How to be lost (Part 3)

Notes 9–14 of 21: How to Be Lost

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 destabilization and ambiguity matters more now than ever.

Part 1, the intro to the series, is here. Part 2, Notes 1-8 of 21: How to Be Lost, is here. Part 4, Notes 16-21 of 21: How to Be Lost, comes out next.

Notes 9–14 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

Cont. from here. Written in March 2023. Updated minimally for clarity; original tense preserved.

9. Regression

I regressed a lot, and before anyone holds up their hand and tries to assure me I did not because that’s a mean thing to think, or because there is no such thing as regression and it’s all just forward movement (a thing I’ve said before!): let me also say that perhaps insisting that everything is The Path, or that regression is actually progression, or God’s plan, or anything that sets us up to absolutely fucking hate ourselves when we return to behaviors we thought we’d outgrown, is part of the problem we have to unwind. Because when we think in these terms—as everything being forward movement and the point of all this work as a means to the end of becoming better than we were before—it becomes its own kind of sickness.

Anyway, as I was saying, I regressed a lot.

There was this day last summer¹ —after I had just repeated the same humiliating pattern with a man and then I drove across the country to start a new life in California and then a tornado hit my house back east and I had to go back there and sort that out and then I caught Covid on the plane ride there (lols) and then I came back to California and went directly to a family vacation—when I got into the most infantile fight with my sister. And I mean, I really did a number, really lost my shit in a big embarrassing way. And there were all these reasons to point to for why I acted so badly, like I was tired and I was confused and my life wasn’t working out like I wanted it to and a tornado hit my house and I got covid on my way to fix it and blah blah blah sad sad—but the truth and reality was that I acted like an eight-year-old, and I had to sit with that.

Sitting with that was just awful but also monumental, and while I don’t write about my family so I can’t really get into the details, what I will say is it wasn’t like some part of me or my life that I’d fixed had broken at that moment on that day. It was more like I had coped for years with a part of me that was hobbled—not healed—and I was finally strong enough to go back and revisit it, work with it, and heal it.

Marlee Grace writes in their book Getting To Center: “There is a part of not knowing that can also call us to deeper knowing. If I don’t know something about myself, about how I walk through the world—it may be time to know it deeper. To seek teachers, books, resources that bring me into a greater knowing of myself.”

This is how I imagine regression—that it is not a step backward so much as it is a step deeper. We thought we knew ourselves completely, we thought we had this thing licked, we thought we were so grown up, and then there we are, standing in front of an Airbnb, a 43-year-old author of critically acclaimed self-help, all red-faced and throwing a tantrum so colossal the kids get scared and cry.

Oof, that was a bottom. But also oof, what a hell of an invitation to do some digging around, to go back, to go deeper. Which I humbly did. And which yielded me a kind of growth that was far more important than the proud illusion I’d held about the kind of person I was and was not.

A lot of what happened over the past few years has felt absolutely humiliating, and not only because of what was actually happening but because of the idea that we all know is patently false, but all kind of collectively uphold, which is that growth is a leveled thing, a video game where you never have to save the princess twice. I am probably a hundred years wiser than I was in 2020, but that’s only because the last few years I was such a regressive fucking mess who made almost all the mistakes she once swore she never would again.

So you regressed. So you did it again. So you fucked up wildly and embarrassingly. Fine. Me too. Now what?

“We can meet our match with a poodle or with a raging guard dog, but the interesting question is—what happens next?” —Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart

10. Non-resistance

As we all do: I had the opportunity to go to war when things started to fall completely apart. Instead, I made the conscious choice to move with and not against, and I’ve maintained that position throughout. Like, I didn’t fight one fucking thing. I let it all happen to me.

This doesn’t mean I gladly accepted what happened, or didn’t react and do petulant things, or that I didn’t feel resistance, or didn’t carry the weight of it all around with me, or that I didn’t fall to my knees and sob-scream a stream of profanities at God for unfairly taking my life away, etc. It means that when unwanted things happened—and many, many, many unwanted things happened over a protracted period of time, as if they were all stored up and waiting to happen all at once when I was at my absolute lowest—I took the thing in, did whatever I needed to do to get right with myself (stared at a wall for hours, screamed, went on a run, phoned a friend, binged TV, drove to the nursery to buy 30 plants, eat an entire pie), metabolized it, and then I just kept going.

I made as little drama as I could about most things, and I consistently prioritized my peace of mind over anything else. I kept asking myself What is the easiest path for me to take in this situation?, and that’s the path I took each time—even if it meant losing a shit ton of money, ownership in my company, my intellectual property, my reputation, my future job prospects, friendships, or any number of things the choice for peace will often cost.