Transitions, part 2: 21 thoughts on how to be lost

"An incomplete collection of potentially imprecise and contradictory field notes on how to be lost, or how I tried to be lost"

Mar 24, 2023

“More often, we need to leave the old without any promise of the new, need to spend time as forest dwellers, just surviving.” - Marianne Woodman

This is a continuation of this column—the second installation of a three-part series on transitions. (Third part is still to come.)

Introduction

This piece has been a slog. It’s also extremely long and I would caution against reading it all at once?

What I set out to write (“A list of the things I found useful over the course of a life transition that seemed to have no end or purpose”, as promised here) sounded doable. I used to be good at listicles, and if you were to come to me and say “I feel like I’m in between two lives can you give me some advice?” I’d make you a spreadsheet. In other words, telling you ‘here’s what I did to manage a really long liminal period’ felt like a very easy and potentially fun exercise, like I was going to make you a list of the best churches to visit in Rome.

But then that simple list turned into a brain dump of the notes I took and the articles I clipped over a two-year period in an effort to make sense of what was happening to me (feeling lost/unmoored/directionless/existential dread for an ‘excessive’ amount of time), and what was happening to the world (everyone and everything appearing to be extremely fucked up), and because both of these things are still mysteries to me (myself, the world), the list of “things” propagated from ten to 20 to 30 and then blurred into something else. Trying to write this piece was like trying to bake a cake when I hadn’t stirred the batter, or like trying to make my brain work in a way it now refuses to. I cannot simplify, boil down, or arrive at universal truths the way I once could.

So. I don’t have “a list of things that I found useful over the course of a life transition that seemed to have no end or purpose”; what I have instead are some tools and some advice I would have given myself if I’d had it, but mostly a lot of thoughts I wrestled with, ideas I developed, patterns I observed, and changes I witnessed, during the period of time when my life was chronically in-between and the rest of the world seemed that way, too.

So. Take this less as some definitive list or set of truths; treat it more like a non-linear, incomplete collection of potentially imprecise and contradictory field notes on how to be lost, or how I tried to be lost. Be assured this is a mess of thoughts, and it absolutely should have been broken up into smaller essays.

Rudolph Bahro said “When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure,” and Krishnamurti said, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” The final thing I’ll say about this specific piece: I am not trying to help you feel better, or make something more of your confusion or in-betweenness, should that be where you are. Instead, my point (in this piece, in general) is: I think the future of our society, culture, species, and planet depends on the extent to which we all allow our identities to be destroyed and ourselves to be lost. Which is to say, if you’re feeling ungrounded or lost or in-between, I think that just means you’re a fertile patch of ground the world desperately needs, and I’m so sorry and happy for you.

Finally: Much has been written on this topic, and I’ve read a nice portion of it. There’s a resource list at the bottom, and please feel free to add yours in the comments.

21 thoughts on feeling lost for an endless period of time

1. First, the money thing

Because enough of you will read this and think this lady had some kind of financial privilege in order to lose her shit and fuck off for a few years, I want to assure you I did. I own my home and my mortgage is reasonable. I had a small retirement account started, I had savings, I had no debt. I had a meager severance from Tempest (that was subsidized later by the temporary CEO, who got money from the sale of Tempest while I did not and who graciously gave me half of her paycheck from the sale). I had money coming in from my first book, including royalties but also a bonus payment because QLAW sold better than expected. I had a few speaking gigs, some contract work, and I started my Substack last January which has brought in some income. I currently do not make enough money to cover my expenses after taxes, but I’m also not worried about that because I have better than average earning potential (I could create a course, start coaching again, really pump up this Substack, try and get speaking gigs, etc.), and I have an existing book deal. I say all this not to justify my worth or show you my financials or anything like that, but to give you a baseline to operate from.

As you’re reading this keep in mind two things: (1) I had time and resources and better than average future prospects, and (2) I used all of my savings, I was willing to drain my retirement and sell my house to buy time (though I have not had to), I forewent a good number of experiences and expenses, and I took a significant amount of risk on myself. Or: I had privilege and I made some sacrifices.

