Chasing my tail

Just sit here quietly and listen. I named my first Tumblr blog non-random Brownian motion. Oh you clever scientist you. Brownian motion IS random. To call it non-random is to call it something other than Brownian. Watching my focus zipping around from one thing to another feels like a random walk through my aspirations and status seeking goals. Take a look at that Primal Leadership book as a potential way to get that leadership program going? No, that feels too mercenary. Read some of The Recognitions? That's too demanding, besides, I just finished a book earlier tonight. How about Awaken the Giant Within? That's been dragging on forever. I can just focus on reading that and get it wrapped up. But is it worth the time to actually read it? It feels so New Bourgeois. I could write about that, the New Bourgeois, all of these productivity/entrepreneur/self-improvement bloggers who peddle the middle class aspirations of a new generation. That sounds demanding. Play Tetris? Bookworm? Why waste the time. I should do something more constructive and creative. I have all this energy just pent up. Maybe I should just go to bed. Or have another beer.

And that's how most of my uncommitted time gets used up. It just slips away as I spend most of it trying to figure out what I should do next. Should is the right word there. It's not what I WANT to do next. I'm not sure I even know what I would really want to do. It's what I SHOULD do. What would be the action that would garner me the most of what I think I want. Do I want to continue my search for the ideology that will fill my soul with meaning and give me a purpose and direction? My small little life with it's joys and pleasures can't be enough. There must be something more right? I should create something. I feel so trapped in a cage at work, running around and doing other people's bidding, this is my time to do what I need to do to feel fulfilled. Maybe I should figure out just what that would be before I get started on that kind of project. I need to do some research. What book should I read for that? And so the wheel goes around and around until I just give up and go to bed.

Idealized future state

Much of my life has been built around a the search for meaning through the pursuit of an idealized future. If I can just get a little closer to that ideal, life will saturate with meaning and significance. This is yet another youthful defense against the burden of emotions and vulnerability. The right college will bring meaning, the right graduate school experience, the right career, becoming who my wife needs in order to fulfill all of her needs. It's been a constant effort to mold myself to what is deemed significant and meaningful. The answers will find me if I can just get to where they can find me. 

This blog is one giant trail of my relentless pursuit of that one elusive thing. The whole premise of the URL, a set of New Year's Resolutions is nothing but a program to obtain some vision of an idealized future. All the bad stuff that I'm feeling now will sublimate to nothingness as I get closer and closer to a smaller waist, check another Dickens book off of my to be read list, or get accepted to law school. My pursuit of other career opportunities. My obsession with The Edge. All this groping for some sense of what I'm about, what I should be doing, what I can do to finally feel accepted and fulfilled. 

It's a futile effort. I've made progress towards the career goals that I thought would bring deeper meaning and purpose to my life. Work will never be the principle source of meaning in my life. The gap between what I wanted from work and what it actually provides has been nothing but an inexhaustible source of frustration and disappointment. The truth is that I have it awfully good where I am now. It's comfortable, but that's not a bad thing. There is no mystical office out there that will vanquish all of my doubts and provide a clear route to a deep and meaningful career. It's a job. It doesn't have to be devoid of significance, but every day at work doesn't need to be a spiritual quest either.

No book will provide the answers for how to live my life or where I can find meaning and fulfillment in every moment of my life. Books can expand my life, make it richer and more complex, but the key to that something else that I've always sought will never reveal itself, no matter how difficult the book is to read. There is no something else. It's all right here. Everything I need is already in my life, but I've been to busy filling my emotional needs and keeping the potential of any bad feelings away by distracting myself with silly little stunts that offer the illusion of getting that much closer to the idealized future. 

I don't need to become somebody else for my wife to love me more or to fulfill her emotional needs. I just need to be me. That's all that she's ever wanted from me. She wants to feel valuable and important, that she matters, that she's desired and wanted and pursued. I feel all of those things for her. It's just a matter of sharing that with her, being in the moment with her, hearing everything she says, not just with her voice, but with her body, her gestures, her actions. The answers aren't out there waiting for me to find them. They're inside each of us, trying to find their way out, but we have to work together to coax them out. I'm getting better, we're getting better. It's not about the ideal. It's about us.

It's not that a goal is unattainable, it's just hard

I was all set to write a weepy post where I chided myself for not making much progress on goals that I've had since I stated writing this blog. (I was thinking about getting in shape and publishing a research paper in case you were curious what long term goals I had in mind.) This feeling was prompted by some old posts that I reread while looking for my reading list from the first years of writing this blog. The topics that I was writing about then are still issues that I think about and deal with today. Weight loss, fitness, reading and buying books, getting a better sense of who I am and what I'm about. Where is the progress, where is the accomplishment?

