Here's a Question That May Change the Way You Look at Life Forever
On loneliness, life purpose and living your best life.
“Loneliness isn’t the absence of people, it’s the inability to express what matters to you most.”
This pearl of wisdom came from the heart of Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung in the late 19th century as he, among many others, was taking creative risks, engaging in brave experiments that would revolutionize the mental health field and leave us with new ways to transform human suffering.
For the past five years, I’ve been tackling this human suffering thing myself, querying not so much about loneliness but about inner peace, experimenting with ways to cultivate it — inner peace being, in my book, a sense of grounded-ness no matter what life is tossing my way; to accept life as it is and me as I am.
Recently, something hit me. A realization that touches, if I may dare say, on the purpose of our existence. It’s cracking my inner peace puzzle.
It’s helping me relax.
After years of working out, often panicking (out), who I am and what I want to express as an artist/writer while managing the grueling task of bringing home the dough, this thought came knocking at my door a few months ago:
We’re Here on Earth To Simply Get Things Out
“Getting things out” means what the master said. We must be expressing and engaged with things that matter to us in order to feel the connection. Usually, this occurs through our relationships, work, hobbies, and interests. To take it a step further, connection is, as the great Krishnamurti said, not simply a part of life; it is life!
The process of getting things out, therefore, is also life itself. Our bodies, those fleshy vehicles with hands, feet, brains, and hearts, don’t just assist us in expressing what matters to us but require it in order to stay healthy.
Getting things out is a biological need.
Modern-day science is proving that. Gabor Mate calls this biological imperative the drive for authenticity. If we don’t remain in integrity with ourselves, getting out by engaging with, creating, or embodying what matters to us, we get sick.
One thing though striking me damn hard about this getting things out business, was the equal if not more crucial (and difficult) task of being present for the process in which what matters to us finds its way out of us. To give what we find important the time it deserves to develop and take form (a.k.a.: be there for the growing pains, whether that be a relationship, finding a more fulfilling career, etc.). Or when what matters is not yet known, having the patience to let it be revealed.
Then it hit me.
The question to ask ourselves, especially in times of existential angst and uncertainty, is not the typical and/or spiritual, “What is my calling or purpose in life?” Or the rather square: “What’s the thing that will bring me the most success or money?” It’s the practical:
What is it that I need to get out of me?
We need to dive a bit deeper.
Over your lifetime, there are many things you’ll need to get out and the form and magnitude it takes will vary: getting something out at one point may be a truth you need to name, leaving a toxic relationship, or for once, being in a relationship, expressing anger, allowing joy, working out an unresolved trauma; at another time-an idea, an artwork, a hobby, a business plan; at another or in parallel time-a budget, a bill, a pecan pie, a garden, an exercise routine. And then, of course, sometimes there is absolutely nothing to say or do.
We humans are systems, with the individual parts of our being affecting the whole. For example, getting out of a toxic relationship first may facilitate getting your dream job later; clearing your head by going for a run first may help you solve a complex mathematical equation.
Focusing on what’s burning in the here and now, down to the seemingly most unimportant minutia of daily life, like making that stupid phone call to the credit card company you’ve been putting off, actually has something to do with your big vision and your health and everything to do with inner peace.
An even better question to ask, therefore, is:
What is it that I need to get out of me right now?
More on that later…
First, Come Along With Me On a Journey
I’m 44 years old and have lived two lives.
When I was 38, I gave up one, letting go of many parts of myself I had once considered important: my 15-year career as a psychotherapist, a therapy co-working space in the heart of mid-town Manhattan I cofounded and designed, a city I’ll forever be in love with and a steady income.
By the time I left New York City for Berlin, Germany, I was making six figures, working 15 hours a week. I had actualized my wish to live a relatively free and relaxed life, uninterested in being held hostage by the puritanical work ethics of a hyper-capitalistic society, its energetic epicenter dwelling ironically in the city that freed me. A proud feat.
To be honest, though, I wasn’t really free.
The thing that made me leave it all was an agitated restlessness and emptiness that wouldn’t go away. The idea of living the rest of my life in this half-alive state scared me more than giving up everything and not having a clue what would come next.
The antidote for my loneliness, in other words, became more important than my fear of the unknown.
What mattered to me most at this time was following an intuition that had no clear definition whatsoever. Getting the hell out of my profession and New York was what I needed to get out.
If I think about it, what happened was I got to a point where I trusted myself more than I trusted my fears. Fear, I’ve come to learn, often arrives as a signal new ground is about to be broken, that, in fact, you may be on the brink of revolutionizing your life.
Scared shitless in Berlin.
After one year of just being without rushing to find out who I would “become” next, the new me found her calling first in the art world and later (as in eleven months ago) back in the world of words. I’ve always been a strong writer. She became dormant, however, as an emerging part of me wanting to explore the world of images began to speak louder, a visitor who arrived as a complete surprise. I had never once considered being an artist a path I would take.
Five years after my art extravaganza, experimenting like a child with mediums, colors, and ideas with no training whatsoever, even after giving birth to three meaningful series and nearly selling out one, only now can I tell you this:
I’ve been scared shitless during a large part of that journey, half the time not admitting or even knowing it myself, the only palpable clue being digestive issues. I felt scared about who I was becoming in the absence of a tangible identity to anchor in.
Did I have anything special to contribute, and even worse, am I special at all?
We are all unique, and we are all not. This paradox, which helps me be my best while keeping my narcissism at bay, humbles me daily. Yet even if the higher, more evolved part of me can accept the “not part”, there is another part of me burning with the feeling that I do have something important to say. That, of course, is wonderful; after all, this is a piece about expression.
From the perspective of my ego, however, I’ve been, more often than I care to admit, scared that what I have to express may not be as important as I think. I want to be original. I want to be recognition. I want to be stellar! Above all, I want to create a dialogue to feel my work is having an impact.
All of these perfectly normal, wonderful human desires, however, were being hijacked by my ego, the part of me complicit with a culture that glorifies big success and focuses on end results rather than the process.
While I have always remained authentic to my visions, I’ve exhausted myself with the pressure (often unconscious) to be somewhere much further along in my process than is humanly possible, to have already discovered my voice, to have already made some big contribution.
No wonder the digestive issues and inner turmoil.
If Carl Jung were alive, I would say to him: Loneliness can arise even when you are expressing what matters to you most if what matters to you is put in service of your ego.
And then came the Midlife angst.
Am I, at 44, too late to enter the game? I’m deconstructing deep and pervasive myths running through the marrow of my bones about age and where I should be at this point in my life, as if success, recognition, and the discovery of one’s passion must come in one’s twenties when we look ripe and have endless energy.
We have less to offer as we age, says a society scared shitless of death and hell-bent on staying and looking young at all costs. I’m slowly finding my arrival into life as a new artist, and born-again writer comes at a time when I have more to offer than ever before.
My intuition is razor-sharp. I’m wiser and feel more at home with myself. I have more compassion for all beings. I am in love with life. What can be a better offering to the world than that? I have asked myself.
The dough.
And how will I survive financially? Basic survival angst is still operating as I find ways to balance my time between making art, writing, and paying the bills. Not once, though, have I entertained the thought of going back to being a psychotherapist. Although her wisdom informs my current work in spirit, I would not hold her nor myself captive in a house they don’t belong.
Back to My “Getting It Out” Realization
After five years of becoming ultimately exhausted by my ego’s demands to be somebody important fast, even as I was expressing things that mattered to me, I realized first that bit I mentioned earlier: Even when you do something that matters to you, you can still feel lonely if the end result becomes the emphasis.
Your work suffers. Your creativity suffers. You suffer. Why? Because your work or whatever you’re engaged in becomes about what it can do for you rather than what you can do together. This is narcissism at its best, a dysfunctional relationship at the least. When I start feeling empty inside and especially when I hear myself ask: What’s the point of any of this? I know now my big fat ego is running the show.
