Feeling through the chaos
More fetter work. I might try this every day for a month and see what happens. Would there be anything left?
I've felt heavy, for weeks now. It's like, as I've cleared stuff away, I've felt into deeper and deeper levels of dissatisfaction that were hidden away within the core of my being, stuffed into a closet and forgotten about.
It's a lovely coincidence that I've had a garage stuffed full of old things I've forgotten about, waiting for me to return to it for the past two years. Now I'm paying the bill, having to face it, and it feels awful.
I've been carrying this feeling my whole life. Fundamental dissatisfaction with life. Nothing is good enough. Everything feels...off. It's an almost autistic desire for order, in a life that feels chaotic and messy. Simultaneously, I've felt that nothing I can ever do is ever good enough. Nothing I ever do can scratch that itch, so deep beneath my skin, right on the surface of a bone I don't even know how to find.
So that's the backdrop for today's fetter work. That's the condensed primal scream I've been carrying, because I know screaming won't actually shift things at all. Maybe it'd make me feel a bit better for ten minutes, but the itch would be back, and with a vengeance.
I sat down with this feeling. Well, I tried to, but the distractions abounded. YouTube, chatting with ChatGPT about my dreams, anything and everything else. But, when I finally put the "else" down, I sat, and I tried to focus. And I couldn't. It was too much. So I moved to the floor. I placed the neck extender down, and stretched out. I felt the pain, I felt the discord, and then I spotted a cloud, sailing through the sky. I felt a flash of freedom, a hint of a time and a place from years ago, when I felt free and untethered, and when the world felt lovely and adventurous. And then it was gone.
I looked to the left and saw the underside of my coffee table. It had grooves cut into it. I examined the wood, the chamfer, the surface. It was lovely. My mind drifted to the thought of making my own wood surfaces — sanding, gluing, routing — how fun and satisfying that would be. I let the feeling fade and felt a bit more at ease. I turned my gaze to the C-table that I proudly salvaged from my time at LivePerson. I thought about how the other C-table had fallen and the MDF had split a bit, and how I would maybe replace the surface with a board of beautifully finished wood. Maybe I could make a base, as well? These were the most sturdy and wonderful C-tables I've ever seen. The base is so heavy. I came crashing back down to reality — I don't have any metalworking skills, and I don't think I could get there without a great amount of effort. It wasn't worth it. Maybe I could purchase a base from online? Ehh...I was just bargaining, at this point.
As I fell back down to Earth, the mess in my living room greeted me. Ah, yes, I have a ton of things to work on that are not these fun and rapturous activities that feel like flow. I have to clean my house and empty my garage. I have to work. I have to get back in shape. Ugh. All loathsome work that I don't want to do.
And then it hit me.
What was going on here? How did I go from feeling so light and free, to feeling so heavy and trapped? What ...is this?
I dropped my favorite prompt into ChatGPT, and started the inquiry.
My reality was overwhelming. I don't like where I am, and I feel a heavy weight in my chest. I can see beauty, but I'm mired in chaos.
What are the stories and the physical sensations?
"There's nowhere to go. I'm trapped. Even if I could get out of this place, get rid of this stuff, nowhere would be better. I would have the same feeling of being trapped and stuck and not being able to engage the way I want to, even somewhere else."
I was right.
"The feelings are bad; I have a tightness in my throat, a rawness in the base of it that makes me want to hurl or dry-heave. There's a slight pinch on the top of. my nose, and a general sense of unease or churning in my stomach. I feel like I'm clamped down because if I open up, the sickness inside will come out, and I'd be exposing my raw vulnerability to whatever comes by."
If you imagine this voice coming from outside of you, how does it land?
"If I heard it from someone else, I'd feel commiseratory. Part of me would want to throw my hands up and flee—'There's just no helping some people!' But, part of me would want to hear it out and offer some compassion."
"If I really consider it, it's clear there's a way out of everything. I just need to move through it. But, the voice is making it harder to move. There's just such fear. There's even a fear about being on the other side, because it's like... what if I move through all of this? Then what? Then what??"
"Oh...my god. If I resolved all of this in a day or two, I'd have to move on. I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, because I'm sick of moving through life like nothing matters. I'm willing to make things that don't matter into a fog that I can't just breeze through to the next thing and the next thing..."
"I guess I want this stuff to be here and be hard, because I don't want to deal with ...nothing."
What if you are fully present with the struggle?
"Letting go is hard, because it's a physical sensation in my chest. Even as I moved through that realization above, I settled into a deeper feeling of tension and despair. As I felt like I could move through this and breeze onto the next thing, the weight grew and dragged me further down, deep into my body. That weight, whatever it is in me, wants to be cut off and just left to die, here, in this mess."
"I just feel like I can't separate myself from that feeling, that part, to get to a place where I'm okay not solving this. The only way I could move on is the way I always have, which is to just leave the mess and move on. Leave the mess. Pretend it doesn't exist and just move on to the next thing... but I'd be bringing that same mess-making apparatus with me."
"But I'm trying to undo the mess-making apparatus, and that's the part that's so entrenched and... oh, fuck. I get it now. Order creates chaos. This is a law of the universe, the second law of thermodynamics, or whatever. Draw a boundary and lower the entropy in that boundary—you're consequently raising the entropy outside the boundary. There will *always* be a mess behind me, proportional to the fanaticism with which I pursue order."
"Well, now. By holding on to order as an ideal virtue, I'm creating the chaos that plagues me so. It's always right behind me, in my wake."
"Huh. The tension in my chest has shifted now. The weight is still there, but I don't need to do anything about it. I don't know what to do, per se, but maybe I can move through this without seeking so much order. Looking at this mess in front of me, if I just tune my desired order to 50% — halfway between total chaos and pre-big-bang perfection, the decisions just become so much easier."
"The desire and need for order just slipped off, and with it, the existential fear that I needed this, and that loosing it was tantamount to dying or giving up some essential part of me. I'm still here. Now I just want to flow and engage with things, no 'order' needed. What is that? What do I need to pursue?"
What if the pointer is curiosity?
"Hmm...thinking about what order is. It's about stuff being out of the way. It's about things flowing smoothly. It's about things having a place and not naturally drifting from that. But... any ordering is temporary! Things change! Things evolve. Order today is disorder or clutter tomorrow. What works now gets in the way, later."
"The nature of flow is to dynamically engage with something. Like, with woodworking, it would be drawing up a shape, and then making the wood take that shape. The shape is the order, but the grain and assembly of the wood is the chaos that needn't be perfected. It's like, the 'order' is the minimum structure necessary to define a visible goal. Everything else can resolve itself dynamically, and it feels good to do so. Even the mess here is going to ebb and flow as I work through it and as I bring more stuff from the garage in, to process. I just want to engage with those processes, unbound."
So...I guess you could say, I'm freed from another "core value" — something that I thought was a foundation I was building on actually had become a cage, an anchor I used to hold myself down.
Fancy. 🎩
Wonder what's next? Writing was one of them. I'm halfway through that. Feeling the tension of wanting to write for validation, and wanting to write for me. I'm not sure where that will land, but I got through enough of it to write this, so... 🤷🏻♂️
The share link for this session was disabled due to “moderation” (I guess it’s because I said I wanted to cut off a piece of me and let it die). If you’re curious what these chats look like, though, you can look at this simpler one I did about work.
I use the audio input in the ChatGPT app, or MacWhisper on my laptop to just rant, stream-of-consciousness style, to the AI. It works surprisingly well. I wholeheartedly recommend you give it a try.