Insecurity Under the Hood
[Insecurity - I]
Anxiety is in your mind. It’s also in your body.
It constricts. It aches.
It consistently tells us, “Something is off.”
Anxiety also tells lies—false stories about me and the world. "Under the hood" of some of those stories is my insecurity.
Anxiety’s half-truth-filled stories love insecurity because insecurity never slows down.
Insecurity is a revved-up engine of comparison.
It’s a high RPM appetite to win and be better than so-and-so.
It’s a fast-paced need to be noticed.
Comparison, winning, and being noticed burn a lot of fuel but never satisfy. Never.
People like us, while we don't like to admit it, struggle with insecurity. Over the next two weeks I’ll be reflecting on my own insecurity, and I’d sure like to know if any of it resonates.
Weekly Roundup: Anxiety II
February 22-26, 2021
Monday: Anxiety is not a cognitive construct. It's not a mental analysis of data. But it’s not entirely disassociated from the mind, either. Anxiety reminds us that our body and mind are closely, and often mysteriously, connected.
Tuesday: But there’s another type of death that causes perhaps more anxiety: The death of meaning. We worry that this life—our life!—has no purpose, no meaning, no point.
Wednesday: Our "nocturnal tormenters” must be faced, addressed, examined, understood, and ultimately healed from BY DAY. Otherwise, they become our nightmares.
Thursday: If we can’t start here—the sun on our cheeks, the smile of a child, the smell of camomile tea, for example—we will suffocate at the feet of the BIG non-truths of anxiety.
Friday: While anxiety tells us lies, it consistently tells us a truth: “Something’s off. Hope is a mere step toward discovering what it might be.
Are you interested in the whole reflection? Click on any day, and it will take you there.
Want to help grow the community of people like us that are unwilling to continue in ways like this? Help us spread the word: share on Facebook, Twitter, or with a friend via email. Find the links below.
Anxiety & Hope?
[Anxiety - IX]
Anxiety can feel like an uneasy heart.
In us. At our center. Our core.
Where only the people we love can enter.
Where we don’t allow the public to look.
If you place your hand on your chest, and then slide it down six inches . . . right there. Inside.
That’s your “heart”.
And when it constricts.
Compresses.
Aches.
That’s what “uneasy” feels like.
It’s where we might sense something is off.
Not stable.
Imbalanced.
Your anxiety, my anxiety, and hope are sometimes related.
Jurgen Moltmann said hope is not the antidote to your uneasy heart; hope is your uneasy heart. Or, we might say, an uneasy heart is the early sign of hope. It’s hope prior to germination. It’s hope wanting to break in. Emerge.
While anxiety tells us lies, it consistently tells us a truth: “Something’s off."
Hope is a mere step toward discovering what it might be.
Getting Lost from Anxiety
[Anxiety - VIII]
Anxiety feels like being stuck in your own body. It’s claustrophobic. It’s suffocating.
Anxiety also makes up stories. About you. About the world. And they all have bad endings.
Anxiety thrives on telling elaborate lies to a captive audience (you). It’s like story-time at the library . . . except the kids are all forced to be there (with no potty breaks and no snack time) and none of the stories are true, enriching, or remotely healthy.
There’s no escaping.
Unless you’re that one kid that always gets lost on field trips.
Not the class clown that demands 70% of the teacher’s attention. Not the sneaky kid that is assigned a chaperone. And not the cliquey kids that huddle in groups. They’re all accounted for.
No, the kid that sneaks off does it innocently and quietly. One moment he's distracted by the clouds through the window, the next moment he’s following the patterns in the carpet, and 60 seconds later, he's a quarter mile away catching butterflies.
Escaping anxiety doesn’t happen by force.
It happens by noticing.
Noticing what is undeniably true.
Small and tangible truths.
Truths that predate the lies.
Truths that engage the senses.
Truths that are noticeable if we slow down and look closely.
Grounding truths, like the shape of the clouds or the pattern in the carpet or the color of the butterfly.
