How to be lost (Part 4)
Notes 15–20 of 20: How to Be Lost
This originally ran in 2022-3 as part of a series on how to live through a long transition and endless down cycle. Part 1, the intro to the series, is here. Part 2, Notes 1-8 of 20: How to Be Lost, is here. Part 3, Notes 15-20 of 20: How to Be Lost, is here. Part 5, an update (the first four were written in 2022-3), comes out next.
When I decided to republish and finish this series (that I started and abandoned in 2023) this past December, I was operating from the perspective that whatever the fuck this {gestures to all past articles written here about being fucked up for too long} has been—this endless transition of mine—was pretty much over, because it has to be by now. My life fell the fuck apart in 2019; it’s 2026; it’s time.
But of course as soon as I started bragging again about being all healed and different and on the other side, things got worse, and things got worse because somehow even though I swore I’d let go of everything that ever defined me as a human being and surrendered and surrendered and surrendered, apparently I had not. Cue running out of money and having to take advances on my credit cards to pay my bills; cue IRS levy on my home because the accountant I hired to clean up the mess the other accountant I hired made never filed my taxes! and lied about it to me! for six months!; cue emergency dental surgery for my cat that cost 3x the estimate and left her disabled because they decided to take all her teeth out without asking me; cue the deal tied to my income unspooling and dragging instead of closing; cue the ice jams that split my roof apart and then cue the water pouring onto my couch, my carpet, my grandma’s antique table, and the buckets that will need to suffice; cue my period deciding to just not return, maybe ever, and the most monstrous rage a lady can know after she was all smug about her HRT; cue it all, and cue it all while your government murders and kidnaps and tortures the most vulnerable people it can.
Which is to say, sorry you didn’t get a newsletter for a month, I’ve been busy paying the price the earn the wisdom herein contained. It’s still been worth it. Thank you for not unsubscribing, and if you pay me for my work, thank you for that, too.1
I had this whole thing below ready to go weeks ago; I am not re-reading it so I hope this preamble goes with it? I’m sure it will. I love you a lot. Take really, really good care of yourself right now. You deserve it. We all do.
Love, Hol
🌈 Also: I am going to be fine! Many people are not and will not be. If you have spare $$s, I don’t want them, but these folks do. 🌈 I have been candid about my money situation as part of this series and elsewhere in this newsletter because six years ago when this all started, I confused material success with success. One of the biggest lessons to come from this period has been getting right with money and materialism and how much I actually need, and dis-connecting material wealth or attentional wealth from ideas of success; there’s a lot of people we hold up as “successful” simply because they make a shit ton of money and get a lot of eyeballs on their work; I am not that and I don’t want to be that; I just want to be happy?
Notes 15–20 of 20: 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.
15. Presence, awe
In his very good book that I wish I had read a lot sooner than two weeks ago, Charles Eisenstein says:
“The old world falls apart, but the new has not emerged. Everything that once seemed permanent and real is revealed as a kind of hallucination. You don’t know what to think, what to do; you don’t know what anything means anymore. The life trajectory you had plotted out seems absurd, and you can’t imagine another one. Everything is uncertain. Your time frame shrinks from years to this month, this week, today, maybe even to the present moment. Without the mirages of order that once seemed to protect you and filter reality, you feel naked and vulnerable, but also a kind of freedom. Possibilities that didn’t even exist in the old story lie before you, even if you have no idea how to get there. The challenge in our culture is to allow yourself to be in that space, to trust that the next story will emerge when the time in between has ended, and that you will recognize it. Our culture wants us to move on, to do. The old story we leave behind, which is usually part of the consensus Story of the People, releases us with great reluctance. So please, if you are in the sacred space between stories, allow yourself to be there.”
Everything in this statement hits, but three points feel especially true: (1) my time shrunk down to the present moment, (2) possibilities that didn’t exist in the old story came into focus, (3) I allowed myself to be in that space.
