In this week’s Creative Courage:
A story about trying to make a child stop crying
When you’re feeling bad and there’s no way to know if you’re doing enough
What our culture makes discomfort mean
How to put discomfort in its place
After I gave birth in the early days of the pandemic, isolated from family with a spouse who worked far from home, I would sink into the nursing chair in the darkness as my newborn daughter laid on my chest, wailing with life.
I wrote in my notebook:
The baby insists. She insists on insisting. Shushing makes screaming. She will take the warmth she wants and no warmth she does not need. She is done when she is quiet and no quiet until she is done done done. Milk, my heartbeat, and darkness.
Crying just is. It’s absurd to argue with it.
Yet I wanted to argue with it. It was my job to do everything I could to soothe her; didn’t that mean there was a problem to solve? I couldn’t do nothing (that is, leave this newborn alone), but I couldn’t fix it either. 100% responsibility and 0% control over her feelings.
That means my brain was constantly asking, “What else can I be doing? What else do I have to try? I can’t exhale until I win.”
And there was advice! Oh so much advice:
“You could put her down for a nap earlier, you could change your diet, you could swaddle her just so, you could offer burnt sacrifices of many dollars to the God of Sleep and spin around three times at the full moon.”
(FOR EVERY STRUGGLE THERE ARE 5 CONFLICTING “SOLUTIONS”.)
And she was still crying.
What do we make struggle like that mean?
Our society has two equal and opposite explanations for pain.
Discomfort means someone is doing something wrong.
Discomfort is the only way you know you’re doing enough.
The first equation is pain = fault. The economy reinforces the belief that if you are suffering in any way, you must absorb the blame because you did not mitigate against this risk.
Someone must have done something wrong. Probably you. If not you, it’s still you, because you should have anticipated. Or could have, legally speaking. In fact, you could be soothed right now if you had prepared and earned more money. Can you sue someone for this? Your vulnerability, the soft shell of your own humanity, is evidence of a problem.
Conveniently, our economy of the endless scroll and hyper-expansion also offers an alternative, precisely opposite meaning for suffering, especially within the context of work:
go until it hurts.
In the second explanation, you only know you are doing enough when there’s so much pain you don’t have a choice. Pain is the only limit that counts, the only way you can get any recognition as just a person doing a hard thing. Until it’s too painful to continue, you have to keep going or you should feel shame.
Despite the fact that we think it means something is wrong (see equation #1), struggle becomes the clearest way to justify or measure our efforts: it cost me this much. The myth of the tortured artist plays into that idea: “To produce this work I bled onto the canvas for you; do you value it now?”
But how would you be if none of that was true?
Is it possible to show up differently if discomfort doesn’t have to mean any of that?
How would you be allowed to create if:
A) Pain does not inherently mean anything has gone wrong in your process. Anything that grows has to experience a breaking of some kind. Therefore, you do not need to find something or someone to blame if you find it hard, nor does it mean anything about who you are. If you are growing, you will need to be available to cry. You do not need to perform endless success or else get cast out into the outer darkness. You are simply in it.
AND
B) Getting a “win” or feeling terrible isn’t the only evidence you can use to determine whether or not you’ve shown up enough.
Maybe that’s all very philosophical.
Think of it this way: how do you evaluate yourself?
I think of holding my screaming newborn baby and just wanting to know that I’d done my best. Or done enough, at least. That I could just be in the shit with this child who isn’t used to being alive without adding in shame or panic.
If I’ve only used 1) my pain threshold or 2) WINNING as the marker for whether I can feel okay with my efforts, what else is there?
I can decide whether I’ve done enough based on the quality of my PRESENCE, not my frantic action. In the example with my newborn, I wish I’d remembered that the point was to love her, not to stop her from crying.
Think of a specific area of your life or a project that you feel guilty about not doing MORE for. Assume it’s something you care about, that you WANT to respond to:
#1 At its MOST SIMPLE, what’s the most important thing to you about this thing or relationship? If everything else was stripped away, what would you want to remain?
#2 What energy does your answer to #1 need to grow? At your core, what feeling or quality do you want to bring?
#3 Practice your answer to #2 in the smallest way. What’s the most available way you can BE that right now? Today? This week?
I’ll give you a little example. I felt guilty about not writing more this week, so these were my answers today:
#1 The most important thing to me about writing is to get into the mental space that writing provides for me, because it’s curious, open, and clarifying. I also want other people to know that they aren’t alone. It’s a way to connect.
#2 Curious. Loving to myself and someone who will read this.
#3 I’ll arrange childcare with Nate so I can write for 30 minutes on Wednesday. I’ll look in old files to spark something. I’ll remind myself that curiosity and connection is the point and go from there. That’s enough for the day.
That’s it. That’s all there is. All the doing, the how, the enough, the actions, the trying, flows from those three questions.
And showing up will suck sometimes. My brain will offer me anxious thoughts and my body will generate sticky feelings; all that will happen when we care.
But when I’m not searching for whether I’ve done “enough” based on all my actions, feeling uncomfortable feels less meaningful in a good way.
My day doesn’t count as good or bad based on a “win” — including whether I did the right “self care” — and I don’t go to sleep running away from the question of whether I checked the right boxes.
How does that sound?
All my love,
Maria
P.S. The anti-advice column will be back after the Making with the Enneagram workshop on March 5th!
P.P.S. Are you registered yet? I am still getting DMs about the last workshop I did over a year ago saying that it helped change their life and make their things, and this workshop will be EVEN BETTER.