If we can’t start here—the sun on our cheeks, the smile of a child, the smell of camomile tea, for example—we will suffocate at the feet of the BIG non-truths of anxiety.
Notice what’s true and simple and beautiful.
Follow them.
Get lost.
Nocturnal Tormenters
[Anxiety - VII]
Freud said it best: “What we repress by day will haunt us at night.”
Anxiety often attacks at night. It haunts us in the dark.
What have we pushed down?
What are we avoiding?
What pains do we run from?
What are we ducking?
What comes up only to get squashed?
What wounds are we hiding from?
What impulses are there but ignored?
What triggers do we side-step?
What feelings do we choke out?
What memories have we tried to erase?
Our "nocturnal tormenters” must be faced, addressed, examined, understood, and ultimately healed from BY DAY.
Otherwise, they become our nightmares.
Grounds for Life
[Anxiety - VI]
Death causes anxiety.
There’s a pronounced anxiety when we look honestly at our mortality. On a daily basis, we run into the reality that our physical bodies break down. We fall apart. We degenerate. Life, as it were, is a slow process toward death. (Doesn’t that just sound depressing?)
But there’s another type of death that causes perhaps more anxiety: The death of meaning. We worry that this life—our life!—has no purpose, no meaning, no point.
By comparison, the death of meaning has a more profound grip on our wellbeing than physical death because purpose can be pursued, grasped, and fulfilled with very little physical ability. But our physical bodies cannot survive without purpose.
Meaning not only gives purpose to this life.
Meaning is the grounds for life.
Meaning is quite literally the air in our lungs and the blood in our veins.
Addressing anxiety takes immense courage because in the midst of embracing finitude, it necessarily involves the long, hard work of discovering meaning.
Trust Your Skis
[Anxiety - V]A ski instructor told me once, “Lean forward and press your shins against your boots. Trust your skis. Don’t forget: skiing is just controlled falling down really steep hills.”That advice is why my friend JP’s analogy between a ski’s edge and anxiety is meaningful to me. Skiing, he says, “Is a dance of risk, fear, courage, which propels me down the run.” On the mountain, he “seek[s] to find that space, no wider than a ski’s edge, in which I’m simultaneously fully in control and momentarily loosing it.” The ski’s edge—a thin, sharpened strip of steel that runs the length of each ski—is what determines the difference between control and crashing.Life is also a balance between control and crashing. The thinner the “edge” between the two on the mountain . . . the more adrenaline. The thinner the edge in life . . . the more anxiety.Anxiety is not a cognitive construct. It's not a mental analysis of data. But it’s not entirely disassociated from the mind, either. Anxiety reminds us that our body and mind are closely, and often mysteriously, connected. We intuit, sense, and embody the shrinking distance between:Control and chaos.
Order and disorder.
Balancing and crashing.Life, like skiing, is controlled falling. With practice, we learn to grow comfortable with the counterintuitive sensation of tumbling forward. Practice.
Lean forward.
Trust your skis.Weekly Roundup: Anxiety
February 15 - 19, 2021
Monday: You are the friend that must look in the mirror and say, “ I love you just the way you are, exactly the way you feel.”
Tuesday: Anxiety and creativity are related. The greater someone’s imagination, the more they feel anxious. All that creative energy is channeled toward hypothetical disaster. Anxiety, you might say, is pent-up imagination.
Wednesday: Where’s the pressure valve? Not the unhealthy coping. Not the destructive numbing agent. What’s your concrete, repeatable, creative habit that can syphon off some of the build up?
Thursday: Slowing down (prayer, meditation, self-reflection, etc.) and speeding up (exercise, movement, physical exertion, etc.) help us tend to anxiety.
Friday: Anxiety is incarnate language. It’s the vocabulary and syntax of a different intelligence center. It’s the melody of a bodily song to which our ears are not attuned. It’s the expression of a fleshly brilliance from which we’ve been disconnected.
Are you interested in the whole reflection? Click on any day, and it will take you there.
