From R. D. Laing’s Knots (1970)

I’ve always thought there’s something very powerful about Carolyn Elliott’s framework of Existential Kink. Sasha has a great post about it, but I’ll roughly summarize it as integrating your shadow (in the Jungian sense) by accepting that you might be into what you say you don’t want. Like, let’s say you complain all the time about your terrible job, but you’ve refused to quit over a period of years. You might actually achieve integration by realizing that you actually, in her language, get off on hating your job. In other words, you have what you want.

On TikTok I sometimes watch content by women who are in relationships or married to inmates. Some of them conceive children with their partners while said partners are in prison. Now, momentarily putting aside other concerns, it’s very difficult to date an inmate because you can’t see them that often and you don’t know what the relationship will be like when they are released from prison. But you might also be able to imagine how that could be a feature rather than a bug. So someone might consciously identify as desperately missing their incarcerated partner, but on some level they may also have chosen that partner precisely because they are in the most literal sense not available.

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Zhang Enli, The Wires (3), 2015

In Los Angeles, gardenias. In the Bay, bougainvillea and hydrangeas. Summer in San Francisco feels like the center of the world. I associate June with drain flies, coconut-scented sunscreen, tan lines from my sports bra. War and Peace is a winter book; Bonjour Tristesse and The Ravishing of Lol Stein are summer books. I noticed recently that I don’t care about Freud anymore and I no longer obsessively reread Annie Ernaux, Graham Greene, Flaubert. For many years, I would chew through bildungsromans before bed; now I exclusively read shitty fantasy. How I expect books to help me has changed. I used to hope they would explain the vagaries of my emotional life, assure me my appetites were understandable if not typical. I no longer require the same reassurance. More and more I sense that ageing is a process of gradual simplification. I am no longer bothered by complexity, and more and more I’m barely intrigued by it. What interests me is nature, physicality, how one person can move or change another. In other words: summer books.

*

I follow experiences all the way to the end. I can work on the same thing for a very long time. It’s not simple for me to find something that’s a good fit, but I experience compatibility as easy, immediate and seductive. I take things hard but I bear them easily. At my best I’m amused by everything. Amusement, I see it, is the ultimate gesture of gratitude: to take something seriously is also to believe it can be seriously funny and fun.

Six years ago, I started writing consistently. I take writing seriously, but it has been both funny and fun. Part of that fun includes prolonged moments of extreme despair and hopelessness. Writing makes me feel free and often it makes me feel incredibly stuck. For me, a creative life means that there’s always something that I’m evading and something I’m running towards. It requires gradually building up my tolerance for intensity, disappointment, and repetition. It’s made me more interested in pain, and more sensitive to joy. I’ve tried to treat it as a marathon: it’s more important to keep going than to run fast.

I’m in love with writing still. More and more, all the time. It is what I hoped it would be.

*
In sixth grade, over summer break, I attempted to read the classics. I’ve spent every summer since more or less the same way. Other summer books: Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, Mating by Norman Rush, Herzog by Saul Bellow, Inseparable by Simone de Beauvoir, the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante, Blue Skies, No Candy by Gael Greene, Anais Nin’s diaries. Summer books have a heat to them.

Each year, summer feels like starting over. I go to a new country and for around eight days feel like I could be anyone I want. Then I think, like clockwork: I want to go back to my house in San Francisco and be myself. Eat a popsicle, call my mom, give my dogs a belly rub.

The more I write, the more I feel that it takes me home. My preoccupations change, but my obsessions run deep. I am drawn to similar stories about similar girls. There’s always a party on a warm evening and there’s always a boy, and the face of the boy is always a little haphazard, because his face is a representation of our narrator’s hopes and dreams. It’s a repository for memory and emotion. Love is when we assign irrational amounts of meaning to someone based on how fast they speak, the way they look at us, the color of their eyes. Like all deep magic, it’s so simple and dumb it has no choice but to be profound.

*
I miss summer in Utah, hot and green, the mountains craggy against the sky. Summer in Vancouver, taking acid in Stanley Park, last month’s rain like a distant dream. In Shenzhen, it rains sometimes in the summer, and the rain that runs down the back of your neck is warm. In Tokyo I read Timothy Williamson and walked until my feet were raw and drank a cocktail out of a tiny bathtub. This year I’d like to see some more Bernini sculptures. His masterpieces focused on moments of extreme narrative tension: Pluto grabbing Persephone as she cries, Apollo catching hold of Daphne just as her skin turns into bark. I guess you could say they are summer stories.

Patrick Procktor, Gervase IV, acrylic on canvas

I was at dinner with a longtime friend today and he casually brought up something I’d said to him a few years ago. I’d completely forgotten making the remark, and my immediate reaction was, Why would anyone say that? What I said was honest—way too honest.

I think I’m generally tactful, but in certain moments I can be brutally direct. My directness irritates me. It reflects an inability to fake it that causes problems. I’ve been having conflict this week with another longtime friend. I’m mad at him and he can tell. He said, “I don’t think you like me very much right now.” And I thought: how is it that I cannot muster the basic motivation to pretend that I am okay with things as they stand, when it would make my life easier? But I just can’t.

I don’t think this is a virtue. In fact, it’s almost certainly a vice. I understand that the gears of civilization are oiled by the ability to fake it. And to be clear, I can smile and nod along to a conversation I’m not enjoying with best of them. But the more invested I am, the less I seem to be able to pretend. And the longer I stay in my particular line of work, the worse it gets.

If I love you, I will not be oblique with you. I will be direct, and if you are oblique with me, I’ll press the question until you are direct. Sometimes this means that I get answers I don’t like. I’m pretty much resigned to that. It’s taken me a long, long time to learn this:

I believe there is extreme value in being in touch with your deepest emotions. They can tell you very important things about how you should live your life. I’ve also learned that you are the only person who is responsible for figuring out what they are. Do not think that you can go with the flow and someone else will anticipate your sincerest needs and desires for you. That is a great strategy for not getting what you want.

I think my relationship strategy is something like this: you should sincerely express your deepest desires, learn about the other person’s, and see if the most important parts of yourselves say yes to each other.

The problem is of course that we are forced to take other people at face value, and they may be varying degrees of in touch with themselves. Sometimes people are not quite what they present themselves to be, and that’s not because they mean to be disingenuous. I try my best to figure out if what I observe about someone else lines up with their self-narration.

As I become more self-aware I become a better narrator of my own desires. More and more my goal is to become someone who is so sincere I compel sincerity in others. I am working on sounding less like someone just shoved Veritaserum down my throat, but I think my directness reflects an impulse I find endearing: the desire for there to be fewer barriers between me and the people I love.

It’s definitely an interesting dilemma: certainly no one believes that you have to disclose every thought to the people closest to you. But I also believe that most of us disclose too few. That’s why I use the term “deepest emotions”—it’s fine to omit small things, maybe even medium size things, but I think there’s nothing more corrosive to a relationship than omitting core parts of your experience. You can tactfully pretend the elephant isn’t there, but the elephant is still going to step on you.

