I'm doing so well :)

Journal entry (transcribed without edits)

This trip to the desert has been doing me so well. I’ve been feeling so healed. Just in a completely different place mentally from where I was a short while ago. It’s as if my whole value-system and incentive structure seems fixed somehow. So much more able to be open and friendly, curious and connected. Much less annoyed with myself/repressed.

Thought: is vanity just insecurity in disguise? Is ambition pain in disguise?

Maybe… although it’s not so clear-cut. I reckon one can have healthy/healed ambitions (which is what I’ve been trying to find in my work), inasmuch as one can enjoy one’s appearance without being vain about it.

But I do think that by and large I am less vain and ambitious now. More focused on what matters. And I can tell how it immediately makes me more interested in visiting friends and family again. I feel a little bit ashamed of how unable I had become to be there for others, but it also felt like I had to protect myself in order to get to survive.

It took so much energy to maintain my walls. And anything that could penetrate them would make me tense and defensive. Now I think I’m starting to learn how to live without the walls. And it’s just a much better place to be.

I’ve been here before, but it was always a much bigger swing between extremes. Either I’d be exuberantly care-free or completely walled-off. Now it’s somewhere in the middle, and that seems more sustainable and less exhausting.

The thing is that I used to “know” all of this, but somehow failed to live up to my own expectations of how I wanted to be. I’d never addressed the underlying issues, and so I couldn’t stay consistent and I’d be angry at myself for failing to live up to my own standards.

For example, I’d say: “the work should be its own reward.” But since I hadn’t addressed any of my pain, I’d still get ambitious and desire validation. And then I’d be furious with myself for using the work to satisfy my ego. Whereas now, since my pain and anxiety is so much diminished, the ambition (in terms of ego) is not as strong, but suddenly the work does fulfill me. I’m not doing it for any extrinsic validation, but for the sake of doing it. Which means that now, finally, the work has become its own reward.

And so the idea/value/principle couldn’t be the starting point, lest it became a cudgel I could punish myself with. But once I began addressing the underlying motivations for why I needed validation and attention, suddenly I realized the person I’d wanted to be, the person I’d hated myself for not being, was there all along, just waiting to be unearthed.

It also feels like now I can finally do the work in a way that expresses what I feel, not just what I think. For such a long time I’ve confused them, thinking that feelings were inferior to thoughts. Now I see that when I combine them, the work feels much more rich. As Pessoa put it, some think with their feelings, others feel with their thoughts. I think that when one is able to combine them somehow, that’s when something special begins to take place, and that’s when the life-work becomes a kind of truth-procedure, something approximating truth.

For me, it’s about re-discovering a certain ethic. A way of living and thinking that feels open and forgiving, curious and alive. And that’s what I’ve been thinking about, here in the Moyave Desert. How to embrace an ethic of living/thinking/feeling.