Want to help grow the community of people like us that are unwilling to continue in ways like this? Help us spread the word: share on Facebook, Twitter, or with a friend via email. Find the links below.
Bodily Song
[Anxiety - IV]
For some, anxiety is held entirely in the body. There is virtually no “cognitive overlap” associated with the experience.
My friend, Tara, tells her story:
"I woke up at 4am with a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. I stumbled out of bed and walked into our bathroom and looked in the mirror. All of the sudden, the color rushed out of my face. I clammed up completely, felt dizzy and my chest began to hurt. Heart attack? I [thought] I was dying. Nothing scary was happening around me. I had been sleeping. The night before Wade and I had sat on our porch and enjoyed some Shiner Bocks and hours later I’m in the parking lot at the ER with [what felt like a] heart attack.”
Reflecting on the experience, she said, “Our bodies are very intelligent, but where I’m from, we consider the brain the intelligence center of our bodies.”
Anxiety is incarnate language.
It’s the vocabulary and syntax of a different intelligence center.
It’s the melody of a bodily song to which our ears are not attuned.
It’s the expression of a fleshly brilliance from which we’ve been disconnected.
Our bodies have a lot to say. We ought to lean in and listen closely.
Reconnect.
And learn.
Illusive & Accumulative
[Anxiety - III]
My friend Henry helped me understand anxiety as both illusive and accumulative.
Anxiety is deceptive, wears a mask, and goes by other names. It slithers in and out of our attempts at control, waiting for our overreach as an opportunity to strike. The promising news is that when we take responsibility only for what's within our domain of control, we find “peace and resolve”. Discerning the difference, in Henry’s terms, is a matter of “prayer and meditation”.
Anxiety can also accumulate. Even if you can syphon most of it off with healthy habits, anxiety can leave a residue, which accumulates over time like "gunk" in the plumbing of your daily wellbeing. This is why Henry trail runs. It’s not only for the endorphins, but it’s literally to “flush out nervous energy that accrues over time.”
Slowing down (prayer, meditation, self-reflection, etc.) and speeding up (exercise, movement, physical exertion, etc.) help us tend to anxiety.
Anxiety is illusive (and elusive). . . slowing down helps us see where it’s lurking.
It also can leave a residue . . . speeding up helps with regular maintenance.
Syphon Off
[Anxiety - II]
Anxiety is pressure.
It can be in your head, or it can lodge itself in your gut.
Your shoulders.
Your back.
Your lungs.
It’s somewhere between your head and your body. Or, both at the same time.
It’s pronounced but not specific.
It’s agonizing but doesn’t hurt.
It can overwhelm but not necessarily intimidate.
It’s in you, it’s yours, but not who you are.
It feels like a sickness but not an ailment.
Everyone experiences it differently, but the best I can describe it is an inner pressure—with notes of worry, fear, and panic.
Where’s the pressure valve?
Not the unhealthy coping.
Not the destructive numbing agent.
What’s your concrete, repeatable, creative habit that can syphon off some of the build up?
(Warning: you may have been told at some point in your life that your pressure valve is a waste of time. In the end, if it releases pressure, it’s actually a gift of time.)
Pent-Up Imagination
[Anxiety - I]
Anxiety comes in different forms.
There’s the panic variety. It’s a flooding of strong emotions that build as the “cause” approaches. Opening night of your show, the day of the big presentation, the night before the championship game: panic sets in and escalates as we march forward.
There’s the worrying variety. While rarely coming to fruition, the object of worry seems in crystal-clear focus. Worry convinces us that we can see into the future. We can’t. And we’re often wrong, but worry is like an emotional lawyer, building a case for why we should be anxious.
Theres’ also the fear variety. Fear perceives both real and false threats. Physiologically they feel the same. I’m alone and I must do something to save myself. Fear is isolating.
Anxiety can also be neurotic. And angry. And Jealous.
Anxiety is often a mosaic of related emotions that all feel threatening, which is why it’s so hard to pin down.
