I've been trying everything I can to improve my well-being in the last few months. For most of the last year, I've been down more than I've been up. I slowly lost a lot of my healthy habits around work, exercise, socializing, and so on, and there are a lot of reasons that might have been. But the last few months got much worse, and then I kind of scraped the bottom and started coming back up thanks to help from people close to me, so I've really been trying to change everything I can to get to a better place. New counselor, trying medication, resuming exercise, and trying to practice the mental habits that have helped in the past.
I've also tried to change my inputs. I realized I was listening to too many podcasts out of habit that I didn't find interesting but were comforting because they helped me avoid thinking, not enough good-energy music, too many stressful video games, all kinds of ingredients that can be fine but were only adding to the negative outlook I have had a hard time shaking. So I'm trying to change my mental environment partly by changing what I spend time immersed in.
This includes trying to consult books and other resources that might reinforce a healthier outlook, and this is what has proven to be hardest. I've tried to look for guidebooks that I can trust to try and reinforce the possibilities of life rather than its limits or lacks, including the Universal Traveler book I posted about last week. The thing is, though, that I've been really resistant to engaging with anything that says things can get better. That people can improve. That I specifically can feel better and be healthier or happier. I have slid off of several different texts that had been helpful in the past, and I wondered if it was because they just didn't feel exciting or like a new approach, or because they genuinely weren't helpful. But then beginning to re-read The Artist's Way this morning, I paid attention to my feelings more closely and understood: I stopped believing I could be helped.
Man, that's a fucked up thing to type out loud. I don't believe I can be helped. When looking at a book that says, "Do this, and you will improve your life," I have been responding with a scoffing skepticism that is based in disgust with how difficult it's been for me to feel good lately, but not on the reality of whether I can change for the better or not. But it's also something that's been uncomfortable enough that I haven't engaged with it directly until today; I had to try extra hard to inhabit myself and really feel what I was feeling to notice this, rather than just slide off of the book dismissively and go do something else. I know doing things from the Artist's Way can be helpful. I've done the Morning Pages and benefited. Ryan said he was doing them the last few months and really enjoying it; I realized that I was thinking to myself, "Well I'm glad it's working for you," with the rest of the thought being an implied, "... but they wouldn't help me. Nothing is helping me right now." But saying that out loud shows me immediately that it's not true! When I do helpful things, they help. It's the presumption of defeat (and probably a severe serotonin deficiency) that is preventing me from engaging in helpful strategies.
Nothing can help if you just do nothing.
So I want to counter that thought directly: I can be helped. We can be helped. When we are struggling, we need to admit that we need help, and find it wherever we can. I want to be open to listening and trying things that could help me feel better. I want to set aside the skepticism that precludes any attempt. I can learn new things. I can remember and reclaim old strategies that helped. I can set aside habits that don't help. I am not stuck, I am not too old to change, I am not doomed to repeat the same mistakes in exactly the same ways forever.
We can be helped. That's a nice thing to type out loud.
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An earlier movement in this change in my understanding came yesterday, when I looked around a bookstore for a little bit, wondering what I wanted to read that I didn't already have access to. I kept thinking, "I want to read something that will help me feel better," and struggling to imagine what that might be. Finally, I came across Emergent Strategies by adrienne maree brown. My friend Sara recommended this to me over a year ago; I'd read some of brown's essays in the meantime and enjoyed them, but hadn't followed up on the book. Okay, I thought, let's take a look. I flipped open the book and the first thing I read was, "In these ways, I meditate on love."
I felt my ghost roll its eyes so hard that it did a full flip inside my body. COME ONNNNNN! But then I caught myself: what the fuck is wrong with me that I don't like the sound of meditating on love? That sounds like a nice thing to do! "Love is useless," I thought, and then, "Meditating is painful." Ah, buddy. Aw man, poor little guy. I felt my long-absent compassion for myself open up, and I remembered that one counseling approach is to treat your internal voices with the care you would show a close friend who was hurting, or a little child who needed perspective. It was deeply sad to feel and recognize those feelings in myself, and to go, "I don't agree with those thoughts. I, the one who can respond to the thoughts that surface and break in the water of my consciousness, don't agree. What can I do to help?"
So I made myself read a bit more, flipped around, and found the book brimming with positivity and actionable ideas. I pushed through my resistance, bought the book, and began reading as I walked a mile up the sidewalk. Slowly I opened myself up to the book's attitude and approach, which begins:
First and foremost, thank you for opening this book. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed living, learning, and gathering it.
What a nice way to start a book!
Wherever you are beginning this, take a deep breath and notice how you feel in your body, and how the world around you feels.
