Jared F. sent me your way, and I'm so glad he did. I'm in a similar situation as you, and your post inspired a bunch of thinking.
It’s given me a sense of safety to hold an identity of, “one who can always out-think the system to invent a spot where I belong, imagine ideas of value, and be seen as a cherished teammate.” But my ability to strategize doesn’t protect me from everything. Some things that I most value about myself are even the very things that make me gravely susceptible to certain systems and situations. So, when I fall prey in those ways, it’s a moment to feel validated, not to cringe with shame. And maybe it’s not so important, even, to be completely protected.
If I take the time to discern what that identity has been protecting (maybe my sense that my perspective matters to others?), then I can hold it up to the light. “See? That thing is not actually at risk.” It’s a mark of maturity to let the “safe harbor” identity be forgotten and grieved, so that I don’t just end up grasping for another way to exercise that identity, or even for a new comforting identity to fill that hole, but instead being open to ways of living that don’t use such stridency as armor.
When I can sit in a place where my old strategies to matter aren’t effective or even possible, it creates an opportunity for new strategies to grow – whatever strategies are right for who I’ve become, and for the moment. ‘Being Nothing’ creates a space to discover, “What are my ways of mattering, these days?” I’m honestly still running the same script from when I was 12. “You must architect the impressive,” it says. What if the person I’ve become is even okay with being ordinary (whatever that is) and just being the most skilled that I can be at responding to the moment? I may find that I don’t matter to others in the ways that I’ve mattered before.
I need to tolerate and accept that this sense of untethered freefall is the terrain that I need in order to “become” next. Being lost is, quite literally, the only way to find untouched terrain. “The lost person is unable to identify or orient his present location with respect to known locations, and has no effective means of or method for reorienting himself.” If it feels like emptiness, aimlessness, loss, head-spinning disorientation, panic, and a feeling of detachment from my body and the earth, then I’m doing it right. It’s a disservice to myself to wallpaper over those with striving. My habit would be to optimize this time of ‘empty space’: map it, document it, reframe it, get creative, meta-cognize my way to safety, squeeze the most from it. But those efforts would so readily shine brighter than the signals that I need to watch out for.
I need to let emptiness do its work. The less that I do to fill the space, to fill my days, the more the next thing can find me. I don’t want to be so focused on the road that I miss my exit. “The most difficult conversation to have is the one with the stranger looking back at you in the mirror in the morning.... Give yourself over to this first of all fearful experiences that we call vulnerability. Vulnerability really comes from the Latin word for ‘wound.’ It means where you’re open to the world whether you want to be or not.” - David Whyte
When belonging and mattering return, when the world shows them to me, they will look different than they have for me before. I can dare to discover what they will be. And what a wonder, to be able to find something so new in a life I had come to think that I knew.
Hi Seth, thanks for your response! Are you familiar with Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy? An old friend recently introduced it to me. It’s a type of psychotherapy that views the mind as made up of multiple sub-personalities or “parts”, each with its own perspective, emotions, and role. Something in your response about the functions of the parts of yourself reminds me of it. You might look into it as a way of identifying and understanding those old strategies you refer to.
Oh yes, very familiar, but thanks for the flag! Are you familiar with Jill Bolte Taylor's book "Whole Brain Living"? An incredible read. She gave basically the first viral TED-talk, on the same topic, which she expanded by far in the book. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU
I've done a borderline-pathological amount of spelunking into my "parts", core wounds and coping strategies from childhood, and so on. (It's now all material saved into a ChatGPT Project that helps me when I want to be reminded of "the best of me" or think about a situation that's causing some kind of strife. It helped me come up with the thoughts above, which I then reshaped and added color to.) So I understand that landscape well, but I was still missing a sense of how to *relate to* those factors in the context of a transition. Your post helped me think about a transition as a way to allow all the infrastructure that the parts have built to flex or reform into a new configuration, in this time where they're not "load-bearing."
