what you were taught to want

Dear Reader,

When I ask people what they want out of the next few years, the answers tend to come quickly and sound a lot like each other, usually some version of moving up at work or a bigger house. When I ask about the best ordinary day they've had recently, the answers slow down and get oddly specific. Someone talks about a Saturday morning when nobody needed anything from them and they sat outside with their coffee until it went cold. Someone else describes an afternoon spent fixing a fence with their brother.

The two lists rarely seem to have much to do with each other. I used to think that was simply the difference between goals and pleasures, and maybe some of it is. But I've come to suspect that the first list was largely handed to us, and the second is closer to what we actually want, and that somewhere along the way we learned to treat the second one as too small to count.

Part of what makes the taught wants so persuasive is that they're easy to announce. Other people understand them immediately and can be glad for you. The things we genuinely want often feel too small or too particular to bother telling anyone about, and it's hard to imagine someone congratulating you on a slow Saturday morning.

There's often a bit of embarrassment in how people admit to them, too. They'll describe the slow Saturday morning and then add something like, I know that's not much, as though they've confessed to a lack of ambition. That little apology is worth paying attention to. It suggests we learned early which wants were respectable, and the ones that didn't qualify got moved quietly to the side.

I don't think the answer is to throw out the bigger goals. Some of them are genuinely ours, and many were handed to us by people who loved us and wanted good things for us. It might just be worth giving the smaller list a little more standing than we usually do, since it may be the more honest record of what we've wanted all along.

Yours in the journey,

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the voice inside your head

Dear Reader,

A woman I worked with kept describing what she called her inner critic, and she talked about it the way you'd talk about weather. It was just there, a condition of being her. So one day I asked her to say out loud what it actually said, in the exact words.

She had trouble with it. Not because she couldn't remember, but because saying it in a room with another person made it sound different than it did in her head. Eventually she got through it: that she was pathetic, that everyone could tell, that she needed to get it together. Then she stopped and said, quietly, that she sounded like her mother.

I want to be careful here, because this is the point where it would be easy to make the whole thing about her mother, and that's often not how it works. The voice isn't usually a recording of one person. It tends to be assembled from several, over years, and by the time we're adults it's been running so long in our own voice that the sources have mostly blurred together.

What struck me about that session was something else. She'd been carrying those sentences for thirty-some years and had rarely, if ever, said them aloud. They'd mostly existed inside her head, where there's nobody to hear them and little reason for them to sound like anything in particular. Saying them in a room changed what they were. She could hear the cruelty in them, which had been harder to catch from the inside, where they mostly just sounded like the truth.

That's the part I'd sit with this week. Whatever the commentary is in your head, it may not have had to survive being spoken. It might not have been heard by anyone who could have said, wait, that's not fair. A lot of it has been running in a closed room for years without much to answer it, and that's probably some of why it still sounds so convincing.

Yours in the journey,

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where your beliefs come from

Dear Reader,

Tell someone they'd be good at something and watch how fast they correct you.

It's one of the more reliable things in my work. A person will describe a limitation they have, you offer a small piece of evidence against it, and they come back immediately with three reasons you're wrong. It's like they're helping you get the facts straight. They know themselves, and they'd hate for you to be operating on bad information.

I used to read that as low self-esteem, and sometimes it is. But there's something else going on that took me longer to see. Those beliefs are doing work. As long as you're not someone who leads, you never have to find out whether you'd be any good at it. As long as you're bad with people, the friendship you let go of wasn't a failure of yours, it was just how you're built. The belief comes with a way out attached, and after enough years, you'd miss having it.

Which changes what it means to ask where a belief came from. Part of the answer is the obvious one, that something happened early and you drew a conclusion. But part of it is that you've kept it. Beliefs about ourselves don't survive on their own. They survive because we maintain them, and we maintain the ones that spare us something.

It's easier to think we absorbed all this from other people, because that lets us off the hook. This is harder. Nobody handed you the argument you make when a friend says you're better than you think you are. You wrote that yourself, and you've been rehearsing it a long time.

So this week, notice what you defend. Not what you believe about yourself, but which of those beliefs you'd fight for if someone questioned it. That's usually where something is being protected, and it's worth knowing what.

Yours in the journey,

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who you are when no one’s watching

Dear Reader,

There's a version of you that may have never been seen by anyone. It operates during the hours when nobody's around: the drive home, the shower, the walk to the car, the stretch after everyone's gone to bed. Add those up across a week and it comes to a meaningful portion of your life.

Think about what actually goes on in there. Some people talk to themselves, whole arguments, rehearsed or replayed. Some people cry in the car and are completely composed by the time they walk inside. Some people put on music that would surprise everyone who knows them. Most of it is fairly ordinary to us, and most of it has simply never come up in conversation with anyone.

Which puts us in an odd spot. We've spent weeks now looking at things other people can see, our pace, the way we come across, what we say about ourselves. All of that is real and worth knowing. But most of the people who've formed an impression of us were working from a partial view, since hardly any of them have been in the car. 

What I find harder to shake is that we may be in a similar position ourselves. Those hours tend to be so ordinary that we barely register them, which can leave the least examined stretch of the day as the one where we're most ourselves and least on duty.

So this week, if you can, pay a little attention to what you're like in those gaps. Just enough to see it clearly, since there's a chance you never really have.

Yours in the journey,

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what you reach for

Dear Reader,

A client told me once that she never remembers picking up her phone. She remembers putting it down, twenty minutes later, without much sense of what she'd been looking at. The picking up doesn't register at all.

I hear versions of this constantly. The wine that gets poured at 5:15 whether or not the day was hard. The refrigerator opened three times in ten minutes when nobody is hungry. The house that gets cleaned when there's a difficult conversation waiting. Someone will describe it and then say they don't really know why they do it, and often that's true. It was already happening before there was anything to decide.

What strikes me is how few of these we have. You'd think comfort could come from anywhere, but most people have two or three and that's the whole list. Ask someone what they used to do with a hard evening fifteen years ago and it's usually close to what they'd do tonight. The wine might have been cigarettes. The scrolling might have been the television. The habit itself hasn't moved much.

These are among the most private things about us. Your pace shows up in your calendar and other people can see how you come across, but almost nobody knows what you do at nine o'clock on a bad Tuesday. The kitchen at that hour is usually empty except for you.

So this week, see if you can name yours. Just the one or two you'd go to if this afternoon turned hard. There's nothing wrong with having a way to get through a rough hour, and you don't need to give anything up. It's enough to know what it is, and to catch yourself the next time you're already halfway through it.

Yours in the journey,

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