I do wish all the time that I could fake it. Why can’t I just ignore the stupid elephant? Everyone else is doing such a great job at ignoring it and I don’t want to disturb the party. It would be so nice and so easy to hang out right up until the moment I get smushed. (Is it even so bad to be smushed?) However I’ve reluctantly decided that each person is allowed to have their own threshold, and I don’t need to defend mine: I can just live it. It doesn’t make me feel virtuous, but it makes me feel like myself.

Elizabeth Murray, Study for "Body and Soul", 2001

I don’t think you’re good at arguing. I don’t feel that when we disagree you ever assume the best of me, the way you do when you’re calm. I bet everyone in your life feels the same way about you.

It’s okay. Everyone doesn’t have to be good at everything. For instance, you are infinitely more gentle and kind than I am. I know that it is my calling to learn to love people as they are. I’ve always found it so hard to manage my intensity, the sheer weight of my expectations for others. Everyone I’ve been close to has said that I’m impossible to control. If you get in my way, I will chew through you like an animal chewing off its own leg to get free.

I’m also receptive, easygoing and warm. I love to listen: I do it for a living. I do best with difficult people. You can drop me in any room of people anywhere for an hour and I’ll have fun. But in me, receptivity is the flip side of aggression.

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Peter Doig, Hitch Hiker, 1990

ANNOUNCEMENT: We are a hosting a Love Science x Bookbear Express matchmaking party on May 15th!! Take the quiz here and get your spirit animal. It’s gonna be very very fun.

The thing I like about desire is that it’s unfakeable. You cannot force or even simulate well intensely wanting someone or something. The very act of forcing by definition shuts it down. There is so much in life that can be attained simply through diligently going through the motions; desire is not one of those things.

I don’t like to fake things. I will not pretend to like you if I don’t; I won’t pretend to understand something I'm clueless about; when I stop having a good time, I leave. If I disagree with you and I care about you, I’ll tell you. Maybe this is not the best way for everyone to be, but there are a lot of people in this world who are willing to fake everything—I think they compensate for my bluntness. Also, I spent most of my life faking things, so I’ve paid my dues.

Visa: “I never fully realized how much pressure I was under, as a kid, to pretend I was fine when I was not. I pretended inwardly as well as outwardly. because I internalized “It’s not okay to be visibly not okay” from my social environment. So I became invisible to myself.” He goes onto say that writing is his “reaction against internalized tyranny.” It’s mine, as well. Before I started writing every day, I simply couldn’t make contact with my real feelings.

Accepting what you really feel is inconvenient, especially if you’ve built an entire life on the feelings you believe you’re supposed to have. There are extreme costs to integrating. I think about this Murakami line literally every day: “You don’t have to judge the whole world by your own standards. Not everybody is like you, you know.” Right: people are different from me, they feel different things, value different things, have different fears.

I know that the heart of love is acceptance. And yet I’ve spent so much time and energy trying to help people reconcile their conflict. All of it on some level is an escape from the fact that I value enormously a certain purity of feeling and the complete integration of it into my life. For me, desire has never been a part-time project. When I accepted that everything became easier.

Knowing who you are necessarily means tolerating that other people are different. Perhaps that’s why desire is conditional and love is not—love is about accepting the essence of someone, being moved by them; desire is more tied to a way of being. I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve learned I shouldn’t try too hard to convert people to a different way of being (unless they’re paying me, in which case… fine). That’s putting too much of the onus on me and not enough on them.

To me, desire is aliveness. It’s automatic, uncontrollable and rare. The body doesn’t often line up with the soul. In the novel I’m working on a character complains to her friend about the difficulty of finding true love when you can’t prove definitively that it exists. Her friend replies that it probably exists, but that doesn’t mean you’ll find it. (And of course, finding it doesn’t mean you’ll keep it.) I feel the same way about desire: there are no guarantees about finding it, no guarantees about losing it. I try my best to just live it.

To be happy on this earth you have to believe in certain things, fight for certain things, have the will for the fight. Lately, I have to confess to a sense of alienation. It’s enough to make a girl turn to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. From Lives of the Saints: “Some take to the bottle, some look to the sky, but it is all the same. Byzantine empires, lives …

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• I’ve been reading The Vital Spark by Lisa Marchiano and really enjoying it. It’s very similar in tone to Women Who Run With the Wolves, if you enjoy that.

  The mythic banishment of Lilith speaks to a universal truth. There are qualities such as kindness, empathy, and agreeableness that can help us get and stay connected with each other, and there are fiery qualities such as anger, shrewdness, and forcefulness that can help us get and stay connected to ourselves.”

  Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves,” according to the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. Staying cut off from our vitality is a form of anesthesia.

• Why do high agency people put themselves in low agency situations? I was puzzling over a friend of mine who is incredibly capable but consistently chooses to be in relationships where their competence is just… not useful. Then I realized I have my own version of this. I suspect that many of us do. It’s a strange paradox—you know you’re able so you take on difficulty, and you can’t quite make the connection that you’ve consciously chosen to be in a situation where you have little to no leverage. We all choose the ways we are trapped and the ways we are free, and I’m starting to believe a certain type of high-functioning person is irresistibly drawn to making themselves artificially low-functioning. Mirages and oases look similar for a reason, in other words.

• Most people don’t have a type. I find this to be very true in matchmaking: the people most likely to find awesome partners they’re happy with tend to have about two or three things they really care about, and they don’t sweat the details at all.

  But regardless of how you meet people, the crucial pieces are: Find someone you think is reasonably attractive and then hang out with them at least three times, doing things together that will inspire deep, connection-building interactions (such as playing a conversation card game and maybe answering the “36 Questions That Lead to Love” from that old New York Times essay). The person you spark with might be too tall or too short, or be a dog person to your cat person, or have an extremely boring job. Even so: They might be just your type.

TECHNOLOGY

• Dwarkesh profile in NYT!

• I just want to take a moment to solemnly promise that no part of Bookbear Express will ever be AI generated. You’re here for the artisanal emotional angst, and I plan to deliver :)

• Kevin Kelly on uncertainty.

CULTURE

• The Japanese designers reshaping menswear. I, too, love Auralee and have a take on Evan Kinori and shop at C’H’C’M’ and generally know a lot about menswear. Mostly because I am a control freak. I will not be elaborating.

• I did not know about the concept of the kunstlerroman! But it is relevant to me!

• On Marilyn Monroe. On my coffee table I have a copy of the 1962 Eros volume that contains The Last Sitting (the last pictures taken of Marilyn Monroe before she died). This essay does a great job of describing the photos, which are beautiful, strange and sad.

  In the pictures, Marilyn sports a peroxide bouffant and modish makeup—white eyeshadow with a heavy crease line, a colorless lip. Monroe was drinking heavily during the shoot, and her eyes bear a glazed expression, gauzy and vacant. She wears costume jewelry, scarves, and little else. Modern sensibilities cast these photos in a different light—how ethical is it to take nude pictures of someone so drunk?—as does the fact that Marilyn crossed out many of the images on the contact sheet, drawing great big red Xs over photos where she looked tired, or where the camera captured the scar that ran across her abdomen from an endometriosis surgery. But the portraits are transfixing, precisely because they show her famous fragility on display. Her skin is papery and loose; she has deep lines at the corners of her mouth; drugs and grief are aging her hard. And still, she is magnetic, radiant.