All that being said, financial insecurity has been a real theme, I have worried about how I’ll make a living as a full-time writer or if I will ever make an ‘adequate’ living again, and it has been uncomfortable and scary depleting what I’d saved up. But I also have refused to let financial security be the primary driver of my choices, which allowed me to walk away from situations I found to be highly compromising of my values, and allowed me to only pursue things I found to be full yeses. I discovered over these past few years I would rather be in integrity than be rich or even solvent.

I also value comfort, I like nice things, I don’t believe in zero-sum realities, and I have an abundant mindset (in less a law-of-attraction, more adrienne marie brown kind of way). If I want to believe in a world where everyone is taken care of and everyone has a sense of abundance and everyone gets to make a living doing things that inspire them rather than destroy them, I have to live that principle myself.

Lastly, and this kind of goes to point #4 (“Values”): I have a very different idea of what enough is now, and it’s a much smaller sum than it used to be.

2. Healing as performance

I think for a lot of reasons I don’t need to name, we’re convinced what a sane person does is heal and then turn that healing into some kind of product, and I don’t mean something like a fitness app (which I do indeed mean), but also a better job or a better ass or a better personality. All failure or struggle or pain or inertia gets reduced to what we make out of it, what we transmute it into, and what we become after, and therefore experiences don’t hold intrinsic value, they are only a currency worth what we exchange them for. As Caleb Campbell put it in this interview, we’re awash in a culture that subtly and unsubtly encourages us to reduce all our healing to a kind of performance.

In the beginning, I felt pressure to do something with what was happening to me—to turn it into a book or podcast or an op-ed or a really compelling Instagram post or a life that was better than the one I had before. There was a true period of time—about six months in—when I hadn’t really changed all that much or done much of anything to improve my situation and by objective appearance, I was just fucking off all day every day. And I kept thinking to myself: It’s been a long enough time, shouldn’t you be talking about this? Shouldn’t this be an integrated lesson by now? Which is not a kind of healing, but a kind of cruelty.

I start here with this because as you read through the rest, I want to be clear that part of what allowed me to move forward was dropping the illusion that I was supposed to turn my experience into something more than it was, and I say this not to release me from some kind of judgment or assure you this column that is written as a product of my experience of being lost is not the product of commodifying my experience of being lost, but simply to tell you: it is a bad and destructive idea to think we are supposed to turn our healing into anything beyond the experience of it.

You don’t have to make anything out of this. Just be lost.

3. Feeling like yourself

In Haley Nahman’s essay, On Feeling “Like Yourself”, she does a much better job than I could describing what it means to feel, or not feel, like oneself. A few poignant quotes: “I don’t think ‘not feeling like myself’ has to do with being sad necessarily, I suspect it has more to do with comfort and control. I feel like myself when I recognize the terms of my existence and feel comfortable navigating myself within them.” And: “I approve of my current desires, therefore comprehend myself.”

I have at many points in my life not felt “like myself”, mostly in small and fleeting ways, like when I don’t get enough sleep or I’m traveling or I’m in some kind of depression. There’s usually a relatively quick reprieve, some moment of “Oh there I am again,” and in a way, I was waiting these past two years for that exact moment: I would know my in-between had ended when I began to recognize myself again. Only that makes it sound a lot nicer than I actually was with myself about it. It was more like: Why the fuck haven’t you snapped out of this yet?

Early on, I imagined feeling “like myself” again would be just that—an again—wrought through a return to some former behavior. I would be me again when I was producing, working on my next project, on the schedule I desired, with an intact sense of purpose. I’d be me again when I was forward driving or getting a consistent paycheck or doing my hair for a reason. But that return never materialized. I didn’t wake up one day spellbound by the next idea or vision of my life to work toward. Instead I just kind of slowly creamed outward like spilled yogurt.

