As you may have noticed, I took last week off from the newsletter. While I had some thinking problems around what I wanted to write, some other things required my time and attention and were more important. But I’m back!
About a month ago, immediately after the second session with my new therapist, I had a revelation.
We’d finished our meeting with a guided visualization meant to help calm my mind before sleep and keep my racing mind at bay. The exercise had me feeling light and clear and purposeful in ways that encapsulated my entire body, mind, and soul. In the time it took me to drive home — at most, eight minutes — I’d gained a deep, visceral understanding of what I needed to do with my life.
While it hit me like a flash, none of it was new. I’ve long had goals around how I want to spend my life, as I hope most do. Getting there is what had always eluded me, and I’d been unsure enough of whether these goals were even achievable, so never had I sat down to chart my path.
But this revelation brought me a sense of knowing and confidence I’d never experienced. While the entire path wasn’t visible — is it ever? — I knew my starting point and I knew how to discover the path.
More than knowing, the urgency of this epiphany was shocking. My entire body felt new and light, like each individual cell had been replaced. I became buoyant and floated around, the way only renewed reassurance — or being literally lighter than air — can provide.
It took a few days before I could really analyze what happened, so I rode the high of clarity and understanding, and used the energy to write and look for jobs and be the version of me I want to always be.
Once the haze of reality set back in, I was confused. How could this happen from just a sleep exercise? I’ve been clear and present of mind before, why was this different? Was this actually a newly opened window through which I was able to see this revelation and some bigger change happening slowly inside of me, its incremental change was unnoticeable until now?
Let’s travel back to see when those seeds were planted.
In the first days of the new year, a few months before I started therapy, I made a few changes in how I thought about myself.
I’ve longed cared about what other people thought of me and took what I imagined their opinions to be to heart, often letting these perceived opinions dictate my actions and behaviors. I wanted to be seen as cool, calm, easy going, reliable. Inside, I was anything but, giving myself mini panic attacks at the thought of being perceived badly by someone whose opinion I cared about, oftentimes avoiding being around people to try staving off rejection in any form.
While it’s taken many forms — my mind loves trying to control and change the past and future, and more on that in a few paragraphs — this was often a large source of my anxiety.
At the end of 2023, things came to a head. I was still struggling to deal with the ending of a five-plus year relationship and how much being rejected hurt me to my core, as it felt like a direct judgment on who I was as a person. I wanted to be loved and accepted by her so much that I’d forgotten that the only person who’s acceptance mattered was my own.
So, in January, I worked on breaking my pattern of needing external validation. This was no easy task, as my thought channels surrounding this were worn into a deep canyon. (For a lighter, short-ish take on breaking out of thought channels, peep my newsletter from a couple weeks ago.) But I was determined.
I decided to try the approach of ‘fake it till you make it.’ I’d heard this hundreds of times, but it always seemed like bullshit. I’d only applied it to outwardly actionable skills, i.e. skills that truly require expertise. Faking being a doctor will NOT make you an actual doctor one day, you’ll just harm people. No one wants the construction company building their home to have faked anything, they need to already have the expertise to build a structurally sound building. So, to my past self who only saw these contexts, it was garbage.
But embodying this phrase when trying to change my mind around certain beliefs and ideas worked.
I started by telling my mind that I was confident in who I am, that I am who I’ve always wanted to be. I began by occasionally acting like the world was mine and that I had all the answers — admittedly, a slippery slope for a cis white guy. The channels I’d traveled for so long still had a hold on me, but refreshing my old acting chops was fun. I couldn’t do this all the time, I don’t have the energy for that.
And then it happened: I wasn’t acting anymore. I was.
It didn’t happen overnight, but the speed with which the new pathways became usable and preferable was incredible. Both quick and gradual enough so as to not even really notice it. I was just becoming more myself.
Not that I’ve been this much myself every moment since I began. When I went on dates, for example, I was self conscious and nervous, deeply hoping for each new person to be the one. But I was still able to be myself and comfortable in who I was so that when things didn’t work out, it wasn’t a big deal. I knew I’d attract the right person.
A massive part of updating my mindset around who I am and how I can exist in this world has been trusting myself. Previously, chronic unsurety was my MO. Did I really want to make that decision? Was I sure I wanted to move to that place? Did I really want to write for a living? Would another shirt impress the people I might see tonight? On and on and on.
So, my solution had been to not make decisions, and instead to just float down the lazy river of life, too scared to use my paddle. There was a comfort in pretending the things happening to me weren’t my fault. I could be a helpless victim whom life happened to.
No longer.
Taking life for what it is is easy, but also is likely the only wrong way to live. As long as we actively make our decisions and move forward, we’re doing pretty well. Yes, not every decision will work out how we want, but that is how life works and will happen no matter what. We need to choose our paths. (Although not everyone is lucky enough to have this privilege.)