Jared F. sent me your way, and I'm so glad he did. I'm in a similar situation as you, and your post inspired a bunch of thinking.
It’s given me a sense of safety to hold an identity of, “one who can always out-think the system to invent a spot where I belong, imagine ideas of value, and be seen as a cherished teammate.” But my ability to strategize doesn’t protect me from everything. Some things that I most value about myself are even the very things that make me gravely susceptible to certain systems and situations. So, when I fall prey in those ways, it’s a moment to feel validated, not to cringe with shame. And maybe it’s not so important, even, to be completely protected.
If I take the time to discern what that identity has been protecting (maybe my sense that my perspective matters to others?), then I can hold it up to the light. “See? That thing is not actually at risk.” It’s a mark of maturity to let the “safe harbor” identity be forgotten and grieved, so that I don’t just end up grasping for another way to exercise that identity, or even for a new comforting identity to fill that hole, but instead being open to ways of living that don’t use such stridency as armor.
When I can sit in a place where my old strategies to matter aren’t effective or even possible, it creates an opportunity for new strategies to grow – whatever strategies are right for who I’ve become, and for the moment. ‘Being Nothing’ creates a space to discover, “What are my ways of mattering, these days?” I’m honestly still running the same script from when I was 12. “You must architect the impressive,” it says. What if the person I’ve become is even okay with being ordinary (whatever that is) and just being the most skilled that I can be at responding to the moment? I may find that I don’t matter to others in the ways that I’ve mattered before.
I need to tolerate and accept that this sense of untethered freefall is the terrain that I need in order to “become” next. Being lost is, quite literally, the only way to find untouched terrain. “The lost person is unable to identify or orient his present location with respect to known locations, and has no effective means of or method for reorienting himself.” If it feels like emptiness, aimlessness, loss, head-spinning disorientation, panic, and a feeling of detachment from my body and the earth, then I’m doing it right. It’s a disservice to myself to wallpaper over those with striving. My habit would be to optimize this time of ‘empty space’: map it, document it, reframe it, get creative, meta-cognize my way to safety, squeeze the most from it. But those efforts would so readily shine brighter than the signals that I need to watch out for.
I need to let emptiness do its work. The less that I do to fill the space, to fill my days, the more the next thing can find me. I don’t want to be so focused on the road that I miss my exit. “The most difficult conversation to have is the one with the stranger looking back at you in the mirror in the morning.... Give yourself over to this first of all fearful experiences that we call vulnerability. Vulnerability really comes from the Latin word for ‘wound.’ It means where you’re open to the world whether you want to be or not.” - David Whyte
When belonging and mattering return, when the world shows them to me, they will look different than they have for me before. I can dare to discover what they will be. And what a wonder, to be able to find something so new in a life I had come to think that I knew.
Hi Seth, thanks for your response! Are you familiar with Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy? An old friend recently introduced it to me. It’s a type of psychotherapy that views the mind as made up of multiple sub-personalities or “parts”, each with its own perspective, emotions, and role. Something in your response about the functions of the parts of yourself reminds me of it. You might look into it as a way of identifying and understanding those old strategies you refer to.
Oh yes, very familiar, but thanks for the flag! Are you familiar with Jill Bolte Taylor's book "Whole Brain Living"? An incredible read. She gave basically the first viral TED-talk, on the same topic, which she expanded by far in the book. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU
I've done a borderline-pathological amount of spelunking into my "parts", core wounds and coping strategies from childhood, and so on. (It's now all material saved into a ChatGPT Project that helps me when I want to be reminded of "the best of me" or think about a situation that's causing some kind of strife. It helped me come up with the thoughts above, which I then reshaped and added color to.) So I understand that landscape well, but I was still missing a sense of how to *relate to* those factors in the context of a transition. Your post helped me think about a transition as a way to allow all the infrastructure that the parts have built to flex or reform into a new configuration, in this time where they're not "load-bearing."