If I take something Haley said—that we more easily comprehend ourselves when we approve of our desires—and apply it here, it follows that because in my in-between, I did not approve of my desires (which were mostly to be left alone and not do very much work and not try very hard at anything at all), there had to be some known desires I did approve of, and if I could recapture them then I would comprehend myself, and feel like myself once again. But then eventually I started to think: What if the known desires are dead for a reason? What if there are new unthinkable desires, and I just haven’t given myself the grace to find them?

I can confirm that not feeling like yourself is a special kind of hell, and it’s a special kind of hell mostly because we define health and functioning and flourishing through a really narrow lens, one that assumes that we know who we are and we know where we’re going, or at least that we know what we want, or at the very least that we’re still productive and contributing members to society. If we don’t have those things, we assume a lack, a thing we’re supposed to correct for. No one ever tells you to just absolutely lose your shit and fuck off and be confused, they tell you to make a plan. And no one ever says this is so fun not knowing who I am at all anymore—what we say, or what I said, is I feel like such a fucking loser.

Refer back to the Bahro quote above. Maybe this sounds like a detour from everything I’ve just said, but I see the idea of knowing ourselves, and the idea of a future being created by those unafraid to be insecure, as inseparable statements. We already have a world where people are trying all the time to know themselves through comfort and familiarity and unexamined desires. What kind of world would it be if instead, everyone tried to lose themselves, tried to not know who they were, and accepted that not feeling “like their old self” was just exactly that: not being their old self?

I think I am saying if you don’t feel like yourself, even if it’s been years, perhaps that’s a sign of health, an opening and an offering, and not a sign that something needs to be fixed.

4. Values

Which brings me to values, because when you’re desperately trying to resurrect the familiar in order to save yourself from the skin-flaying insecurity that is the in-between, or fast-forward to what comes next, you aren’t necessarily questioning whether you even hold the same values you once did.

The version of me that imploded in 2021 valued a lot of things I still do, like integrity, directness, and generosity. But she also valued achievement, productivity, reputation, drive, recognition, and hustle. And she measured her worth by these latter things more than she did the others, and mostly because the latter things rewarded her greatly.

It was only through a long period of not feeling like myself, and losing all the things I’d previously counted on to determine my worth, that I started to question if these things even mattered to me, or if they’d ever made me happy, and if not then what did. A few years in, I can tell you that many of the things I listed off above, such as success and recognition and productivity and reputation, don’t hold much meaning for me anymore (though they do hold some). Instead, I value things I never thought I would, like ease, completion, contemplation, space, flow, and connection. And this only came about because I lost the regular touchstones that reinforced those previously held values; because I didn’t feel like myself or know myself or where I belonged or even what the point of my life was. It was only from that place that it was possible to ask the question, What is it that I actually value? And then, even worse, it was only from that awful period of waiting, of not knowing anything true at all, that the answers began to firm.

5. You are going to be okay

The thing I kept wanting people to tell me the most was that everything would be okay; that I would turn out okay, that I wouldn’t be stuck like this forever, that I hadn’t maxed out all my good life credit cards and would spend the rest of my life on some increasingly pathetic downward trajectory paying off the debt of a few good breaks. I would ask my friends “I’m going to be okay again, right?” And they would laugh, and they would coo, “Of course you are.” Then I would ask if they were sure, and they would promise they were sure, and then I would have them tell me one more time.

You are going to be okay. Really, truly. I promise.

