What You Lose By Lying…to yourself
Some thirty years ago, I participated in a mass introduction event at UCLA. One at a time, the instructors in the writing program spoke for about three minutes to an auditorium filled with students, describing what their classes would contain so that students could make an informed decision. I said that I would cover things like research, organization, structure, and breaking writer’s block.
After the event was over, one of the other instructors cornered me. “Why did you tell them you’d help them break writer’s block?” she asked. “It isn’t possible.”
I was stunned. Literally didn’t know what to say. These days I would understand, but possibly still wouldn’t explain that I grasped what was going on. SHE DIDN’T KNOW HOW TO BREAK WRITER’S BLOCK. How did she come to the conclusion it couldn’t be broken? Because she was, herself, crippled by it, or had been. It came and went as it wished. Her creative flow was out of her control, so she had a mythology that no one could help.
She almost certainly had many things to offer her students. But like going to a relationship counselor who has been divorced five times, mentors cannot help you past barriers they do not understand.
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I ran into a group of Clarion students recently. I asked them how their writing was going, and some were enthusiastic. One shyly reported that she wasn’t writing at all. I saw her pain, and asked why. She was TEACHING writing, and didn’t have the time and energy for her own material. I started to discuss the “one sentence a day” approach, and saw a tide of conflicting emotions cross her face, including anger and fear. I did not know her, and she had not invited me into her inner world, so I backed off.
But I thought back on that conversation at UCLA, and felt sad. Yes, this lady doubtless had much to offer. But in the critical arena of productivity, she could not help. There is no way she could say she didn’t have the time to write a single sentence. But admitting that forces you to look at your beliefs about yourself, your work, your life, the industry. And some of the things will be painful.
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So the article says “eating while stressed will make you fatter.” Things shift in your body that affect the way you store fat and secrete insulin. If you start with the physics of the entire process (if you take in fewer calories than you burn up, you HAVE to lose weight) then you run into the psychology, endocrinology, and all sorts of other “ologies” I probably cannot pronounce, as you discover the human body-mind is an amazing interconnected machine.
I’ve had lots of people say the physics model is “too simple”. Really? It is certainly simple, but no one is saying you STOP there. It is a starting place. Saying “your body doesn’t disobey the laws of physics” isn’t saying “and therefore it is easy to lose weight” or “and therefore you are lying/lazy/stupid if you cannot.”
If I say “the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” or “write a sentence a day” or “pay yourself first” there is no moral judgement on those who stumble or find obstacles, cannot move past their fear, or lack clarity on how a latte a day adds up FAST.
It is in reducing a situation to its simplest components that you can finally see where your own actions and programming stop you, as well as defining the external obstacles that stand in the way. But fear of how others might interpret some basic perception like “burn more than you take in” can cause odd reactions.
“That means that if you take in MORE calories than you burn, you have to gain weight, right?” Nope. Not all equations work both ways. Addition and multiplication do, but division and subtraction do not. 7X8 = 8X7, but 5–3 does not equal 3–5. Or in other terms, you can take in food, but unless your body absorbs those calories, you won’t gain an ounce.
What the article listed above makes clear is that that the EMOTIONS you feel while eating cause your body to store fat differently. Why? Probably want a panel of experts for that, but a quick guess is that your body is trying to protect you from potential starvation by storing sandwiches on your hips.
Those other examples could similarly be explained. A complex goal can be frightening. Why invest yourself in efforts that might take years and produce nothing? Why risk the mockery of the tribe? Or risk losing the tribe by trying something new, such that you walk alone, with all the attendant risks? Change is HARD: living systems crave homeostasis. Try to change anything that shifts your core identity and it will fight back, like a rubber band trying to snap back to its original shape.
“Write a sentence a day”? Why is it threatening? Because there is no logical reason not to do it, other than not believing it can make a difference.
“That’s only 364 sentences a year” is perfectly reasonable to say. But all you have to do is try, and you’ll see that you cannot actually limit yourself to one sentence once you set that goal. For a few days, sure. But once you make contact with your creative drive, even a little bit, on a regular basis it changes everything.
And I suspect that on some level, we all know it. We KNOW the truth, and look for useful lies to obscure it. One step doesn’t take you anywhere. One sentence makes no difference. Our bodies disobey the laws of physics. Once you actually admit that the basic reality is simple, and affected by our behavior, we have the opportunity to ask: “why is my behavior non-optimal to the achievement of my goal?”
If the answer is “because I’m bad/wrong/stupid” how likely do you think you are to speak the truth? I do not, by the way, believe in lazy people. I believe in people who don’t believe in themselves. Don’t believe that their efforts will bring them more pleasure than pain.
As all animals are programmed to respond to the sensations of pain and pleasure, and the emotions of fear and love, ANY time you see someone who doesn’t take action, you are looking at someone who does not believe those actions will or can have a positive result. “I could try, but why bother?”
To look directly at this is to risk pain. “I could make my life better. Why don’t I take the actions?” If you can look at this without guilt, blame, or shame, it is just a problem, not a judgement.