I almost threw the book on the ground. "TAKE A DEEP BREATH???? HOW DARE YOU!!!!" But... why on earth am I so resistant to this? I love taking a deep breath. I know it helps. I do it all the time. Somehow, being told to do this simple, helpful thing felt offensive, aggressive... I don't know! But I knew this would be good, even though my initial surface-level response was to get defensive. I took the deep breath, tried to feel my body, and the warm sun and air and my feet hitting the pavement, the book in my hands, the bag slung over my shoulder. And it helped. I felt better, more open, more grateful, immediately.
I needed to be told to take a deep breath, and not just to notice the world around me, but to remember there was a world outside of the constricted personal internality that has held me captive for so long. I can remember times when I've walked down the street and simply smiled at sunlight waving through trees, but that felt like someone else. Someone gone. But following this admonition, unconsciously seeking help, I felt a glimmer of that warmth and peace.
The book goes on:
Take a breath for the day you have had so far.
I did. I briefly reviewed everywhere I had been so far, and felt nice about the morning.
And a breath for this precious moment, which cannot be recreated.
Still fighting the resistance, I took a breath. I was glad to be reading this book on this sidewalk.
Now, another for the day and night coming.
Pushing through my fear of any future, even the immediate, I took another deep breath. I felt better and better.
Here you are, in the cycle between the past and future, choosing to spend your miraculous time in the exploration of how humans, especially those seeking to grow liberation and justice, can learn from the world around us how to best collaborate, how to shape change.
Every fragment of that sentence met brick-wall resistance from my negative mind, but one by one I let them through. I do want to grow liberation and justice. I do want to learn how to best collaborate. I do want to shape change, within and without. Fuck, it feels good to affirm these things; birds breaking through the smog of my factory mind.
The most dangerous thing about cynicism is that it feeds on ego; you must be convinced you are absolutely right about the world being an irredeemable shithole to sustain complete negativity. And you have to work to reinforce that position, or else risk ego-pain by realizing and admitting wrongness. This is the conservative death spiral. Wrongheadedness that requires you to put in work to prop it up. An abusive relationship with the self. So much of my negativity is based on believing I am smart enough to see things as they are, but somehow it has also become a belief that I am powerless to change anything about that bad world, seen so clearly. But a deep breath is a simple act of change that can undermine the cynic entirely.
And the cynic wants to be right. So the cynic resists even simple acts of change. Take a deep breath and remind the cynic that they aren't in charge here.
A few pages later brown writes:
Staying focused on our foundational miraculous nature is actually very hard work in our modern culture of deconstruction. We are socialized to see what is wrong, missing, off, to tear down the ideas of others and uplift our own. To a certain degree, our entire future may depend on learning to listen, listen without assumptions or defenses.
IT IS HARD, ADRIENNE!!! God, it's hard. But saying that it's hard helps relieve the pressure! If something is hard, it's okay to feel scared by it, or defeated. But difficult is not impossible. If it's hard work, then applying the work is worth it.
I think about how invested I've been in the deconstructive exercise. How clearly I can see sometimes the weaknesses in our cultural Jenga tower. If we only tear down and dismantle, the world looks like rubble we'll never recover from. But it's not enough; it's not true that this is all there is. There are things to build, other ways to use little wooden blocks besides inevitable precarity. Games about building shared solidity, rather than trying to squeak out one more useless achievement, one more extraction of finite resources, before the whole thing comes crashing down.
Our culture blames the last person to touch the tower when it collapses. But we're building this thing together. We need to change the rules.
Octavia Butler, one of the cornerstones of my awareness of emergent strategy, spoke of the fatal human flaw as a combination of hierarchy and intelligence. We are brilliant at survival, but brutal at it. We tend to slip out of togetherness the way we slip out of the womb, bloody and messy and surprised to be alone. And clever—able to learn with our whole bodies the way of this world.
My hope is that this content will deepen and soften that intelligence such that we can align our behavior, our structures and our movements with our visions of justice and liberation, and give those of us co-creating the future more options for working with each other and embodying the things we fight for—dignity, collective power, love, generative conflict, and community.
These are all such lovely observations, and pleasant things to envision and work toward. And then, on the topic of love:
One thing I have observed: When we are engaged in acts of love, we humans are at our best and most resilient. The love in romance that makes us want to be better people, the love of children that makes us change our whole lives to meet their needs, the love of family that makes us drop everything to take care of them, the love of community that makes us work tirelessly with broken hearts.
Perhaps humans' core function is love. Love leads us to observe in a much deeper way than other emotions. I think of how delightful it is to see something new in my lovers' faces, something they may only know from inside as a feeling.
