I only started feeling creatively fulfilled when I realized that productivity should never be the purpose of creativity, because the energy used in creative work is totally different from productive energy. Productive energy throws a wrench into the gears of creative flow.
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Figuring this one thing out changed everything for me.
This post is now a podcast episode!
Let’s be real: after enough living it’s easy to come to the conclusion that directives like “follow your bliss” are bullshit. The simple equation of do what you love = successful and happy life seems to only work out for a vaunted few. The rest of us mere mortals are just trying to survive each day with our sanity intact. We’re lucky if we have any energy left over to follow our bliss – if we even know what our bliss is. I used to think I knew. For me, it’s writing. But somewhere along the way it stopped being my bliss. After years of struggling to make something of my writing, my joy in it had evaporated. All meaning I’d found in it was gone; I no longer knew why I was bothering to do it at all. Eventually my burnout became so extreme I was unable to write. But I’m stubborn, and I still believed that I was meant to be a writer. That’s when I realized I had a fundamental misunderstanding of “follow your bliss.” It’s not bullshit after all – I’d just been doing it wrong.
The one thing I’d failed to understand about “follow your bliss” is that my bliss is incompatible with success and happiness as those are defined within our capitalist system. I know what you’re thinking. Sure, some people do succeed within that system by following their passion. A friend of mine built a lucrative party catering business from one hotdog cart. So what’s his secret? Nothing more than this: his bliss already fit the system. He’s an extraverted natural salesman. Me? I’m an introverted creative. Creative work by its very nature does not fit the system: it’s generative rather than productive, emerges on a slower schedule than what is profitable, and creative products don’t have a large market. It’s rare for creatives to make a living from their work – not impossible, but very, very difficult. And in order to do so, it often involves a sacrifice that kills their creative capacities.
The incommensurability between creative work and conventional work may seem obvious, but for creatives who are struggling to fit both in, or better yet find paying work that allows for at least some creativity, things get muddied. The problem is that creative work gets relegated to the leftover time and spaces, after the productive, money-earning work is done. And this never ends well for creatives, because it means that who they are is diminished and confined to the leftovers. When I finally understood that this two-track life would never lead to anywhere but burnout for me, everything changed. I realized I needed to shift the lens through which I experienced life. I will always have to earn money somehow, but I wanted to find a way to live from my creative center in everything I did, because that’s the only way my spirit could regenerate and thrive. I call this whole-life creativity, and it showed me what “follow your bliss” really means.
It should be called “living your bliss,” because that’s what it is, and I believe that’s how Joseph Campbell, the originator of the saying, meant it. He saw it as a state of being in which you have fully committed to manifesting an expression of your true self in the world. This is similar to what Brené Brown terms “wholehearted living,” but Campbell, a scholar of world mythologies, saw it as having an esoteric and spiritual dimension. He conceptualized the experience of following your bliss as being on your destined track, where your life is harmonized with what the universe wants for you. He alternatively called this state of being “refreshment” or “rapture,” that feeling of being truly alive. So following your bliss isn’t really about doing what you love – it’s about experiencing the act of living from that creative well of life itself, the place where wonder, astonishment, and joy come from. We can access that place through doing what we love, that is, doing the thing that allows us to speak the language of our soul into the world.
I used to think that following your bliss was hard, something only a lucky few got to do, but that was because I was forcing myself to accept and pursue the values of the conventional capitalist system while simultaneously attempting to keep the flame of my creative spirit alive – and I failed at both. But it was only when my creative flame finally burned out that I became truly capable of following my bliss, because I had nothing else to lose at that point. I committed myself fully to living from my creative center. This involves a tremendous amount of trust, both in myself and the universe, because it’s risky in every way: financially, emotionally, relationally, reputationally. Full commitment means entering a territory of total and uncharted uncertainty. You know that scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade when Indy steps off the cliff? That’s what it feels like. It’s petrifying. But I still find it easier than splitting myself between my creative soul and my false conventional self. It took descending into that dark place of being confronted with my own failures and despair to gain the perspective I needed to start living my bliss.
We all have our own journeys and no one’s individual path looks like anyone else’s. But creatives come across similar obstacles on their way, and the biggest is trying to live their bliss in a society undergirded by a system that does not support the creative life. It’s an obstacle that reappears again and again, but we can diminish its power to block and divert us by claiming, and committing to, our identities as creatives. It’s okay if this happens in stages – in fact the daily devotional act of living from your creative center is, in large part, what it means to be a creative. Simply making the decision to try that today and the next day and onward is how you can begin to follow your bliss.
How to start being unapologetically yourself.
If you are the type of person who follows the path less taken, chances are you’ve been criticized for it at some point in your life. People who are particularly individualistic, like creatives and other types of seekers, are vulnerable targets for condemnation because they challenge the status quo. Our culture professes to value independent, creative thinking…as long as you still play along. Some of us don’t want to play along – in fact, we may want to leave the room altogether. This isn’t a matter of inclination; it’s about the survival of our spirit. But living a wholehearted life in which you are fully yourself comes with a cost. Other people may not like it. I’ve been called selfish, lazy, pretentious, and arrogant for traveling my own path. Here I’ll focus on the first of these, as “selfish” is probably the most common judgement aimed at nonconformists, and it’s one we often hear from our own inner judge (you can find some of my views on laziness in this post). Let me start by asking you a question: if you are selfish, so what?
I’m quoting Madonna here. “So what!” was her response when nude photos of her were discovered in 1985. I was under ten at the time, but I still remember seeing that phrase on the cover of a news magazine in Waldenbooks (remember those?). It stopped me in my tracks; admiration overwhelmed me. Even at that young age, I could see that these were magic words, capable of turning criticism to dust. But I understood something else at an instinctive level that took me decades to be able to articulate. Whoever found the photos was hoping to use them to diminish Madonna, and she refused their agenda. But the way that she did this wasn’t to deny the ugliness they were launching at her. It was to embrace it as a positive. The power of this approach is like that moment in the Wizard of Oz when the great wizard is revealed to be nothing but a pitiful little man hiding behind a curtain.
I could run through all the reasons you’re not actually selfish for pursuing a life path that isn’t what’s expected and condoned, give you advice about putting your own air mask on first and the importance of self-care. But doling out the standard prescriptions is not what I do here on this blog. My purpose is to help you upend the internalized beliefs we have all been socialized into accepting about what it means to be a good person living the right way. I want to help you not only live life on your own terms, but feel good about it. Here I’ll tell you what it actually means when you are criticized for being selfish, so that you can get to a place where you can say “so what” and mean it.
When someone says you’re selfish, the most powerful weapon in your arsenal is this question: what is their agenda? There is only one answer. The commonly accepted definition of selfish is that you are acting to meet your own needs over those of others. Whoever is condemning you isn’t much concerned with the first part – it’s the second, italicized, part that matters to them. So the answer to the question is this: their agenda is to get you to meet their needs. It really is that simple. What selfish actually means in such exchanges isn’t that you are acting to please yourself over others. It means that this person has needs that aren’t being met and is trying to get you to do that work for them.
But what about when the criticism is coming from within ourselves? Our inner judge is often our worst critic. Women especially are socialized to serve and are primed to feel guilty for not meeting other people’s needs. This inner judge is the one who makes you think, “Maybe I am selfish” even when you reject the external critics who said so – or when no one has actually said it at all. Our inner judge is very difficult to argue with or disregard because it operates from a position of cultural authority, our internalized values about how we should or should not behave. It speaks directly to our sense of ourselves as (un)worthy human beings. The question you ask it is the same, though: what is its agenda? But we need to understand who this inner judge is before we interrogate it.
This inner judge is not you, nor did you create it. It is not the same thing as your inner critic, who speaks with the voice of your insecurities. Your inner judge is a disciplining voice that is comprised of all the lessons you’ve absorbed from external disciplining voices – your family, teachers, peers, media – and its job is to ensure you are doing your part to uphold the cultural structures that enable society to function and endure. It does this by making sure that whatever you choose to do with your life, your primary (often subconscious) actions are for the good of your group. This is primal stuff with roots in evolutionary advantage. The dark side is that it also works to discipline those who challenge the status quo, because this threatens the underlying power structures of society. When the voice of your inner judge gets louder, that means you’re straying from societal norms. And that’s its agenda: to keep you in line.
Whether you are being called selfish by internal or external voices, both share this agenda. They are not interested in what’s to your benefit, though they may pay lip service to that. Their goal is to get you to behave in ways that benefit others. These voices are insidious. If you are a very individualistic nonconformist, particularly if you are also very sensitive, as creatives often are, their disciplining effect can kill your spirit. But you do not need to apologize for who you are. Only you have your best interests at heart, and you must be your own advocate. It’s a very difficult thing to do, but you can start by practicing your best Madonna response to the voices that seek to diminish you with critical arrows meant to damage your sense of worthiness. Yeah, I’m selfish. So what!
We are designed to thrive in the liminality.
These days it feels like the world is experiencing a lumbering, unending crisis. The pandemic, political and social turmoil, and the looming threat of climate change…the emotional weight of all this is profound. For creatives, times such as these can be overwhelming because they feel everything intensely. Creatives often find themselves blocked during crises because the process of creativity requires openness and receptivity, and painful times cause people to shut down. But I’ll let you in on a secret: creatives are actually meant to thrive in crises. Crisis signals that big changes are occurring. This space of transition, between what came before and what will come after, is called the liminality. It is a time when old rules and traditions are breaking down, and it holds infinite creative possibility for new ways of being. Creatives are optimized for the liminality because they are able to sense and take advantage of this creative possibility. So how can creatives work through their blocks and access their creative potential?
If you are a creative and find yourself blocked during tumultuous and unstable times, consider that the reason may not be the crisis state itself. Creatives are generally empaths, meaning they feel and absorb the emotions of those around them, including those of the wider population they live among. During times of crisis, people feel stressed, frightened, confused, grief-stricken, and angry. Creatives pick up on that; nor are they immune to these emotional reactions themselves. The difference is, creatives also have a deep intuitive sense of the potentialities of crisis, and they have access to the full range of emotions that crisis provokes – including excitement and inspiration. If you are experiencing a creative block, it may be because you are tuning in more strongly with your empathic nature than your intuitive one.
There are some steps you can take to reroute your perception through your intuitive, creative nature. The first is to accept that you are energized by things that others may experience as wholly negative. Crisis times are scary and depressing, no doubt, but you don’t have to experience them that way just because other people do. You can acknowledge the challenges of living in times of great uncertainty while also seeing that such times are full of possibility because of their uncertain nature. Things are changing in interesting ways. The old reality is falling away; we don’t yet know the contours of the new reality. As a creative, it’s natural for you to feel energized in unsure situations that cause many to react with caution or fear – embrace that without guilt.
Another step you can take to access your intuitive, creative capacities is to trust your own perceptions. While it’s good to stay informed, no viewpoint presented on media platforms has a claim on truth. We create our realities through how we perceive the world, and you possess sole sovereignty over your own reality. Pay attention to what you are seeing and feeling. Make note of those little sparks of interest and excitement that flare up, the ones that don’t jive with what anyone else seems to be experiencing or talking about. Explore your thoughts and feelings that seem out of sync. That’s your intuition working for you. Believe what your intuition is telling you.
I’m going to get esoteric with this last step. Creatives experience reality as circular or spiraled, rather than linear. We live in a linear, rational society, but internally creatives reside in multiple and intersecting realities. Consequently, their feelings and thoughts are complex and multifaceted, and they can struggle with identifying which are “real” or “true.” Here’s the thing: they’re all real and true. Especially the ones that contradict each other. The ambiguity of liminality opens up creatives’ sensitivity to paradox, where multiple seemingly opposing things are simultaneously true. This is a very uncomfortable place to dwell in, but being able to sit with paradox is essential to the generation of creative work because it is where pure creative energy resides. As a creative, you are a channel for this energy – you manifest it in the world. Pure creativity energy imbues everything you think, feel, and do; it is your calling to recognize that and embody it.
The era we are living in right now is one of liminality. It’s an extraordinary time in the literal sense of that word: we are outside of ordinary times, refugees from the familiar. But crises can also occur on a purely personal scale. It took me a long time to realize that throughout my life I’ve actually sought out and generated personal crises because I’m a creative – I just thought I was neurotic and unstable! But no, it’s because I require crisis in order to grow as a creative. Learning to deal with crisis, whether it be imposed or self-generated, in a constructive rather than destructive way is key to creative thriving. The in-betweenness of liminality is a threshold, a space where nothing is sure, and everything is possible.* So step on up: wonders await you.
*Based on a quote by Margaret Drabble
How to find your natural flourish points.
The other day a friend told me to lean into my flourishing, and my immediate thought was no, I want to fall into it like it’s marshmallow fluff, I want it to envelope me. This sums up my approach to life over the last year or so, since I’ve recovered from burnout. I don’t want things to be hard. Instead of fighting with life, I want to allow it to happen. I’m ready for a gentler experience. Leaning into something, as originally used by Sheryl Sandberg, meant to be assertive and take the lead. This is not my style. But even the softer way the phrase is often used, to indicate embracing something wholeheartedly, can seem like too much of a struggle sometimes. Right now, I want to flourish effortlessly.
Is such a thing possible? Aren’t we supposed to work hard for what we want? In fact, flourishing should be especially hard to achieve, right? Someone who is flourishing has really made it, they’re living their best life. It’s a decadent, indulgent state of being. Many of us have a deep-seated conviction that we don’t deserve to flourish. Or that we haven’t earned it yet. Or that it would be wrong to flourish when there is so much suffering and injustice in the world. Flourishing, it seems, is a condition that is conditional. Adding to its mysterious nature, it is often unachievable no matter how much effort we expend.
And therein lies the contradiction, this idea that we have to work hard to flourish. Flourishing actually implies effortlessness: it’s a condition that naturally arises when we are in our element. Maybe flourishing isn’t something we have to work toward, but something we already have available to us. Maybe it’s as simple as closing our eyes, opening up our arms, and falling backward into its enveloping.
In fact, we can look backward into our past to discover how we can flourish. Think about what brought you joy and comfort as a child. Before all the “shoulds” entered your life, what activities did you gravitate toward without thought, simply because you loved doing them? These are your natural flourish points. Chances are, these same activities have resurfaced in your life over and over as you matured, but in different forms. Here’s an example of what I mean. After school every day when the weather was good, I’d plunge into the large wooded property owned by my neighbors, two elderly sisters who were very kind about allowing me to play there. I loved spending time in nature; I had a special grove with a fallen tree I’d sit on for hours, lost in dreams, just enjoying being myself. When I was older I gravitated toward activities such as camping and hiking. Now, even older, I am learning how to care for a vegetable garden. Being in nature is one of my flourish points.
Here’s another. My hobby as a child was reading. But it was more like an obsession than a hobby. I spent nearly every free moment reading. I would have read at the dinner table had it been allowed. I also noticed early on that I am a mental narrator – I have a habit of putting my experiences and thoughts into words in my head, full sentences and paragraphs, throughout the day. I have full-on conversations with myself in there. When I grew up I became a writer and a scholar. I still spend most of my free hours reading everything I can on all kinds of topics. Over the years I’ve written fiction, policy articles, and scholarly works. Now I’m blogging. Reading, thinking, and writing are my flourish points.
Recognizing your flourish points can help you gain a sense of self. There may be some that you haven’t developed throughout your life that you can pick up again, and you may find additional ways to express those you have kept up with. This is how we flourish, but doing more of the things that come naturally to us and make us feel good. It seems obvious, yet it’s not, because we are used to judging flourishing by outside markers of achievement, such as career and family. But if we switch our evaluation to internal markers, how we feel about things, we gain clarity. What makes you feel joy, comfort, excitement? Understanding this will lead you to your natural flourish points.
Wasting time is a radical rebellion.
This post is now a podcast episode!
What was your gut reaction when you read the title of this post? Did you feel unaccountably uncomfortable? Did the judgy part of you clear her throat? In our culture we are given two ideological choices of how to use time: wisely, or wastefully. One good, one bad. When I first started wasting time as an intentional personal practice (yes, you read that right), I felt like a bad person. I felt lazy, ungrateful, spoiled…all the negative things we’re taught to think about people who don’t diligently apply themselves to getting it all done. The indoctrination runs deep. See if you can complete any of the following:
Early to bed, early to rise…
Strike while the…
Pull yourself up by your…
Idle hands are…
You probably know at least one – we memorize such sayings in childhood. There are hundreds more, proliferating everywhere from your Facebook feed to the walls of your workplace or gym. They glorify our cultural approbation of hard work, getting ahead, and keeping busy, and structure our understanding of how we should conduct our lives. Industrious activity is seen as the way to succeed, but it’s more than that. It’s ingrained in us as a moral virtue. People who work hard are good people; we admire them. We believe they should be rewarded because they deserve to be.
Think about how we talk about not getting things done. It always carries a stigma. It was an unproductive day. I lazed about. I did nothing. Is it even possible to communicate this in an unequivocally positive way? The best we can do is something like, It was a restful day. But even then, we’re doing something of value – we’re resting so we can be ready for more work. Wasting time feels bad because we’re supposed to feel bad about it.
This is why we have a cult of busy. Creating busyness in our lives makes us feel like we are one of the good people, and it allows us to signal our worthiness to others. Busyness is a social status symbol and a way of self-medicating difficult feelings regarding our own value. How much busy is ideal? Being a little too busy. The kind of busy that you can show off with that tone of light exasperation everyone instantly recognizes: I’m just so busy, I barely have a moment to myself! Feeling that overwhelm – or giving the impression of it – is how we know we are part of the cool kids’ club (cult) of busy.
That’s bullshit. Being too busy isn’t a badge of honor. It just means you overscheduled yourself. Of course some of the ways our time gets used are out of our control, but we all can make choices about how busy we want to be. Sometimes those choices are hard, and you have to make sacrifices. People who say they wish they weren’t so busy are really saying that they’re too scared to make those changes. They don’t know how to exist without busy.