This is where anxiety plays its role in my brain. As mentioned earlier, my mind wants to control both the past and future — things obviously impossible to control or change.
Trying to change the past is a different game with a similarly simple solution, but let’s save that for another time and address trying to control future outcomes. If I can anticipate and fastidiously plan for all the things that could happen, I can control the outcome, which brings joy to my inner planner. Or so I’ve let my mind convince me.
Of course, nothing we do can predict the future and no amount of planning can control what the outcome will be. Still, when I’m scared about a meeting with my boss or how my parents will react to my latest tattoo, my mind goes into overdrive about everything I can do to control the situation. Yet, others will do and react how they will.
So instead — with some therapeutic guidance and mantras, among other tools — I’m learning to trust myself. As my therapist is quick to remind me, I know how to react or what to do as the situation arises. Everything I need is already in me. And it’s true. Even with all my planning and anticipating, virtually no scenario has gone the way I envisioned, yet I’ve handled each one with the genius, grace, and gumption I know I possess.
The more I travel these neural pathways (as the more scientific term goes), the less work it takes to access my new thinking habits. The ease with which my new thinking has come can mostly be attributed to this trust in myself. To put it another way, I’m trusting my intuition.
It’s a scary new feeling, but also exciting and bursting with possibilities. I’ve started to introduce myself as a writer to new people. The charm I knew I possessed — but had seldom cared to access — is something people recognize and point out, even when I’m not trying.
Even in writing this, I’m confident in the knowledge that I am revealing my true self to whomever may read it. Am I tooting my own horn? Sure I am, but maybe we should all play our melodies aloud more often. Maybe the tune isn’t for everyone, but at least we can be sure the cows will mosey down to listen. ‡
Reading
The Big AI Risk Not Enough People Are Seeing by Tyler Austin Harper, in The Atlantic
As a response of sorts to Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd —among other things AI leaders have said recently — Harper beautifully argues that we’re being sold AI as a way to learn human skills, or a way to avoid these human skills altogether, even though the tasks and skills AI is taking over are fundamentally human — and therefore taking away our humanity.
The mid-beginning of this article (about how we’re in the age of expertise and fundamentally human tasks that have been working for millennia are now being taken over by ‘experts’) sparked loads of thought and inspiration for this article. This was one of my favorites I’ve read in a while!
Dear Therapist: A Son I Didn’t Know Existed Just Found Me by Lori Gottlieb, in The Atlantic
Gottlieb’s monthly column shines light on what the reader/writer-in calls a situation that happens ‘only in books and movies.’ With grace, elegance, and radical empathy and understanding, Gottlieb works through what is likely the underpinning of the conflict at hand, and deftly navigates how to approach such a sensitive and life changing occurrence.
The Very Online Afterlife of Franz Kafka by Amanda Hess, for The New York Times
Kafka has long been one of my favorite writers. Upon first reading The Metamorphosis in middle school, I knew I’d found the writer who understood me. Though he didn’t live a long life — he died 100 years ago today at age 40 — his resurgence with Gen Z has brought his deep feelings and ways of looking at the world around him back to prominence. It’s forgivable to believe Kafka lived in the alienation of the internet age and is just a bit more poetic than the rest of us. Hess brings it all together, showing how such a deep feeling, depressed man from a century ago embodied and gave a voice to today’s youth.
My State Of "State Of Music Criticism Thinkpieces" Address by Steven Hyden, via his newsletter, Evil Speakers
Hyden thoughtfully brings his perspective on music criticism, mapping out what he sees as the real problem going on with the criticism of criticism articles that often seen to be written in bad faith without actually trying to address what is happening. Hyden’s advice to ‘click the link’ is worth listening to.
Music
Music League has driven my listening even more than usual the past couple weeks. We finished up a decades round last week — best of the 90s! Sure, Biggie’s ‘Hypnotize’ is a certified, all-timer that I can’t truly complain about taking the round, but Radiohead’s ‘Airbag’ — or really anything from OK Computer, arguably the best album from the best band of all time — finishing with -3 points at the bottom?! It’s taken every ounce of willpower I possess to not blow the chat up with (what I’d call) a history lesson (and what they’d call spam) and why they should also take personal offence to result.
Instead, I made a way-too-big playlist of my favorite 90s tunes that will surely be ever-evolving. Peep it below and let me know what’s missing.
With the 90s in mind, I’ve been revisiting some classic 90s albums that don’t as much attention as many others. Stereolab’s Dots and Loops, The Afghan Whigs’s Gentleman, and Braid’s Frame and Canvas, are some that I’ve given plenty of airtime to recently thanks to this round.