How to be lost for a long time (Part 2)
21 notes on how to be lost (notes 1-8)
This originally ran in 2022 as part of a series on how to live through a long transition and endless down cycle. When I wrote it, I thought I was approaching the other side of that transition. I wasn’t even close. It’s only been in the last year that I’ve begun to feel like “myself” or like I’ve solidified into this next version of me. I’m resurfacing these essays and finishing the series now that I’m actually on the other side, because learning how to live in-between and with massive massive destabilization and ambiguity matters more now than ever.
Part 1, an intro to the series/my story, is here. Part 3, 21 Notes on how to be lost (Notes 9-16), comes out next.
21 notes on how to be lost
Originally written and published March 2023. Updated minimally for clarity; original tense preserved. I’ve broken it up into 3 essays (notes 1-8; notes 9-15; notes 16-21) because it was 8000 words, which is a crime.
What I set out to write—a list of the things I found useful over the course of a life transition that seemed to have no end or purpose—sounded very doable. I used to be good at listicles, and if you were to come to me and say “I feel like I’m in between two lives can you give me some advice?” I’d make you a spreadsheet. Telling you Here’s what I did to manage a really long liminal period and giving you advice about it felt like a very easy and potentially fun exercise, like I was going to make you a list of the best churches to visit in Rome.
But then that simple list turned into a brain dump of the notes I took and the articles I clipped over a two-year period, from March 2021 to March 2023, in an effort to make sense of what was happening to me (feeling lost/failed/ungrounded/existential dread for a protracted amount of time) and what was happening to the world (apocalypse?), and because both of these things are still mysteries to me (myself, the world), the list of “things” bloomed from ten to 20 to 30 and then blurred into something else. Trying to write this piece was like trying to bake a cake when I hadn’t stirred the batter, or like trying to make my brain work in a way it now refuses to. I cannot simplify, boil down, integrate, or arrive at universal truths the way I once could.
So. I don’t have “a list of things that I found useful over the course of a life transition that seemed to have no end or purpose" because that list would number in the thousands. What I have instead are some things I found useful, some tools and some advice I would have given myself if I’d had it, but mostly a lot of thoughts I wrestled with, ideas I developed, patterns I observed, and changes I witnessed, during the period of time when my life was chronically in-between and the world seemed that way, too.
Rudolph Bahro said “When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure,” and Krishnamurti said, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” The final thing I’ll say about this specific piece: I am not trying to help you feel better, or make something more of your confusion or in-betweenness, should that be where you are.
My point (in this piece, in general) is: I think the future of our society, culture, species, and planet depends on the extent to which we all allow our frames to break and identities to be destroyed and ourselves to be lost. Which is to say, if you’re feeling ungrounded or lost or in-between, I think that just means you’re a fertile patch of ground the world desperately needs, and I’m so sorry for you, and I’m so happy for you.
Finally: Much has been written on this topic, and I’ve read a nice portion of it. I’ll share a resource list at the end of the series.
Notes 1–8 of 21: How to Be Lost
An incomplete collection of imprecise and often contradictory field notes on what to do when you don’t know what to do
1. Healing as performance
I think for a lot of reasons I don’t need to name, we’re convinced what a sane person does is heal and then turn that healing into some kind of product, and I don’t mean something like a fitness app (which I do indeed mean), but also a better job or a better ass or a better personality. All failure or struggle or pain or inertia gets reduced to what we make out of it, what we transmute it into, and what we become after, and therefore experiences don’t hold intrinsic value, they are only a currency worth what we exchange them for. As Caleb Campbell put it in this interview, we’re awash in a culture that subtly and unsubtly encourages us to reduce all our healing to a kind of performance.
In the beginning, I felt pressure to do something with what was happening to me—to turn it into a book or podcast or an op-ed or a really compelling Instagram post or a life that was better than the one I had before. There was a true period of time—about six months in—when I hadn’t really changed all that much or done much of anything to improve my situation and by objective appearance, I was just fucking off all day every day. And I kept thinking to myself: It’s been a long enough time, shouldn’t you be talking about this? Shouldn’t this be an integrated lesson by now? Which is not a kind of healing, but a kind of cruelty.
I start here with this because as you read through the rest, I want to be clear that part of what allowed me to move forward was dropping the illusion that I was supposed to turn my experience into something more than it was, and I say this not to release me from some kind of judgment or assure you this column that is written as a product of my experience of being lost is not the product of commodifying my experience of being lost, but simply to tell you: it is a bad and destructive idea to think we are supposed to turn our healing into anything beyond the experience of it.
You don’t have to make anything out of this. Just be lost.
2. Feeling like “yourself”
In Haley Nahman’s essay, On Feeling “Like Yourself”, she does a much better job than I could describing what it means to feel, or not feel, like oneself. A few poignant quotes: “I don’t think ‘not feeling like myself’ has to do with being sad necessarily, I suspect it has more to do with comfort and control. I feel like myself when I recognize the terms of my existence and feel comfortable navigating myself within them.” And: “I approve of my current desires, therefore I comprehend myself.”