“So please, if you are in the sacred space between stories, allow yourself to be there. It is frightening to lose the old structures of security, but you will find that even as you might lose things that were unthinkable to lose, you will be okay. There is a kind of grace that protects us in the space between stories. It is not that you won’t lose your marriage, your money, your job, or your health. In fact, it is very likely that you will lose one of these things. It is that you will discover that even having lost that, you are still okay. You will find yourself in closer contact to something much more precious, something that fires cannot burn and thieves cannot steal, something that no one can take and cannot be lost. We might lose sight of it sometimes, but it is always there waiting for us. This is the resting place we return to when the old story falls apart. Clear of its fog, we can now receive a true vision of the next world, the next story, the next phase of life. From the marriage of this vision and this emptiness, a great power is born.” - Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible

6. Egypt, or this time counts

In the book Dawn of Everything, the authors talk about how Egyptian history is marked by three distinct periods: the Old Kingdom (about 2,700-2,200 B.C.E.), the Middle Kingdom (2,050-1,800 B.C.E.), and the New Kingdom (about 1,550-1,100 B.C.E.). I don’t have the text with me in Los Angeles so this is paraphrased (from my faulty memory), but what I recall from the discussion about it was how there were gaps in between the times that counted as history, which unintentionally implied a kind of unimportance. What happened between 2199 and 2051? What about 1799 to 1551? Were they periods of nothingness, a waiting for the next great period to begin? Or were people still living their lives and doing things of consequence?

I’ve thought about this concept so much through all of this, how this period of time was marked by so much absence, but it was also a presence, a living, an existing, a fullness. When we’re conditioned to mistake our actual lives or the merit of our lives for the milestones, instead of each painstaking breath between, we can discount the in-between periods of our personal history as gaps. I’ve tried very, very hard to remember through all of this: this is not a gap. My real life isn’t about to start, I’m not wasting time, I’m not failing at existing because there’s nothing to show for it. This time counts, as much (if not more, and I would argue more) than any other.

7. Speaking of time counting

Throw out your ideas of how long this should take. It will take the time it takes. Don’t compare yourself to other people who went through similar things, or other people at all. The timing of your life is unique to you, and if it feels like it should “be over by now” or that you’re “doing it wrong” or if you were some different kind of person who was more capable or healthy you’d be “better” by now, that’s only a sign that you’re exactly where you should be.

It has been my experience that I’m changing the most when it feels like nothing is happening at all.

8. Speaking of comparison

Don’t do that either. I kept looking at other people I counted myself among who had similar-type careers and who were just totally crushing it, at the top of their game showing up on social media every day all sane looking. Nothing made me feel more out of my skin than thinking they were moving ahead while I was dissolving into my couch. I had to stop looking, I had to totally detach myself from what other people were doing, I had to remember that I was going on a different tour than everyone else and it was fine fine fine. (This ended up reinforcing something I hadn’t anticipated, which is how rewarding it is to go your own way and do what appears to be different than what everyone else is doing.)

9. Regression

I regressed a lot, and before anyone holds up their hand and tries to assure me I did not because that’s a mean thing to think, or because there is no such thing as regression and it’s all just forward movement (a thing I’ve said before!): let me also say that perhaps insisting that everything is The Path, or that regression is actually progression, in a way sets us up to absolutely fucking hate ourselves when we return to behaviors we thought we’d outgrown. Because when we think in these terms—as everything being forward movement and the point of all this work as a means to the end of becoming better than we were—it becomes its own kind of sickness. Just a thought.

Anyway, as I was saying: I regressed a lot.

There was this day last summer—after I had just repeated the same humiliating pattern with a man and then I drove across the country to start a new life in California and then a tornado hit my house back east and I had to go back there and sort that out and then I caught Covid on the plane ride there (lols) and then I came back to California and went directly to a family vacation—when I got into the most infantile fight with my sister. And I mean, I really did a number, really lost my shit in a big embarrassing way. And there were all these reasons to point to for why I acted so badly, like I was tired and I was confused and my life wasn’t working out like I wanted it to and a tornado hit my house and I got covid on my way to fix it and blah blah blah, but the truth was simply that I acted like an eight-year-old, and I had to sit with that.

Sitting with that was just awful but also monumental, and while I don’t write about my family so I can’t really get into the details, what I will say is it wasn’t like some part of me or my life that I’d fixed had broken at that moment on that day—it was more like I had coped for years with a part of me that hadn’t been healed, and I was finally strong enough to go back and revisit it, work with it, and heal it.