I said in point #4 (Money), that I have a much different idea of what enough is now, and it’s a much smaller sum than it used to be. And this is kind of what I mean. Because my life shrank to the size of a pore, because things I thought I’d die without died, because things I relied on that I thought brought me contentment and satisfaction and joy were no longer there, because the past and future became some kind of hallucination and the ever shitty present was all I had all I had all I had—it followed that the purpose of my life was found in different things than it had been. The bike ride I was taking, the run I was on, the laugh I was having, the coffee I was drinking, the way the person I was with made me feel. With nothing to look forward to (as in, without being able to imagine a future I wanted) and without a past I could parse, what was in front of me had to become enough, and over time it did.
In early sobriety, when I was in my pink cloud or whatever, there was this very intense relationship with the world around me. I noticed everything, was delighted by everything. If you look back through my camera roll almost all my photos of that period show so many pictures of the sun, of the trees, of art and birds and trash and immediate beauty. It is the visual record of a person who was paying attention, and I remember it as the happiest period of my life.
But somewhere along the way, all those pictures of awe were replaced by selfies and memes and things I posted to Instagram; clips of articles and other filler. But then starting in 2021: the same theme from early sobriety emerges. PIctures of the sun; of the landscape; of the abandoned boat with the sycamore growing out of it; of things I notice only because I’m paying rapt attention once again.
I learned to see the world again and to love the world again, is what I’m saying. I learned to savor the minutia again—the fresh creamer in my fridge and the water that comes out of the tap and the way the she smiled and how you could see the snow capped mountains in the valley for just a minute—is what I’m saying. I am pulling off the highway and taking pictures of the sky like my life depends on it, is what I’m saying.
Selected photos of things I wouldn’t have noticed if my life hadn’t gone to shit.
16. Hateful things
Lest this sounds too inspiring, I want to make sure you understand so much of this was hateful. I felt like my life was over, that I’d never be creative again, that I’d never be successful again, that I would end up dying alone in my house in a fleece rob and slippers and that my cat would eat my eyeballs before anyone found me, that there was something permanently broken in me. I thought that my recovery and healing were just a fluke, that I couldn’t be trusted, and that real ‘healers’ or real ‘teachers’ or or people who write for a living or whatever the fuck I was didn’t completely fall apart or go through periods of extreme confusion and dissolution. I was painfully insecure. My hair fell out—like I actually fucking molted. I had no energy, no motivation, no life force, and I couldn’t quite understand the purpose of my existence. Things were meaningless! There’s more, but I think you get it. I just kinda hated myself and my situation, which only made me kinda hate myself and my situation even more because I’d written so many articles about self-love...
I share this part for a few reasons. First, to normalize that when you’re lost and without your regular distractions, all the terrible ideas you have about yourself will absolutely float to the surface and choke you. Second, to tell you that this kind of thing doesn’t count you out or make you some sort of fucked up, it makes you really really human and puts you right up there with all the ascended masters, who were also huge fuck-ups. Third, to suggest that perhaps this Shit Rising is a good thing, or at least confirm it was for me. I didn’t have to go rooting around looking for all my limiting subconscious beliefs. They were all right there, plain as day, made conscious, on display for everyone to see. And I had lots of time to work with them because I had no job or job prospects, intimate relationship or intimate relationship prospects, community, hobbies, or interests. It was just me and my horrible thoughts, all day every day.
I’m not going to get into all I did to work with the many things that came up in all that space; that’s for later. What I will tell you—other than it was terrible, heroic, and constant—is that similar to what I’ve said about addiction, I’m grateful I absolutely hated myself that much, and knew it, and had nothing else to do but address it, because I don’t anymore.
17. Lazy
I was lazy (sin) and I loved it so much.
18. The thing you don’t want is often a portal to everything you do
I was surprised by the fact that someone who could say they loved evolution and change and growth and development so much could be such a coward when I was forced to change and grow and develop, but that’s exactly what happened. I cowered.
