwear and then get on with life.” You do get there.
You can die of:
starvation
strangulation
gunshots
snake bites
You cannot die of:
shame
humiliation
mortification
embarrassment
teasing
ostracism
insecurity
doubt
anxiety
fear
neediness
rejection
heartbreak
anger
confusion
uncertainty
loneliness
resentment
longing
failure
These things will not kill you. I promise.
