We live trapped in the mental structures that we allowed external circumstances to construct, because we never realized we could dismantle them. As soon as we’re in a situation that activates one of those memories, taps into an unhealed, unresolved issue, we don’t stop to see it objectively; we lash out at what aggravated the problem.
Our pain can’t dictate our internal dialogue, and we can’t let ourselves run with compulsive, involuntary thoughts. Every time we do this, we allow that emotion to infiltrate our awareness and transmute itself into our current experience. We project what was onto what is.
There’s an element of disidentification that has to happen. The realization that what’s being experienced isn’t a matter of what’s at hand, but just a subjective, temporary projection of whatever it is you currently believe—in this case, that you should suffer.
Ironically though, the opposite of pain isn’t joy—it’s acceptance.
Resisting only adds more fuel to the fire. It sets you back to where you were when you initially repressed it. It’s not dismantling the structure; it’s strengthening it. You permit it by fighting it.
It’s hard for us to believe we deserve happiness, and so we continually go out of our way to attract and inflict pain. That dichotomy is natural, and it’s human, but there’s something to be said for transcending it. If you want to think it’s impossible, you’ll only continue to suffer because of it. If you want to keep valuing that suffering as something that makes you more human, then so be it—but the reality is that what makes us human is not what destroys us, but what we build ourselves with again.
As Marcus Aurelius has said: Choose not to be harmed, and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed, and you haven’t been.
78
WHAT YOU FIND
in SOLITUDE
Loneliness is just an idea.
It is the implication that you are ever disconnected from those around you.
It’s what happens when you depend on interaction to understand—and be okay with—yourself.
Because interaction has less to do with how other people treat you and more to do with how you perceive yourself based on that treatment. It’s not about how many people are actually around us, or giving us love; it’s what that love means to us and how it alters our mindset toward whatever it is we’re doing or focusing on. Companionship seems like the reinforcement of oneness and connectivity, but it is also the idea that you not only need someone else’s presence, but their approval, their acceptance.
You can be more alone in a crowded room and feel more connected in complete solitude.
To the extent that we are separate beings, or to the extent that we are aware that we are separate beings, is how “lonely” we can ever be.
Essentially: You are only as alone as you think you are.
Getting past that idea that aloneness is lonely is chiefly important because there is something phenomenally foreign and elusive that you find in that kind of sacred idleness. When you stop working and start being. When you stop defining yourself by the roles you play for other people—and for yourself. You stop seeing yourself within the context of a society. You stop judging yourself by comparison. You start diffusing your mindset of thinking through what would be acceptable to others. You don’t just start to hear yourself talk, but you realize that you are a person, hearing a mind.
And you begin to communicate with yourself in ways that are so much deeper, more fathomable, more understandable, than language can ever permit. As Huxley again once said: “In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the
individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.”
This is not a bad thing, though.
It shows you who you are because you’re no longer being someone else to someone else. You are only to yourself. You stop behaving to fit a standard and start acting for the sake of survival, of being alive, of humanness. You don’t realize how much of your daily life, how many of your rote actions, are contrived solely by the means of being “acceptable” to the world around you, and how much these actions that are not founded in genuineness can disconnect you from yourself.
Solitude is the most important practice of all. It grounds you in what is and helps you escape from what you think should be. It is both infuriating and freeing for just that reason: It leaves you alone to see who you are and what you do; more importantly, it leaves you alone to see the real essence of what it is to be a person, the good, the bad, the downright odd and ugly. It leaves you no choice but to contemplate the bigger picture, the underlying reasoning, the way things are.
The only time we see the whole structure clearly is when we step away from it.
79
HOW TO RAISE
A GENERATION
OF KIDS
who don’t have
A PROBLEM
WITH ANXIETY
Most people don’t think they’re obsessed with controlling their emotions because they aren’t consciously thinking about their feelings. Instead, they are thinking about everything else that needs to be “right” so that they don’t have to feel at all.
They imagine their worst nightmares to life. They worry incessantly about how much money they have to make to be “successful,” how much food they must constrict to maintain their size, the minutiae of how other people respond to them so that they may behave in a way that makes them likable.
They think about their social media presence, whether or not something is
“right” for them, how nice their home appears to be.
They use fear to police themselves into being “good.”
We don’t think of these things as emotional control because they are the physical or mental parts of our lives. Yet we don’t control the physical things in our lives when we can’t control our emotions; we control the physical things in our lives to control our emotions. We think that if we find a “soul mate,” we can’t get heartbroken, if we’re attractive, we’ll be respected, if other people think of us fondly, we’ll always think of ourselves that way, too.
As anyone who struggles with heightened or irrational emotions can tell you, the root of most anxiety and panic is a fear of experiencing anxiety and panic.
We deny our feelings not by refusing to feel them, but by using other things to try to avoid them. When we are obsessed with trying to control outcomes and reduce risks and ensure that we do not experience anything
“bad,” we are not living whole lives. We are fragmented selves, expressing only the parts we are momentarily comfortable with.