I started a personal practice of wasting time because I wanted to stop feeling that overwhelm of having to get all the things done. I wanted to cure my burnout. But I realized the practice had a larger value than just changing my own life. Intentionally wasting time is a radical rebellion in the face of our cultural indoctrination. It’s a rejection of the societal moralizing (laziness is a sin) and the capitalist valuation of human activity (time is money) that keep many of us from living our best lives. We all know the world is changing, that we’re entering a new era politically, economically, and culturally. It’s time to examine and subvert our limiting indoctrinated beliefs.
So how do you intentionally waste time? Here’s how I start. Whenever that anxiety comes on that I should be getting all the things done, I sit. I do nothing. I don’t try to use the time to meditate or “rest.” I sit and stare at a wall or out a window and let my mind wander, and sometimes I switch on a tv show as background static. I sit through that urgent feeling that there are all these things I need to do and the accompanying discomfort of leaving them undone. I tell myself that the urgency isn’t real, and that most of these things don’t actually need to get done at all. Eventually my mind always comes to rest on something I want to do. And I do that thing.
This practice helps fill my life with spirit-sustaining activities to the detriment of soul-destroying busywork. Like any mindful practice it can be challenging, but you will begin to see changes in your approach to life if you stick with it.
You already know how to handle uncertainty fine, but may not recognize it.
For many of us these are the most uncertain, frightening times we’ve ever experienced. Not only are we going through a historic sociopolitical shift, but there’s the pandemic in the short term and climate change in the long term…and we have no idea how any of it will turn out. It’s normal to find this uncertainty overwhelming. Desiring certainty in our lives is an evolutionary tactic, after all: certainty ups our chances of survival. But I think most of the advice out there about how to deal emotionally with uncertainty takes the wrong approach. Trying to “get better” at handling it is a waste of energy because you’re fighting against your own nature. We are hardwired to hate uncertainty.
What can help is understanding the role your personality plays in your experience of uncertainty, and recognizing the coping mechanisms you already have in your toolkit. Below I detail four personality archetypes and how they react to uncertainty. These are archetypes, which means real people can span several or all categories. I explore each archetype through its relationship to the following:
Time. Our conceptualization of uncertainty is based on how we experience time, because time is how change occurs. We spend an enormous amount of energy either living in the past, trying to influence the present, or predicting the future. Understanding our particular relationship with time can help us understand our fundamental reactions to uncertainty.
Traditional institutions of society. These include, inter alia, the structure of our politics, the public institutions charged with protecting our wellbeing, and the organizations we work for. People have differing reactions when our institutions begin to misfunction, as we are seeing now. Our attitudes toward these institutions and our reactions to their breakdown can be taken as a proxy for how we tend to deal with uncertainty.
Point of overwhelm. Everyone has that limit where they are exhausted in their effort to handle uncertainty. The ways people behave when they reach this point can be considered the extreme manifestation of the coping tendencies of their personality. Being in a place of overwhelm, therefore, can actually help you understand how you can develop your native coping skills.
The Stockpiler
The Stockpiler highly values security, and they spend much of their energy ensuring security for themselves and their families. Their focus is on the circumstances of the immediate present, such as money, home, and relationships, and their actions are guided by their imagining of the future. In times of great uncertainty, this imagining becomes fear based; they turn inward, becoming more protective of their home and family. When they feel they can no longer trust the word to provide them with security, they look for ways to increase self-sufficiency.
This type of person (remember, these are archetypes) generally does well in traditional institutions because of the security and protection they provide. They are attracted to organized systems where there is a clear and competent leadership structure. When institutions shows signs of breaking down, they are prone to see an acute and all-encompassing catastrophe looming.
At their point of overwhelm, the Stockpiler may resort to forms of hoarding as a hedge against the coming catastrophe. Preppers are an extreme example of this. It’s important to realize that the imagined future driving this kind of anxiety is just that: it’s imagination. Most societal catastrophes actually unfold over long periods of time and their impacts are variable across society. The key to a healthy coping mechanism for the Stockpiler is therefore focus: concentrating on activities that involve creating both order and useful resources (i.e. veggie gardening).
The Spark Plug
Do you know someone who is determinedly positive, who almost refuses to acknowledge any darkness? This is the Spark Plug. When met with challenges they dig in and glare those challenges right in the eye. They are likely to say things like, “I don’t have time for unhappiness or worry.” Their focus is on generating positive energy, and they spend this energy on transforming their present circumstances in positive ways. They are the type who make a special meal from leftovers.
The Spark Plug is focused solely on the present, but their instinct, rather than being protective like the Stockpiler, is for improvement. Something can always be done to make things more pleasant, fun, and beautiful. This type of person also does well in traditional institutions, and during normal times they are a combination of both driven and adaptable. During times of uncertainty they double down on these qualities.
The Spark Plug’s point of overwhelm can manifest in martyr behavior. Like the Stockpiler, their need for control over circumstances is strong, and when pushed to extremes they meet this need through frenetic action that may not actually accomplish anything other than keeping them busy until they burn out. They key to a healthy coping mechanism for the Spark Plug is therefore grounding: filling their days with activities that contribute to the betterment of their environment or the people around them and involve some aspect of self-care (i.e. a meditation circle).
The Troubadour
The Troubadour is an observer of the world, and so they always sit apart. Their energy is used primarily internally, in forming understandings of human nature and what they might call “the way of things.” They share this knowledge through functioning as a mirror to society, filling the roles of artist, scholar, counselor, or similar. But their priority is their relationship with their own mind, and so they rarely become wholly invested in the here and now. The Troubadour’s focus is understanding the links between past, present, and future, but they tend to live in the past, as history informs this understanding.
The Troubadour does not generally fit well into societal institutions because they must always maintain a separation between themselves and the world in order to accomplish their purpose, the generation of knowledge. The Troubadour can react to eras of turbulence almost complacently, because they see change both as the constant condition of life and as cyclical: the world has been through many times of great upheaval and uncertainty and will again in the future. While the Troubadour cares deeply for humanity, they tend to feel that they are separate from it. They may suffer from a dissociative sense that they themselves are not quite as “real” as other people.
Their point of overwhelm is found in this contradiction: the deep concern for the human condition and their desire and need to remain apart. The Troubadour who immerses themselves in the troubles of humanity is quickly exhausted, but the Troubadour who always holds themselves apart can become lonely and bitter. The key to a healthy coping mechanism for the Troubadour is therefore balance: carving out strict boundaries between people time and self time, and enforcing these without guilt.
The Renegade
The Renegade expends their energy in active rejection of conventional mores, and focus on making life meaningful rather than the acquisition of resources. In this they share the inquiring vagabond spirit of the Troubadour. The Renegade functions somewhat out of time, as they are the type that is the least likely to get bogged down by the past or obsess over an imagined future. They skip through the present lightly, as they are never satisfied with the status quo. The Renegade is often an activist, and works to transform the present into a better future.
Because of their rebel spirit, the Renegade not only does not function well within traditional institutions, but is usually wholly uninterested in trying. Unlike the Spark Plug, who seeks to improve institutions from within, the Renegade wants to tear them down and build better ones. During times of uncertainty the Renegade sees opportunity to remake the world, and may actually thrive on the chaos. Alternatively, they may be so anti-institution they peace out altogether.
Their point of overwhelm is exactly this: their tendency to throw themselves into the whirlpool and lose sight of the possible in their pursuit of a beautiful but improbable dream. They either get addicted to the high of constant agitation and make change that is counterproductive, or they can recede into their own heads, absenting themselves from reality entirely. The key to a healthy coping mechanism for the Renegade is therefore perspective: learning to live with their own limitations and those of others, and to pick their battles.
Do you see yourself in one of these, several, or all of them? Hopefully they can help you recognize your instinctual reactions to uncertainty and how to develop them in positive ways. Remember, none of us is doing uncertainty wrong! We sometimes just take what are healthy coping mechanisms a little too far under the mistaken and usually unconscious assumption that more is better. Sometimes all we need is to dial it back. This may feel like you’re losing control, but it is actually you gaining control. So you can stop exhausting yourself by trying to learn how deal with uncertainty “better” – you already have all the skills you need.
Nobody's broken, okay?
You know that Leonard Cohen song with the lyrics about there being a crack in everything and that’s how the light gets in? It’s beautiful, right? Well, I hate it (sorry, Leonard!). You’ve probably come across this metaphor in another form: we’re all broken. This idea that humans are imperfect is supposed to make us feel better about our daily failures, I guess. Except it’s never made me feel better, not even once. It just doesn’t resonate with me. I’m already hyperaware of my inadequacy – why make it an essential feature of my personality? Are my only choices wholeness or brokenness? Because I choose wholeness. Or am I not allowed to do that?
Acknowledging our human brokenness is seen as a way of being compassionate with ourselves. Many of us do hold ourselves to impossible standards; we all feel we are failing at something. The idea is that we are still worthy despite our flaws. Sounds nice, right? But I don’t want to accept that my worthiness is a condition bestowed charitably at best. Sometimes you’ll hear a rephrase that seems to make it make it more palatable: we are all worthy because of our flaws. Our flaws, after all, are what make us human. This still doesn’t work for me: we’re right back to making brokenness our essential nature. I want to escape this paradigm altogether.
I ask you: what if there is no such thing as flaws?
What if the things about ourselves that are labeled “flaws” are actually symptoms of us trying to accommodate ourselves to circumstances that don’t suit us? How many of these supposed flaws would be strengths in another type of situation?
