Splash No. 247 - Feeling Seen
Feeling Seen
This week I read a piece that felt like it was written just for me, since it seemed to home in on the types type of internet content that I love and address the issues with the lifestyle that they show, and that I have often embraced. I’ve written before about my proclivity for self-help content, and how I earnestly believe that I can continuously improve as a person. But even in the times where I’ve been “focused on myself,” as many of the TikToker content creators instruct me, I’ve often thought about how independent it seems from the reality of other people. In the piece “no good alone,” Rayne Fisher-Quann diagnoses the problem with these approaches to self-improvement: they glamorize and moralize a life spent alone.
It’s not just this sub-genre of TikTokers that hold this idea — about how much I’ve internalized this idea when it comes to learning new things. I’ve spent a lot of time in my life alone, for different reasons, and the results of that led me to moralize and glorify solitude as a way to cope with my situation. This is something that everyone does — we find ways to justify the way we live so that it can be normal. Shifting the situation entirely is difficult and painful, so moralizing our position and digging our heels in allows us to exist as if there’s nothing wrong.
I’ve talked in the past about how my solitary nature is a result of having a low social battery and preferring to spend time by myself at home. I identify myself as someone who doesn’t do friend groups and floats around different circles. These are true things, but they also reflect a deep-seated fear of wasting people’s time, or not being worth spending time, they reflect my distaste for the conflicts that can appear when regularly dealing with friend groups. Fisher-Quann on the subject, “When relationships are made difficult by traumas, anxieties, and neuroses — and when those issues are triggered as you navigate complicated relationships — being alone really can feel a lot like being cured.“
Even after I spent time working on myself and improving lots of the aspects of my mental state, I can’t help but notice how much I’ve withdrawn from the world as a means of finding the “peaceful” life that I live these days. My life is simple and sometimes meaningful and wonderful in many ways, but as I spend much of my days in my room listening to music or laying on my couch watching TV, I wonder if I’m skipping out on the living part of being alive. I’ve mastered the acts of being alone, but...
Being alone is hard, to be sure, but it’s also deceptively easy — it requires nothing of us. People, on the other hand, challenge us. They infuse our life with stakes. You can hurt a friend or partner or lose them forever if you refuse vulnerability or reject growth — the same cannot be said of a therapist, for instance, which makes them far safer companions.
The danger and unpredictability of people is what makes avoiding them make the world feel simpler and peaceful, but what do we really have without them.
One last quote:
The process of becoming yourself is not a corporate desk job, and it is not homework, and it is not an unticked box languishing on a to-do list. You do not have to treat your flaws like action items that must be systematically targeted and eliminated in order to receive a return on investment. You have no supervisor; you should not be punished when you fail. Your job is not to lock the doors and chisel at yourself like a marble statue in the darkness until you feel quantifiably worthy of the world outside. Your job, really, is to find people who love you for reasons you hardly understand, and to love them back, and to try as hard as you can to make it all easier for each other.
I don’t know if I can even add anything to this. My jaw dropped as I read this, as if she had grabbed my shoulders and looked deep into my soul to deliver the message to me in particular (as far as I know, she does not know who I am). I truly wish that life could be as simple as a to-do list of actions to become whole, a clear path forward to living a meaningful life. Instead, what she suggests is much harder and much more meaningful. I’m reminded of Ram Dass’s quote, “we're all just walking each other home.”
Drops of the Week
ALBUM - Either/Or by Elliot Smith - good album for solitude
POEM - "What Were You Waiting For" by Aria Aber - it's national poetry month!
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Figuring it out,
Nikhil