Issue #124: How to Wake Up to Your Life
Let's stop distracting ourselves.
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Note: For the first time ever, I’ve recorded myself reading the full post, available to paid subscribers. It’s long and packed with information, but I also think it’s on one of the most important topics I’ve explored. I hope this makes engaging with it, or reading it on your commute, a little easier. You can also expand the full thing in your browser here.
You already know the way this story begins… When I exploded my life and my marriage, it was largely in reaction to the realization that I had been sleepwalking1 for thirty years; going through the motions of “good” grades, college, career, husband, and house.2 It was as if I woke up and realized, Oh, fuck. I don’t want any of this. I spent the immediate aftermath ripping myself out of the only life I’d ever known, operating in survival mode. As difficult as that was, it turns out that the initial awakening, and accompanying logistics, was the “easy” part. What’s proved to be much more challenging is the task of building a life that reflects this recognition, and honors a more attentive and intentional way of being.
It’s the difference between going through life sleepwalking, self-soothing through dopaminergic rewards like shopping, to-do lists and inboxes, TikTok, substances, and other distractions, versus engaging wholly in life. Settling into the good and the uncomfortable; the inherent difficulty that comes with being a person. To be, as Mary Oliver writes, “a bride married to amazement,”, as Buddhist thinker Jon Kabat-Zinn puts it, “living more in the actuality of our lives,” or even Emma Stone said of Bella on Sunday at the Golden Globes, “to fall in love with life itself.” When the in/out lists flooded my feed and my inbox3 at the end of last year, they felt like a battle cry for this reorientation away from the doing and self-distracting into being present and intentional.