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It's not as simple as just telling people to start feeling things. We don't feel things for very good reasons. We've inherited piles of trauma and conditioning going back generations. We don't want to risk losing the people we have in our lives, who have their own piles.
Along the path we can start having the opposite problem - to become overwhelmed by feeling too much, to not know where to direct the energy, or to direct it in destructive ways that hurt ourselves and others.
Our feelings are like babies who never had a chance to grow up, and babies make messes. They scream and cry. They shit and vomit. It takes a lot to raise a baby, especially by yourself. And the world isn't set up for it.
I don't know how to do it, but I know it's much too hard to do alone. The whole concept of "personal growth" is based on a kind of individualism that is actually also part of the problem. We do this together or not at all.
I feel anxious and embarrassed as I write the above. I've been mostly avoiding social contact the last two months. I've been feeling sick and hopeless and exhausted and small. I worry I've been a bad friend and I'm letting people down.
Last year I thought I had all this feelings stuff figured out. I thought I knew what to do. I thought I was listening to and trusting the wisest part of myself. And then it all fell apart, a little over a year ago.
I've been afraid to talk about the details; the very short, painfully incomplete version is that I learned that someone I trusted was hurting me and people I cared about, and I also learned that I was hurting someone I cared about, in ways I hadn't recognized or understood.
That paralyzed me. I felt guilty, ashamed, disoriented, betrayed. I lost trust in myself. I didn't know what to do. I didn't do much. I shut down emotionally. And, that experience taught me things I desperately needed to know, and I can sometimes manage to be grateful for it.
My heart and my gut hurt thinking about what to write next. I've been holding this for a year and I still don't know what to do with it. I still feel guilty. I still don't know how to trust myself, not really.
What I suspect is that I spent the last several years running on fear, and I spent most of last year running on hope. Hope felt a lot better. It felt incredible! But it turns out hope has all of the same problems as fear.
The shape of my hope was this: all I have to do is this feelings stuff, and then people will love me. And then I won't feel so alone. And then everything will finally be okay.
It took the almost complete dissolution of my most important group of friends for me to begin to understand that hope wasn't the answer any more than fear. That, in fact, there was nothing I could do that would make it all okay.
I have been slowly losing hope over the last year, and I want to be very clear that I think this is progress. I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to do the things I want to do in the world without risking hurting people. I don't know, yet, how to act without hope.
What I do know is that there is something I care about, and that something matters.
I'm gonna spend a decent chunk of the day trying to say nice things to strangers on Kind Words if anyone would like to join me:https://store.steampowered.com/app/1070710/Kind_Words_lo_fi_chill_beats_to_write_to/ …
Commentary on this thread from my friend and mentor Pete Michaud on Facebook, re: emotional capacity, reproduced with permission: https://www.facebook.com/qiaochu/posts/10156289323935811?comment_id=10156303178865811 …pic.twitter.com/W4nC7Hq96Y
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