Marlee Grace writes in their book Getting To Center:

“There is a part of not knowing that can also call us to deeper knowing. If I don’t know something about myself, about how I walk through the world—it may be time to know it deeper. To seek teachers, books, resources that bring me into a greater knowing of myself.”

This is how I imagine regression—that it is not a step backward so much as it is a step deeper. We thought we knew ourselves completely, we thought we had this thing licked, we thought we were so grown up, and then there we are standing in front of an Airbnb in a ridiculous pink bathing suit we got on Instagram, a 43-year-old, a best-selling author of a self-help book, all red-faced and throwing a tantrum so colossal the kids get scared and cry.

Oof, that was a bottom. But also oof, what a hell of an invitation to do some digging around, to go back, to go deeper. Which I humbly did. And which yielded me a kind of growth that was far more important than the proud illusion I’d held about the kind of person I was and was not.

A lot of what happened over the past few years has felt absolutely humiliating, and not only because of what was actually happening but because of the idea that we all know is patently false, but all kind of collectively uphold, which is that growth is a leveled thing, a video game where you never have to save the princess twice. I am probably a hundred years wiser than I was in 2021, but that’s only because the last few years I was such a regressive fucking mess who made almost all the mistakes she once swore she would never make again.

So you regressed. So you did it again. So you fucked up wildly and embarrassingly. Fine. Me too. Now what?

“We can meet our match with a poodle or with a raging guard dog, but the interesting question is—what happens next?” —Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart

10. Non-resistance

I had (as we all have) the opportunity to go to war when things started to fall completely apart. Instead, I made the conscious choice to move with and not against, and I’ve maintained that position throughout. Like: I didn’t fight one fucking thing.

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This doesn’t mean I gladly accepted what happened, or didn’t react and do petulant things, or that I didn’t feel resistance, or that I didn’t carry the weight of it all around with me, or that I didn’t fall to my knees and sob-scream a stream of profanities at God for unfairly taking my life away. It means that when unwanted things happened—and many, many, many, many unwanted things happened over a protracted period of time, almost like they were all stored up to happen when I was at my absolute worst—I took the thing in, did whatever I needed to do to get right with myself (stare at a wall for hours, scream, go on a run, phone a friend, binge TV, drive to the nursery and buy 30 plants, eat a pie), metabolized it, and then I just kept going.

I made as little drama as I could about most things, and I consistently prioritized my peace of mind over anything else. I kept asking myself What is the easiest path for me to take in this situation?, and that’s the path I took each time—even if it meant losing a shit ton of money, ownership in my company, my intellectual property, my reputation, my future job prospects, friendships, or any number of things the choice for peace will often cost. I made a vow of non-resistance, and I mostly kept that vow. This also means that when I couldn’t get out of bed, or make myself work, or get inspired, or feel passion, or return a text, or exercise or shower or whatever, I didn’t resist those things either. Everything was just what was happening.

There’s another side to the coin of non-resistance, which is trust. Throughout all of my coming undone and feeling totally fucking confused and living in between, I kept asking myself if I could trust what was happening, and most of the time I found I could.

13. Resistance

I might have been non-resistant outwardly, but I wasn’t inwardly (i.e., I didn’t want what was happening to be happening). I’ve written about it here.

14. I was frequently a bummer of a person who didn’t know how to be in public

For at least two years I was basically an amorphous blob with inert-to-bad vibes and nothing of consequence to add to any conversation, anywhere, with anyone. I was people-repellant and what you’d invite to a party if you wanted to make it awkward and sad for everyone else.

