Our feelings are our teachers. Omnipresent helpers. We don’t have to collapse under them. Instead, we should let fear, anger, and disappointment clarify our position. That clarity is the next toehold. If we refuse the guidance, choose to go it arrogant and alone, the feelings will run us down. They’re here to save us, but we’re not listening.
We have too much fear of our fear. We are too intimidated by our own anger and too crushed by our disappointment. Our feelings have us tazed into believing we can’t survive ourselves. We’re cornered by our fragility. Shamed into submission by our failure.
So we run. We’re done for, and we know it. And we know what to run to. Addiction is the fast track out of the tyrannical control of reality. Alcohol, naked people, anything new—it’s always about more and always alone—anything to avoid the ego’s destruction.
The critical time in our reckoning is the space between ruin and the reach for relief. In that pause is the information we need, the insight into what’s driving the reach. That insight is the nightlight. We’re running from the monster in the closet, shut down but still sane, and now we can see it. The running is automatic. Staying is the choice. This is where we turn around.
If we are to survive as anything worth being, we must stare down the feelings. It’s in the flinch where we lose. Without that nerve, we’re a danger to ourselves. If we freeze, if we shrink, we’ll remain prey to be batted around until we die. To live is to let what we feel burn through, not consume us.
When we take away the balm—the phones, the sex, the purchase—and fill the existential dread of that space with stillness or hard exertion, we can begin to see. That sightline can be enough.
The dogs are always circling, and they’re ferocious, but if we ever want to be free, we can’t cower. Avoidance doesn’t shrink the fear — it trains it. We have to drive straight into the fear, the disappointment, the rejection. If instead we shield ourselves and wait to be mauled, our lives contract around the flinch, leaving us a shell of what we might have been if we’d been willing to charge.
If we are to survive, we can’t protect ourselves.
Quote
We need to tell ourselves a little more of our own truth because we pay too high a price for our concealments.