If love were the central practice of a new generation of organizers and spiritual leaders, it would have a massive impact on what was considered organizing. If the goal was to increase the love, rather than winning or dominating, I think we would actually imagine liberation from constant oppression. We would suddenly be seeing everything we do, everyone we meet, not through the tactical eyes of war, but through eyes of love. We would see there's no such thing as a blank canvas, an empty land or a new idea—but everywhere there is complex, ancient, fertile ground full of potential.
I have a hard time believing this as true or possible, but the cynical part of me that rejects this kind of thinking is precisely the part of myself I want to stop empowering. It feels nice to hear this shape of thought. "Love is useless," I thought, even though I don't believe it; and here is someone saying, "Love is most useful." I want to listen and agree.
Coming back around to that first line I read:
The Sufi poet Hafiz said, "How do I listen to others? As if everyone were my Teacher, speaking to me (Her) cherished last words."
I am listening now with all of my senses, as if the whole universe might exist just to teach me more about love. I listen to strangers, I listen to random invitations, I listen to criticisms, I listen to my body, I listen to my creativity and to the artists who inspire me, I listen to elders, I listen to my dreams and the books I am reading. I notice that the more I pay attention, the more I see order, clear messages, patterns, and invitations in the small or seemingly random things that happen in my life.
In all these ways, I meditate on love.
Based on these examples, what could be nicer than meditating on love? I have experienced this mindset in the past, I remember and recognize it, and I want to do the things that will help create the conditions for me to feel this way again.
And so, following adrienne's example, today I tried to listen to my body more closely, and listen to the teachers who are available. And this led to the concrete understanding that I've internalized my own helplessness, that I just could not be helped, even when it was materially untrue. Even when being helped, I felt helpless. Even when helping myself, or others, I was operating from an assumption that it didn't really matter. That these things might help in the short term, or appear to help, but that ultimately it was useless.
I disagree with that thought. I disavow it. I want to set it aside and pick up the position that helping, listening, and loving is the whole thing.
And so I pick up the Artist's Way, find myself sliding off of Julia Cameron's suggestion that change is possible, and realize that I can't hear her through my own resistance. Even as she simply says that things can improve, I’m rejecting it. I don't want to reject this advice! I want to listen and believe:
No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity. One fifty-year-old student who "always wanted to write" used these tools and emerged a prize-winning playwright. A judge used these tools to fulfill his lifelong dreams of sculpting. Not all students become full-time artists as a result of the course. In fact, many full-time artists report that they have become more creatively rounded into full-time people.
Through my own experience — and that of countless others that I have shared — I have come to believe that creativity is our true nature, that blocks are an unnatural thwarting of a process at once as normal and miraculous as the blossoming of a flower at the end of a slender green stem. I have found this process of making spiritual contact to be both simple and straightforward.
Both adrienne and Julia make use of natural analogies — adrienne talks about mushrooms and dandelions being resilient, versatile, and healing members of their ecosystem — as well as the word "miraculous." From the cynical perspective, a "miracle" feels like a frivolous idea, or an exaggeration of things that are simply and boringly normal. But it's not a bad idea to remember the cosmic wonder that any of this exists at all. And that humans might be best-suited as natural producers of love and art.
If you are creatively blocked — and I believe all of us are to some extent — it is possible, even probable, that you can learn to create more freely through your willing use of the tools this book provides. Just as doing Hatha Yoga stretches alters consciousness when all you are doing is stretching, doing the exercises in this book alters consciousness when "all" you are doing is writing and playing. Do these things and a breakthrough will follow — whether you believe in it or not.
"Whether you believe in it or not." That's important to me. That part of me that can't believe, versus the part of me that wants to believe. The cerebral bureau of skeptics and prosecutors of my FBI attitude, and the Fox Mulder working in the basement of my mind, but instead of a UFO on the poster, there's a smiling moon of creativity and peace. I WANT TO BELIEVE.
In short, the theory doesn't matter as much as the practice itself does. What you are doing is creating pathways in your consciousness through which the creative forces can operate. Once you agree to clearing these pathways, your creativity emerges. In a sense, your creativity is like your blood. Just as blood is a fact of your physical body and nothing you invented, creativity is a fact of your spiritual body and nothing that you must invent.
Creativity moving through me like blood. Deep breaths of presence. Love inhabiting my mind as home. These are all such lovely thoughts, and have been so far away in recent months. I have proven to myself that my internal assessments of myself and my relationship to the world are flawed, unpleasant, and harmful. So I turn to my friends, who can see me more clearly. I turn to my teachers, new and old, who still have things to share and want only the best for me. And I extend a hand to myself — a gesture that brings a little tear to my eye just to type — a hand of friendship, of care, of forgiveness for all the difficulty that's come before. We can be helped. I can feel better. I want to say it out loud, type it, and make it real.
Thank you, as always, for reading.