I have at many points in my life not felt “like myself”, mostly in small and fleeting ways, like when I don’t get enough sleep or I’m traveling or I’m in some kind of depression. There’s usually a relatively quick reprieve, some moment of “Oh there I am again,” and in a way, I was waiting these past two years for that exact moment: I would know my in-between had ended when I began to recognize myself again. Only that makes it sound a lot nicer than I actually was with myself about it. It was more like: Why the fuck haven’t you snapped out of this yet, you dumb ho?
Early on, I imagined feeling like “myself” again would be just that—an again—wrought through a return to some former behavior. I would be me again when I was producing, working on my next project, on the schedule I desired, with an intact sense of purpose. I’d be me again when I was forward driving or getting a consistent paycheck or doing my hair for a reason. But that return never materialized. I didn’t wake up one day spellbound by the next idea or vision of my life to work toward. Instead I just kind of slowly creamed outward like spilled yogurt.
If I take something Haley said—that we more easily comprehend ourselves when we approve of our desires—and apply it here, it follows that because in my in-between I did not approve of my desires (which were mostly to be left alone and not do very much work and not try very hard at anything at all), there had to be some known desires I did approve of, and if I could recapture them then I would comprehend myself, and feel like myself once again. But then eventually I started to think: What if the known desires are dead for a reason? What if there are new unthinkable desires, and I just haven’t given myself the grace to find them?
I can confirm that not feeling like yourself is a special kind of hell, and it’s a special kind of hell mostly because we define health and functioning and flourishing through a really narrow lens, one that assumes that we know who we are and we know where we’re going, or at least that we know what we want, or at the very least that we’re still productive and contributing members to society. If we don’t have those things, we assume a lack, a thing we’re supposed to correct for. No one ever tells you to just absolutely lose your shit and fuck off and be confused, they tell you to make a plan. And no one ever says this is so fun not knowing who I am at all anymore—what we say, or what I said, is I feel like such a fucking loser.
“If you lose one thing, like money, that’s not so good. But if you lose everything you get a bonus, which is entreé into a different world.”
—Phil Stutz
Refer back to the Bahro quote above: The new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure. Maybe this sounds like a detour from everything I’ve just said, but I see the idea of knowing ourselves, and the idea of a future being created by those unafraid to be insecure, as inseparable statements. We already have a world where people are trying all the time to know themselves through power and control and comfort and familiarity and unexamined desires. What kind of world would it be if instead, everyone tried to lose themselves, tried to not know who they were, and accepted that not feeling “like their old self” was just exactly that: not being their old self? Becoming something newer? Maybe more grown and evolved?
I think I am saying if you don’t feel like yourself, even if it’s been years, perhaps that’s a sign of health, an opening and an offering, and not a sign that something needs to be fixed.
3. Values
Which brings me to values, because when you’re desperately trying to resurrect the familiar in order to save yourself from the skin-flaying insecurity that is the in-between, or fast-forward to what comes next, you aren’t necessarily questioning whether you even hold the same values you once did.
The version of me that imploded in 2021 valued a lot of things I still do, like integrity, directness, and generosity. But she also valued achievement, productivity, reputation, drive, recognition, hustle, and lots of people liking her. And she measured her worth by these latter things more than she did the others, and mostly because the latter things rewarded her greatly.
It was only through a long period of not feeling like myself, and losing all the things I’d previously counted on to determine my worth, that I started to question if these things even mattered to me, or if they’d ever made me happy, and if not then what did. A few years in, I can tell you that many of the things I listed off above, such as success and recognition and being likeable and productivity and reputation, don’t hold much meaning for me anymore (though they do hold some). Instead, I value things I never thought I would, like ease, good enough, contemplation, space, flow, feeling good in my body and life, and connection. And this only came about because I lost the regular touchstones that reinforced those previously held values—because I didn’t feel like myself or know myself or where I belonged or even what the point of my life was. It was only from that place that it was possible to ask the question, What is it that I actually value? And then it was only from that awful period of waiting, of not knowing anything true at all, that the answers began to firm.
4. The money thing 💸
Because enough of you will read this and think this lady had some kind of financial privilege in order to lose her shit and fuck off for a few years, I want to assure you I did. I own my home and my mortgage payment is low. I had a small retirement account and I had savings and I had no other debt besides my mortgage. I had a meager severance from Tempest. I had money coming in from my first book, including small royalties from translations and a bonus payment because QLAW sold better than expected. I took a few speaking gigs, did some contract work, and I started my Substack in January of 2022, which has accounted for most of my income. I currently do not make enough money to cover my expenses after taxes, but I’m also not worried about that because I have a high risk tolerance, better than average earning potential, an existing book deal, and I can sell my house if it comes to it.
That is: (1) I had time and resources and better than average future prospects; and (2) I used all of my savings and retirement, went into a shit ton of debt, forewent a lot of experiences and expenses, and still might have to sell my house to cover it all. Or: I had privilege, and I made sacrifices.