What if your brokenness is a symptom of doing for others instead of yourself?
What if your flaws are actually strengths that are out of their element?
What if your life was about becoming more fully yourself rather than fixing yourself?
Metaphors like “we’re all broken” are what I call meaningless meaningfulness. They sound wise, but don’t stand up to critical scrutiny. You don’t have to limit yourself by accepting you are broken. You don’t have to accept your “flaws” to make progress in your life. In fact, outright rejecting conceptual paradigms such as these is how we can make our greatest leaps forward.
Think about those things that you consider your flaws. Maybe they’re the things about yourself you’ve always been made to feel aren’t good enough or need to be changed outright. I’m not talking about habits here, but aspects of character. Are you socially awkward, like me? What would this trait look like if you re-imagined it as a strength? Maybe it’s a manifestation of the fact that you are an observer by nature, someone who sees straight to the heart of things. Do you worry that you’re lazy, as I did for many years? Maybe the problem is what you’re focused on accomplishing – if it doesn’t inspire you to action, perhaps it’s not the right thing for you. Reframing it in your mind can help you begin to tear down limiting beliefs about yourself. There’s no telling where you might go in life, once you throw off those mental constraints.
Let the cracks be ones you make, and let the light be your light that you shine out to the world.
Maybe trying to find the “right” job is the wrong approach.
I’m one of the many creatives who decided early on that I would pursue “regular” jobs rather than attempt a creative career. As a writer of fiction, I was realistic about my chances of ever making a living off of it. So I tried to find jobs that were “parallel” to my writing, jobs that involved writing and that would allow me to be a novelist in my spare time. This failed on two fronts. I didn’t end up writing many novels, let alone publishing any, and I found myself severely burned out by the time I was in my mid-thirties. I’d always believed that there was a “right” job out there for me, but I never found it. I tried one thing and then another, and failed to capitalize on my experiences and build a career of note.
I never could get the hang of the linear, progressive career trajectory, and this made me feel that something was wrong with me. What I realize now is that my story is typical for creatives. The problem isn’t us. It’s that we are part of a system that tries to assimilate those who would live by a different set of values. Creatives just aren’t that good for the economy. We want to do what we want to do, and when a job ceases to inspire us, we cannot stay in it and remain sane. On top of this, we have very limited reserves for dealing with bullshit. So our work histories often look patchy, and we get questions about why we haven’t made anything of ourselves, given our talents.
This perspective is built on faulty assumptions about what we should want or pursue in our working lives. Let’s tear some of those assumptions down.
Career trajectory is a lie
The idea of a career trajectory is just that: an idea. It’s an idealized model of what a “successful” career looks like that has emerged from a system that values the productive capacity of workers. A successful worker is someone who is consistently productive up to the point of no longer being able to contribute, i.e. retirement. The problem is that fulfilling work and a successful career are usually at odds, because they operate on opposing tracks. A traditional career trajectory is meant to benefit the organization you work for, and through that the larger economy. People who stay in one industry and move up the promotion ladder are efficient cogs in a smoothly running machine. A fulfilling career, on the other hand, is for the benefit of the worker. It may sometimes happily coincide with the ideal career trajectory, but mostly not. It may have starts and stops, an industry switch, retraining, or any number of inefficient moves. The system, while paying lip service to the idea of a fulfilling career, will punish you in numerous ways for trying to have one. Anything like a spotty work history or one that seems to lack focus will be a detriment in job hunting. And thus the truth is revealed: the system does not actually want you to be fulfilled by your work, unless it is a side effect of your productive capacity.
Creatives are particularly disadvantaged in this system. It’s not because we cannot find fulfilling work. It’s that in order to continue to be fulfilled, we need to feel inspired – and generally working in the same career for our whole lives isn’t going to do it. What feels like the right path can quickly become the wrong one once we have reaped all the inspiration we can from it. Our system likes to frame this experience as that job not having been the right one to begin with. This puts the responsibility squarely on the worker to find the job that will be “the one,” in which they can finally fulfill the capitalist requirement of sustained productivity. But creatives are not linear people, nor do we function well within rationalized systems that constrain creativity. We usually end up blaming ourselves for being “unfocused,” “lazy,” “selfish,” or any other negative character trait the system likes to assign to people who fail at traditional career trajectory. In this environment, creatives can often begin to distrust their instincts.
No. Trust your instincts. In a system designed around precepts that are fundamentally at odds with how you need to live your life, your choices will inevitably look bad or wrong, or perhaps even like failures. They’re not.
Career trajectories don’t exist anymore, anyway
In high school I can remember being told that kids in my generation were the first who could not expect to do as well as their parents. I imagine this is even more true for youth today. I came up during the era of bankrupt pension funds and a loss of trust in big companies. Now we are transitioning to a gig economy in which long-term, secure jobs with good benefits are increasingly scarce. It’s a painful time to be alive – but some of this is actually good news for creatives. Why? Because we are built for times such as these. We understand job insecurity because we’ve always dealt with being unable to settle down. Many of us already have the experience of patching together a living that allows us to continue our art. And we have a head start on dealing with the feelings of inadequacy that come from not being able to build a traditional career. So keep on doing your thing, creatives!
You will never “figure things out” (hopefully)
The other day I was listening to a podcast by a woman about a decade younger than me who was talking about how it took her a long time to figure out what she wanted to do with her life, and that she’d finally done it. I remember feeling exactly that way at her age. And I couldn’t help but smile at her confidence and enthusiasm. It’s likely she’ll need to reinvent herself a few more times before her allotted life is over.
Make no mistake: there is no such thing as figuring it out, at least not for all time. You may find something that works now, and it may feel like it’s The Thing, but I can promise you that you will grow to a point where you’ll need something new. This is a good thing! Follow those instincts. Life is long (well, hopefully), so don’t fall for the lie that it should look like education/preparation → marriage/kids → career/savings → retirement/“fun” → decline/death. Instead of feeling inadequate if your life veers around and seems to fold back on itself, be proud of it. “You have to live spherically, in many different directions,” as Federico Fellini said. “Never lose your childish enthusiasm, and things will come your way.” Words to live by for creatives!
How can I contribute in a meaningful way?
A curse of introverts, especially those of us who are intuitive feelers (INFPs and INFJs), is that while we tend to care deeply about social and political issues, we are also behind-the-scene types, if not actively avoidant of large group activities. We want to do our part, but being on the front lines – for example in emotive protests – quickly and painfully overwhelms us. And mental health issues can make participation all but impossible. The attention garnered by active forms of dissent can make those of us inclined toward background roles and a quieter approach wonder if we are doing enough. It can even make us wonder if we are contributing anything significant at all.
This is on my mind a lot recently, because I want to see significant and enduring social justice occur for oppressed peoples. I’m a white, cishet woman who comes from a privileged background, so it’s incumbent upon me to educate myself and do the work to make change. As an intuitive feeler and an HSP, my emotional response to the injustices I see occurring is deeply painful. And yet I struggle to actively participate in frontline activities in any sustained way because of my introversion and severe anxiety issues. I also have to limit my consumption of news and social media. The result of this is a lot of guilt.
I want to be clear that my personal feelings of guilt and inadequacy are not important in the context of working for social justice. When I show up, I push all this aside because it’s not about me, plain and simple. But in my own time this is something I grapple with, and I know I’m not the only one. This post is for people who are similarly struggling. Here are some of my thoughts on how to work through complex and difficult feelings about social justice work when you feel unable to participate in meaningful ways.
We need to stop saying silence is complicity
Silence in the face of injustice can be complicity. We should not stay silent in our private spheres, and people and organizations with a public presence have a responsibility to take a stand. But silence has its place, particularly now, and particularly on the part of people who have privilege of any kind. The first and most important thing we can do is to shut up and listen. Without responding. Our opinions are not needed. We should be listening to the recounting of the lived experiences of those who need justice, and we should especially be listening to what they say about what they need and how we can help.
Guess what introverts are really, really good at? Listening. And thinking deeply about what we have heard. Why does this matter? Because just listening is not enough. We need to practice active listening. This means continuously working to examine our own biases and doing our own research to supplement what we’ve heard. It especially means sitting with discomfort, because discomfort is the growing pains of the soul. If you can do this, you are already ahead of most people, including many of those who jump at the opportunity to go out on the front lines. Demonstrating and protesting, while it certainly can be a catalyst of change, cannot equal sustained and deep work in the realm of discomfort on the part of every individual. That which we seek to change in society is rooted within ourselves, and the biggest and most important work you can do is in your own heart and mind.
You are allowed to be slow in your response
Introverts require more time than extroverts to formulate responses. We also generally prefer quality over quantity – we’d rather think carefully about our response to make sure it’s relevant and targeted than blurt out just anything. This is why participation grades in school are a nightmare for us. Our approach to taking action is similar.
This can feel really bad when the need for justice is urgent – which it always is, right? But it’s important to remember that change inevitably takes time (unfortunately), and that it really is sustained action that makes the difference. Very rarely do overnight revolutions occur. Most of the time, social change happens when a critical mass of people push for it, and political change happens when social pressure results in the political will to legislate. Demonstrations and protests certainly matter, because they are a very public way of showing how much support an issue has. However, most of the work for change occurs behind the scenes and in support roles.
