The response I received from last week’s column was the biggest I’ve experienced. More than a week later, I am still talking to people about it. Many people mentioned how they relate, how they appreciated the fact that I put myself out there, that I was willing to share parts of my inner world. I appreciate the feedback. Writing these posts can feel strange—I think them through, write, and revise– and then send them off into the world. It can be hard to know how they land, and it's gratifying when they do.
When I talk to patients in the office, I can gauge reactions and adjust. Writing does not usually offer similar feedback. Once a piece is written, it is gone, and I can only cross my fingers and hope it's helpful. This past week, I was struck by the degree to which people felt a connection to what I wrote. This was also a cause of sadness for me.
So many people feel alone with what happens between our ears. We all have these thoughts, feelings, and emotions (yes, me too), and we struggle with how to share and communicate this with the people we love and care about. We spend 12 years in compulsory education learning how to conjugate verbs and find the area of a circle, but most of us are poorly trained to share our inner world with another person—even when we want to, trust the other person, and are trying as hard as possible to feel less alone.
This difficulty connecting often leaves us feeling alone and adrift in the world—even when we are surrounded by people. We feel a little bit apart from those around us. It is no one’s preferred state of being, but it is so hard to articulate the feeling that we assume there must just be something wrong with us. Everyone else seems to be having a good time, connected and engaged. This disconnection, we tell ourselves, must be something that afflicts me uniquely. That’s the belief, anyway.
Drugs—particularly alcohol—sometimes help dissolve this feeling and foster a closer connection, as does sex, but that feeling of actual connection remains elusive in a way that leaves us convinced there is something wrong with us, each of us a member of the “only one” club that feels this way. Turns out the “only one club” is actually crowded. Many of us are walking around with the same internal noise, the same uncertainty about how to translate it, the same fear that if we tried, it wouldn’t come out right—or worse, wouldn’t be understood. And at the same time, we share the deep longing to be connected to others. When we feel alone, it often has more to do with the fact that we have not yet learned how to show each other that we’re not.
I relate— I say this as someone who has not completed this journey. For me, understanding this process of learning how to share my inner dialogue with others is like mastering a skill—riding a bike or throwing a ball. It is teachable and learnable, but not usually innate. Moreover, this skill is most often learned at home. The challenge is, many (perhaps most) of our parents also were never taught how to do this. Like a language that was never spoken in the house, generation to generation, many of us do not learn it. And because we need the very awareness we lack to articulate the problem, it is virtually impossible to communicate what is missing.
This skill is not binary—it is not something that we either can or cannot do. Instead, it is something that we likely have more or less facility with. Regardless of what we have figured out, there is always more to learn. I think about my ability to sit with discomfort, to communicate with my wife and kids, to make sense of the noise between my ears, and I notice a significant change over the past 1, 5, 10 years. On the one hand, there’s embarrassment in that. Who the hell am I to talk about this, to offer advice, to point the way forward when I don’t even have it all figured out? I may have come a long way, but I can only imagine how much further I have to go. Part of me fears I’ll look back on this at some point in the future and cringe. This sense of trying to talk about this and help others with it at the same time, when I still have much to learn can make me feel like an imposter.
I am also learning to find liberation in the recognition that there is no end to this learning. If I am doing my job as a human being—learning, growing, changing—then I’ll be wiser in 5 years than I am now. If I am lucky, that process will only end when I die. Accepting that creates real humility, and also real freedom. I do not have to know everything, or always have the answer. Phew! Instead, I just have to be walking the same road, however well I can at that moment.
There is a Jewish saying that you are not obligated to finish the work; nor are you permitted to abandon it. I think about this a lot, with respect to working both internally and externally. If we have chosen worthwhile projects in our life—and discovering ourselves is one of the most worthwhile there is—then we will always be in this liminal state of not finishing and not walking away.
We don’t need to solve ourselves to move forward, or even to begin. We just need to practice letting another person see a little more of what’s already there. Wherever we are on the path, there’s a possibility of sharing a little bit more, of being slightly more honest. If taking the risk of being known feels awkward or uncomfortable or a little nerve-wracking, that is probably a sign that we’re on the right track. I still have to remind myself that feeling uncomfortable is a sign that I am exactly where I’m supposed to be—still learning, still uncertain, still in it. If the work is never finished, then being in progress isn’t a flaw—it’s the whole point.
If last week’s piece created connection, it wasn’t because anything in it was particularly unique or special. It was because it felt like a bit of risk, of making something usually hidden a little more visible. That is a useful starting point: not to say something new, but to say something true—clearly enough that someone else can recognize themselves in it. At least for me, that’s my plan for making more of us recognize we’re not the only one.
Love,
Doc
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