The frustration really amped up when I read some of my comments on writing a research paper. I'm still working on that same paper! Shouldn't I have finished that by now? I say these things are important to me, but my status doesn't seem to change. I had this whole internal narrative about the appeal of unattainable goals playing in my head. Just as my self-loathing was really starting to ramp up, I challenged myself to take a look at my supposed failures from a different perspective.

I challenged this idea that I'm all about unattainable goals? What if I just choose to pursue activities that require lots of hard work, but haven't put in the effort needed to perform at a desired level? Hard goals are hard for a reason. They require consistent effort. I may face set backs. I might have to start all over again on some of them. Activities may conflict from time to time. I can't pursue all of them with the same level of intensity for an extended period of time. Hard activities are not fun. They require focus and commitment and sacrifice. I have a busy life. It's a fantastic, wonderful life. I make sure that the people who matter most to me have as much of me as they need. Should I really beat myself up if I slip a little bit in my workouts or avoid working on a research paper?

That's when I realized what is really bothering me. I haven't finished anything in awhile. I've finished a few books, but I need to finish Toll the Hounds. It's a huge book. I've made it a point to get through that series this year. Finishing it will feel like progress in a way that getting through some other books just can't match. That damn manuscript has been hanging over me for years. I did finish the version that I mentioned in that early blog post. I submitted it to a journal and it was rejected. I took a look at my paper after that rejection and realized that it needed to be totally reworked. I am close to finishing that reworked draft. There is tremendous progress on that project, but it doesn't feel like I've made any progress because the work remains unpublished.

I'm also still figuring out how to capture a sense of progress and achievement as a manager. I record and note all kinds of activities because I relish the sense of getting something done. When I was working at the bench, getting something done meant testing some samples or completing an analysis. Now getting something done means keeping a project on track over the course of months. I'm also not the one doing the work. That dilutes the sense of something getting done. I need to find ways to make my team's accomplishments more real. That will go a long way towards making me more satisfied with my work life.

Difficult feeling avoidance strategy

"Rather than learning how to tolerate difficult feelings, many of us have learned only to avoid them...[O]ur inclination is often to run from our emotions because they carry with them the threat of destruction. Indulging ourselves in thinking as a protective alternative, we try to avoid our fear by staying aloof of our feelings." Mark Epstein, in Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart

One sentence captures what I've been struggling to express for many, many months. This sentence slapped me when I read it this morning. I was stunned. To see in such plain terms made it's reality all the more stark. The undercurrent of fear in so many of pursuits, the hint of it that I had spotted last week, was made all the more clear.

What the future holds

So what in the future as I move beyond The Edge and slowly negate the influence of the anti-me? Big bummer coming, but I have to say that not much is going to change in my life. At least not in terms of where I am and what I'm doing. How I go about doing these things, how I relate to other people in my life, and my level of engagement are things that should be very different.

Imagining a greatly improved future was always a favorite hobby of mine as a kid. All the things that were holding me back would be gone and everything I wanted would be ready and waiting for me to enjoy. Status played a big role in those imaginings. I wanted status because I didn't really know anything else that was worth my effort. There was a certainty to status symbols that more abstract things just didn't seem to deliver. I was too busy looking past what made me worthwhile and looking for ways that would make other people take me seriously, like me, think I was valuable. I have extensively documented how I've sought similar status type things here. Law school, new jobs in new places.

So my new future is about all those things that I overlooked and failed to appreciate for all too much of my life. People, relationships, things that I enjoy no matter what the popular opinion of that activity may be. I still want a rewarding career, but I'm not about putting in mad hours and neglecting the rest of my life to make that happen. I still want to push myself and keep learning and getting stronger, but that's more about being more healthy and present than proving something to myself. I've always had this nagging sense that in order to really have proved something, to have really succeeded, I would have to really struggle and fight and battle to reach some impossible goal. My reluctance to take on that struggle felt like a failure. That's the vestige of something that I picked up at a time in my life that is no longer relevant. Throwing myself into the maelstrom was the essential step.

That's the absolutely wrong way to look at it. I was running on Thursday morning and rather than focus on the pain and fighting against it, struggling to stay strong in the presence of a sensation that was making me feel bad, I simply let it be. No struggle, no wanting it to go away. I experienced it, but I didn't feel like I was in it. It was like watching waves from the shore rather than standing right in the breakers. I was aware that they were there, but I wasn't letting that energy control my state of mind. That fear that always gripped me when things got a little uneasy just slipped away. There was nothing to be afraid of. I didn't have to fight against it. There was no need to battle. It was just a feeling. It was temporary, I was in control.

