“We can hardly begin to consider this problem unless it is clear that the craving for security is itself a pain and a contradiction, and that the more we pursue it, the more painful it becomes. This is true in whatever form security may be conceived. You want to be happy, to forget yourself, and yet the more you try to forget yourself, the more you remember the self you want to forget. You want to escape from pain, but the more you struggle to escape, the more you inflame the agony. You are afraid and want to be brave, but the effort to be brave is fear trying to run away from itself. You want peace of mind, but the attempt to pacify it is like trying to calm the waves with a flat-iron.”
- Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity
This is a story of fear and faith.
Following your dreams is terrible. It’s a gift and a privilege to be able to do it (as everyone you talk to about it will remind you), but the process is truly unpleasant. My dream is an improv theater I’m starting with a few of my friends called Union Comedy - a project nearly three years in the making that is still waiting to be built.
Any physical creation comes into being in more or less the same way: first its essence exists in the mind, then its composite parts and the tools required to assemble them are defined in language and symbols, then the language and symbols are exchanged for material parts and tools, and finally that material is assembled. The more complex the creation the longer each of those steps takes. For months my dream has been stuck in the realm of language and symbols. It exists in essence. It exists in legal documents. It exists in architectural drawings. But despite our best efforts it’s been heavily resisting tangibility.
One of the reasons following your dreams is terrible is since they’re your dreams they’re your responsibility. They may, as mine are, be shared with others, but the pursuit is ultimately very personal. This is great when things are going well; when the project is succeeding you feel like a successful person. This is not so great when things are going badly. In many ways your ego clings to your dream and it becomes difficult to disassociate your progress from your self-esteem. This is what makes waiting so frustrating. When the project is stuck you feel personally stuck.
It’s interesting that the first step toward creating something is completely dissecting it; there’s something about a state change that requires a thorough audit. It’s like if I wanted to move a bed frame from one room to another, I’d have to disassemble it and bring it through the doorway in pieces which I’d then reassemble on the other side. It ends up being the same bed frame, but in order to get somewhere new it has to stop being a bed frame for a little while. Similarly, I’ve found myself spending much of the last three years doing an immense amount of self-dissection as I undergo a major life transition. After spending the large part of a decade in the world of improv it’s starting to look like I might actually have a shot at making a career out of it.
Uncertainty is kind of the point, I’m learning. We play games because we might win, not because we definitely will. We enjoy stories because we don’t know how they’ll play out. The entire thrill of improv is that none of us know what’s going to happen. The excitement of “what’s next?” is what keeps us engaged. But the dark side of uncertainty is doubt. It’s “what if what’s next is bad?” Doubt creeps in when we’re invested in a certain outcome. It thrives in stretches of stagnation. It quickly matures into fear. Following my dreams required an increasing commitment to uncertainty, and in those long periods of setbacks and little progress, doubt ran wild.
The more invested I became in my dream the more it started to scare me. What if it never panned out? What if we put all this work into this just for it to fall apart? What if I wasn’t good enough? What if I did something that screwed the whole thing up? Could I do anything else if I failed? Why was I committing myself to the pursuit of this thing that constantly refused to be real and often seemed impossible? Why didn’t I have a backup plan? Scariest of all this was a project that attracted a lot of attention. I knew a lot of people were invested in this. I knew there was a lot of anticipation about it. What if we couldn’t get it done, if this was a promise we couldn’t keep? What if we could but it wasn’t successful? What if I let everyone down?
The thing about moving the bed frame is you don’t get to pick and choose which parts you want to take into the next room and which ones you want to leave behind. If you want to finish the job you have to eventually carry every individual piece, even the ones that are heavy, dirty, ugly, and broken. These also tend to be the pieces we save for last, knowing they’ll be unpleasant to handle. The main problem with getting disassembled is you temporarily stop existing as a whole. During the time it takes you to transfer each individual piece from one room to the next it seems like that piece is all there is. I had spent a long time carrying each of my pieces from one room to the next, taking a close look at them along the way. Fear was the final, most daunting one.