Roy Oxlade, Rose and Old Clubs, 1984

1. If you want to be more perceptive, Occam’s Razor helps a lot. Every time someone does something you’re even slightly confused by, ask yourself, What’s the most straightforward theory for why they’re behaving like that? Why does Mary seem to dislike Jeff? Why is Tina so anxious when the subject of Jenna comes up? Why does Marissa consistently date guys who suck? The answer is usually surprisingly simple, but most people never even bother to come up with a theory. If you keep theorizing and testing it against reality, eventually you’ll develop a great intuition.

2. Being comfortable in large groups and parties is just a learned skill. For many years, I identified as someone who was very comfortable in one-on-one settings, but unsure of how to socialize in groups. Then I started hosting more parties and events for work and realized I’d mythologized this “comfortable in small groups/comfortable in big groups” thing way too much. It’s literally just a thing you teach yourself how to do. Assume a normal and friendly affect! Talk to people sincerely and unpretentiously! Circulate! If needed, break it down into a set of procedural steps—this is how I enter a conversation with a group of people I don’t know, this is how I leave the conversation when I’m bored.

3. Not everyone needs to like you. In fact, people are allowed to dislike you for dumb reasons—projecting their own insecurities, completely misunderstanding you, whatever. It is in your best interest to just let them dislike you. In fact, being secure in yourself and comfortable with being disliked will actually make you more likable.

4. All the popular dating advice out there is advice for anxious women. If you are an avoidant woman you should not be taking this advice. In general, hyperfixating on any particular dating advice is likely lead you down the wrong path.

5. As a reformed people pleaser myself, I ardently disapprove of them. Constantly repressing your true desires in order to “please” someone else leads to worse outcomes for everyone involved. However people pleasing is an deep-seated addiction and you have to accept that most people are just Stuck That Way. Focus on rectifying your own people pleasing tendencies instead.

6. When multiple people say the same very bad thing about someone, it’s best to take it as true and avoid them. I don’t mean, like, they’re difficult to work with or they’re a negligent boyfriend or whatever—I mean that they’ve hurt someone in a way that’s beyond the pale. Back away slowly.

7. People who lack discernment will cause you a lot of problems. They’ll date annoying people, work with annoying people, befriend annoying people, and if you are sufficiently close to them you will be impacted by all of this.

8. Try to be dispassionate in your assessments of people, but forgive them easily. Life is easier when you let people be who they are instead of resenting them for it.

9. If you think you lack discernment because you always end up enmeshed with questionable people, what’s likely going on is that they are bristling with red flags and you ignore every single one because your family of origin or previous romantic relationships have conditioned you to see them as normal. Try to identify someone who is more relationally discerning than you and think deeply about what they index on.

10. If you think of someone, text them :)

11. Don’t let not texting someone back for a very long time stop you from doing the above.

12. If someone is avoidant, let them avoid you. Check in at a reasonable interval to let them know that you care.

13. Be gracious, even when you don’t have to.

14. From Codependent No More: The surest way to make ourselves crazy is to get involved in other people’s business, and the quickest way to become sane and happy is to tend to our own affairs. When someone asks for your advice, it’s fine to give it. But I recommend only giving them further advice if you notice them actually listening and implementing what you’re saying. Otherwise you will become as crazy as they are.

15. If someone is in a pretty good relationship and you think it’s not the perfect relationship for them, Do Not Say Anything. If someone is a definitively bad relationship, Say Something Once. Then move on.

16. I find the mentality of “your critics are always right” to be very helpful. Try to find the grain of truth in what people say about you.

17. At the same time, what you think of yourself is ultimately more important than anything else. Our culture castigates people wholesale and then forgets about it six months later. Opinions come and go, but self-regard persists. If you don’t like yourself you will punish yourself in cruel and unusual ways.

18. Rejection is protection. Seriously. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but once you get it you really get it.

19. Conflict can become really fun once you get it right! Conflict can be incredibly painful when you get it wrong. Don’t let the excruciating pain turn you off conflict—passionately disagreeing with people is what makes life worth living.

20. Try to see it from their perspective. Even if they’re obviously wrong and you’re obviously right ;)

21. Resentment happens when you’re unwilling or unable to stand up for yourself. Instead of fixating on how someone else is letting you down, examine how you’re letting yourself down, and change your behavior.

22. Glennon Doyle: “Your job throughout your entire life, is to disappoint as many people as it takes to avoid disappointing yourself.”

• A quality I find very attractive in people is a sense of lightness or mobility. It’s the opposite of stagnancy, of being paralyzed and bogged down by your problems: the ability to shrug off the heaviness and keep moving forward. A perpetual willingness to try a new experiment, a different angle. Most of the time when someone tells me they’re trying very hard to solve all of their problems I’m like “It really seems like you’re only exploring 20% of the options available to you.” But it’s like they can’t see the possibilities, or just reject them outright. When someone is truly creative about all areas of their life it strikes me as both cool and very rare.

• I read Codependent No More, which Ben has recommended to me a million times. It’s very good! Melody Beattie’s definition of a codependent is “one who has let another person’s behavior affect them and who is obsessed with controlling that other person’s behavior.”

  I believe that clutching tightly to a person or thing or forcing my will on any given situation eliminates the possibility of doing anything constructive about that situation, the person, or me. My controlling blocks access to my higher self. It blocks other people’s ability to grow. It stops events from happening naturally. It prevents me from enjoying people or events.

  Control is an illusion. It doesn’t work. We cannot control alcoholism. We cannot control anyone’s compulsive behaviors. We cannot (and have no business trying to) control anyone’s emotions, thoughts, or choices. We cannot control the outcome of events. We cannot control life. Some of us can barely control ourselves.

  People ultimately do what they want to do. They feel how they want to feel (or how they are feeling); they think what they want to think; they do the things they believe they need to do; and they will change only when they’re ready to change. It doesn’t matter if they’re wrong and we’re right. It doesn’t matter if they’re hurting themselves. It doesn’t matter that we could help them if they’d only listen to and cooperate with us.

  Ben’s takeaway from this book is that it is selfish and bad to try to help people and you should stop. (This is a very Ben thing to say, by which I mean somewhat hyperbolic). I think the real problem that I sometimes succumb to is an issue of confusing control with care. People do what they want to do, and one of the easiest ways to escape from accountability for our own lives is to take on responsibility for other people’s actions. Because they need us; because they tell us they need us; because they are self-harming or making questionable decisions; because they are lonely or struggling or sad. Because their suffering makes other people around us suffer, because we love them so dearly. Because we need them. Because we want, very sincerely, for them to be happy. This is all very good and noble—this is also, generally, a way to not confront the question of what we ourselves want and need.