I didn't worry about feeling bad. I just kept on running. Bad feelings will come, but they will also go away. There is no need to fixate on them and force them into submission. Accept and acknowledge.

What does the future hold? I don't know, and, to a certain extent, I'm not going to burden myself with caring all that much. I'm going to live my life as deeply as possible.

Fearful

The Edge, anti-me, the overseer, they are all ways that I have deflected and misdirected myself from clearly stating what's really at the core of the issues that I use this space to look at in as unflinching manner as I can handle at the moment. 

Fear. 

That's the core of so much that I've been wrestling with over the last couple of years. I've been scared to engage life in a certain way. I've gone off and pursued all kinds of different things to avoid dealing with things that are scary. And the worst part is that I really had nothing to be afraid of in the first place. The fears were almost entirely a product of broken beliefs about myself and how other people experience me. At some point I became convinced that bad things would happen to me if I did not conform just so to certain expectations. The only problem was I really had no idea of what those expectations were. So I've been inventing things in my head for all these years and feeling bad about myself when I failed to meet those expectations. 

The pattern is pervasive. Everything in my life is in some way affected by these self-imposed limits. I've put the fewest limits on myself professionally, but that's also where expectations and acceptable behaviors are relatively well-defined. I didn't have to invent anything in my head. There's also lots of objective feedback in a professional environment. This feedback reduced the disparity between how I see myself and how others see me. It's really no wonder that sports and school have always been my comfort zone. Rules are defined. The desired outcomes are clearly defined. There was less space for me to wonder if I was doing the right thing.

As I've recognized that my fear of social shame, rejection by somebody else, or simple self-loathing are grounded in some ephemeral notion of "right" that I developed deep in my youth, I have been able to recognize the urge to give into that pathetic voice. When I hear it, I stop and really think about why I'm feeling afraid (I'm being very deliberate in my use of words associated with fear), I can talk myself out of simply responding to the environment in my standard way and do the thing that really needs doing. I have some examples to illustrate what I mean.

Saturday night was my daughter's Father/Daughter Dance. This was a very important event for her, so I went into it very aware of how my behavior could impact her experience. When we got there, we saw plenty of adults that I knew. My fearful self felt like I needed to chat with these people, participate in the social milieu because that's pretty much what everybody else was doing. Nope, this was about my daughter. I wanted to do what she wanted. So I hung out with her, I talked to her, and I danced with her as much as I wanted. I didn't worry about what the other dads were thinking. I did crazy dances with her, asked her what she wanted to do. I let the night be about her (rather than me, which was my old way, to make sure I did whatever I needed to do to alleviate the fears that I was feeling in the moment). By the end of the night, I think a few of the other dads were jealous. Their daughters were busy playing with their friends and wanted nothing to do with dad. My daughter was still excited about the dance the next day. I felt good about that. It made me feel like I had done my job well. 

My son plays baseball. Last year I experienced all kind of anxiety every time he was at bat. I wasn't nervous for him as much as I was nervous for me. I didn't want people to judge me for his performance. I wanted him to perform at a certain level so I could feel better about myself and not have to worry about what other people thought. I wasn't so interested in who he was and loving him for that, but getting him to become who I needed him to be to relieve my fears and satisfy my petty emotional needs. Then I realized that so much of what I've been struggling with was a consequence of not feeling like who I am was enough for the people who were supposed to love me no matter what. I had to be what they wanted and hide everything else or they wouldn't love me anymore. I had to make things easy for them so they would accept me and make me feel loved. I didn't want to do that to him, so I decided to focus on what he did well in a baseball game and not worry too much about everything else. I also had to recognize how hard last year was for him (he got hit with the ball a couple of times) and to give him time to get comfortable. I was rushing him back to hard last year. I never really listened to him, I never gave him time to feel afraid. I didn't want to acknowledge his fear because that would mean that I would have to acknowledge my own. I've spent my entire life hiding from my fear. I hide from my fear because I am ashamed of it. I don't have all the anxiety this year. I just focus on accepting him for who he is. He is a wonderful person. He doesn't need to be fixed. Sure, there are things that we can do to help him get better at baseball, but those are just skills that he can learn. They're not defects that he needs to hide. That's how I felt growing up and it's taken me 30+ years to recognize that I'm not defective. He doesn't need to grow up with the same baggage.