Consider this: Anxiety and creativity are related. The greater someone’s imagination, the more they feel anxious. All that creative energy is channeled toward hypothetical disaster. Anxiety, you might say, is pent-up imagination.
It needs focus.
It needs a target.
It needs a concrete outlet.
[H/T Julia Cameron]
Change by not Changing
[Emotions - V]
We all know non-addicts.
We all know addicts.
Few of us know sober addicts.
A life of sobriety for an addict is darn near impossible. But it happens!
I asked a sober addict how they ’succeeded’.
“Everyone told me to change. Chided me. Criticized me. Threatened me. Hated me. They were right, and I knew it. I did those things to myself, too. I was killing myself and everyone I loved. But I couldn’t change. Nothing I tried worked.
Then I met some one that said, ‘Don’t change. I love you just the way you are.’ I mean, they didn’t love the drugs, but they loved me despite the drugs. I relaxed. I stopped criticizing and hating myself. And I changed.”
So it is with our dark, negative emotions.
You are the friend that must look in the mirror and say, “ I love you just the way you are, exactly the way you feel.”
[Beginning tomorrow, I’ll be devoting at least a week of reflections to each of the following emotions: anxiety, fear, restlessness, insecurity, self-pity, and doubt. And I have some friends that will be contributing their insights!]
Stuck Behind the Gate
[Emotions - IV]
Have you ever seen a Border Collie moments before she’s actually herding?
Have you ever watched a race horse before the gate opens?
Have you witnessed a team in the tunnel before they enter the field for the big game?
Their bodies are full of skittish energy. Pent up passion. Restrained purpose.
When the conviction strikes that the world is not as it should be, and you and I have a responsibility (and ability) to help steer it a different direction, it is like bottling up rocket fuel.
People like us are the Border Collie, the race horse, the team in the tunnel. Some of what we feel are just nerves but most of it is pure creative potential to do as we are suppose to. And yet it’s restricted, withheld, blocked, or bottled and capped.
Your agitation is not bad but good.
Your restlessness is a sign pointing you to something.
You have work to do. Good, purposeful, life-giving work. And so long as you're stuck behind the gate, your neurosis will feel negative, like a problem that needs fixing.
Perhaps the only thing needing to change is getting you out of the tunnel and on the field.
Time to Exit
[Emotions - III]
People like us that are unwilling to continue like this . . .
Unwilling to head the same direction we’re heading . . .
Unwilling to wield the same tools and strategies we’ve used . . .
Unwilling to see the world through the same lens as before . . .
Must find the next exit.
It’s futile to travel the highway of status quo and arrive at a different destination.
The fast lane on the road to an undesirable future is to reduce yourself (and others) to one-dimensional talking points and rhetoric. One gift psychoanalysis has given the world is the truth that we all bear a complex universe within. Gutted of this internal dimension, you (and others) are a mere mask of your whole self, left only with norms of the road you're traveling.
Speed. Get ahead. Beat the competition. Win.
It’s time to turn on your blinker. Change lanes. Exit. And do the work of befriending the complex inner-universe you’ve been avoiding.
Obliquely Emotional
[Emotions - II]
“Don’t be so emotional.”
I get it. Emotions are like viruses. They’re contagious, they spread quickly, and they can kill (an otherwise positive vibe). “Don’t be emotional” is basically a public health mandate. We don’t want to catch what you have.
Mandating stoicism, however, is not a vaccine, doesn’t strengthen the immune system, and doesn't increase antibodies. It merely covers up the symptoms. Stuffing emotions hides them, making them more "dangerous".
I think we’re one word off from a truly helpful request.
“Don’t be obliquely emotional.”
Whatever you feel, you must feel directly. Head on.
Don’t address it at an angle.
Don’t employ other antics to hide it.
Don't’ repackage it with another name.
Feel fully. Feel honestly.
It’s safer.
Shadowy Emotions
[Emotions - I]
“It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God” - Mary Daly
We are all creatives, which is simply to say that there is within us the capacity to make something that doesn’t exist yet.
