I Clicked a Button
disentangling from grad school (for now)
Three days ago I drafted an email to the administrators of the mental health counseling program I’ve been attending. I said I’d be taking a hiatus. I said some positive (and true) things about the program and the teachers and my classmates. “Mostly,” I said, “this choice has to do with a felt sense that there are some other options that are calling to be explored before I can fully commit to the path of becoming a therapist. I think it's very possible that I'll return after this exploratory period to continue my degree in winter 2024—assuming I'd be allowed to do so.”
I wrote this and then I hovered my mouse pointer over the Send button for a long time. I sensed that this was probably a move I wanted to make—it had felt pretty good to write the email, and I’d been thinking about this from many different angles for a while—but I wanted to be in full alignment before I flicked the switch. And what I found when I hovered was… I wasn’t. I was hovering.
So this became my process for those few days. Whenever I had time between classes and final projects, I’d pull up the email; almost click Send; feel stuff; and this would take me back either to my journal, to think through something I hadn’t yet, or to the internet, to look something up, or, most often, to the loveseat next to my desk, to lie down and feel some patterns of emotion that I had been neglecting to feel in some cases for a very long time. Helped along by some very good advice from friends, I did my best not to collapse the tension, not to preempt an answer or “rush my defenses,” a phrase that kept swimming through my head, a phrase I once read as a description of the internal gesture that precedes suicide.
I am surprised how effective this simple algorithm was in getting me unstuck. I guess I’ve been hinting for a while in this newsletter about “a big decision” I’ve been trying to make, which has prompted a number of kind people to ask me what the hell I’m talking about—sorry, I didn’t mean to build suspense, I kinda didn’t think you were reading that closely. A lot of processing and situational change had had to happen before I drafted that email. But working from the trigger point, so to speak, was immensely clarifying. It ensured that whatever resistance came up was actually relevant to the choice at hand, and it told me in no uncertain terms that yes, I really was pretty terrified of making this leap, whereas my earlier convolutions had just sort of predicted that there were some fears involved that I should attempt to root around for.
Before trying this more direct approach, I might have guessed that it would “help” by producing a gradually increasing certainty. If anything, it had the opposite effect. By the time I clicked the button—and as the heading will have made obvious, I did—the feeling was not one of making “the right choice.” It was more a sense of being fundamentally okay with making a decision that didn’t make rational sense, and that I also had no need to justify to anyone. My final thought wasn’t even about my future, it was more like: Clicking this button is going to feel incredible. I mean the disbelieving kind of incredible, not the “it was so good” kind. Or actually, both. I wasn’t wrong. Clicking the button felt like falling down a warm, dark well that turned out to have no bottom to it. Or at least I haven’t hit the bottom yet. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, feels like I threw myself at the ground and missed.
What was I so afraid of? Quite a few things as it turned out, but these were some of the ones that appear talkable.
Not Having Enough Money / Wanting Money Too Much
One of the big things driving me to choose a “legible” and “stable” profession (does anyone actually know what will be stable in this century?) was a sense that if I didn’t, I wouldn’t make enough money to do the things I really wanted to do, and then I’d, uh, have to feel bad about not getting to do those things. When I looked into this, I realized I was working from a model that said something like, “If I don’t have a reliable and higher-than-average income, I won’t have enough money to do things, and then I’ll feel anxious about getting more and I’ll make the people I love anxious.” This largely came from watching my parents worry about money as a kid and feeling that it was an existential problem over which I had no control. A lot of clarity came from the simple realization that what had made me anxious as a kid wasn’t my parents’ lack of money—it was their unintegrated anxiety about money. In reality, we always had more than enough money, apparently. And, I’m very fortunate to have more than enough money now, where “enough” simply means having housing, being able to feed myself, hot water, and so on. Any anxiety here has been optional and basically just a tool for getting even nicer things and experiences. Sounds kinda weird to put it that way, doesn’t it?
I also noticed I was simultaneously stuck up against a contradictory sense that it was socially dangerous to let on that I wanted more money than I had—by, for instance, doing something that would be more lucrative than therapy. The model there seemed to be, “If I let on that I want a lot of money, people will resent me the way I’ve often resented people who have or pursue a lot of money.” There was a feeling in there that I’d end up resenting myself and doing things that went against my principles. Wanting money felt like evidence that I wasn’t a good person or didn’t care about the right things, I think connected with another model I was working from (see next section). This seemed to loosen up substantially when I realized I’m not going to become an asshole to make money, because I don’t want to and because various forms of being connected with people are the main things I want money for.
As tends to be the case, navigating between these two fears was generating an aversion to actually looking at the money situation, which quickly became apparent once stuff started moving. When I finally added up the financial cost of finishing this program, factoring in tuition, the loans I’d be taking out, and the fact that I’d eventually need to give up my podcast production work, I saw it was going to be much more expensive than the superficial estimate I’d worked out in my head when I started down this path. (I guess really calculating it would have been evidence of caring too much, or would have made me anxious about having too little, maybe.) Holding that amount up against the present strength of my desire to be a therapist was not a decisive moment, but it was definitely a clarifying one.