  From the book: “I don’t trust people who never get mad. People either get mad or get even,” my friend Sharon George, who is a professional in the mental health field, said.” I’ve found this to be very true: when I abandon myself, certain elements of said Self tend to resurface at inopportune times in amazingly inopportune ways. Have you ever behaved in a way that you would not have previously imagined yourself capable of? In my experience, this tends to not be an issue of self-control so much as me consistently and forcefully negating needs that Absolutely Refuse to be negated. In other words: if you don’t take care of your Parts, your Parts will take care of you. And you may not like their methods.

• Having a body is supposed to be fun (I really like this Substack!)

• What is love?

TECHNOLOGY

• What’s the best technology that doesn’t exist yet?

• Blake’s tweet was interesting to me because I’ve ended up doing the same thing—I specifically talk to ChatGPT about relationship things and Claude about work stuff. Claude’s tone has shifted significantly in the past couple of years—in my personal opinion, he’s become more didactic and less sweet. I miss my guy.

• Times change.

CULTURE

• I really enjoyed Ordinary Wear and Tear, a short story by Thomas McGuane. Who is 86!

• New Yorker essay on Vermeer’s serene art made in violent times.

• Very fun reading about the return of Grimes.

• Merve Emre on the role of the critic: “With one eye fixed on the present and the other on the future, the critic pre­serves the author’s identity not by uncritically celebrating or canon­izing his books but by transmitting the generosity—the generous pleasure, generous manners, and generous converse—by which others can learn to read these books as the singular works that they are. The critic models the practice of inquiry and the manner of feeling by which you, the reader, can also become a friend to the text. Of course, just because I am someone’s friend does not mean that you can be persuaded to be his friend too. But our friendships do not resist all attempts at articulation.”

• On Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring. Which you can watch here.

• Obsessed with this extremely chaotic chronicle of youthful alcoholism “I woke up in the hospital the first night I moved into college, kicking off a 14-year binge-drinking career.” DM me Tara, we both went to Penn!!

• I went to a Bookbear Express meetup Ebaad (thank you!!) organized yesterday. There were cookies! There was chai! The name tags were so cute and I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed meeting you guys. Five and a half years into writing this newsletter, the question of “How do I keep it fun?” is more relevant than ever. I often doubt anyone needs more of my interiority—I get so sick of my own mind—but meeting you guys and hearing about the interests we share makes everything feel worth it.

• I’ve been thinking a lot about disagreeableness! I’ve become so disagreeable, and I never identified as such before. Was I just suppressing how I felt before? I think I always had a sense of how I actually felt, but it was smothered by my desire to please. I still want to please, but it turns out I really want to share what I’m thinking. (This is inconvenient sometimes, actually.) I’m curious if anyone else has an experience of going from very agreeable to way less agreeable, or a significant change along any other Big Five axis.

• Minnow kindly came over today and took some photos of me and it was such a wonderful experience! Thank you Christine for connecting us. It reminds me of when I took a couple of singing lessons and realized that what I thought was a “technical” problem (I’m unable to sing for vocal reasons, or tone, or something) was way more of a psychological problem (I’m bad at singing and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to). I don’t think I have a terrible relationship with being photographed but like most people I’m sensitive to how I look and what I think looks “good” or “bad” and I’ve been very frustrated with experiences where my attempts to convey that I hate the lighting have been ignored. This was the opposite of that, it felt very attuned :)

TECHNOLOGY

• Currently hyperfixating on the question of “Can Claude be a child of God?” There’s something really beautiful and poignant to me about the idea.

• I’ve also been rereading the Californian Ideology, which was written in 1996 (!) but still feels relevant today:

  The Californian Ideology, therefore, simultaneously reflects the disciplines of market economics and the freedoms of hippie artisanship. This bizarre hybrid is only made possible through a nearly universal belief in technological determinism. Ever since the '60s, liberals— in the social sense of the word—have hoped that the new information technologies would realise their ideals.

  More importantly, many members of the 'virtual class' want to be seduced by the libertarian rhetoric and technological enthusiasm of the New Right. Working for hi-tech and media companies, they would like to believe that the electronic marketplace can somehow solve America's pressing social and economic problems without any sacrifices on their part. Caught in the contradictions of the Californian Ideology, Gingrich is—as one Wired contributor put it—both their 'friend and foe' (Dyson, 1995).

  The search for the holy grail of 'Artificial Intelligence' reveals this desire for the Golem—a strong and loyal slave whose skin is the colour of the earth and whose innards are made of sand. As in Asimov's 'Robot' novels, the techno-utopians imagine that it is possible to obtain slavelike labour from inanimate machines (Asimov, 1986a & b). Yet, although technology can store or amplify labour, it can never remove the necessity for humans to invent, build, and maintain these machines in the first place. Slave labour cannot be obtained without somebody being enslaved.

• My current bit is Big Thropic: as in, in the future is the only company going to be Big Thropic? (I think no. But the next five years seem like they’ll be pretty wild.)

CULTURE

• I read all seven Dungeon Crawler Carl books and I really like them (I will admit book six and seven were a slog for me). Basically, aliens take over earth and the titular character (and his cat, Donut) enter an intergalactic game show. A lot of humor, violence and death ensues.

• I’ve really enjoyed the Helen DeWitt saga. This Substack post is amazing. And how cool that Emergent Ventures is funding her!

• Started Famestruck last night; Lena Dunham is a genius and spoilers unfortunately are all over X. Also about to start Gwendoline Riley’s new book The Palm House. And the new Ben Lerner, which I hear is very good. And Rainbow Rowell’s new book. It’s a good month for new release.

• Plath’s Mad Girl’s Love Song:

  I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
  And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
  (I think I made you up inside my head.)

Paul Klee, Moonshine, 1919

If you’d asked me 10 years ago, I would have told you that I was one of the least likely candidates for becoming passionately moral. I’ve always been laissez faire, more drawn to utilitarianism than virtue ethics. It feels like a surprising and undeserved blessing to tumble into a set of beliefs and concerns that were never mine.

I also have always been a sporadically direct person. I can be very blunt, but by and large I preferred to be tactful and oblique. Over the past year, I’ve become more direct in ways that surprise me. I don’t find it difficult to say what I think.

Both of these changes feel like doorways. More of human experience seems open to me now, and I feel more solid, more myself. It’s strange to change in ways you didn’t intend to, then discover those changes are fulfilling and expansive. They feel necessary, though they happened by accident.

I’ve been thinking about this line that “most relationships are karmic, existing only to show you what parts of your anima/animus are not integrated.” It feels very true to me. What I find attractive in others is often directly correlated to what I’m missing in myself. And I think many of the ways I’ve changed have to do with correcting personal failings. Relationships show you how you fall short, and if you pay careful attention, you can change for the better.

There’s no formula for change, but here’s my best approximation: you have to be honest with yourself about what you avoid doing because it’s incredibly hard and painful. And then, over time and in increments, you try to do it. This is difficult. You are incentivized to mislead yourself about what the hard thing actually is. There is so much cognitive dissonance around it, and then so much emotional resistance.