Financial insecurity has been a real theme for me: I have worried about how I’ll make a living as a full-time writer or if I will ever make a good living again, and it has been uncomfortable and scary burning through what I’d saved up. But I have also refused to let financial security be the primary driver of my choices, which allowed me to walk away from situations I found to be highly compromising of my values, and allowed me to only pursue things I found to be full yeses. I discovered over these past few years I would rather be in integrity than be rich or even solvent.
I also value comfort, I like nice things, I don’t believe in zero-sum realities, and I have an abundant mindset (in less a law-of-attraction, more adrienne maree brown kind of way). If I want to believe in a world where everyone is taken care of and everyone has a sense of abundance and everyone gets to make a living doing things that inspire them rather than destroy them, I have to live that principle myself.
Lastly, and this kind of goes to point #3 (“Values”): I have a very different idea of what enough is now, and it’s a much smaller sum than it used to be. Even with so much less, I finally have enough, which is something most people will never, ever have.
5. You are going to be okay
The thing I kept wanting people to tell me the most was that everything would be okay; that I would turn out okay, that I wouldn’t be stuck like this forever, that I hadn’t maxed out all my good life credit and wasn’t destined to spend the rest of my life on some increasingly pathetic downward trajectory paying off the debt of a few good breaks.
I would ask my friends, I’m going to be okay again, right? And they would laugh, and they would coo, Of course you are. Then I would ask if they were sure, and they would promise they were sure, and then I would have them tell me one more time.
You are going to be okay. You are going to be okay. Really, truly. I promise.
6. Egypt; or this time counts
In the book Dawn of Everything, the authors talk about how Egyptian history is marked by three distinct periods: the Old Kingdom (about 2,700-2,200 B.C.E.), the Middle Kingdom (2,050-1,800 B.C.E.), and the New Kingdom (about 1,550-1,100 B.C.E.). I don’t have the text with me in Los Angeles so this is paraphrased, but what I recall from the discussion about it was how there were gaps in between the times we recognize as history—gaps between the Old Kingdom and the Middle and the New—which unintentionally implied a kind of unimportance of what happened in those gaps. What took place between 2199 and 2051? What about 1799 to 1551? Were they periods of nothingness, a waiting for the next great period to begin? Or were people still living their lives and doing things of consequence?
I’ve thought about this concept of missing history so much through all of this; how this period of time has been marked by so much absence; how it has also been a presence, a living, an existing, a fullness.
When we’re conditioned to mistake our actual lives or the merit of our lives for the milestones, instead of each painstaking breath between, we can discount the in-between periods of our personal history as gaps. I’ve tried very, very hard to remember through all of this: This is not a gap. My real life isn’t about to start, I’m not wasting time, I’m not failing at existing because there’s nothing to show for it. This time counts, as much (if not more, and I would argue more) than any other.
“There are huge gestations and fermentations going on in us that we are not even aware of; and then sometimes, when we come to a threshold, crossing over, which we need to become different, that we’ll be able to be different, because secret work has been done in us of which we’ve had no inkling.”
—John O’Donohue
7. Speaking of time counting
Throw out your ideas of how long this should take. It will take the time it takes. Don’t compare yourself to other people who went through similar things, or other people at all. The timing of your life is unique to you, and if it feels like it should “be over by now” or that you’re “doing it wrong” or that if you were some different kind of person who was more capable or healthy you’d be “better” by now, that’s only a sign that you’re exactly where you should be.
It has been my experience that I’m changing the most when it feels like nothing is happening at all.
8. Speaking of comparison
Don’t do that either. I kept looking at other people I counted myself among who had similar-type careers and who were just totally crushing it, at the top of their game showing up on social media every day all sane looking. Nothing made me feel more out of my skin than thinking they were moving ahead while I was dissolving into my couch. I had to stop looking, I had to totally detach myself from what other people were doing, I had to remember that I was going on a different tour than everyone else and it was fine fine fine. (This ended up reinforcing something I hadn’t anticipated, which is how rewarding it is to go your own way and do what appears to be different than what everyone else is doing. Highly recommend, 10/10.)
Part 3, Notes 9–16 of 21: How to Be Lost, is next in the series. Part 1, Introduction, is here.
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I am incredibly grateful for this. Thank you. The pandemic ended my job and plunged me into a lost phase, and the last two years I've been *really* lost, with no work (I'm old, so nobody sees my experience as valuable). I haven't lost everything but I've lost a lot, ideas and things and people I thought were with me for the long haul. The grace, and I know it's there, is the long liminal space that is allowing me to finally look at my life and my giant catalogue of mistakes deeply and differently than I have before. I plod along day by day, walking for miles, yoga, reading, doing my dumb little French lessons, not-painting but sometimes painting, not-writing but sometimes writing, keeping the bills paid but salted with worry. I can see the shape of it all better because of what you've written, and maybe stop hoping every day for some miracle that will catapult me into something else.