No More Shortcuts
Discover more from Pulling the Thread with Elise Loehnen
Thrilling news! I’m doing a three-day online workshop/retreat with Carissa Schumacher from October 12-14 to dive deep into On Our Best Behavior. (More on Carissa here.) We’ll be joined by my good friends, Lauren Roxburgh and Andrea Bendewald (you can hear them both on recent episodes of the podcast: Lauren’s episode on fascia is here; Drea’s episode on circling is here), and human design guide / intuitive astrologer Nik McRae (more on Nik’s work here). And yes, it sounds like there will be a transmission. More information, including registration, is over here on Carissa’s site—proceeds will benefit several causes, including people and animals devastated by the Maui fires. I hope you can join us!
No More Shortcuts
In On Our Best Behavior, I included a chapter on Sadness. While it’s not one of the 7 Deadly Sins, it was one of the “eight thoughts” that Evagrius Ponticus wrote down—when Pope Gregory I turned seven of the eight thoughts into the Cardinal Vices, he kicked Sadness out of the set.
While we’ll never know why, its absence is telling—particularly in the context of how boys and men come to experience themselves in the world. In the book, I argue that severing boys from their feelings results in toxic masculinity. (You could argue that severing girls from their feelings also results in toxic masculinity.) To quote psychotherapist Terry Real (if you missed our conversation about covert depression in men, you can find it here), these wounded boys become wounding men.
This past week I had one of my favorite interviews about the book. It was with a radio presenter in New Zealand, where we dipped into Sadness (one of my favorite chapters). This radio presenter was a man—remarkably, the first man to interview me at length about my book. I haven’t been hosted by any male podcasters, and while a few men have been present for my TV interviews, they’ve mostly wanted to ask about my career.
I’ve been surprised—really surprised—that no men have engaged with me publicly about my book, particularly because I think OOBB offers insight into the psychology of women, and is a clarifying read. (Movingly, I’ve received some powerful emails from male readers.) The book is also not blaming or man-hating—instead, it’s an exploration of how patriarchy lives in each of us and wounds us all, regardless of gender. (I might argue that patriarchy is particulary destructive for men—look at deaths of despair, addiction rates, suicidality, and the chaos wreaked on culture for further proof. Men are not in good shape.)
Part of the final chapter, the chapter on Sadness, is about our collective fear of death, our culture refusal to contend with the cycles of life. This seems to be particularly difficult for men, perhaps because they don’t cycle with the moon, or exist as portals of both life and death—women, on the other hand, occupy both ends of this spectrum, routinely. There seems to be a belief amongst men that they can outsmart death, or up-and-to-the-right in an endless growth curve. I also write a bit about the ways in which the latest wave of wellness—helmed by bros—ostensibly offers an antidote to disease and death through the promise of longevity, simply by tracking every input, and monitoring every morsel. The idea is one of self-obsession and self-studying—it’s ironic, really, as it suggests that a good use of a significant part of your days, this finite pool of energy, should be spent…obsessing about how to have more of them. Personally, I’d rather just live. With joy.
There’s existential dread at the center of the impulse though—the bigger theme or idea is the delusion that it’s possible to have ultimate control, to engineer a bulwark against the only certainty we can count on: We’re all going to die. I’ve written about this before (see this newsletter, “Fear of Life,” about the Chris Hemsworth docuseries Limitless and my dear friend B.J. Miller), but the age of bio-hacking needs to end so we can engage in the actual process of living. Rather than obsessing about our future, we need to be here now.
It’s funny, because the word hack itself is so strange and awful—its etymology is not much of a leap: it comes from haccian “hack to pieces.” Hack has a wide variety of definitions, including: “cut with rough or heavy blows,” “use a computer to gain unauthorized access to data in a system,” “manage, cope,” “a kick or hit inflicted on another player,” “a cut or gash,” etc. I don’t know why it’s the way we talk about our health—or really any other facet of life. I don’t want to hack. I don’t really want to take shortcuts, either, particularly when life already seems like an awfully short game. Why make it Chutes & Ladders? I think I’d prefer to just stay the course, come what may.
I was reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s beautiful book, An Altar in the World, where she writes about contending with a labyrinth, both IRL and in her own mind.
With all my excuses gone, I returned one late summer afternoon, said a prayer, and entered the labyrinth. The first thing I noticed was that I resented following a set path. Where was the creativity in that? Why couldn’t there be more than one way to go? The second thing I noticed was how much I wanted to step over the stones when they did not take me directly to the center. Who had time for all those switchbacks, with the destination so clearly in sight? The third thing I noticed was that reaching the center was no big deal. The view from there was essentially the same as the view from the start. My only prize was the heightened awareness of my own tiresome predictability.
