You’re likely stuck in a cycle.
You get excited about something.
You pour yourself into it – and your money.
Progress comes quickly, and you wonder how you can get better.
It may be weeks or years, but the enthusiasm fades. By then you’d already turned it into something to achieve.
It’s taken me the better part of a decade to really see this pattern in my life.
And I didn’t see this on my own. It took reading about how we develop before I began noticing it everywhere.
I wasn’t totally blind before then either. I could sense I was attaching my worth to these projects. I just kept going anyway.
I assume I’m doing it now. I can feel the edges of it, but I can’t quite name it.
Past Midnight
One Thursday evening after work I found myself alone in my apartment with no plans.
In the silence the restlessness began to build.
I didn’t know what else to do so I dove straight into parts work. It felt safer than trying to just be with my thoughts.
Insights came and went. I tried breathing techniques to release. I tried negotiating with the parts to let go. And the whole time I knew that forcing it was not how this works.
I forced it anyway. I was still sitting there past midnight, further from anything than when I started.
And I’d been doing this most nights for months.
I told myself I was healing.
The Achiever Finds Healing
I began meditating consistently at the beginning of this year.
I found my fears and anxieties slowly started to melt away, and for the first time in thirty years I felt like I was actually comfortable being me.
But I found my psyche had begun to reorganize itself in an attempt to recreate this feeling.
This protective part of my psyche crafted the narrative I needed to purge every imperfection.
The motivation underneath was one of neediness, and it held little regard for the rest of me.
I sought out the parts of me that were riddled in shame from early childhood years to adulthood.
Most of it sat in my throat. The part of my body that learned it was better to repress my voice than to use it.
I even went after the burdens I was carrying from my mother and father – painful experiences that were never mine, but lived in me as if they were.
I pushed and pushed. Took my mind to the breaking point.
I could feel my grip on reality clenching, yet I kept dismantling the scaffolding I was standing on.
The self that I was tearing down had no time to rebuild itself.
An ego just doesn’t disappear. It gets reintegrated into something more generative.
But that takes time.
And my need to arrive at a new self couldn’t wait.
I was slow to pick up on this at first.
To be honest, I thought my ego was more mature than how I was acting.
I’d watched this show up in my life before.
I wasn’t satisfied as a pharmacist and spent two years of evenings in school to get my MBA.
Even a prestigious consulting job wasn’t enough – I was already signing up for Ironman races soon after transitioning careers.
I didn’t expect it to migrate over to healing. Healing was supposed to be the thing that undid the achiever.
The only way to save me from myself was to take my foot off the gas.
Lessen the intensity. No more metrics. No streak. No checklist to achieve.
This doesn’t solve anything. But it makes room for me to change my relationship to the work.
Given the option between sitting with my parts and being with a group of people – I’d choose the cushion every time.
The inner work had become the hiding spot.
It was costing me my life.
Dating a Hyena
At the start of June I had made the commitment to get social.
Toastmasters, yoga classes, dinners, improv classes.
All of these planned activities.
Classic achievement framework, but necessary to get me out of my comfort zone. To be around things that I couldn’t control – other people.
I feared improv the most at the start.
I struggled to wrap my mind around adults pretending. Playing.
After getting past the nerves of the first class, I found myself thoroughly enjoying myself. I was being genuinely goofy without it being some type of performance.
During one class I got selected as a participant for a dating show scene.
I was one of the lucky bachelors and got assigned to be a hyena…
I had no idea how to play as a hyena looking for a date. So I did the only thing I could think of and laughed hysterically. At one point, I was on all fours wandering the stage as a hyena.
It was a big hit. In the moment though, I was mortified.
I look forward to it every week now.
I go when I don’t feel like it.
I go when I carry shame.
I even made a new friend. And by July we were hanging out outside of class.
What I found in my improv classes was that the achiever faded.
The effort of showing up was still there, but in class there was no agenda. No metrics. Just play.
The other activities didn’t do this. Toastmasters and yoga had structure to them.
I showed up, did the thing, and left. I barely talked to anyone. They got me out of the apartment but that was about it.
Improv gave me nowhere to hide. I had no choice but to be in it. There were real stakes. I had to be emotionally exposed to people I hardly knew.
Which was the opposite of what solitude was giving me.
Open or Closed
How do you tell if you’re caught in the cycle?
First you need to recognize the progression – excitement, investment, progress, and then the mapping.
But having the insight is not enough. You have to notice how it gets constructed – does it open you up or does it close you?
When you start mapping out how you optimize the thing, watch what the mapping feels like. If it feels like certainty, you need to be skeptical of it.
The mapping is the certainty. It’s what “having figured it out” looks like from the outside. And it’s why the enthusiasm dies soon after.
Ask yourself:
Do you want to teach it before you live it?
Do you start building a system around it?
Do you have to insistently check it?
Does it become an identity?
Second, you can’t always see this on your own.
If you ask yourself does this open or close your mind, the answer is going to come back as definitive. The verdict becomes a conclusion in itself.
The mind that’s running the show can’t always see the show it’s running.
So you stop trying to catch it yourself and look to:
People: close friends and family can tell you when you’re performing
Uncontrollable situations: business or relationships
Your Body: the sensation before the story gets constructed
Building in Public: how things land vs. what you intended
Time: most of this only becomes visible in hindsight
None of these alone tell you anything that you didn’t already suspect. But they do make it harder to dismiss.
Frameworks aren’t the problem either. Just don’t mistake one for the answer.
Which Self Is Surviving
How you go about implementing this in your life is a huge challenge.
I’ve come to see that it is better to default to a mode of subtraction in your life.
Now this doesn’t mean to live passively. You still have to make money. You still have to act with a certain seriousness to survive.
But recognize what is fighting for survival. It’s not your physical body, but it’s the identities you’ve constructed.
You don’t want to admit to yourself that you’ve constructed these identities because it would threaten their very existence. That’s why it’s so hard to catch. And why it’s so hard to outgrow.
In practice, you want to separate the effort from how you identify with the effort.
I’m trying to restructure my relationship to the inner work.
I’m not abandoning the parts still carrying guilt and shame, but attempting to bring presence without an end goal to achieve.
This is way harder than it sounds.
I’ve deconstructed myself faster than I’ve rebuilt.
I don’t know how this ends.