But when you do change, and you observe yourself behaving differently, it feels so liberating. For so long I felt pinned in place, and now I know that things are different because I’m different. And I didn’t even want to change in these ways! It’s more like, I had a way of being that wasn’t working for me, or it was working but there were some issues with it, and I wanted to try something new, so I tried, and it didn’t work that well, so I tried again, and then eventually I had a new way of doing things.

No one likes looking too hard at their shortcomings. People seem to universally feel shame and berate themselves, but that’s so different from actually changing. You hate yourself so you trap yourself, and then it’s just more of the same. You live out of alignment, you wish you could do something differently, you keep living out of alignment. You ruminate, analyze, repeat the pattern. You know you’re repeating it, but you hope this time it’ll be different or better.

I lived like that for so long, just longing for something to change so I didn’t have to. Because change felt annihilatory, I couldn’t risk it or bear it. Then one day the door opened and I stumbled through it half-unwillingly and everything looked different. And I felt grateful for all of it, every sacred trigger.

For so long, my deepest knot was that I tried to help other people change as a way of resisting what I needed to do differently, let go of, grow. Of course I resisted—change is death. People fairly characterize most modern memoirs as always being about the narrator overcoming their dysfunctions and solving all their problems, right up until the next memoir. I don’t think I’ve solved all my problems, and I don’t at all know what’s to come. But I know my behavior has changed in ways I’m proud of, and I am more present with my discomfort.

When people tell me how they see me, it’s so much about them. The question I always struggled to answer was how I wanted to live, how I wanted to be. Change is just the byproduct of answering that question.

Marianne von Werefkin, Fall, School, 1907

It’s hard to know what to make of it all. The first day of spring was March 20. One of my friends says that March is a cursed month so I’m glad to be safely into April, even if T.S. Eliot disagrees. If you told me in December what would happen in the next four months I think I’d be happy with the progress in my creative life, my emotional life, but so different living it.

I anticipate movement eagerly. When it happens, I feel mostly shell-shocked. I try not to fight it. I write diligently. I stay in my apartment all day, and I think the best description of what I’m up to is just that I’m trying to work through my problems. If you want things to be different, you have to act differently. And, as I’m learning, accept a sense of extreme dislocation.

The last year has given me a kind of radical confidence. I was never this way before—willing to be disagreeable, open to conflict. I’ve always been someone who prioritized connection at all costs. I couldn’t regulate without it. So how is it that I’ve changed, why is that I’ve changed, why does it feel so weird?

Like most forms of change it’s relational, a result of being loved and grappling with love. I fell in love, there were consequences. I accommodated you, it was difficult. I changed, slowly then all at once.

I’ve been off the rails for so long that the real rebellion is going on the rails. You can sense that in me, even without knowing the details. I always tell people I won’t make plans more than a week out because I don’t know if I’ll be alive in 10 days. It’s just that I’m so absurdly tethered to the present moment, have been for quite a while.

*

Charisma, authority, superiority. After all this time, I’m still absurdly soothed by your voice. I miss being a teenager, boy crazy. Also I don’t. You’re different from me, you would’ve been 17 years old with a particular kind of girlfriend. You would’ve enjoyed college. I am less reckless now than I used to be.

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Florine Stettheimer, Bowl of Tulips, 20th century,

I’m having the best writing week I’ve had in years. It makes me happy but it also makes me sad, because why is it the case that I’m happiest when I’m writing a lot, and yet… I’m often not writing a lot?

I think many (but not all!) writers can relate to this: some of our time is spent actually writing. Another significant chunk is spent anticipating writing, agonizing over what you have or have not written, and procrastinating. Writing, as I see it, involves both a lot of avoidance and a lot of overcoming avoidance.

As a result, I’m certainly an expert on intrapersonal avoidance. I also like to think that I know a thing or two about interpersonal avoidance. I was telling my friend C that I see both as the same thing: a fundamental fear of conflict.

I tweeted this a while ago: As a rule the psychologically healthier someone is, the less time it takes them to do something they were eventually going to do anyway. Anything from sending a text to quitting a job. I’m not sure what to call it—processing time? lack of blocks? low avoidance?

Here’s one way I model it: the psychologically healthier someone is, the more willing they are to face and overcome friction. Friction, in my mind, is synonymous with conflict. For instance, I noticed a couple of weeks ago that one subconscious hesitation I had about editing my book was fear that I didn’t know how to resolve some of the problems with the plot, and wouldn’t be able to. Which is of course self-defeating, because the only way I can resolve the problems is through editing and rewriting parts of the book. When I became conscious of that fear, and decided I was willing to grapple with it, I could unblock myself creatively.

Imagine seeing life as a series of confrontations stretching out before you. More radically: imagine being excited at the prospect of confrontation.

For much of my life, I was so afraid of conflict that if I noticed in the middle of a haircut that I, uh, was getting a haircut I didn’t want, I simply kept my mouth closed and accepted that I wouldn’t like my hair for six months. Looking back now, I find this completely bonkers.

Q: Why was I so unable to just speak up and say what I was feeling?

A: I was afraid of making things awkward.

Friends, the optimal amount of awkwardness is far from zero. One thing that really annoys me about the term “people pleasing” is that it implies consideration for others, when really it’s self-serving. You are, in fact, pleasing yourself by avoiding any prospect of a negative reaction from another human being. Which is, generally speaking, not what’s best for them and not what’s best for you.

Here’s how I model the three stages of avoidance:

1. You’re delusional. You have some completely dishonest reason for why you’re avoiding what you’re avoiding, like “I can’t text the girl back because I’m going on a vacation to Mexico next week and I should text her when I’m done traveling,” and you sincerely believe it.

2. You’re aware that there’s something you should do but you just absolutely can’t do it.

3. You do it.

I don’t pathologize avoidance itself, because everyone avoids things. Trust me, even the most conflict-happy person needs a week off once in a while. But of course, it becomes a problem when your fear of friction dramatically affects your quality of life. Here’s how I described it to S: most people live in a way where it’s like their psyche is a backyard and there are 10 to 12 giant rocks in the backyard that they are terrified of moving, because they’d have to see what’s underneath. So instead they just chart a path around the giant rocks and pretend not to see them. You can easily imagine how depending on how many rocks you have in your backyard, and how large they are, your ability to move around quickly becomes constrained.

Conflict is the art of checking underneath the rocks. It’s something you only learn by doing. It’s really, really scary. It’s also often the only sincere way to solve the problems in your life.

I think I’m on a journey to be more honest with myself. This seems to have had the side effect of me being more honest with other people about how I feel and how they affect me. It can be as simple as giving feedback during a haircut, or as heavy as telling a friend how I felt let down by them. And sometimes the right thing to do is to say nothing at all. But you can’t have real discernment if you aren’t willing to brave conflict, because then the only option you have is to run away and keep running. When it’s fight or flight, sometimes the right option is to stay and fight.

Zhang Enli, Red and Green Circles, 2016

I really like Rachel’s tweet: “Every relationship starts off as a chemistry test, then a compatibility test, and later becomes a test of capacity.” When I fall in love, two main questions tend to present themselves:

1. Is this, in fact, The Real Thing?

   • (A large percentage of people, unfortunately, get stuck on this question for many years.)

2. If it is, can we do it justice?

*
Some years ago, I met a friend and it was instant magic. I remember standing in the kitchen maybe five hours after we met with a bunch of other people and thinking, knowing that he was special. It was in the way he moved, the way he walked. I wasn’t attracted to him but it didn’t matter. With certain people it doesn’t matter because what’s compelling about them totally transcends the body, and then in time you learn to love the body. Heretical to say as someone who is supposedly devoted to being a good animal. But it’s what I know to be true.

We talked passionately. Upon meeting him, I realized that all I’ve ever wanted is to talk passionately. We were cheerfully, intently, sloppily enthusiastic about each other. We both liked to walk all over the city.

But I also had this extreme hesitation about whether the relationship could ever be successfully romantic. Because I hated, hated, hated how he handled the relationships in his life. The way he dealt with conflict, disappointment made me sad.

It’s taken me many years to understand that I was right on both fronts. He was, is special. I liked the way he used language, we had similar conceptions of what made for a good story and a good walk, similar enthusiasms about certain animals. In the photos I have of him he’s beaming, and when I look at them time collapses like a crushed can: I can see the boy he was, and the man he has become, a person I no longer know. But he was not the person for me.

*

Capacity is so hard to talk about, and so unfair. People might change very little in a year but transform over the course of a decade. Instead of making predictions about someone’s absolute capacity for change, I like to talk about it in terms of ability to journey with each other. Can we remain side by side over the weeks and the years? How close should we be?

*
I wouldn’t say I’ve ever truly doubted that what I’m looking for exists. I know that it does. But I’ve certainly felt discouraged and anxious. To be loved and cared for in a way that suits me, to feel a deep and abiding sense of connection, to be able to grow together—these are deep desires with no guarantee of satisfaction.

*

Obviously, I can recognize The Real Thing. It’s the way the air in the car feels when you’re driving. It’s a pleasure that presents as panic in its intensity, abruptness and force. How it’s difficult only because it’s easy. The sense of extreme relief after, and the eagerness bordering on nausea before.

*

I’m 17, wiping A’s sweat off my forehead after losing my virginity with affection and disgust. I’m 20, eating a spam and egg sandwich in Hong Kong across from K, lovelorn but aware that I shouldn’t be. I’m 22 and S still kisses me with his mouth open and we order the Impossible steak at Prairie on Friday evenings. I’m 23, high on mushrooms in Park City. I’m 24, picking Akko up from the airport and rocking him to sleep in my arms. I’m 27, living in an apartment in San Francisco on Oak St, the first place I’ve ever decorated myself.

The place is a country I can never live in again. I met you right when I was ready to, not a minute sooner. I used to think you were the only one changing, but I see now that so many pieces of myself have become unrecognizable. I’m so much less scared than I used to be. I’m more honest, and it takes less effort.

*
From Lives of the Saints: “There’s a famous line in a story where there is a married couple and it is observed about them that she had none of the world’s dark magic for him, but he couldn’t live without her for six consecutive hours. My feeling for Claude was like the reverse: I could live without his presence—as I had just done, when I was away at college—for a whole duration of years between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two. But he had the world’s dark magic.”

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Christopher Wood, The Cove, 1926

I know most of the people I’m closest to better than they know themselves. For many years when S was annoyed I would ask him what was up and he would reply that everything was normal. Really? I’d say. It seems like you might be upset about X. Oh, he would say upon reflection, I guess I am annoyed you did that. It wasn’t him being passive aggressive: it genuinely took him longer to identify his emotional state.

It was easy for me because I was watching from the outside. Also, as you guys know, emotions happen to be my special interest. I take a particular pleasure in shepherding people from one state to another, and I am often happiest myself when I am in transition. There’s nothing more gratifying than hearing someone admit something in conversation, then pause and say: Wait, I didn’t know I felt that until I told you. It’s a special feeling to know that someone’s body trusts you before their brain has even made up its mind.

I like being trusted. And to be honest, I love being right more than just about anything else in the world. It’s my worst quality—I’m pretty sure that I’m perceptive basically because I so enjoy being correct. I’m never happier than when I say, I told you so. I know that’s unbecoming of me, but there you go. Anyway, turns out it’s extremely useful to be a smug, annoying person who takes a lot of pride in their predictions when people rely on you to decipher their present and future emotional state.

So: I’ve long known that I am a trustworthy steward of other people’s emotions. But I’ve also known for a while that I’m not always the best judge of my own. Why is this? Like I said above: it’s easier when you’re watching from the outside. Very astute people can be incredibly dense about their inner life because they simply don’t have the correct vantage point, and are constantly incentivized to lie to themselves. When other people were struggling with a dilemma I could immediately see what they really wanted and why, but when I struggled with a choice I experienced my emotions as hot pot: varied, bubbling, and unclear.

I really don’t like hot pot.

*
You might have noticed that I’ve been writing a lot lately about topics like coherence and self-knowledge. That’s because in the past couple of months I’ve noticed a shift in myself. All my life, I’ve tried to make up for my blind spots by asking trusted people for advice: my friends, my therapist, my boyfriend, even Claude. But something’s flipped: lately, I’ve been significantly more interested in asking myself what I should do.

Turns out, I have a pretty good sense of my emotional state. I just often prefer to avoid it. This is because much of the time confronting what you really want involves some degree of anguish, change and suffering. I don’t want to suffer. I want everything to be nice, smooth, and pleasant, like everyone else on earth. But I’ve noticed that avoidance usually does not result in the problem going away. It actually makes the problem come back with a vengeance some months or years later. For better or for worse, confronting yourself tends to be the best policy.

How do you confront yourself? Well, for me it looks something like this:

1. There is a situation where I sincerely feel I don’t know how to proceed

2. I tell myself, Fuck you, you do know how you want to proceed

3. I sit down and resolve to think about nothing else for around seven hours

4. Usually by hour three or four I’m like, Oh.

5. It generally takes me some time to actually act on it.

I call this process going all the way to the bottom.

*
Some things can prevent people from going all the way to the bottom:

• their sense of who they should be and what they should want

• expectations and judgment

• fear of consequences

• trying to rationalize the pros and cons

It is really, really hard to ask yourself: What can I actually live with? What am I capable of, right now? What will I regret? Because you may really dislike the answers.

*
People know things, and often choose to un-know them. Knowledge, quite frankly, is sometimes too much to bear.

If you’re upset with someone, you have to address it. But wouldn’t it be nicer to just ignore it?

If you don’t like your life circumstances, you have to change them. But that’s so much work.

If you know it’s never going to work with your girlfriend, you have to break up with her. But you still love her, so how can that be true?

*

The way I conduct relationships is extremely anxiety-inducing for anyone who hears about it. My parents do not understand my career, and neither does my therapist. I am, at almost all times, so delusionally confident it would make you scream. I have my own way of doing things. I’m my own person.

What I learned this year is that I like hearing what my friends think and I will continue to solicit advice from people I trust but ultimately I have to do things my own way. The only way I can do that is if I’m willing to feel things all the way through. And if I’m willing to accept the consequences.

In many confusing situations, there is no such thing as the right choice. There is only the right choice for you, right now. And you can’t identify that if you aren’t willing to go all the way to the bottom.

Noticing things about other people and nudging them forward is my primary passion in life. It’s also a way of avoiding myself.

I’m always going to be scared of what I’ll find. I’m always going to look, anyway. That’s the way I want to live.

Paul Pagk, Tete-à-Tete, 2023–25

Every year, familiar markers of time passing. New Year’s Eve, ski weekends, Valentine’s day, longer windows of daylight. I donate bags of clothes and trade long coats for leather jackets. I attend more parties in February than January. I slog my way through Dostoyevsky. I note recurrent rituals in my friends’ lives: the same meetings on the same weeks, the same work deadlines and the same conferences, same trips on the same weekends. We trade pictures from the California coast and text about the snowpack. Engage in furtive dinner table talk about AI dread, panic and excitement. I have my novel and my matchmaking and all the other projects that make life worth living. For the first time in a while the passage of time thrills me.

Adult life, I’ve decided, is about cohesion. Which is to say it’s about conflict, trade-offs. The ability to acknowledge parts of your psyche you aren’t proud of. The idea that sometimes in life you have to make a choice, and the choice is not only not a perfect choice, but often not even a particularly moral choice: that you can argue for it or argue against it, and both can ultimately be somewhat compelling, but ultimately you cannot escape the problem of identifying not only what you want, but what you want most. Because most of us want many things. I, at least, want many things, and quite a few of them contradict each other. Which leads to—well—hypocrisy.

I read this biography of Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath’s handsome, vital, troubled, Poet Laureate husband. Who was a compulsive womanizer and a sex freak and drove more than one woman (literally) to her death. There was one very funny passage in the book shortly after they got married (maybe engaged?) and were spending some time apart where he was very proud of the self-control he demonstrated by not cheating on her. There was this woman he was flirting with, there was always some woman he was flirting with, and he slept beside her every night but did not actually fuck her. And I just thought: this is such a familiar strain of bullshit, the kind of bullshit people find themselves constantly getting into when they have a lot of energy and cannot integrate their life in a reasonable way.

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Roderick O’Connor, Seascape, Orange and Red Rocks

Relationships are mirrors and it’s taken a long time for me to be okay with my reflection. I’ve always been jealous of people who make it work with their college sweethearts. Smart people who meet their partner early in life and have happy relationships tend to be balanced, grounded, and kind. I have some of these qualities, but I’m also spiky in ways that I find difficult to grapple with, and it’s taken me every day of the past 10 years to process my own contradictions.

What I’ve learned from my own relationships, my friends’ relationships, and coaching is that unfulfilling relationships tend to be the result of two things: lack of self-knowledge and unwillingness to act. You’d be surprised by how many people freeze up when I ask them what they value in life, let alone romantic relationships. The type of person I’m most often surrounded by—cerebral, conscientious, addicted to optimizing—tends to feel most comfortable with frameworks and objective facts. They want to look to the data to figure out the right thing to do, the right person to want, the right partner to be. Looking inwards makes them uncomfortable. It’s panic-inducing: no one can tell you the correct way to feel. But how can you trust your feelings when they’re so changeable? How can you trust your feelings when they might be deceptive? How do you know what the deepest thing is?

The amount of discomfort you have to endure to really know yourself, feel yourself, is sometimes unbearable. Sometimes I think I’d rather do literally anything else, and I’ve done literally everything else. Fly to China. Write a book. Go to yoga. Go for a run. Get drinks with a friend. Get high and watch a movie. Cut my hair. Scroll TikTok. There was a moment this week when I was on the phone with R and he was questioning me about my avoidance and I literally could not stop myself from compulsively scrolling Depop as we talked.

Honesty with yourself involves confronting a lot of difficult emotions directly. And what do you get in return for enduring fear, pain, guilt, regret, and doubt? The reward is so tentative: accountability, self-knowledge, a cohesive internal experience. I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to push themselves in ways that are painful and challenging for the most intangible of results.

I’m not even sure why I care about it. The simplest explanation is that I have such an internally contradictory psyche that I end up behaving in insane ways unless I really reckon with what I actually want. I value both safety and risk, structure and freedom, containment and connection. I have an extreme appetite for complexity, but it also dismays me. I love connection, but I’m afraid of losing it. It’s been hard for me to really figure out what that nets out to: who I am, what I need, how I should live.

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Joan Mitchell, Land, 1989

It’s hard to accept the limits of language. I’m thinking of an old friend, B, whom I loved very much, though the crux of it isn’t loving him but liking him. We got along on every level. There’s a lot to say about it, but in the end there’s nothing relevant other than that I very, very much wanted to make the friendship work, and ultimately he didn’t. For a long time I just kept thinking: if I’d said the right thing, he would’ve understood, and we could’ve bridged the gap between us.

But that isn’t true. The reason I never sent a long, heartfelt email to B in an attempt to repair was because during our friendship, he at one point showed me a long, heartfelt email from someone else attempting to repair and told me: you know, I want to answer it so much, but I just don’t. My understanding of him was that he was conciliatory in spirit but avoidant in action: I’m very sure to this day that he thinks of the friendship exactly the way I do, and misses it exactly the way I do. And yet.

I don’t know if I’m referring to the limits of language or the limits of character. It’s difficult to accept that people have their own desires, judgments, and abilities, and saying I want to meet you in the middle is sometimes all you’re able to do. It does not guarantee they will meet you in the middle. It does not guarantee anything at all, except that you said it.

*
I made up with another friend recently, E. The reason we made up was that they were ready to make up. I bring this up because I texted both B and E at the same time last year: the friend I eventually reconciled with and the friend I didn’t. With both, I just reached out to say: I want to meet you in the middle.

I couldn’t have predicted the outcome. It seems just as plausible that I could’ve made up with B and not E, just as plausible I could’ve made up with both, just as plausible I never heard from either.

*

I have good instincts. There are many times in my life when I’ve met someone and knew instantly we would be close, even if they were reluctant or we had barely exchanged a word. It’s a nervous system thing: sometimes you just know. That knowing, I’ve found, is generally mutual, and there’s nothing more satisfying than when they eventually say: The truth is, I felt it too.

But feelings don’t always translate to actions. People are where they are, and they make progress at their own pace, and you can support them but you can’t force them. You have to give them their freedom, disorienting though it may be, sad as it may be.

*

I believe too much in words. That must be why we have the same exchange over and over again. I say something, you listen, we try, it repeats. But then we try to talk about something else, and it always comes back to this. And when we don’t talk, it always comes back to this.

Connection is what makes things hard. After all, with everyone else I have no trouble checking back in after six months or a year. C told me about running into an ex of mine from many years ago and how completely different he seems now. We agreed that sometimes you get frustrated by how little someone changes in one year, but over 10 years they often change radically. That’s a thought I find immensely comforting.

