Hey let’s try doing a word vomit like this! I’m using an app (it’s not write or die, but it’s built into Chrome… okay this is just me filling up words- see how incentives warp and twist our behaviour whether we realize it or not? but anyway that will still be helping me achieve what I intended to achieve and that was my goal all along anyway…)
pause. My wife has been going through a bit of an identity/quarter-life crisis. She feels like she hasn’t done very much in her life, that she’s not particularly good at anything, and that she’s some sort of failure. On this I disagree vehemently. She read a crazy amount of books as a kid. She’s travelled all over the world despite being middle-class or lower-middle class in Singapore, entirely on her own merit, with her own savings. She’s a wonderfully patient teacher. She’s very articulate and she spots errors and problems and bullshit with incredible precision. Unfortunately for her, she hasn’t learnt to sell herself, to put herself out there, how to be cheery, friendly, sociable. She’s bad with appointments, she’s bad with meeting people…
Anyway, yesterday we sat together and we analyzed her life. I remain convinced that she has massive, massive potential, and fantastic amounts of insight. She has a beautiful, beautiful mind that nobody gets to see. I’m not doing this to be romantic (I’m a thoroughly unromantic person), or to be “nice” (I don’t believe in being “nice”, and I often tend to mess up my relationships with close friends because I save my exceptionally harsh criticism for them.) She has an amazing ability to choose the most visceral, beautiful points.
Example: (“My father understood the importance of having neatly ironed pleats on a pinafore. I was angry when he returned from overseas. He’d sent me cat stickers while he was there. He was delighted when I failed to make the soccer team. I learnt a lot of my behaviours from him.”) Those are just some of the thoughts on her mind. Aren’t those beautiful thoughts? Don’t you think she should be a writer? Or a songwriter? Or an artist? Or anybody doing anything at all? She has all these beautiful thoughts.
“My mother has amazing reserves of strength. She also has an amazing capacity for denial, and she’s great at juggling money.” Isn’t that a fucking beautiful description? Wouldn’t you want to read an entire book written by this fucking beautiful mind?! Fuck, her brain is goddamn beautiful. She cries telling me how she doesn’t feel like she belongs anywhere, and my challenge is to help her see that this feeling is a burden and a privilege, it’s the sort of thing that becomes your ultimate glory when you build a tribe of people who also don’t belong, and then you all belong, together.
Anyway, I don’t believe in being miserable and sad just because it seems like a beautiful romantic idea. Fuck that shit- being unhappy is lame, and we’re going to fix this. So I did what I could: I set out to draw a map of her brain, the best way I know how- with questions and words. We talked in bed, and her heart was heavy- she’s got this amazing recursive burden that’s built up from thinking that she’s not good enough, never going to amount to anything… she’s simultaneously got a huge ego and zero self-esteem. (This is the curse of conditional self-esteem- when you’ve been taught to believe that you are what you accomplish/achieve. You’re not.)
Anyway I tried what I could and I incorporated the principles and ideas I’ve picked up recently (mostly from my boss, who is a sick specimen of a human brain) and I tried to reduce things down to the simplest problem we’ve got to solve. She asks questions like “what do people think of me”, and “am I a failure”, and “i’m horrible at things” and “i’m sorry” (those are not questions, dear, and they’re irrelevant)
here’s what I got to, and it’s the most beautiful heuristic I’ve seen yet: you’ve got to figure out what is the simplest and most immediate change you need to make, and what needs to be done to make that change. And then you make it. She asked things like how can I be amazing, how can I be successful, how can I be a good person, how can I be a better person… all of those are terrible questions. How do I find out what’s meaningful? How do I find out what’s good? How do I find out what I really care about in life? Those are terrible questions too, when you’re not doing anything and you’re stuck in a rut, in a limbo, in a pit.
The first question I got to was: how do we become more hardworking? I say we because we’re a team, we’re connected, we’re tied together by choice and we threw away the key to the padlock so hell or high water we’re going to have to learn to work together. There is no outcome where one of us becomes hardworking and successful and the other doesn’t, it doesn’t work that way. We influence each other in powerful ways and there is no equilibrium where we don’t drag the other with us… to glory or to the gutter.
Then I thought hardworking is still a loaded term, it implies that it’s something innate, something you don’t have that you need to become, need to be, and it’s almost self-defeating from the get-go because you start by thinking “i’m not hardworking, how do I become hardworking?” and it goes to “fuck it, I’m just not hardworking, I can’t do this”
So the question, the sole challenge, the only challenge is- how do we get stuff done? She interrupts me and asks, there’s this company that our investor was talking about, and they were doing this or that, do we help kids of rich parents, or do we seek out the kids of poor parents because they need the help the most… and I go STOP RIGHT THERE CRIMINAL SCUM (jk)- because the best thing you can do to help kids, whether rich kids or poor kids, is to get shit done. You start by getting shit done in your room. In your house. You work out. You get fit. You save money. You get shit done. You then inspire other people to get shit done, too. Then you work together with other shit-doers (who will naturally gravitate towards the shit you have done) and you can all do a whole lot of shit.
The returns on pondering philosophical questions is next to zero once you’ve been at it for a significant period of time, and you’ve explored a significant number of problems. You’re not going to get any amazing insight that’s going to change your life, a clearer map is not going to move you closer to the destination past a certain threshold- and you know what, I bet that if you’re reading this, you probably don’t need a clearer map, either. You need to take a single solitary step forward. Just that. That one step. Take it. And then take another. And another.
We woke up this morning and we cleaned the fuck out of the house. I cleaned the cat litter. I cleaned our windows, washed the dishes. She cleaned the bar. I’m writing a word vomit now while she does our finances. I’m going to do my daily pushups and squats (which I have been doing religiouly, and they’re making a wonderful difference).
More to say, but this word vomit has crossed 1290 words and there are diminishing returns. I’m going to clean the mirror next to me, pushups, then something non-wordy, then do some stuff for Poached Mag and/or my blog or something. Will figure that out in the shower, or meditate. Kthx.
You don’t have to be “cheery and sociable” to qualify for doing something with your life Visa. Sounds like you are inadvertently, unknowingly superimposing your values of ‘success’ onto her.
Though I agree, it begins with getting stuff done, and then, keep doing it without quitting but with a clear objective in mind.
Also, philosophy is always great. If you get into philosophy for answers, you won’t get any. If you love it as a rational exercise sui generis, then it’s better.
Oh I don’t personally believe that anybody should have to be cheery and sociable; I’m just echoing what she said to me that she believed was holding her back. It’s unfortunate that we live in a world that’s unfair to people who are bad at pretending to be cheery. I love philosophy too, you know it, it’s a wonderful and enriching practice, it just doesn’t help when you’re stuck in a rut and need to act. (Well it could… but I trust that you know what I mean)
Thanks for dropping by! <3