Guess what introverts love? Working behind the scenes and in support roles. Especially for those of us with privilege, our place should be in support roles. Taking the lead, unless it is asked of us, is called co-opting the issue, and it’s wrongheaded. As an introvert, you probably won’t have a problem with taking a back seat!
Be skeptical of performative activism
A performative action is one that is done for the sake of appearing a certain way to others. When you are doing something performative for personal reasons – because it’s an easy way to show up or so other people will think well of you – this isn’t true activism. It’s like window shopping. That said, doing something for the visibility of it has its place: this is what demonstrations and protests are. But it’s important to not mistake this type of highly emotive and visible activism for revolutionary action. The unfortunate truth is that often people’s work for change stops when the demonstration does. Again, it’s not that this kind of activism isn’t important – but it’s not the only important way to contribute, nor is it the most important way.
I’m not going to list ways to contribute from behind the scenes, because you can easily google that. I will say that I find that using my money to help fund activist organizations, bail funds, or to support minority-owned businesses is often my chosen type of contribution. And I keep listening, learning, and examining my own biases. Paying attention is itself a kind of activism, particularly when it means you are sitting in discomfort quite a lot. Remind yourself that your discomfort is small compared to those who bear the brunt of injustices. Also remind yourself that you are allowed to take a break from it if you need to (while remembering that the people who need justice often do not have this privilege).
Being an extreme introvert and having mental health issues does not have to mean you can’t do meaningful work on behalf of social justice. If you’re like me, you probably already knew this, but have lacked confidence about your ability to contribute. I remind myself every day that change starts with the personal work I do on myself. If today that’s the only thing I do, it’s still valuable, and tomorrow maybe I can do more.
You don’t need to know where you’re going to get there.
One of the most frustrating feelings I’ve ever experienced is wanting my life to be different but having no idea what a different life would look like. My life had all those things lined up that you’re supposed to have, like career and family. From the outside it probably looked great. But I was deeply unhappy. I could barely drag myself through the days, doing the bare minimum to get by, stuck in an endless loop of self-recrimination and paralysis. Something was very wrong with my life, but I had no vision of what I might want instead. This is a common experience for intuitive feelers like INFPs and INFJs. The things we’ve been taught to want are often unfulfilling, but there aren’t many good alternative models for how life could be different. And because we tend to all be unique in our own ways, it’s doubtful that any model would ever suffice. We have to make our own way.
It’s not an easy path we walk, and it often looks dark ahead. But there are some things we can do to help us move forward and that may open up some surprising doors we didn’t even know were there.
Experiment with doing things the wrong way
We are all socialized to think certain life choices are the “right” ones. Even those of us who have rejected conventional mores have internalized certain beliefs about the things we should pursue in life. A big one for me was career success – I always thought I needed to get a good job that made use of my education and talents. And this isn’t wrong. But it’s also not right.
You know what is wrong? Not making use of my education and talents to get an amazing job. So you know what I did? That. I did not get an amazing job. I did not make good use of my education and talents. I know – it’s cringy, right? And I wouldn’t have made this choice if my mental health issues hadn’t precluded me for a long time from doing much of anything other than a freelance gig here and there. But in the end that turned out to be a good thing, because it taught me that sometimes the wrong way is the right way. I realized that my education – which I am deeply grateful for, and recognize for the privilege that it is – is valuable because of the experience of it, not the specific credentials it confers. Understanding this opened up so many possibilities for me that I wouldn’t have otherwise thought of.
Consciously making choices that go against what we’ve been socialized to think is good or right is one of the hardest things to do. You don’t have to do it in a big way. In fact, at the beginning it’s helpful just to do a deep dive into examining what parts of your life exist only because you are doing what you are “supposed” to do. The best way to do this is to confront your fear of judgement. Ask yourself the question: am I doing this because I want to, or because if I don’t, people may criticize me?
Put away those big dreams
Some people do achieve big dreams – but not as many as you’d think. We’re inundated with bootstrapping stories about celebrities, sports stars, and social media millionaires, so you can forgive yourself for thinking that the formula is “big dream + belief in self + hard work = success.” But it’s not, at least not for most of us. Beautiful dreams are nice, but mostly they’re just dreams. One day you wake up and realize your life is just…normal, and you’re, well, you’re just average. Sure, you’re special, but in the way that everyone is special. Which is to say, not really that special. This can be a hard reality to accept for INFPs and INFJs, because while we may not be “special,” we are different, and we inherently believe our destinies are different as well. And they often are.
Here’s the thing: destiny isn’t something you decide on ahead of time. It’s an emergent property of how you live your life and the small choices you make along the way. So think small. Think today. You don’t need to know what big possibilities are on the horizon – you just need to know what you want to do now, and trust that it will turn into possibilities in the future. Find something that piques your curiosity and explore it. Always wanted to know about raising backyard chickens? Start researching. The trick is to get your mind busy on something that inspires it. Soon enough new ideas and inspirations will pop into it – and they may have nothing to do with chickens! Or who knows, in a few years you may find yourself buying a small homestead out in the country and starting up a chick-hatching business. (Chickens are my latest obsession….)
Very rarely does someone’s life change because they made a big change out of the blue. Usually you build up with little alterations until you reach a tipping point, and then suddenly a big change occurs. It may seem to come out of nowhere, but in reality the ground was prepared over time.
Practice radical faith in the process
You’ve probably heard the phrase “trust the process” before. But trusting it isn’t enough. Trust is based on a hoped-for or predicted outcome. You trust the sun to rise tomorrow. You trust your friends or partner to (hopefully) be there for you when you are struggling. Trust is safe. Faith is an entirely different prospect. It’s based on confidence in the face of uncertainty and confusion regarding outcome. Faith is inherently radical, because it isn’t attached to specific outcomes. And this is radical in our results-oriented culture. You can’t go into work tomorrow and tell them your new philosophy is to only do things that feel good in a way that also feels good, end product be damned.
But you can live your life in a process-oriented way. We’ve talked about putting away big dreams – which are results-oriented – and focusing on doing small things that spark interest and excitement in you. The radical faith part is believing that you are headed somewhere, even if you feel like you’re treading water. Even if the path ahead is dark. In times when you feel a need to change your life but don’t know what you want, having faith in the process frees your mind from obsession over trying to figure out where you are headed. Eventually you’ll probably arrive at more clarity regarding what you want, but more likely one day you’ll look up to find that your life changed without you noticing how. It can happen faster than you think.
Do that thing you want to do now.
Making big changes and starting something new can be petrifying. Especially as we get older, we lose that youthful naiveté and enthusiasm that made jumping into new experiences easier, even fun. But the need to try new things doesn’t fade over time. Life gets boring if you don’t switch it up every once in a while. And some of us find ourselves in a position of having to reinvent ourselves well into middle age or beyond. Maybe we’ve lost a job, or a relationship has ended. Maybe a pandemic hit and suddenly the world is different. Some change is forced upon us. But if you think about it, there’s probably something you really want to do, but haven’t been able to commit. I’m sure you have all kinds of reason why, but ultimately it’s probably because you fear failure. That sounds trite, I know. Let’s break it down.
Fear of failure is at its core a fear of not being good at something. But undergirding this is an even deeper fear we all have: we don’t want to make the wrong choices and mess up our one precious life. We are surrounded by messages about making the most of our time, being competent at everything, and living the right way. We tend to see success and failure as a binary, black-and-white prospect. You either succeed or fail. You’re either good at something, or you screw it up. And by a certain age, we’ve all had our share of major screw-ups, compounding our fear. I have failed badly at times - ironically, often it was at things I’m good at. And sure enough, these failures have taught me some important truths about success.
Being good at something doesn’t matter
You’ve probably heard that in order to succeed at something you need to master it, and to master it you need to put in the time – 10,000 hours of practice is the usual calculation. This is bullshit. It’s something gatekeepers like to say because it gives their position a more vaunted flair and obscures their own imposter syndrome. The truth is, lots of people find success with seemingly little effort. Some people succeed despite sucking at what they do. And some put in those 10,000 hours and never succeed – like me. I’m a good writer, always have been. My dream was always to be published in fiction. I’ve spent way over 10,000 hours practicing my craft, have written short stories and several novels. I’ve gotten interest in my work a few times, but no publications. This is the biggest failure of my life, and it has been super painful.
For a long time I didn’t know how to handle this. It was my dream, I’d put in the time and effort – how could I not succeed? It felt like a betrayal of the logic of success. Finally I realized that it doesn’t matter that I’m a good writer. It doesn’t even matter how hard I worked. For multiple other reasons, many outside of my control, I failed at this dream.
Eventually I moved on. I still write fiction, but I don’t seek the accolade of publication, and I’m happy with that. In fact, it was when I embraced not publishing that I finally felt I had eared the title of “writer.” A writer is someone who writes regardless of outcome.
There’s no such thing as a “right” decision
I can’t tell you how many times in life I’ve planned something so carefully it was destined to work out…and it didn’t. My PhD was like this. I did everything I could to make it the right decision. I wrote a manifesto about how I would meet the challenges of obtaining a doctorate and what I would do with it after. I researched everything I could think of about the process in depth. I was ready. You can guess what happened. I barely dragged myself across the finish line, and by the time that hell was over I no longer wanted what I used to. None of the carefully thought out justifications I’d made for getting it the first place were valid anymore.