A painting.
A pizza.
A paper airplane.
A spreadsheet that works.
A system that doesn’t malfunction.
A strategy that is more efficient.
A new industry.
A new theory.
A new technology.
Some of us are inclined to change the world; others, to change the color of the accent wall in our dining room. It’s the same inclination. The same indwelling, creative spirit.
But this divine, creative spirit is a package deal. It’s not “sold” as a single unit, as if we have the desire to make the world more beautiful, period. In the package comes a landscape of negative emotions.
Creativity, while divine, has a shadowy backside, and what lurks in the shadow is as diverse as our inspiration.
Mary Daly’s quote is a foundational conviction behind this blog, and if you randomly searched the archives, you would find its truth threaded throughout the last 700 entries. What you might not find, however, is much reflection on the negative emotions that often accompany our creative call.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be working through the reality (and importance) of six emotions that are prevalent for those that have a keen awareness of their creative potential: anxiety, fear, restlessness, insecurity, self-pity, and doubt.
Weekly Roundup: Starting & Finishing (Round 3)
February 1 - February 5, 2021
Monday: The sooner we acknowledge life is not a solo act, the sooner we can set ourselves to the task of finding others willing to invest in us (and vise versa).
Tuesday: A cheerleader is a steady backdrop of positivity. Not always “accurate” but always necessary, they show up and cheer you on, regardless of circumstances.
Wednesday: The only way to “get” time is to take it from something else. Something less important. Something distracting. Often you must steal it from your comfort.
Thursday: A naysayer is a gift. No, we shouldn’t listen to what they are saying; rather, we should listen and pay close attention to the parts of us that are most sensitive when they naysay.
Friday: The timing is never right. The resources will never fully be depositing in the account. Regardless, we must get started.
Are you interested in the whole reflection? Click on any day, and it will take you there.
Want to help grow the community of people like us that are unwilling to continue in ways like this? Help us spread the word: share on Facebook, Twitter, or with a friend via email. Find the links below.
Stop the Filibustering
[Starting & Finishing - XV]
When will you get started on the project, idea, program, or career that gives you life, wakes your soul, inspires your heart, and gets you up in the morning?
“When I feel inspired.”
“When the resources are there.”
“When the plan is complete.”
“When the policy passes.”
“When there’s a critical mass.”
“When the climate is conducive.”
“When life settles down.”
“When I have a platform.”
“When the pandemic is over.”
Stop with the filibustering.
A book doesn’t begin with a contract with a publishing company. A book begins with waking up an hour earlier, and writing page after "god-forsaken" page of a crummy first drafts.
A new career doesn’t begin with submitting your two-weeks notice and cleaning out your office. It begins three years before that with the first of 372 phone calls to old friends to make connections and network.
A movement doesn’t begin with a 20,000 person march. A movement begins with implementating a conviction in one’s own life on Monday morning when no one is looking (and no one cares).
The timing is never right. The resources will never fully be depositing in the account.
Regardless, we must get started.
Naysayers are a Mirror
[Starting & Finishing - XIV}
I’ve heard it said, “The most comfortable seat on the couch is that of the cynic.”
I disagree.
Cynics have to believe something, even if it’s undeveloped and weak. That means at one point or another they did some critical thinking.
A more comfortable seat on the couch is that of the naysayer. Nothing at all is required. No homework. No critical thinking. No effort at all. Just opposition to you and your idea.
Then why do they fertilize our doubt, prune our confidence, and uproot our momentum?
Why do they hinder our starting and finishing?
Because they reflect back to us the (inner) work we haven’t done.
Work around our insecurities.
Our weaknesses and undeveloped skills.
Our wounds and our hurts.
Our false narratives and self-doubt.
A naysayer is a gift. No, we shouldn’t listen to what they are saying; rather, we should listen and pay close attention to the parts of us that are most sensitive when they naysay.
(You want to steal their strength? Send them a thank you note for being helpful.)