What happened next was I started to feel in my body the significance of expressing something that matters. In other words, no longer did I hear my head or some internalized guru advising me; I began to feel deep in my bones an overwhelming sense of urgency take center stage.
I felt the biological imperative — my body as an authority, her need, in a wave of all-consuming love urging me-no, commanding me!-not to leave this life without getting out of me what I needed to get out.
This wave of overwhelming love also came quite crudely as a metaphor.
Do you know that feeling when you really need to go to the bathroom but are put on hold for whatever reason? And then, finally, you get to go? It’s that kind of feeling I’m talking about.
Getting things out is like taking a good shit.
It’s all about the liberation.
In less crude terms, the biggest and most sustainable joy among all joys comes from the liberation of something more than the final product.
Waaaaaait a minute, are you calling my work a piece of shit?, you might be asking. Talents, passion, gifts…are far from being toxic material!
True. Doing what we love and taking care of ourselves in general not only makes our lives more enjoyable, it serves our fellow humans. When we share our gifts and live our best lives (a manifestation of love in form), it not only awakens our aliveness, it moves others who witness and receive it. You being your authentic self inspires others to be their authentic self. That’s not shit.
But…not unlike being constipated without relief, when we don’t express what matters to us most, whether that be dancing, a hardware design, raising a child, a truth…that energy will get stuck and create havoc in our bodies, sooner or later showing up as pain or illness, emotional/mental for sure and often as physical ailments. In other words, becomes toxic.
It’s also not that serious.
This makes me think of Sigmund Freud, a contemporary of Jung, at times an enemy. According to him, children regard their fecal matter as gifts, something having the utmost value. It’s one of the only things a child can produce with his or her body at an early stage. The turd, in other words, is a gift for his parents — something to be proud of for sure.
Children, at play, so unselfconscious and free, remind me to take what I do less seriously. How liberating is it to see our lives a little more through the eyes of a babe?
So, What Do You Need To Get Out Right Now?
The million-dollar question. Although it came to me in relation to my work-self, a crude yet smooth flash of light, something about it turned my entire world upside down. I started to think: What if I began to see the mundane as the important and my work as the ordinary? (Getting out what needs to get out in this moment, the master key to kingdom come?)
The sacred in the mundane.
Or what if scrubbing my apartment clean, paying a bill, and taking a walk in the woods became, at the least, just as important as putting pen to paper every day? Going for a run, rearranging the apartment, trashing old clothes, rocking a new style just as crucial to my artistic process and overall well-being, if that’s what’s burning in the here and now on this day? If that’s what needs to get out?
Appreciating the parts means appreciating the whole.
Even if the tedious act of doing my taxes is not as precious as weaving together my beloved text, reframing the mundane as sacred has made me realize how precious each passing second is. Life is composed of many more mundane than extraordinary moments. Why not treat those moments with more respect? Why not give the body a break from being squeezed dry by the mind’s rush?
Putting trust in the absolute mundane as the door to the eternally important and vice versa, that the little shit and big shit count in equal measure, even if they evoke different feelings which vary in magnitude and texture is…
helping me relax.
The parts over the whole perspective.
After three years of putting writing aside to paint, knowing always I needed to (at the least) come back to my poetry, ruminating over at times when if ever it would happen, it’s only now, as I’m coming back to it do I realize how impactful painting has been to my writing process.
It’s deepened my imagination and allowed me to surrender to the unknown. Only now can I say when I write poetry, it’s as if I’m painting with words and understand it’s the artistic medium where I come most alive.
If the parts make up the whole, we don’t have to like all the parts, but we better show up for them. Otherwise, growing pains turn into unnecessary pain.
Gestation is crucial to creation. A genius is not born but made, said some genius. Patience is what I tell myself over and over again.
The long haul, the slow burn…
A chocolate cake, a swim in the ocean, taking a stance, talking nonsense, leaving your job, committing to a relationship, singing, shouting, breathing, crying, silence-
What is it that you need to get out now?
*THE ORIGINAL VERSION of this story appeared in Better Humans.
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