“Transformation sounds like a beautiful process, (who doesn’t like butterflies?). But the thing they don’t tell you is that first, you will become a non-thing, an absence. When you meet a stranger at a party and try to explain who you are, your answer will come out negative space and they will quickly excuse themselves.” —Emily McDowell

I know this sounds kind of awful, and it was, but it also wasn’t. It was not unlike the early days of not drinking alcohol, when I’d go to some social event without the booze or the partaking in a social ritual that I’d relied heavily on to fit in and be normal, and how I’d be weird and awkward and also make it weird for everyone else. What started off as a perceived liability ended up becoming a strength because I discovered what I didn’t like (social relationships and roles predicated on the consumption of alcohol, parties in general), and I discovered the power of being the one who didn’t fit in and therefore, the power of being the one who graduates out of a shitty social contract most everyone else feels beholden too.

I have been asked many, many times by the newly sober how the crap they will manage this part—the feeling of being left behind or being counted out while the world moves ahead, the feeling of being the one who can’t or the one who is weird or the one who ruins the party for everyone else—and I have time and again said something like, you manage it by looking at it like an opportunity, not of a liability; you manage it by remembering you are choosing to live the way other people will not so you can live the way other people cannot.

There is a power that comes from being different, from not fitting in, from observing the world from the margins or breaking the social contract. Not drinking clearly and obviously benefitted me in this way—being the one who could not do this one thing turned me into a person that could do a lot else. And so too did not knowing what the point of me was anymore. I had at least 500 bad days and not much to talk about, I lost some friends, I made people feel weird, I couldn’t tell people what I did when they asked me what I did, I turned off many, many, many many men. But also, I gained a kind of power I didn’t think I would, and I know myself, and am secure in myself, in a way I didn’t think I ever would.

15. I didn’t do anything amazing with my time

I thought about going to India. I thought about getting a dog. I thought about living in Italy. I thought about going back to school. I thought about a lot of things I could do or should do with a total time-out.

I did not travel widely. I did not walk the Camino. I did not learn to play the drums, speak Italian, race cars, fly planes, bake bread, needlepoint or speed read. I did not run a marathon, improve my yoga practice, learn to through-hike, take a writing course, or go on retreat. Mostly I slept and read and ate and sat on the porch and watched TV and hung out with my friends and hung out with my mom and talked on the phone and tried to figure out how to grow my hair back and worried.

I’m not saying this was the right or wrong approach, it was just what I did, and to be honest, I wish I had done some of the bigger things, but I kept thinking it would be financially irresponsible to travel and that I should figure out my life before I did anything “big” so that I could justify the expense. I told myself I’d do those big things after I’d earned the right to do them carefree.

Pieces of advice I’d have given myself at the start: Do the wild thing now, not the responsible thing. And enjoy all those hours of TV, all that sleeping in, all that sloth thoroughly; you can learn Italian and needlepoint later.

16. Presence, awe

In his very good book that I wish I had read a lot sooner than two weeks ago, Charles Eisenstein says:

“The old world falls apart, but the new has not emerged. Everything that once seemed permanent and real is revealed as a kind of hallucination. You don’t know what to think, what to do; you don’t know what anything means anymore. The life trajectory you had plotted out seems absurd, and you can’t imagine another one. Everything is uncertain. Your time frame shrinks from years to this month, this week, today, maybe even to the present moment. Without the mirages of order that once seemed to protect you and filter reality, you feel naked and vulnerable, but also a kind of freedom. Possibilities that didn’t even exist in the old story lie before you, even if you have no idea how to get there. The challenge in our culture is to allow yourself to be in that space, to trust that the next story will emerge when the time in between has ended, and that you will recognize it. Our culture wants us to move on, to do. The old story we leave behind, which is usually part of the consensus Story of the People, releases us with great reluctance. So please, if you are in the sacred space between stories, allow yourself to be there.”

Everything in this statement hits, but three points feel especially true: (1) my time shrunk down to the present moment, (2) possibilities that didn’t exist in the old story came into focus, (3) I allowed myself to be there.