When it didn’t go as planned, I felt like I’d failed even though I got the degree. Because I didn’t end up doing the things I’d expected to with it, I worried I’d wasted eight years of my life. I was tortured by the thought that it had been the wrong decision.
But getting a PhD wasn’t the wrong decision. It’s just that trying to control the process and outcome was the wrong way to go about making it. If I’d been more open to letting the experience be what it was instead of what I thought I needed it to be, things would have gone much better for me. I didn‘t need to justify my choice by planning out every contingency before I committed. A choice can only be right in retrospect, and it’s how you live it out that makes the difference.
There’s no excuse to not do what you want to do
If it doesn’t matter how good you are at something or whether a choice is “right,” how do you decide if you should make that big change, start that new thing? Here’s how: wanting to do something is enough of a reason to do it. All you need is that spark of interest and enthusiasm. If you feel that about something, do that thing. Work at it to get better. We’ve all heard that advice, fake it ‘til you make it. No. Let me assure you, by trying something and working at getting better, you are not faking anything. There’s no need to pretend you are better than you are. What you need is to believe that you are good enough right now, even if you aren’t that great and are still striving.
Keep your focus on the fact that this is something you want to do. Keep reminding yourself that wanting to do it is enough of a justification for your participation. Any true master will tell you there is no such thing as mastery, only practice. So go ahead and do what you want to do, start the new thing, and be open to letting it be what it will.
Empaths need to do more than just survive; we need to thrive.
Empaths are people who are sensitive to the emotions and thoughts of others to the point of absorbing and feeling them as if they are our own. We need lots of time to ourselves in order to process, and are often called too sensitive, withdrawn, or shy because our culture privileges extroverted personalities. In the last decade the character traits of empaths and other types of introverts have come to be more understood and less denigrated. There are now many resources out there to help empaths learn how to thrive. But most of the advice falls flat because it still defines us based on extroverted values. Its ultimate aim is to tell us how to adjust ourselves to fit into the dominant culture rather than helping us discover how to further develop our inherent personality traits.
That’s because standard advice for empaths isn’t really about helping us thrive. It’s about how to survive being one. How to protect ourselves. How to feel less. How to create barriers between ourselves and others in order to block ourselves off from negative emotions. This is based on the understanding that empaths need a lot of space around themselves physically, emotionally, and spiritually. This isn’t wrong, but the assumption that we need this space in order to recover from social interactions is a shadow truth – only true when you define empaths from an extroverted perspective. Imagine yourself living in a society of only empaths. In such a culture, introversion would be normal, simply human nature. In such a culture, it would be understood that empaths need space around themselves because it is in that space that we become fully ourselves.
The skills empaths possess are a gift, and if we spend all our energy learning how to subvert and block our true nature in order to “survive” in a hegemonic extroverted culture, we have nothing left over with which to develop our gift. We are not surviving at all, in fact. We are living at best a half life, living in a realm of shadow truth. And here’s the thing: blocking doesn’t work. At least, I’ve never been successful at getting better at it. I still feel all the things, and on top of that I feel inadequate for not being stronger.
But there is an even scarier side to this. Many empaths, instead of learning how to strengthen boundaries between themselves and others, end up instead creating one between themselves and their own emotions. The emotions are still all there, overwhelming us, but by refusing to let ourselves feel the emotions, we alienate them, turning them into something dark. Anxiety and depression are often the result.
What ends up happening is that empaths accommodate themselves to the hegemonic extroverted culture through an endless cycle of painful engagement and exhausted withdrawal. There has to be a better way. And here’s what I think it is: to stop defining ourselves using extroverted values. Try the thought experiment I mention above – what would life look like, who would you be, in a culture that is made entirely of empaths? We can start there, in a place where our personalities traits are normal, even celebrated.
When I imagine a society of empaths, I see a culture based on kindness, gentleness, and a soft approach to personal growth. No tough love allowed! Think the Great British Baking Show rather than basically every American competitive cooking program. Or maybe let’s just go straight to an episode of the Barefoot Contessa. I want to live in a world where people are nice to each other and see the best in each other. Let’s face it: that’s not what we have. The world we live in right now is pretty damn toxic.
We can’t change the way things are or other people, but we can begin to create the world we want to live in for ourselves in our personal lives. This can look a lot of different ways. For me it has meant deciding to no longer participate in toxic traditional work environments (I freelance now) and ruthlessly excising harmful people from my life (including some close friends and family members). It has also meant sitting with some very uncomfortable emotions. Rejecting a traditional career means that I don’t make much money, and that feels embarrassing. I struggle with regret and anger over past relationships that I stayed in too long. But I want something better. I want to be fully myself, and to see where that takes me. And that will never happen if I spend my life trying to accommodate myself to our extroverted culture by blocking myself off from my empathic nature.
Being an empath shouldn’t be defined as “too sensitive.” Maybe it’s time to define non-empaths as being not sensitive enough! We are empaths for a reason; we do have a higher purpose. We gentle souls are what the world needs right now, even if our individual impact seems confined to our personal spheres. You are more important than you think! And your daily work to become more fully yourself is important work.
Sometimes you just have to lean into the lazy.
We’ve all been feeling it during this pandemic: the creeping malaise, the ennui, the increasing inability to apply ourselves to even the most basic of tasks with any regularity. Like showering. Anyone else? Maybe you, too, are at a point where you decide to eat another snack because it feels vaguely like getting something done. And you desperately need to get something done in order to feel normal and sane and like a worthy human being.
When regular routines have been lost and uncertainty is at an all-time high, this is what it feels like. It’s both anxiety-producing and boring at the same time. On TV, people caught in pandemics seem more vital, don’t they? They band together, use their ingenuity to secure their daily needs. There’s drama, excitement, danger. Think Walking Dead.
Once I went to see a battle reenactment, and it was eye-opening as to the real nature of war. Lots of sitting and waiting. Lots. That’s what real life is like. And that’s what this pandemic is like. We’re all just sitting around waiting for…something. What, we don’t even know. We’re trying to feel as normal as possible and keep up with routines of work and family, but we are failing. And now with things reopening across the country and the future somehow seeming even more uncertain, well…anyone else find themselves so exhausted by circumstances they just zone out completely?
Embrace it. Seriously. One, you can’t really do anything about it. Your brain and body are reacting this way because when there is intense uncertainty, it’s an evolutionary advantage to slow down and conserve energy. If you find yourself zoning out, it’s because that’s what you need to do right now. Trust the instinct, and trust yourself. Come on, you know you’re not a lazy person, even if you feel like one right now! Which brings us to point two: the reason you feel like a lazy worthless human being right now is because that’s what society wants you to feel. Productivity is the fuel that feeds the fires of capitalism and human progress, right?
But does productivity feed your fire? Right now perhaps you feel like you’ve lost your vitality. But ask yourself this: what, exactly, was it about your former way of life that made you feel vital? Was it the busyness? The routines? Is making productivity a priority worth it if any time you falter, you feel terrible about yourself? Ask yourself: why are you doing all the things? To get them done, or because they sustain your spirit?
Lean into lazy. I mean it. This is an unprecedented time. Use it to experiment. Instead of trying to get something worthwhile done today or tomorrow, try getting nothing done except what you absolutely have to. And be ruthless about what is necessary. Feed the pets/kids/etc.? Sure. Vacuum up the pet hair that is now practically another pet? Nope. Or do what I do – scrape together the most visible piles with your hands and toss those. There, cleaning done! Then do what you feel like in the moment. Even if it’s just sitting there staring at a wall. Tell yourself that anything you do - anything - has value, it’s worthwhile.
Here’s the thing. Most of the standards we hold ourselves to are completely arbitrary. In fact, most of our standards are really just measurements we use to judge ourselves and others. Think about it. It’s not enough to just make money – how much money matters. It’s not enough to have a house to live in – how clean and well-appointed you keep it is the true measure of your home’s value and by extension your personal value. Giving up those standards, rejecting them, is extremely difficult. Because they are how we understand ourselves as worthy human beings – through judging ourselves on a scale of “how much.”
This is why we are struggling right now. The scale is unbalanced. It’s fallen off its fulcrum. It’s disorienting: this shit is hard! But it’s happening regardless of whether we want it to or not. And I think we all know that when this all ends, things won’t get back to normal. Things are changed forever. How can we be ready for this new world? By being open to examining our fundamental assumptions about ourselves and what life should look like.
Years ago, on the eve of going abroad to live in China, I was given a little card that read “When nothing is sure, everything is possible” (attributed to M. Drabble). The saying has always made me uncomfortable, because it doesn’t make sense to me. How do you even know what is possible if nothing is sure? We all live within certain constraints; how can everything be possible? But there is something hopeful in the idea that we can remake ourselves, our lives, even if it’s only in small ways.
What are your possibilities? What will you make out of this time of uncertainty?
Are you an intuitive creative? Here’s why it’s your time to thrive.
I’m a synthesizer rather than an analyzer. Analysts take things apart, breaking them down into components in order to understand them. I do the opposite: I cull evidence from disparate sources and put it together to tell a story. I understand the world by recognizing patterns and seeing the big picture.