This is where the Alan Watts quote comes in. I’ve written before about how a lot of the things I was afraid of ended up coming true. There seems to be a certain inevitability to where we focus our imagination. I think we can run from the things we endow with power over us but we can’t hide from them forever. I think we hope that if we put enough effort into staying busy or distracted we can avoid looking at the things that might be difficult to look at and unpleasant to deal with. I certainly used improv as a distraction for a long time. I’m sure a lot of us do. I tried to use it to feel like I was moving toward something. I tried to use it to fill the gaps in myself that I didn’t think I could fill on my own. But I think Ram Dass (who died during the writing of this piece) is right when he says all methods are traps. I think improv, like any method, is excellent at showing us who we are and where we’re stuck. But improv, like any method, won’t do the work required to get unstuck for us.
I think the ultimate lesson of improv is acceptance. It’s non-judgment. It’s the immediate embrace of everything we’re given to work with, and that includes our own choices just as much as others’. What improv eventually showed me was that most of my problems were self-endowed based on my reaction to certain things. This is something that intellectually has made sense for a while, but practically is difficult to embody. As an introvert predisposed to anxiety I have a complicated relationship with perfectionism. On the positive end I think my compulsion to attend to details and my willingness to put a lot of time into the things I care about is what makes a lot of my creative work (e.g. this blog) very good. On the negative end it means miring in unnecessary bouts of analysis paralysis and that mistakes, especially irreversible ones, can be devastating.
I’ve been carrying fear for a while; so long I have to remember that most of me and all of the easy-to-carry parts are already in the other room. But fear is heavy and tends to spotlight mistakes on the way out. It’s forced me to really look at a lot of them in order to get by. For a long time, because of my perfectionism, this was a painful process. But eventually my improv training finally kicked in and I started seeing my mistakes through the lens of acceptance. I realized that what I had been doing was using my mistakes as reasons I didn’t deserve to be happy. Eventually I realized that what I should be doing is treating how I felt about my mistakes as signs that I know I’m capable of being better, that I am continuing to mature. I realized that in my pursuit of perfection I spent more time and energy beating myself up for the few things that didn’t align with my values or fell short of how I knew I could be rather than recognizing that 99.9% of the time I was meeting them completely.
Life is kind of like walking down a dark path where no one can see what’s around or up ahead but everyone thinks we’re heading someplace either really good or really bad. Some people who think it’ll be really bad want us to stay put because they believe at least where we’re at isn’t as bad as what’s coming up. Some people who think it’ll be really good want to give us wrong directions so they can get there first and feel good about themselves for beating everyone there. Some people who think it’ll be really bad hold themselves in place because they feel safe with what they know. Some people who think it’ll be really good will rush full speed ahead only to run headlong into painful obstacles they couldn’t see. These obstacles are mistakes. These obstacles are failure. These obstacles are bad habits, neuroses, attachments. We don’t see them coming because we’re distracted or think we can clear them or the environment won’t allow it. We get stuck because we often don’t know which direction to go. But just because the path has obstacles doesn’t mean that’s where it ends or even that we’re going in the wrong direction. They’re simply markers of where the path isn’t. They’re just inefficiencies in the journey. Working through these snags in the path can make you feel like a Roomba. Sometimes you hit a wall once, turn completely around, and you’re back on track. Sometimes you keep banging into that wall a million times making teeny incremental progress each time before you can finally get yourself turned around. Sometimes no matter how hard you try you can’t get free and you need someone who cares about you to come bail you out.
Moving the final piece of the frame has an extra challenge too; eventually you have to let go of the old room and leave it for the last time. Letting go of old circumstances is just as hard as getting disassembled. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the new room. What if it’s not actually an upgrade? What if it’s not a good fit for the frame? This resistance to the new state is the ego desperately trying to grab onto anything it can to prevent the heart from taking it somewhere unknown. My friend Kate Hopkins calls the ego “the story we tell ourselves about ourselves”. It has a plan and likes to think it knows exactly what our role is in the world and exactly what’s going to happen in the future. That’s why change can be so painful, especially when it occurs unexpectedly or when the outcome is unclear. The ego likes the old room because even if it’s not particularly fulfilled, at least it’s familiar with things. It knows where it stands with everyone else’s egos. It knows the rules. It knows what it can and can’t do in its current space. It doesn’t easily let go of this comfort zone. It wants to keep its story on track.
