Think about one of those optical illusions where you see something … and see something quite different if you look at it again. It’s the same image but you see it differently. Most importantly: it feels very different.
Ask yourself: does your life feel worth it? If the answer veers towards yes then we might assume something happened in your early life where your carers regularly and helpfully mediated whatever life threw at you. If the answer is less certain than perhaps an important sense of protection was never granted you. You learned to live in FEAR.
Living your life in FEAR means somehow remaining hidden, protecting yourself by not being quite ‘there’: presenting a facade, existing in other places (for example in your professional work or in your art. These can be places where you can more safely be yourself because different rules apply compared to the unpredictability of everyday life).
Live your life as if it is absolutely worth protecting. Live it as if you believe this. You need the feeling that comes from such an experience; not, to begin with the experience of believing in the thought of your life being worth protecting
With the feeling that comes from the experience of living your life as if it is worth protecting you can lead a life where you might then feel yourself. Without an experience of this feeling you may never feel yourself.
See life differently to feel it differently.
Life begins properly for you when there is barely an as if. There’s a feeling of you and felt from this place life will seem so different. Possibilities, opportunities, connections and experiments will occur to you that would have remained hidden when you were.
Sometimes it’s hard to see the reasons why you feel anxious or distressed. Think about it: do you feel frustrated? If you feel frustrated it’s likely to be because of your capacity to recognise unfairness. When you recognise it, like a cat with a ball of wool you will not feel able to let it alone. Unfortunately, people whose form of stuck involves FRUSTRATION will never be able to avoid the distress that comes from looking on as terrible things happen in the world. You may do all that you can to right wrongs, to stand up to abuses of power, to campaign or vote or speak out – but that distress will never leave you.
Partly this is because the world provides a steady supply of bad things for you to fight against (and good, we must); and partly this is because your capacity to recognise unfairness will almost certainly relate to personal experiences of unfairness that you were unable to address in your attempts to receive CARE. Your RAGE instinct was not enough to get you what you needed.
There is much I could say about all of this. Psychotherapists tend to dig deep into the effects of resentment and so on. Don’t worry about all of that for now.
Instead search through your life (if possible with a good friend who seems good at caring for themself) and create a list of all the things you haven’t addressed which are addressable. There will be several things, each with a pseudo-reason attached. Maybe you haven’t written to a friend for a while (too busy), or seen the dentist (too scared), or gone for a walk (see ‘written to a friend’, etc). Those pseudo-reasons are excuses not to try and look after your own interests. In the distant past your mind, your body, if not you, consciously, knows that something bad happened when you felt an urge to care about your life and it didn’t go well. Maybe you haven’t signed a contract. Perhaps you haven’t asked for a promotion. Maybe your neighbours make too much noise. Perhaps your pillow is too hard.
Addressing the things that affect you up close and personally is the only way to ease your distress. If you do this then the world’s intractable problems will feel more bearable and you will be able to deal with them more effectively.
On a similar and more complex note you may be interested in reaction formations. People who say they care are sometimes surprisingly cruel. And finally, on the subject of care:
