Feelings (S2E7)
What does not kill you
[Gonna start today with a little news: I have a blog again. Well, a website. Most of you won’t remember me every having a blog. I did! I wrote for several years about style, which you can find if you know what to look for, and wrote two proto-blog columns, one about the internet in the mid-2000s and one about music. Ironically while my personal style has improved I have almost no interest in writing about it again.
This new place was born out of wanting somewhere to put my things that’s not owned by Meta. Writing things, yes, but also photo things and sound things. The main page will be weeknotes, a format I use at work but have never tried for personal writing. Thanks to an old manager, I’ve discovered it’s exactly how I want to record my life.
You can expect a weekly rundown of things I observed, came across, enjoyed and did, with links and the odd image. “Moments” will contain… well I hope all the headings offer an idea. I’m still going to write this newsletter and Something Everywhere. Ok, that’s that. Thanks for reading.
When I was going through teacher training I’d stand every morning in front of the staff bathroom mirror and repeat a mantra. What was I saying to get pumped for the day?
“This day will end. This day will end. This day will end.”
Every day ends. But in the space between driving to school and the final bell ringing, time stopped making sense. It bent and twirled and squeezed my heart like a fist. I developed insomnia. Turns out, not sleeping is very bad for you. Your body responds in all sorts of fun ways, none of which is being tired enough to finally fall asleep. From an evolutionary perspective this feels very stupid. Hey, are you under duress? What if we made that harder? We’re your body and it’s time to geeeeet fuuuuucked uuuuuuppppp.
My lips were horribly chapped. I looked like I had leprosy. I felt like I had leprosy. I felt like I might die. I don’t mean I felt like I was dying. I mean I felt like it was possible I’d be dead, at the ripe old age of 22. I was aware of my mortality.
So I added that to the mantra because, and boy this really should have sent up the emergency flares to my own command center, it seemed like death was an OK way of getting out of having to teach anymore. “This day will end. You can always die.”
Somewhere during all of this my dad asked if I wanted to go swimming.
Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind stars Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey and came out in 2004, the year I got married. Inception stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Marion Cotillard and came out in 2010, the year I got married.
Both movies are about teams of people going into someone’s mind to remove or install memories. In both movies, it all goes horribly wrong.1
I don’t believe in coincidences, except in the sense they’re absolutely real.
Here’s the deal: I didn’t just want to delete memories or install new ones—I wanted things never to have happened. Of course if you watch any time travel movies you know the only thing worse than messing with memories is trying to change the past.
You will definitely break shit.
Eternal Sunshine and Inception aren’t movies about memories or dreams or even actions we regret. They’re movies about feelings. They pose the tantalizing question, “What if you could control how you feel (through invasive mental shenanigans)?2
Given my homicidally inclined emotions (die! die! die!), you’d think I’d be all about controlling them. But for a long time I was against that because my feelings were me. All I had were my feelings. When people talk about the importance of moving on, I hear “move on and disappear”. Practice mindfulness and let things go? Sure, if you’re a coward! Real men hold onto their feelings until they sink beneath the soil straight to the molten core of the earth.
My feelings were everything good about me and also everything bad about me, which I guess sounds like an addiction. I couldn’t imagine a me without their fullness, that firehose blast of All The Feelings.
Because as much as they were trying to strangle me in my sleep, my feelings also gave me a window into the world other people often struggle to find. It was the first thing people would say about me when they were mentioning things they liked. Like a kid praised for being quiet that encoded on me the certainty that radiant emotions = connecting to people, and terrified me of its opposite:
Holding back or controlling those emotions would leave me utterly alone.
I have a bin (many bins but we’re only going to talk about this one) where I put all my activity gear. Cycling bibs and running tops and climbing shorts, all piled together with no sense of seasonality or frequency. Every time I need to find something I hopefully poke at the top, and when it’s inevitably not there I start to push things to the side and burrow down. This leads to a kind of tidal pool of clothing, where I’ll end up picking out and assessing the same item three or four times as it washes in and out of reach. After that stuff starts to go on the floor. After that it all goes on the floor.
A few weeks ago I decided this was terrible, so I started folding the clothes and placing them in what felt like appropriate piles. Just putting things into piles felt good, like something had already happened. The piles didn’t really make sense, so I gave up on having exact boundaries and focused on the folding. The neatness. They’re still all in a pile, but the pile is neat and it’s easier to access what I need.
There’s something deeply contradictory when it comes to our feelings. On the one hand, you’re supposed to trust your gut. Really hone in on it. On the other, we’re basically houseplants.
Should you trust your emotions? Depends on what you mean by “trust”. If you’ve been to therapy or look at Instagram stories, you know your thoughts can lie to you. And yet, we don’t often consider that we shouldn’t “trust” our thoughts. We learn, through therapy and Instagram and very patient friends, to question our thoughts, interrogate them, weigh them up in the marketplace of ideas.
What if, instead of wanting to erase my feelings, I engaged with them instead? Feelings are just thoughts after all, thoughts you have in your stomach (and chest and feet and eyes…). This was the turning point, although at the time it was like stepping into a cage with a tiger and saying, wait, let’s see what it has to say first. And the tiger has a gun.
Because my feelings didn’t kill me, I had to figure out what to do with them.3 After an extended period of trial and error I landed on a system that, and this is going to surprise you, is a lot like my clothing bin. I call it, Good Enough And Unlikely To Improve.
GEAUTI sounds pessimistic but it’s a helpful reminder that not everything has an optimal state. If something works you can stop improving it, especially when the potential for improvement far outstrips the necessary effort. This is true of exercise routines, relationships, and emotion-managing strategies.
So my GEAUTI is to think of feelings as being in a bin. Potentially, they’re all useful, so I try and keep them tidy. Tidy emotions sounds like a contradiction, but sit with a feeling long enough and it’ll become a physical object you can pick up. After that, the natural inclination will be to sort. Some may turn out kind of useless, so those go at the bottom of the bin. Ordering feelings lets them exist but also literally puts them in their place. And just like the physical world, anything on fire has to go on the top so I can work on putting it out.
I went swimming with my dad. He didn’t explain why he’d asked me, and I don’t remember why I said yes. Swimming wasn’t really a thing we did together. But I went that first time and felt someways better. So I went again, and soon we were going about twice a week.
Shortly after I started swimming with my dad I started sleeping more. Things improved at teacher training, by which I mean I no longer started the day with my death mantra. Correlation or causation? Chicken or egg? I can’t be sure, but I know I started hitting that pillow like a bag of wet, satisfied leaves. And I no longer felt like I was going to die.
Many years later I did a search for swimming and insomnia.
Not only does being around water have a naturally calming and meditative effect, but swimming is also an excellent form of exercise and has many known benefits -- including better sleep.
I guess this partially depends on your interpretation of Inception’s ending.
If you need to feel differently because your feelings might kill you, and drugs are how you can do that, you should take the drugs. I didn’t do this, but I very much considered it.
This is genuinely a privilege and I never stop being grateful.
T started taking swimming lessons on Sunday and we were so surprised that she kept it up as H wasn't going (it's like the Hunger Games to get your kid into swimming classes; you have to get up at 5:30 am and sit at your laptop ready for when the five available classes open). They are all full by 6:03 am). Anyways, noticed she was a lot happier, calmer and at ease when she came home. Sunday evenings became relaxing dinner get togethers instead of tense standoffs they usually devolved into. I actually credited swimming today and now it makes sense. Y managed t sign her up again and she was keen. Will be going all of us with M&D once a week.
Beautiful, Thom. And I very much relate.
My Audible library is almost entirely incredibly frustrating books by organised people that I hope will teach me their secrets, through osmosis. I go to sleep listening to someone describe how all I have to do to be like them, is be like them. None of them ever start as me, and become them. But I live in hope. So I "buy with one credit" and drift off, exhausted into restless, anxious sleep as someone describes task management techniques that will never be implemented by me.
Big love.