At some point in the first decade of this century I began noticing social, political, and economic trends that pinged in my mind. They started to form a picture for me that told a story about transformation. Nothing can hold forever; I believed we were experiencing the beginnings of a period of tumultuous change that would most certainly cause tremendous upheavals. Secretly, I thought we were probably entering a phase of history somewhat like a new dark ages.
Many people are recognizing that COVID-19 will change our world forever. It already has. Life as it was before is over. But in fact, this process of change has already been going on for some time in all areas of our public lives. The increased polarization we are seeing around the world is part of this. People are feeling more anxiety and suspicion. And right now, it feels like the world has gone crazy.
We will emerge from this latest challenge, but there will be more ahead. Make no mistake: we are entering a new world. It will hopefully bring positive change, but the process will be (and has already been) painful. What can we do? How can we survive these tumultuous, frightening times? If you are an intuitive creative, it may seem that your high sensitivity, empathic nature, and unconventionality make you maladapted to dealing with all this. In fact, the opposite is true. You are actually made for times like this. Here’s why.
You saw it coming
I don’t mean you saw this exact thing coming (though maybe you did!). But like me, you probably have been feeling subterranean shifts for some time. Even if you haven’t consciously recognized what’s happening, you’ve experienced increased anxiety. You’ve intuitively understood that what we’ve come to take for granted about the way things work in the world may not hold true in the uncertain future. It’s important to understand that your anxiety is more than just a reaction to the times. It’s information. As an HSP, intuitive, and/or empath, you pick up on energies all around you. You see and feel things other people don’t. Pay attention to your impressions, and learn to trust them.
You know that the best information comes from within you
Sure, experts in various fields have much to teach us, and we should listen to them. But no one knows you better than you do. You are the foremost expert on yourself. Intuitives who trust themselves are powerful, because they don’t waste any more time than absolutely necessary parsing the constant stream of information and opinions we are all inundated with. They are able to immediately grasp the important facts, understand what they need to do for themselves, their loved ones, and their community, and take action. One of the most interesting qualities of highly sensitive intuitives is that while they may suffer from sometimes debilitating anxiety in daily life, in a crisis they can be the most incisive, calm, and rational people in the room.
You think outside of the outside of the box
Yes, you read that correctly. Not only are intuitive creatives unconventional in their perspectives and approaches to life, they are true original thinkers. So much so that they can even appear, well, crazy to other people. Even other unconventional thinkers. What makes it so difficult for us to find a place in society and its institutions is exactly what makes us exceptionally suited to times that are not normal. People who thrive within the structures of society tend to feel disoriented to the point of panic when these are upended. While intuitive creatives feel disoriented, too, they may also feel strangely energized. Don’t feel guilty about this! You feel this way because you are actually in your element during times like these. When the binding, punishing structures of society-as-it-was fall away, space opens up for you to not only come into your own, but to be appreciated in a way you have never been before.
What does this mean for you during these strange times? If you haven’t been feeling very confident about moving forward into the uncertain future, I encourage you to begin by appreciating the qualities I discuss above. Treat your anxiety as information – anxiety doesn’t feel good, but instead of focusing on the discomfort, interrogate what it’s telling you about your situation. Trust what you discover! Work on developing a respect for the special personal knowledge you generate. Manifest that in the outside world through action. In crazy times, what we need are creative solutions. What we need are “crazy” ideas. In the new world that’s coming, there will be space for those ideas, and for you.
Creating a spacious life.
Some personalities thrive on busy: time deadlines, packed schedules, multitasking, and to-do lists. You know the type – they’re always just so…well, busy. These are the people who live on the periphery of your life, because you rarely get to see them. They may complain about having so much they need to accomplish every day, but ultimately they have a life like that because they’ve invited that kind of busy into it. Many of the things they “need” to do could be postponed, delegated, or outright left undone.
I do not have a personality that thrives on busy. Most creatives don’t, because art requires a lot of space around it in order to emerge into being. It’s not that creatives can’t learn to survive a busy life – we can grow adept at fitting creative work into small bits of time – but for many of us our natural preference is toward a slow life. A life that’s more open than closed, loose rather than tight. A life in which our meditative space (mine is long walks) isn’t spoiled by anxious thoughts of the next thing that needs to be done. A spacious life.
If there is a silver lining to having a severe anxiety disorder, it’s that I become so easily overwhelmed by a packed schedule that I have no choice but to say no to things that “need” to get done. I began creating a spacious life out of necessity, because I was burned out to the point of being unable to do my primary creative and life-giving practice, writing. I whittled my life down to only what was absolutely required. I became a person who accomplished the bare minimum.
At first this felt horrible. My tiny daily accomplishments seemed worthless (I washed the dishes! I shopped for groceries! I paid a bill!). I was socialized to believe that only productive time has value. Think about it: is there any way to say that you did nothing all day that doesn’t sound negative? How do you communicate the value of your time to someone without listing all the things you did during it? It’s harder than you’d think. In the beginning this project of opening up my life caused its own brand of anxiety. I won’t lie – it could be miserable at times. But I felt in my gut that I was doing something important, and that it would eventually pay off.
Here’s what happened. Over time, all those bare minimum tasks began to expand to fill the space I had opened in my life. My little life-sustaining activities began to feel like sacred tasks, part of a daily generative act of living. And I became okay with long stretches of doing…nothing. Wasting time. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do more with my time, it’s that during my recovery from burnout, I honestly wasn’t capable of much more. I had to be okay with that before I could move through that part of my healing.
In creating a more spacious life, there are significant sacrifices I’ve had to make along the way. I’ve had to reevaluate my feelings about money, for example, as I began to spend less time trying to chase it down. I learned that my best life is a slow life. The rhythm of a simplified, opened-up way of living allowed space for my creativity to reemerge.
Eventually I was able start writing again. And through the process of creating a spacious life I realized something important. In order to be creative on a large scale I need to be able to experience the generative creativity of even the small, everyday tasks of my life. If I am only doing things to get them done, check them off a list, and prove my productivity, then I will bring that approach to my writing as well. If I keep focused on opening more space in my life, rather than filling it up with yet more busyness, I will prosper in my writing. Learning to live with slowness is more difficult than you’d think, as it goes against everything our culture outwardly values. It requires a willingness to live with the discomfort that comes from going against what our society explicitly condones as “right” choices. But for creatives like myself, it is essential to our well-being.
How I use tarot for psychological insight.
I still vividly remember the first time I ever saw a tarot deck. It was in a little shop my family stopped at during one of our summer road trips through the western United States. A bookstore, maybe – we were always stopping at bookstores to get me more reading material. This time, though, I left with only that tarot deck. I recall the moment I first understood what it was as one of recognition. This is for me, I thought. Tarot has been a part of my life ever since, and has become an important tool in my mental health kit.
I’ve never really believed tarot can be used for divinatory purposes. I’m agnostic about whether it is possible to “tell” the future, but I don’t use tarot that way. I’ve always used it as a form of psychological sequential art. Sequential art is a series of images that tell a story. In the case of tarot, the story is about the person being read for (the querent). People are often astonished by how uncanny and accurate tarot can be about their situation. The reason isn’t that tarot somehow “knows” you, or that the reader is psychic (though many tarot readers do possess powerful intuitive abilities) – it’s because tarot imagery is so rich with symbolism and metaphor that it triggers deep unconscious knowledge and understanding. Tarot can help us make sense of what we are experiencing, which in turn can help us move forward in positive ways.
I believe that people have both the right and responsibility to be sovereign over their own decisions and life. For this reason, I rarely give advice and I never “give” readings to others. Rather, I do readings with querents. I can interpret the cards for them, but ultimately only they can apply the reading to their lives in a useful way. Often cards have multiple meanings, especially when combined with other cards. By talking through a reading with a querent, I can suggest how the cards apply to their situation and use their responses to glean additional meanings from the cards. A querent usually comes away with a greater understanding of their emotions and actions, and often with feelings of peace and hope.
My reading method comes from several decades of studying tarot and reading for myself. When I am feeling confused or fearful, I’ll draw a few cards and tell myself – out loud! – the story that they are narrating. Even though I remain agnostic about the nature of the tarot’s power, I’ve almost never had a reading that hasn’t made me catch my breath at the clarity it provides. For me, tarot isn’t an impersonal fortune teller doling out impartial judgments about my choices and my fate. It is a gentle, supportive tool that reminds me I have power a value in this world, even if it feels there are many things I cannot control. Reading tarot helps me feel less alone, and that the universe is supporting me on my path.
I’d recommend studying tarot as a psychological tool to anyone who is attracted to its imagery and personal storytelling power. There is no need to believe in anything mystical to benefit from it. While modern tarot did originate as an occult tool, there are many decks that have done away with esoteric symbolism - I have about twenty decks and am familiar with many more, so can recommend ones that might suit your esthetic. Please don’t hesitate to contact me with any questions if you think you may want to get started with tarot!
My depression was a symptom of a bigger problem.
This blog post is now a podcast episode!
I once spent three weeks straight in bed. I’d get up to shower occasionally, but mostly my biggest daily expenditure of energy was reaching over to the bedside table to get more Benadryl to make me sleep again. Being awake was hell on earth. I wasn’t bad enough to want to die, but I certainly didn’t want to be alive. I thought I was depressed. I was wrong. What I actually had was burnout.