I said in point #1 (money): “I have a very different idea of what enough is now, and it’s a much smaller sum than it used to be.” And this is kind of what I mean. Because my life shrank to the size of a pore, because things I thought I’d die without died, because things I relied on that I thought brought me contentment and satisfaction and joy were no longer there, because the past and future became some kind of hallucination and the ever shitty present was all I had all I had all I had—because of all of these things—it followed that the purpose of my life was found in different things than it had been. The bike ride I was taking, the run I was on, the laugh I was having, the coffee I was drinking. With nothing to look forward to (as in, without being able to imagine a future I wanted), what was in front of me had to become enough, and over time it did.

In early sobriety, when I was in my pink cloud or whatever, there was this very intense relationship with the world around me. I noticed everything, was delighted by everything. If you look back through my camera roll my photos of that period show so many pictures of the sun, of the trees, of art and birds. It is the visual record of a person who was paying attention, and I remember it as the happiest period of my life.

I learned to pay attention again, to love the world again, is what I’m saying. I took pictures of the sun again, is what I’m saying. That has been really nice.

17. Hateful things

Lest this sounds too inspiring, I want to make sure you understand so much of this was hateful. I felt like my life was over, that I’d never be creative again, that I’d never be successful again, that I would end up dying alone in my house in a fleece rob and slippers and that my cat would eat my eyeballs before anyone found me, that there was something permanently broken in me. I thought that my recovery and healing were just a fluke, that I couldn’t be trusted, and that real ‘healers’ or real ‘teachers’ or or people who write for a living or whatever the fuck I was didn’t down-cycle or go through periods of extreme confusion and dissolution. I was painfully insecure. As I’ve mentioned before, my hair fell out. I had no energy, no motivation, no life force really, and I couldn’t quite understand the purpose of my existence. Things were meaningless! There’s more, but I think you get it. I just kinda hated myself and my situation, which only made me kinda hate myself and my situation even more because I’d written so many articles about self-love.

I share this part for a few reasons. First, to normalize that when you’re lost and without your regular distractions, all the terrible ideas you have about yourself will absolutely float to the surface and choke you. Second, to tell you that this kind of thing doesn’t count you out or make you some sort of fucked up, it makes you really really human. Third, to suggest that perhaps this Shit Rising is a good thing, or at least confirm it was for me. I didn’t have to go rooting around looking for all my limiting subconscious beliefs. They were there, plain as day, made conscious, on display for everyone to see. And I had lots of time to work with them because I had no job or job prospects, intimate relationship or intimate relationship prospects, community, hobbies, or interests. It was just me and my horrible thoughts, all day every day.

I’m not going to get into all I did to work with the many things that came up in all that space, other than it was terrible, heroic, and constant. What I will tell you, similar to what I’ve said about addiction, is that I’m grateful I absolutely hated myself that much, and knew it, and had nothing else to do but address it, because I don’t anymore. Not in that way at least.

18. Lazy

I was lazy (sin) and I loved it so much.

19. It’s happening again

I was surprised by the fact that someone who could say they loved evolution and change and growth and development so much could be such a coward when it happened again.

“Michael Singer, in The Untethered Soul, says, ‘You end up loving your edges because they point your way to freedom.’ What he means is, we have this unbounded soul, this boundless energy and essence, that is the truth of who we are—we are limitless. But limitlessness doesn’t do so well within the context of reality, so we create walls, or edges, or identities, and before we know it, we are boxed into a cage. The most insidious part about that cage is that we often don’t even know it’s there or that it’s movable. We think it’s fixed—I’m this person, I’m this way; I’ll always be this person, I’ll always be this way. And so we move about in that cage, living the same day over and over again, unless we are lucky enough to get knocked out of that cage. Maybe someone dies, or maybe we lose our home, or maybe our partner cheats on us, or maybe our plane crashes and we are the only one who survives. Or maybe drinking is murdering us and we can’t ignore it anymore.
I’ll tell you what I know for sure: I would have kept going, trying to grasp that shitty little life, that fixed identity, for as long as I could. I would have done anything to avoid the pain of transformation. I would have stayed in that dull, aching pain for as long as I could. But I was forced in another direction, the absolute last direction I would have ever chosen for myself, and all I can tell you is I will never get over how lucky I was to be so totally messed up, to be so sick and in so much pain that I had no choice but to confront it and challenge everything I thought I knew about myself. Most people go through this world clinging to what they think is safe, having an idea of who they think they need to be in order to be liked, and passing through this society with the least amount of friction. This is what we hope for; this is what we think means success. But then some of us won’t get that chance; some will be ejected right out of the normal way and into the fire, launched into the adventure of becoming. When this happens, we can cling to what we think is safe and try to construct a socially acceptable version of ourselves. Or we can jump into the void, risk everything we think we are for what we are being asked to become, swim far from the safety of the shore for the unknown horizon, answer the call of every wild, bleeding desire we have buried in us, and use this one life we’ve been given to blow every edge, limit, and wall we’ve ever constructed.” — Holly Whitaker, Quit Like a Woman