This is where faith comes in. In its quest for fulfillment the heart asks the ego to trust it. It argues that the pain of change will be worth it. It asks it to let go of knowing for a chance to know better. It asks us to jump. Because deep down the heart knows the ego is well-meaning but shortsighted. Its goal is survival, but the heart wants to thrive. The heart knows the ego can learn to tell a different story once it adjusts to its new situation. But the ego doesn’t particularly enjoy leaps of faith. I know because for I’ve been in mid-air for what feels like eternity. Time will tell if I can stick the landing.
Once we’ve closed the door on the old room there’s still work to be done in the new one. The frame still needs to be reassembled. You’re finally in a new place but you’re still in pieces. But at least now you know all the parts that make up the frame. You’re familiar with the heavy, dirty, ugly, and broken pieces from carrying them one at a time from one room to the next. When it comes time to start putting them all back together again, we have some choices to make. One option is to leave everything the same. Maybe carrying the heavy ones made us stronger and they won’t be as hard to carry next time. Maybe some stains are permanent and serve as a reminder to try not to make anymore big messes. Maybe we accept that the frame will never be perfect, and the parts that aren’t so attractive are what makes the frame unique. Maybe the broken parts aren’t a real danger to the integrity of frame, they’re just another reminder that it’s been through some rough times. Maybe all we really needed to do was to understand how the frame fits together, acknowledge its flaws and weak spots, and hope we treat it better in the new room.
Another option is taking the time to put in the extra work to clean things up and repair some damage. Maybe we get some help with the heavy ones. Maybe we take a close hard look at the dirty and broken ones and figure out what it takes to clean and fix them up. Maybe we give the ugly ones a paint or a polish or some sort of decoration. The choice depends on how much we’re capable and willing to put the extra work in. If we think the frame is sturdy enough as it is, we might let flaws and damage slide. If we think things will compound over time and we’ll have to deal with them at some point, we might decide it’s time to do the work.
I’ve been doing a mix of both options as my life changes. Being forced to carry every piece of myself made me recognize which parts I had to learn to accept and which parts I had to work on if I wanted to enter a new chapter feeling as sturdy as possible. Uncertainty, doubt, fear, guilt - these are some of the bigger parts I need to simply accept. For a long time I hoped ignoring them would make them go away and all that would be left were the bits I was proud of. Creativity, vision, drive, endurance - if I could just manage to make things like this be all of me I’d be perfect and I’d be happy. But assemble the frame without all the parts and it can’t do its job. I’m still working on accepting that all my parts are there to serve a purpose, that they wouldn’t be there if I didn’t need them for one reason or another. As much as I resisted this truth, the parts of myself I’m not proud of are what make me fight harder for the ones I am. The light needs the dark in order to shine.
Here’s another one from Alan Watts: “Waking up to who you are requires letting go of what you imagine yourself to be.” My ego has thrown everything it can at me to keep telling me the story it was prepared to tell. It wants so badly to keep me contained in the realm it knows. But in all those moments when it seemed like fear would win, when I’ve thought that the easiest thing to do would be to give up, a voice in the darkness was there with one message - “you are so much more powerful than you think you are, and that is always true.” Well I believe it’s true of all of us. But it takes faith to make the leap required to find out.
I’m tired of running from the parts of myself I know now I can’t escape. I’m tired of trying to be perfect. I’m tired of pretending this path is leading anywhere completely good or bad. It may be more of both, but it won’t be all of either. There is no escape, there is only acceptance, and I continue to work on accepting all of myself.
I’m passionate, I’m indifferent.
I’m industrious, I’m lazy.
I’m perceptive, I’m oblivious.
I’m all in, I’m flaky.
I’m confident, I’m shy.
I’m ready, I’m unprepared.
I’m open, I’m aloof.
I’m bold, I’m scared.
I’m chill, I’m stressed.
I’m honest, I’m a liar.
I’m smart, I’m dumb.
I’m energized, I’m tired.
I’m generous, I’m selfish.
I’m ecstatic, I’m miserable.
I’m a little bit of everything.
And that’s what makes me whole.