With writing, it might be: “why am I afraid? What limiting beliefs are stopping me? Where did I get them?”
Here are a bunch of candidates:
- Perfectionism. You are comparing your first draft to the final drafts of the masters you’ve studied. A sure flow-killer.
- Fear of failure. If you finish the work, it might not be good, shattering your self-image.
- Fear of rejection. If you submit a finished work, you will be vulnerable to judgement, and that would hurt.
- Fear of success. If you succeed, you might fail down the road, and that temporary success could cause you to take risks (like leave your job) that hurt you down the road.
- Fear of the voices in your head. They might warn you that REAL adults don’t waste their time with nonsense like writing. They have JOBS.
And on and on. Unless you have permission to succeed, and SEE the way to succeed, and BELIEVE that your efforts will bring you more pleasure than pain…you won’t do it. But if you are torn by conflicting drives you can have that AA conflict Stephen King talks about in his terrific novel OUTSIDER. “Can’t” and “Must.” I can’t do it. But I must. So I remove any possible agency from the equation. I don’t have time to write because I’m making a living. I’m making use of my education by passing on my education (NOT by passing on my actual experience). Writer’s block is impossible to break.
My body disobeys the laws of physics. There are no good men/women.
Only rich people can save a portion of their money. That’s a caramel latte, please.
Sigh. One day at a time we throw away the potential of our lives, because if we looked directly at it, we’d have to deal with the guilt, blame, and shame. How to avoid this?
- Start with loving ourselves. START THERE. Not if we get result X, or change behavior Y. The child within you deserves to be loved for her own sake. She is trying the best she can. If she could see a way to do better…she WOULD. 100% guaranteed. That pain-pleasure thing works every single time.
- Reduce the “chop wood, carry water” to something so small and inarguable that it cannot be logically argued against. “A sentence a day” works. “My body doesn’t disobey the laws of physics” is one.
- Once you have that, you have flipped over the flat rock of your conscious and unconscious actions, beliefs, and values. You can notice the stress triggers that sabotage your behaviors, and instead of judging yourself JUST NOTICE. Remember: you love that little kid inside you. She’s doing the best she can. Why might she break her word to herself? Where do those voices in her head come from? When did she develop that value system, and does she still want to hold onto it? Are those beliefs accurate? How do you know?
Meditation is about standing outside your ordinary mind, observing your reactions and thoughts, and grasping that they are not you, and do not control you except when you lose awareness and act automatically.
If you remove logical reasons for failure or inaction, what remains, however discomforting they may be, are the fear-based emotions, misconceptions, illusions, conflicted values, anchored pains and limiting self-image that keep you from your dreams. THIS is the real “thousand mile road.”
To say: “if I had no internal obstacles I’d be able to simply do this, every day. And over time, life would show me my limits and gifts. My job is simply to chop wood, carry water. Do what I have to do every day.”
You could specifically study fear, writer’s block, goal-setting, motivation, anything else stopping you if you could thereby gain an advantage, if the commitment to writing, or balancing finances, or increasing fitness, or finding love or whatever was larger than your fears.
My life as an author started the day I realized I’d rather fail as a writer than succeed at anything else. Burn the ships. Ride or die.
If you look at the “sentence a day” and say “you know…I don’t really want to be a writer” and mean it, that’s fine. Find another dream, and live with joy.
But if you are dying inside, if you yearn to be a published writer but are running into all the obstacles that we human beings use to screw outselves over, I beg you to start by loving and forgiving yourself for not being perfect, and have a good laugh at our existential folly.
Then…take a cold, steely-eyed look at the path that would take you to your goal. Define yourself as someone who can do this. Has done harder things in the past. Remember the times you were knocked down and got back up. I’ve had so many women tell me about childbirth, that they can’t really remember the pain, and that if they could, they would never let their husbands touch them again.
We also forget the pain and despair and fear we experienced with EVERY major accomplishment. This can be good — we can’t remember how hard it will be, because that fear would stop us from trying. But it can also be bad — we hit the “wall” and somehow hallucinate this isn’t a normal, natural part of the process.
I hit it in relationships, sitting and stewing in my solitary misery.
In martial art, condemning myself for cowardice.
In writing, losing all faith and hope in creating a career I could be proud of.
But my salvation was that I never blamed the outside world. Didn’t blame women for not being attracted to me. Blamed martial arts for being so confrontational. Or the writing field for putting up barriers.
Because I loved myself, I was willing to do what parents have always done for the good of their children: WHATEVER IT TAKES. Whatever. No limits.
And that commitment will give you the strength to look directly at what is really going on. And then, perhaps for the first time in your life, to engage with the real struggle: to be as much YOU as you are capable of being, the best and purest expression of yourself, one day, one moment, one action at a time.
You will fail. Again and again. But as long as you don’t lie to yourself, and as long as you never lose love of yourself…you will also succeed. Guaranteed. Because the real success is living your life one day at a time on your terms. And that is not about external validation or even external accomplishment.
It is about living authentically. And that…is your damned birthright.
Namaste
Steve