20. Being lost is your number one job (and everything else can wait)

In a Hidden Brain podcast on the five stages of grief (Healing Your Heart) the host Shankar Vedantam interviews Lucy Hone, a grief researcher who lost her 12-year-old daughter, Abi, in a car accident. At one point in the interview, Lucy is talking about how one of her first thoughts about living through her unimaginable grief was that it was her only job. She’d said My mission is to survive this. I listened to the episode in April 2022, about a year into being fully out there in the ether spinning, and it reminded me of the advice doled out to folks who are trying to not drink, which is that not drinking is their only job. This means something like, if you did nothing but watch Netflix all day or if you did nothing but blow up all your meaningful friendships that day or if you did nothing but play Oregon Trail all day, you still did something, because you didn’t do the thing that all the other things you meant to do are dependent on you not doing.

It’s setting the right expectations for what you’re trying to accomplish.

If you’re trying not to drink, you’re tending to that and only that: the not drinking. If you’re grieving a horrific loss, you’re just grieving/surviving your horrific loss. And if you’re totally confused and can’t make sense of your life and are so lost lost lost you think you’re never going to find yourself again? You’re just surviving that, too. You’re not making a ten-year plan. You’re not beating yourself up for not being more productive. You’re not asking yourself when you’re going to snap the fuck out of it. You’re not fretting over using your time incorrectly or throwing away your life. Are you breathing? Did you have one glass of water today? Can you brush your teeth? Did you live through today? Wonderful. You did it.

21. Other stuff

There are so many topics I didn’t even begin to touch.

22. Books and resources that were helpful

I read a number of books that I found extremely helpful.

Here are a few of the ones specifically about transitions that I loved: Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes (William and Susan Bridges); The Way of Integrity (Martha Beck); Life is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age (Bruce Feiler); Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (Parker Palmer).

This book on grief that reminded me extreme pain is the price of extreme love.

I read many spiritual/wisdom tradition texts. My favorites: The Wisdom of No Escape; When It All Falls Apart; Paths to God; Zen Mind, Beginner Mind.

I listened to a lot of Abraham Hicks’s talks on YouTube and re-read The Secret which I know runs the risk of discrediting anything I have said. I was interested not in the message of manifesting my partner, a car, etc., but interested in working with a more expansive view. Hearing Esther Hicks scold me over and over and over to believe my life was working out exactly as planned and that I couldn’t get from there to there and that there was so much magic to be grateful for even right now, was one of the things that saved me. A gem: “You’re going to have to get comfortable with the eternal incompletion that is you.”

Voices that I found helpful (too many to name but here are a few): Africa Brooke (podcast), Sam Harris (podcast), Lisa Olivera (Substack), adrienne marie brown (books, Instagram, podcast), Charles Eisenstein (book, Substack) , Marlee Grace (Substack), Stephen West (podcast), Martha Beck (podcast, books), Ken Wilber (books). So much Pema and Ram Dass.

Finally, I read a lot of fiction and watched a lot of fantasy, and mostly because I wanted to imagine different worlds.

Recovering