I love reading Barbara Taylor Brown—a recommendation from recent podcast guest Kate Bowler—in part because Brown talks about God as More. And I love that. Here Brown is again:
While none of these displacements was pleasant at first, I would not give a single one of them back. I have found things while I was lost that I might never have discovered if I had stayed on the path. I have lived through parts of life that no one in her right mind would ever willingly have chosen, finding enough overlooked treasure in them to outweigh my projected wages in the life I had planned. These are just a few of the reasons that I have decided to stop fighting the prospect of getting lost and engage it as a spiritual practice instead. The Bible is a great help to me in this practice, since it reminds me that God does some of God’s best work with people who are truly, seriously lost.
Much of Brown’s work, particularly as she moved away from the church she grew up in, is contending with the richness of darkness, and the fact that perhaps it’s not our enemy, but the source of our growth. The richest times are often the hardest, even when they’re beset by diagnosis, decay, and death. As she explains:
When the safety net has split, when the resources are gone, when the way is not clear, the sudden exposure can be both frightening and revealing. We spend so much of our time protecting ourselves from this exposure that a weird kind of relief can result when we fail. To lie flat on the ground with the breath knocked out of you is to find a solid resting place. This is as low as you can go. You told yourself you would die if it ever came to this, but here you are. You cannot help yourself and yet you live.
And then finally—sorry, this is a Barbara Brown Taylor dedicated post—a final moment.
If you have ever made a graph of your life—writing your birthday at the left side of a page and today’s date at the right, filling in the major events that have made you who you are—then you are likely to note that the spikes in your pain bear some relationship to the leaps in your growth. It was when your family moved for the fourth time in five years that you learned to enjoy your own company in the months before you made new friends at school. It was when your partner left you that you remembered what else you meant to do in your life beyond staying together. It was when the doctor called about the spot on your lung that you finally made up with your sister. These are not the ways you would have chosen to become more than you were, but they worked. Pain burned up the cushions you used to keep from hitting bottom. Pain popped your clutch and shot you into the next gear. Pain landed you flat in bed, giving you time to notice things you never slowed down enough to notice before.
It’s the hard times—the sadness—and yes, the anger and fear as well, that shapes our experiences here and gives us an opportunity to grow, break, get bigger. When we try to forestall this experience, engineer against grief, lock our hearts against these most essential animating emotions, then what is even the point?
I’m reading The Sedona Method right now, a New York Times bestselling manual that came out decades ago. It’s a little wonky, but I came to it after reading this Hale Dwoskin quote, which took my breath away: “You cannot go anywhere to get what you already have and you cannot do anything to become what you already are.”
I’ll have more to say about this book in the coming weeks, but it’s a book about releasing and letting go of these big, big fears and emotions. Dwoskin argues that beneath the emotions and thoughts that capture our sleep at night, there are three or so primary drivers: We want APPROVAL, SECURITY, CONTROL, and SEPARATION—and sometimes a combination of all four, or their opposites. Control and Security seem most at play in our fear of Sadness—and in the context of a culture that programs men for power, perhaps Approval is in there too. It’s a weakness to show feelings. But our very survival depends on letting our sadness come up, at welcoming the end without needing to zig and zag to avoid its eventuality. I believe that accepting our sadness, in this culture drowning in grief, is essential for us all to move forward. Not so much so that we extend our own lives, but so we can extend our collective lives on this planet. Please encourage the men in your life to read On Our Best Behavior!
THE LATEST FROM THE PODCAST:
9/14: Contending with panic with Matt Gutman
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9/7: Understanding psychological safety with Amy Edmonson
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8/31: On What We Can Become with Kate Bowler
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8/24: Why Do We Expect Life to Be Any Other Way with Nora McInerny
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8/17: The Science of Heartbreak with Florence Williams
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8/10: What We’ve Chosen to Forget with Baratunde Thurston
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8/3: Accepting the Invitation with Frank Ostaseski
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7/27: Contending with Fear with Jakki Leonardini
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7/20: Our Collective Psychological Development with John Churchill, Psy.D
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THE LATEST POSTS:
How’s the Wanting Going?: The Magic of Group Revelation
The Layers: “I am not who I was”
Why Are We So Scared of Mediocrity? Mediocrity is a Cultural Construct
Splitting Ourselves: The Unintended Consequences of Projecting an Image
Tapping Into Creative Potential
Exercising Appreciation: This is a Tough Art
Radical Candor: The Venn Diagram of Truthfulness, Openness, and Awareness
Understanding the Energy of Shadow: Jakki Leonardi Explains
Let’s Go Barbie!: Ken is Biting My Style
Managing Our Energy: When You Feel Like a Bobblehead
To Counsel or Console?: We All Have Different Gifts
Full archive HERE
My New York Times bestselling book—On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good—is out now.
No More Shortcuts
I loved your episode with Matt Gutman! So good!
Hack-I love your thoughts on that word. I've been thinking a lot about how we use words and how many of the words are so violent, aggressive and assertive in nature..slay, kill, squash, and of course hack, as you point out. I try to be aware of the energy underneath the words-it's really interesting to ponder (I think!). Great post, thank you.
(Love Barbara Brown Taylor's work so much, have you read her book on Darkness?)