Let me explain. I tried for many years to treat my depression. Medication after medication. Cognitive-behavioral therapy. Wine. Endless rounds of falling into the abyss, dragging myself out and to the doctor yet again, only to come out feeling that there was no hope and nothing would ever get any better for me. “Treatment-resistant depression,” is what it’s generally called.
I don’t know exactly when I realized my depression was actually a symptom of something else. I suppose eventually I became so frustrated by the inability of medical approaches to help me that I started looking for other answers. I just couldn’t believe that I was doomed to feel like shit for the rest of my life because of some inherent biochemical or psychological flaw. But if the problem wasn’t me, what was it? The answer was obvious once I took brain chemistry and mental illness out of the equation: it was the circumstances of my life. I was suffering from the effects of years of anxiety that came from trying to survive and thrive as an intuitive feeler, a gentle soul, in a world that is not made for such as us. I was burned out from it.
In 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) recognized burnout as a legitimate condition (a “syndrome”). Which is great, right? Not exactly. There is this major caveat: it is considered an “occupational phenomenon,” related only to the workplace context. Burnout comes from being overwhelmed and exhausted in one’s job. The standard treatment advice is to take a vacation, maybe change jobs.
I think this is bullshit. Burnout is a whole-life condition, caused not just by a particular job but by the system that supports our work institutions. A system that prioritizes an individual’s productive and economic value for the organization they work for over their humanity. Take a look at the WHO’s list of burnout indicators:
· feelings of energy depletion and exhaustion;
· increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and
· reduced professional efficacy
Let that last one sink in. Reduced professional efficacy.
According to this, the true cost of your burnout is that you cease to be an efficacious member of your organization. You cost them money because your productivity decreases.
The irony is that this system of valuation is a root cause of burnout. Even when your job is ostensibly for something other than profit, like my previous work in academia, it still always comes down to what is good for the organization, not you. Any institution seeks first and foremost to survive, and your worth to it is based on whether or not you contribute to that.
You’re probably thinking, well duh. That’s just the way our system works. And anyway, everyone’s got to earn a living. True and true. But for gentle souls, this system is particularly spirit-crushing. We are not primed for the competitive, impersonal nature of it. But it’s more than that. Many intuitive feelers find that the institutional/organizational context just doesn’t make sense. It is so fundamentally contrary to our own personal value system that we often can’t function within it anywhere near a level of competence that expresses our true talents and skills, even as we exhaust ourselves trying to fit in. And this is devastating. It can lead to feelings of futility and hopelessness.
What really turned things around for me was when I realized that my real problem was that I was allowing the societal values of productivity and money-seeking to lead my decisions. All along I was chasing things I don’t personally value. I began to reassess my life from my own perspective, rather than society’s. This is an incredibly difficult thing to do – it requires a real commitment to examining and throwing away some beliefs that are so ingrained it feels wrong to reject them. Like deciding to not pursue certain career opportunities you’ve spent years qualifying for, even when it impacts your personal bottom line in life-altering ways. Or deciding that you are going to start “wasting” more time – see, we don’t even have positive ways to talk about being unproductive in our language!
Clearing my own mind – working to eliminate the cultural brainwashing – was the first and honestly only really difficult step I needed to take to heal from burnout. Once I gained confidence in living my personal values, and in a way that prioritizes my own mental health at all times, everything else began to fall into place. I’m not saying this is the way for everyone. But for me, trusting myself and trusting my values made all the difference.
You are not the problem, and it is not your fault.
This post is now a podcast episode!
You know who you are, you gentle-souled people. You are the ones that life hurts regardless of how strong you try to be. You are sensitive, intuitive, empathic. You feel things all the time, all day, in every moment. All your life, you’ve noticed that there’s something different about you. You’ve been called too sensitive and made to feel that this is bad. Other people often seem like they just don’t want to deal with your shit. You’ve learned to keep quiet and process it all inside. Or, because no one has taught you how to be who you are in this sharp-edged world, your emotions overload and come spilling out in torrents, creating a huge mess that feels like it’s all your fault.
I know you, I hear you.
You feel like there is no barrier between your soft, raw underbelly and the slashing parries of the everyday world. Some days are like sandpaper against your soul. Maybe you avoid going out into the world, because you know it will hurt. It’s not your imagination – you know that inevitably, you will hurt. Some days you can manage your shit and you feel almost normal. But mostly it seems like the world is just waiting out there to rough you up.
I know you, and I hear you.
There are many of us like you out there, more than you realize. But because we live in a society that denigrates our personalities – our gentleness, our introversion, even our tendency toward sincerity and kindness (you’re too soft, gullible, naïve!) – we have grown adept at hiding ourselves and do not recognize each other. Often we do not even understand ourselves. And often – usually – we feel that what’s wrong is within us, not out there in the world.
That’s bullshit.
The truth is this world was not made by, or for, the gentle souls. That doesn’t mean there’s no place for us! But it does mean we have to struggle harder to find our roles. We have tried so hard to fit conventional ones, and it has been uncomfortable at best, traumatizing at worst. Many of us are very strong (although we feel weak!), and can go years trying to mold ourselves to a world that is not suited to our particular skills and characteristics. Eventually, though, we will find ourselves experiencing serious burnout.
Understanding this cycle of burnout we undergo – attempting to contort ourselves to fit into conventional roles to the point of trauma to ourselves – is essential to breaking out of it. Complicating things is that we are often actually good at these roles. Our intuitive, creative natures give us special skills that allow us to excel. But the cost is too great. We are ultimately being harmed by the world we are trying so desperately to compete in. What we need to do is stop competing. We are the ones who forge new paths, not follow the well-trodden ways.
Is this challenging? Yes! Is it scary? Hell yes. But if you are one of the gentle souls, you will eventually arrive at a point where it is essential you break out. It may feel like your only choice, if you are to survive emotionally.
What this process looks like is different for each individual. But you will find that many of the ingredients you need are already a part of your life. Shifting your perspective will help you understand what is life-giving, and what is soul-sucking. It may take time – it took me years! – but it is never too late to begin. Take heart! Having a gentle soul makes you special. The first step is recognizing this and learning to accept and value who you are. This requires you go against a lifetime of socialization that taught you that it’s you, not the world, that is flawed. So start here: Repeat after me: That’s bullshit! Say it again. Keep saying it until you know deep inside that it is true.
This is the era of introverts!
I’ve noticed something interesting in the midst of the social distancing required by the coronavirus pandemic. My introverted friends are suddenly much more active on Facebook, posting about resources, spreading positive messages, and proffering solidarity. My more extroverted friends, the ones who usually clutter up my feed, are…fascinatingly silent. It’s almost as if introverts, with our more attuned sensitivities and ability to enjoy periods of isolation, are uniquely suited to this unprecedented situation (hint: we are).
I’ve been pondering something that’s often occurred to me over the last few years. In a world in which we are already socially isolated for so many reasons, and with the growth of home-based personal internet businesses in the last decade, are introverts finally having their day?
When I was growing up, being shy and introverted was not considered cool. I felt like a pariah among my peers. My friends were the other geeks and nerds. Most of us got bullied eventually, some of us horrifically. I can’t tell you how much I prayed that my shyness would be taken away (I didn’t know the difference between shyness and introversion back then). My profound socially awkwardness meant that I was under constant stress. Group activities of any kind at school were a nightmare. I was often very, very unhappy. Weekends were spent shut up in my room, reading and working on crafts. And during those long stretches of time alone, I felt happy. Very, very happy.
My life is little changed by social distancing during this pandemic. I already work from home, I take daily walks with my dog but otherwise don’t go out much, and most of my friends are text message buddies. Even my writing group meets online! All those personality traits other kids made fun of are now a benefit.
Then, today this popped up on Facebook: “Introverts, check in on your extroverted friends; they’re probably really suffering right now!” And you know what? I didn’t really believe it - because come on, being home all the time isn’t that hard, is it? I did an experiment: I posted about how I feel that I’ve been training my whole life to survive this enforced social distancing. An extroverted acquaintance replied, “I’m the opposite. It’s going to kill me.”
It’s not going to kill him (and hopefully the virus won’t, either), but wow. I can’t imagine finding social distancing that hard! But here’s the thing - extroverts can’t imagine how hard introverts find daily life in a society that favors extroverted personalities. We have to work harder for everything. Now it’s the extroverts who are going to have to work harder to adapt. I told him I know he’ll make it through - but he may have to find some creative solutions to his cabin fever. And he may find he’s more exhausted than usual, not at the top of his game - the way introverts often feel when we have to go out into the world and extrovert.
In the meantime, I’m doing pretty well, at least with the social distancing part. In fact, despite all the fear and uncertainty, I feel strangely confident, given the circumstances. And I was thinking: us introverts should start being proud of who we are. We are like the new cool kids in town - we have skills and resources that will help us endure and thrive in this new reality. I think it’s time we start saying – Out loud! To other people! – that we are glad we are introverts, that it does not make us the “second-bests” of society. We are not less useful than extroverts - in fact, quite possibly the opposite is true. We have a chance to shine in this new era – during this pandemic and beyond.