For other people, not you. For other people, life is long.

*
Life is long. When I fight with my friends, I know for the most part we’ll work it out. Heather: “Long-term relationships thrive when you can set aside your shame enough to take responsibility for the storm inside of you, and forgive the storms inside of the people you love the most. When two storms collide, it doesn’t have to be catastrophic. It can be miraculous and hopeful instead.”

Freedom is disorienting because there are no guarantees. I don’t know when someone will come back, or if. Half the time I don’t know what I’ll say, and when. Love persists even when language doesn’t.

Henri Fantin-Latour, Roses in a Bowl, 1883

You have to trust people to know what’s right for them. Well you don’t but that’s beside the point. First you have to know what’s right for you. No way out of it—not your best friend, boyfriend, therapist, Claude. No way out of sitting down, sprawling out, consulting the feeling deep in your bones. Though the feeling deep in your bones is mostly a confused muddle that doesn’t tell you anything much. Tough luck! You meditate with no success, go to yoga class, walk all the way through Golden Gate Park to the ocean and call a Waymo back, slap a boy as he’s driving you home, take three grams of shrooms belly down on your bed, read Tolstoy, read Edith Wharton, try to read Shakespeare. Fights, frustration, silence, crying. Writing, coaching, matchmaking. It takes a while before you realize there’s no drug in the world that could free you from this mess. If someone Eternal Sunshine’d you you have no doubt that two weeks later your memories would freakishly flood back in.

You stop believing in talking about things. You no longer think that confession will save you; you no longer think anyone has insight to offer. When you tell someone something it’s just so you can see how they’ll react. There’s certain lines of analysis you do not want to go down. What made someone this way. Are they happy. What will they do. What do they fear. Are they capable of change. It’s not interesting to you because you are no longer interested in culpability or salvation. Everything that could be said you’ve already said to yourself. Even when you get mad you have a sense of humour about it. You are so far past disappointment you feel relief. You don’t find secrets erotic. It’s hard to even talk about beauty.

What’s at the very bottom of it all? What do you do when you stop thinking reason, language, virtue, or obsession can save you? You move onto other preoccupations, like pushups and martial arts. You are so sick of being bad at jiu jitsu. You have never been more enamored with the life of the body. It’s so hard to admit that this is all there is, slightly uneven dining table with the laptop, Google doc open, White Rabbit candle lit, wondering if anyone will ever understand. You can feel yourself, K says you seem more grounded. Your therapist says you’ve made quite a lot of progress, she’s impressed. You buy a second coat rack for the loft of your apartment. You don’t worry anymore about who likes you or dislikes you. You’re not insecure about your face or body. You’re not sorry you told the truth even though it didn’t go so well. Who are you? You’re someone who can live with other people’s mistakes. You’re someone who can live with your own mistakes. You can be mad at yourself. You can forgive yourself.

The girl on Tiktok says: "It’s you, babe. You’re what you’re after. You’re what you’re looking for. You’re the missing puzzle piece. You’re what you miss. You’re what you want to experience and have yet to experience.” Her voice sounds like the very beginning of crying, the welling of emotion in your throat. You don’t care if it’s cheesy. You can feel your questions, your longing, your irritation, your rage, and your love. It’s easy to do and it’s very simple. You know when you like someone and how much you like them. You know when you trust someone and how much you trust them. It used to scare you when people said extreme things to you and now it doesn’t. They should think a little harder about what part of their emotional experience you’re actually responsible for.

It used to scare you so much when someone was mad at you. Or didn’t think you were pretty or thought you were standoffish. You never trusted yourself, so you could never trust anyone else. You never felt yourself fully all the way down because you were scared of what you were going to find. You flinched at your shadow. You fawned, you placated people when you didn’t have to. You woke up in the middle of the night and ruminated. It was so hard to let go of all of that. It was what you knew about being a person.

You have to trust yourself to know what’s right for you. Mostly people are just trying their best. You have to love them, forgive them, let them get it wrong. You have to believe that you know what you’re doing. At this point, you know in your bones you’re past advice. You finally feel loved after all this time.

Emil Nolde, Heidehaus, 1900

It is possible for people to change a lot. It is possible to help them change. Here are some of my thoughts on how to keep your head while they’re losing theirs that I’ve picked up from coaching as well as years of experience with friends and partners.

1. Nervous system capacity is the constraint, not logic. You can explain something to someone a thousand times and it probably will not address the fundamental issue, which is that they’re paralyzed by fear and guilt. The bottleneck is never that you haven’t explained something well enough. It’s safety.

   1. A common error is thinking, They just don’t see the pattern! I need to point it out. I just need to explain myself better. This is why talk therapy from a bad therapist does not work. Believe me, if you guys have discussed it before, they get it. The limitation is Not Intellectual.

2. Do not have delusions of grandeur. I genuinely think I’m good at my job: clients, friends and partners have given me credit for helping them make some of the biggest decisions in their lives. However I’m very much aware that 1) I can’t help anyone who isn’t ready to change, and 2) any support I can give in the present does not override influences they absorbed from their childhood and family of origin. If any part of your plan depends on someone changing a lot it’s not a good plan. Do it purely for the love of the game (or, in my case, as a job).

3. It’s worth asking: Do you want to change? Do you want my help? Consent is important.

4. Take note of people’s patterns. What keeps recurring is telling.

5. You’re gonna be worse at supporting others if you’re codependent. However, most people who are extremely interested in helping other people change are codependent. Sorry. It’s just a fact. If you want to help people, it’s in your best interest to develop clear boundaries between your experience and theirs. If someone else’s flailing affects your emotional life to the point where you’re very distressed you will not be detached enough to help them effectively.

   1. I’ve generally found that the less my happiness is tied to someone else’s day-to-day emotional fluctuations, the better of a friend and partner I am.

6. It’s really hard to help people who are not self-aware about their motivations, limitations and desires. If you can’t have a clear conversation about what they’re feeling and what they want it’s best to just leave it be for now. It is a very, very bad sign if you bring up a topic and someone refuses to engage or talks about it in an extremely oblique manner.

7. Related: do not over-index on people’s mental content. What someone says to you about their state, rationale, and expectations is usually a mental layer on top of a much more primal feeling. Try to identify what the feeling actually is and point it out to them.

8. Relate: a good sign someone is closer to acting is if they’re fairly consistent in what they self-report. If they tell you wildly different things every week, they’re just not ready yet.

9. People choose partners at the same level of differentiation as them, or at most a half step ahead or behind. If you think you’re two steps ahead of your partner, think again.

10. People form unspoken contracts in every relationship (you do X, I do Y). If you don’t understand why someone is acting the way they are, think about what they’re getting from the implicit contract.

    1. Many, many people want to suffer. A partner or family member or a friend who has a lot of issues makes for a very interesting Gordian Knot (ask me how I know!). It feels really, really satisfying to take care of someone and be needed.

11. If you are very sure someone you love is lying to themselves about their experience, kindly and tactfully say it once. They will come to appreciate it in time.

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