having a moment where I realize I don't... make much of an effort to *experience* the kinship of my friends
it's kind of weird, like, i've put in all this effort into *making* friends, but I hardly spend any time *enjoying* them
both are quite elegantly explained by fear
I used to spend loads of my time lounging around with my friends as a teenager, we were a group of misfits and we could be kinda casually harsh and cruel with each other but there was a love there, maybe largely out of a sense of shared suffering
the adults in my life often attacked/insulted/shamed me for this, and the hardest part was that there was a part of me that agreed with them, like at some level we were certainly a bunch of low-lifes just fucking around aimlessly. AND we also had big ambitious dreams. it's messy
i love my wife to bits, she's my best friend, we got married at 22. there's some details about the backstory here i've shared in bits and pieces involving the broader social context that our relationship was forged in, that was quite traumatic for both of us, in different ways
[waves hands around] at 22 we were married, broke, bought a house, and I was very determined to "get my act together" and work my ass off to pay the bills. i tried to consciously become a workaholic. my journal entries from those years were full of "fuck you, work harder" vibes
and i'm just really sad right now realizing that Mr. Friendly Ambitious Nerd hardly ever made time to just *be* with friends, and that even now there's a part of me that's like "fuck you, finish and publish the book"
i have loads of things to be grateful for. i still love my wife. the traumatic context we experienced is no more. my relationships w/ my old friends are good. I have lots of excellent amazing new friends. i'm living my dream as a writer, like 10-20 years earlier than i expected
still, there's a harshness and a coldness in certain parts of my psyche that remains, despite all the rehabilitation I've done. there's been progress I'm sure, I'm kinder, smarter, less catastrophic in my thinking, more skilled, etc. but the coldness is really startling me today
that coldness I think is something deep in the heart, in the body, maybe the lizardbrain or amygdala or whatever, a deadness, a freeze response, fear. fear that I cannot truly relax, bc, just like my friend maia eloquently and bravely said,
I was reading recently about some guy who was tortured, I think during WW2. and he said something that shook me to my core. I paraphrase– he said... until he was tortured, he had never been truly awake, truly alive. like torture was the moment he first experienced consciousness
now obviously i've never been physically tortured by enemies
but I feel like... to some degree, there's something about the shocking experiences that I've had (that I still have never fully articulated on main, because they involve/implicate other people)... that "set me apart"
and I don't mean in a good way. it's alienating. it's isolating. it's a curse. I feel like I was struck by lightning and I didn't die, and instead it elevated the voltage in my nervous system to something quite difficult to bear, and I have electric hands... ah fuck i'm elsa lol
I don't hide in a castle, I don't think that's sth that a large brown man with a weird name and little $ can do. I hide in plain sight by being open & charismatic, being obsessive abt doing favors for others, as many loyalty missions as I can, to build a crew that'll protect me
I don't think I have secret monstrous instincts. I'm genuinely the person I portray, I truly love books, I truly try to be kind, etc. My anxiety isn't that you'll find out something about me. I have nothing to hide. My anxiety is people will assume I'm a monster *regardless*
I mean I don't walk around with this anxiety day to day. It's more like something buried pretty deep. I can conduct myself with abundance mindset and honestly believe it. but if you dig deep deep down (and my book makes me do this every day lmao, exhausting) you see a kid...
that experienced coercion, manipulation, gaslighting, abuse, and didn't have anybody to rescue him from those circumstances. nobody cared. not enough to do anything about it.
I don't wanna make this about race, but there *is* a racial component to it. A book was published in 🇸🇬 just last year where a brown kid is a school villain – honestly, I'm grateful for it, because it puts into print the mysterious bog that i've been swimming against all my life
I'm not looking for sympathy or anything like that. Really, it's just that nobody fucking ever listened to me when I was growing up. So here. I spent 20 years building an audience, one person at a time. Now there are people who listen. Thanks for listening. ❤️
I suppose to tie it back to the start, the thing here is... I'm so used to people not listening to me, not trusting me, etc, that now when I have people who do, I kind of don't really believe it still, lol. I believe it in my verbal-conscious mind, but the coldness is in my heart
strong sense of deja vu here I feel like I did a thread where I was stuck in this same loop about a year ago, maybe too. like "erm, I didn't plan *this* far ahead, I didn't expect people would actually listen to me"
a thing i dislike about a lot of advice you'll find on the internet – and this is kind of a consequence of search engine optimization – is most advice ends up being very tactical. like if you struggle with sleep, you'll encounter a lot of "use blackout blinds, wind down early..."
but it's not just about SEO, it's also abt the fact that tactical advice is the easiest to give, it's never wrong, but if you have a wicked problem that you haven't been able to solve, the issue is rarely bad tactics. most people with wicked problems already know all the tactics
“Under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness.”
― Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
“Nobody complains about all the fog. I know why, now: as bad as it is, you can slip back in it and feel safe. That’s what McMurphy can’t understand, us wanting to be safe. He keeps trying to drag us out of the fog, out in the open where we’d be easy to get at.”
– Ken Kesey
“Night-time is being brushed aside like so much cobweb. The day is wound up and begins even before the last haunted dreams, the last of the fog, those spectral and evanescent residues, have faded away.”
― Gregory Maguire
funny how when my friends give me their reads of my situation with "I might be projecting", it's accurate
recently also saw someone wrongly project his own shit onto a friend with an assertive "look at you, typical X, doing things like Y on purpose, you know what you're doing"
my read is that this is foundationally about intellectual humility
my friends aren't being fake-humble when they say they might be projecting, they're being honest
but because they're intellectually honest, they've gotten good at modelling things well and making good reads
whereas a recurring thing with people who are too confident with their reads seems to be that that they pattern-match based on a couple of phrases. eg someone seeing me say "pattern-match" and assume I work in tech, QT "tech bros love to pretend they've invented social dynamics"
took me years to begin to understand that one of the most heroic things you can do is not hate yourself
writing a book lol. will be published hopefully end of the month: gum.co/introspect
a short answer might be, take inventory of yourself, identify specific behaviors that you love and do more of that. investigate what you hate, and be genuinely curious to understand how/why