One of the first things I wrote for Substack was a piece called “What to do with the things you don’t want,” about how so often the very thing we don’t want to have happen is the very thing we need to have happen, for our growth. In it, I wrote:
I can theoretically understand that I’m going through a cycle and some necessary part of my unique development so that I can dig deeper, expand more, love more, live more. I can also theoretically understand that as a human who is committed to growth, my prayers are actually being answered. But I still want my growth to be on a meditation cushion with rose colored light streaming around me and a lavender scent. I don’t want the kind of growth that includes extreme humiliation, loss of desire to live, creative bankruptcy, financial insecurity, perpetual loneliness, premature aging, or being, as one friend recently said, “The one who always starts over.” I have said in the past that I would swim to the bottom of the ocean to understand truth and God—that I’d do anything to get closer to being the light or love embodied or Jesus or whatever equals those things. But for some reason, I won’t do what I’m being specifically given right now? Going to the ends of the earth and walking through fire, and all that shit I’ve claimed I would do, is workable. But being groundless and challenged in the particular way I have been this past year and am right now is some kind of mistake that is actually running counter to my spiritual and human development?
The truth is, honestly, that growth is boring as fuck. It’s as vanilla as how kind you are to the guy checking you out at the Safeway or how bitchy you were in that text and sometimes it’s the literal sound of your life standing still while everyone else’s moves forward. It’s dull and monotonous and tedious and it is exactly the flavor of what you’re dealing with right now. That you think it shouldn’t be happening (or wish it wasn’t) is the telltale sign that it should. You said you wanted to wake up? Here’s a shitty DM. Go forth and grow and stop looking for the better path or lesson you want because you’ll miss the exact opportunity you asked for. Your prayer is being answered. —Holly Whitaker, What to do with the things you don’t want
19. Being lost is your number one job
In the Hidden Brain podcast on the five stages of grief (Healing Your Heart) the host Shankar Vedantam interviewed Lucy Hone, a grief researcher who lost her 12-year-old daughter, Abi, in a car accident. At one point in the interview, Lucy was talking about how one of her first thoughts about living through her unimaginable grief was that it was her only job. She said: My mission is to survive this.
I listened to the episode in April 2022, about a year into being fully out there in the ether spinning, and it reminded me of the advice I’d doled out to folks who were trying to not drink, which is that not drinking is their only job. This means something like, if you did nothing but watch Netflix all day or if you did nothing but blow up all your meaningful friendships that day or if you did nothing but play Oregon Trail all day, you still did something, because you didn’t do the thing that all the other things you meant to do are dependent on you not doing.
It’s setting the right expectations for what you’re trying to accomplish.
If you’re trying not to drink, you’re tending to that and only that: the not drinking. If you’re grieving a horrific loss, you’re just grieving and surviving your horrific loss. And if you’re totally confused and can’t make sense of your life and are so lost lost lost you think you’re never going to find yourself again? You’re just surviving that, too. You’re not making a ten-year plan. You’re not beating yourself up for not being more productive. You’re not asking yourself when you’re going to snap the fuck out of it. You’re not fretting over using your time incorrectly or throwing away your life. Are you breathing? Did you have one glass of water today? Can you brush your teeth? Did you live through today? Wonderful. You did it.
20. There is no point #20
There’s no last point, because there is no end, because life isn’t actually just the fence posts. It’s the posts and everything in between; an ongoing process of change; a spiral that never ends, that only brings you back around again and again and again to the same exact lessons you swore you already learned, if you’re lucky.
Part 5, 3 years later, about what happened between 2023 and now (2026), is next in the series.
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Heads up that in the next three roundups, there will unfortunately be advertising!! But just for a minute and only for things I use; ty for understanding.
This series is so incredibly helpful to me, thank you for your courage and persistence in sharing it all.
Thanks for this series~ I always look forward to your posts, their layers and threads.