A failure to appropriately express my affections has been a big problem in my marriage. Expressing feelings means being vulnerable. That was a scary thought for me (even in the context of a relationship where it has been made very clear that my love and affection is shared and appreciated). Last night would have turned this morning into an emotionally painful time a year or so ago. I would have missed some very clear signs and left my wife feeling hurt and unappreciated. I was experiencing the feelings that used to make me disengage, but I recognized them for what they were and focused on what my wife was telling me. She wasn't saying anything with words, but with her actions. That's a mode of communication that is just as relevant to her as words, but has given me all kinds of problems over the years. Actions are open to all kinds of interpretations. While one part of me was reading the situation in the intended fashion, another part of me was too busy thinking of ways that things might go wrong and would do all that it could to prevent those possibilities from becoming a reality. I was able to get beyond that limit last night. Nothing I feared was true and the night was fantastic. 

The limitations I've put on myself with fear is not restricted to my relationships with others. I was running yesterday. This was my weekly long run, but I wasn't sure that I was up to the distance that I had planned. I was feeling a little thirsty and a bit out of sorts. I recognized it as fear, fear of the pain, fear of boredom, and just kept going. I put the fear out of my mind and stopped fighting. I fight to keep the fear at bay rather than just letting the less than pleasant sensations have their moment and move beyond them. Feeling afraid, inadequate, hungry, thirsty, embarrassed, or ashamed will be a little unpleasant, but it will pass. Having those feelings doesn't make me weak or less of a man or an inferior person. Those feelings just make me human. Fighting against them won't prove anything. Not every accomplishment needs to be a monumental struggle. Sometimes surrendering to the moment, feeling the pain, feeling bad, is the best way to move forward. Those bad moments don't define you. It's ok to feel bad. That doesn't make you bad or weak or a waste. 

Anti-me

I spend way too much time thinking about what I do, why I do it, and how I can get better at whatever it is that's on my mind at the moment. That's the legacy of this blog (if the web allows hyper-specialization in one arcane topic, I've specialized on myself). I once feared that this suggested some kind of narcissistic character, but the simple fact that I was concerned about being so self-involved shows that I'm not a narcissist. No, my concern with what I have going on professionally, academically, or in some kind of activity where I can be judged against some standard is rooted in my combat against the anti-me.

Oh yes, my nemesis the anti-me. The anti-me is all those things that I don't have, everything that I'm not. The anti-me is the antithesis of all of my short-comings and failures. It's a highly sophisticated construct that has been hounding me for my entire life. It's what I feared people would see that I'm missing if I opened up. It's all the things that I thought I should have but I lacked. It's the superior me, the self that I thought I should be. It's what I'm not rather than what I am.

I've never lived up to the ideals of the anti-me. Of course it's impossible to meet those expectations. No matter what I achieve, there's always something greater that could have been done. The satisfaction of accomplishment is always tinged with a note of the possibility of something more impressive. The anti-me was the handsome, acne-free version of myself. The anti-me was more aggressive on the football field, a better student, not so socially awkward. People loved the anti-me because he didn't have all the awkward undesirability that was such a central part of who I was for so much of my youth.

He's stalked me as an adult. His influence was just a bit more stealthy and insidious. He's the voice that keeps me from fully recognizing and appreciating all the great things in my life. He's all the doubt that keeps me from fully expressing myself, from being open and vulnerable. I may have projected some of the sentiments that I felt flowing from him onto other people in my life. How can anybody see me as capable of being a certain kind of husband, a certain kind of parent, a certain kind of friend if I'm lacking in all kinds of important traits.

All my crazy schemes, law school, the pursuit of new jobs, all my talk of The Alpha, even my fixation on The Edge, are my efforts to negate the impact of the anti-me. If the anti-me makes me feel undesirable, being found worthy of acceptance into a law school class or competent to fill some random industry role must mean that I have some desirable qualities. Even my reluctance to be open with my needs and desires in my most intimate relationships comes down to a fear of having my deficiencies confirmed. It's only safe to express those needs once it's been made clear that they will be accepted in a positive fashion.

So all of my focus on myself is really a focus on what I need to do to prove that I'm not as deficient and undesirable as my anti-me makes me feel. That negative voice, always emphasizing what I'm not, how I'm imperfect and a failure, has had a larger role in how I perceive myself than I've every fully appreciated. What I'm not has always claimed a greater share that what I am and what I have. I have started to see where the anti-me comes from. It's not a natural part of who I am. It's a response to stuff that was going on in my life, and the lives of the people around me. It's propelled me forward, but it's also held me back. It's presence is a sign of the most dysfunctional relationship in my life, the relationship that I have with myself.

It's time to quiet the anti-me.