Helping People Less Fortunate Than Myself
When I signed up for this counseling program, one of the main ways I framed it to myself was that it came from a desire to “help people.” It’s true, I enjoy being helpful; this is something I know about myself. But one of the more interesting things that came up as I considered taking a hiatus was a fear that I’d be moving away from an opportunity to help people who are significantly desperate or, to use the technical term, seriously fucked up. I’m all for wanting to do this in theory, but why was I afraid of not doing it?
This seemed to have quite a lot to do with something I’ve already written about, a recurring sense, of which I only recently became conscious, that the real aboutness of my life had something to do with helping people understand and transcend limitations. If I was moving away from the people in and around whom these limitations were the most densely thicketed, I was moving away from the best way to do the main thing I was supposed to be doing.
Why was I “supposed” to be doing this? Reader, the answer was not as noble as you might think. When I actually looked at it, the emotional model seemed something like, “If I help people overcome their limitations, they’ll admire and appreciate and respect me, and then they’ll never leave.” This seemed to be creating all manner of dissonance with the path I’d chosen, because therapy of course is a context where the people you help absolutely do leave, and generally should, as part of the process. Anyway, they’re not your friends. I’m still working this one out, but maybe one version of what I’m wanting could just be more and deeper conversations in general? This Substack feels already connected with that.
But more important was to acknowledge and actually feel this fear of abandonment, which took shape as a running attempt to utterly avoid the possibility that someone I loved could ever choose to leave me. Turned out I was still trying to avoid the pain and bewilderment of my still-recent breakup, when someone I loved absolutely did choose to leave me. When I sat with this, I realized I was still working from an old emotional model that framed abandonment as “what people do when they realize there’s something wrong with you”—which then construed being abandoned as evidence of that inherent wrongness and therefore dangerous even to look at closely. This framing entirely missed the (more banal, less egocentric) possibility that someone could leave me simply because they wanted something or someone else more, on the basis of that feeling more right for them in their particular context, without any concept of inherent wrongness needing to come into it. I think I was creating a lot of unnecessary tension by seeking to push away the basic truth that abandonment happens, has already happened, is gonna happen again in myriad forms. In other words, I was trying to abandon my abandonment. When I stopped doing that, it mostly just felt sad and sweet, and it came with the understanding that it was okay to love someone, miss them, and at the same time know that finding a better option is possible, without any of these things in any way canceling out the others.
I don’t think these shifts lead to less of a desire to help people, at all. What is feeling clear is that I’ve been construing “helping people” in a very constrained way, which incidentally hasn’t been that helpful for that many people. An idea I’ve been coming around to strongly lately is that if you can’t give something freely, it isn’t a gift and people will not be able to receive it as a gift. Humans are too good at reading intentions for that shit to work. If I come back to the therapy path, I want it to be not because it’s an abstract good thing to do, but because I’ve discovered that it’s possibly the most beautiful activity I can think to share with other people. That seems very possible, still—it’s just, I’m lately becoming aware of large social and experiential territories I’ve never let myself consider entering, and, like I said to the shrinks, “this choice has to do with a felt sense that there are some other options that are calling to be explored.”
Having Good Conversations
A few months ago I made a list of things I probably couldn’t bear to live without—activities that, if the possibility was taken away for good, would really make me consider foreshortening my life. Conversation was one of very few things I couldn’t remove from the list. Hovering over the Send button triggered a fear that I was moving away from some incredible conversations. And what I seemed to find most beautiful in these imagined conversations was the possibility of sharing and affording insights and co-creating meaning.
Thing is, there are innumerable ways to do this. And there is no enforced certification system around having hypermeaningful conversations, as far as I can tell. (Well, there are some, but they’re mostly enforced by secret judgments and passive-aggressive jokes, and I might be able to handle those.) I’m wanting to spend some of this free time I’ve opened up exploring ways of having deep, excellent, insight-provoking conversations outside of the medical model that underpins most therapy modalities. Like I said, this Substack feels like it’s already connected with that project, though it’s early to say how exactly. Seems fun to find out.
Okay, thanks for listening, those were some of my worries. Perhaps I am trading them in for new ones I do not yet know.
Resolution?
Since starting this newsletter I’ve often found myself oscillating between fear of vulnerability and a corresponding fear of vanishing into the black maw of disregard—in seconds I can go from “whatever, it’s mediocre and dashed-off but no one will read it anyway, just click the button” to “Jesus Christ, how can this vulnerable and searching work of passionate inquiry have eighty fucking clicks?” I’m basically okay with this pattern, getting used to it, it’s a productive tension and infinitely preferable to my years of sharing nothing. More importantly, between and around those oscillations it will sometimes occur to me to be astounded and sort of freaked out by the quality of the very small readership I’ve lucked into. The majority of my favorite people alive are subscribed to this thing now, and, I’m surely biased to the point of derangement, but I have a suspicion that some of you may be the wisest, most intelligent, most hope-inspiring people currently inhabiting this planet. God that sounds pandering! but I don’t know how else to say it. It’s a trip to see each week that I haven’t lost you, that you’re still reading these weird inward-looking missives.
Now that I’ll have more time I want to find new things to do here, new kinds of writing and thinking to share. I don’t know what they’ll look like yet, but I’m glad we’re all here.
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