You know what you should be doing. You know the steps you should be taking, the little actions that will pave the way forward. You know you’re perfectly capable of taking those steps, that there’s no good reason to delay any longer, and yet… 🌞 a weekly newsletter for conscious self-creation 🪴 join 600+ subscribers: Subscribe What do you do instead? You scroll Twitter. You stare at the ceiling. You clean your apartment (again). You dilly dally. You do a bunch of things that you don’t even really like doing, and then you feel even worse.

The result is a vicious spiral downwards, where we keep doing things that drain us of energy, and then we don’t have the energy to do the things we actually want to do, and so we do more of the things which are depleting, and… well, so on, so on. Where we actually want to create is the opposite: a virtuous spiral upwards, where we focus on things which inspire us, giving us energy to take on bigger and bigger challenges, unlocking even more energy

The first thing to notice is that the things that deplete us have gravity. We don’t choose them freely. They pull us into old patterns, often without us noticing. That gravity is a product of fear. Your nervous system has one primary goal: keep you alive. It has one primary method of doing so: keep doing the things that kept you alive before. Our biology has an incredible bias towards the familiar, because familiar = safe. When our body is experiencing fear, that means our nervous system thinks we’re in danger. The fear says “get somewhere safe, now.” That translates to “get back to the familiar.”

Which means… if we’re able to be present and curious with the tension in our body, without trying to fight it or “fix” it or “solve” it, our experience transforms. Suddenly, the tension becomes almost pleasurable, as an opportunity to “be with” ourselves. This process does take a bit of practice, but once you’ve found it, you’ll know. It’s the deeply satisfying sense of “I am stepping into fear, but I am not alone—I have my own back.” 🌞 a weekly newsletter for conscious self-creation 🪴 join 600+ subscribers: Subscribe Once we’ve unlocked that feeling, then it becomes easier and easier to break out of these draining patterns. Attunement-to-self is an energizing process, so the moment we begin noticing what we’re feeling, we’re stepping away from depletion. We’ve instantly liberated ourselves from stuckness.

I think she enjoys treating her boyfriend like a chore because her relationship with her parents acclimated her to the feeling of being depended on. She likes the feeling of parenting and babying someone because her child-self had to do that to stay on her parents’ good side. In other words, her psyche felt like, in order to keep her parents’ love and protection, she needed to turn herself into a caretaker, going above and beyond what she knows she should be doing.

Patterns that are formed out of necessity in an earlier stage of life determine what you look for for the rest of your life. The behaviors you were forced to do when you were younger become the behaviors you itch to do when you’re older.

Like making a tie-dye T-shirt, the twists and turns of childhood shape the way we’re colored as adults.

There’s a flipside to the wonder of childhood, though: things can be as terrifying as they are mesmerizing. In fact, when I think about childhood the feeling that usually comes up is not wonder, but terror. I was afraid of everything as a kid: of my parents dying, of burglars breaking into our apartment, of the dark and dirty hallways of my elementary school. Even the shows I loved would scare me: there was a character in dragonball z, his name was broly, and even to this day thinking about the image of his face sends the faintest shiver down my spine.1 This is why I always say I’m happy to have grown up: life is less scary now that I’m older, now that the world is more predictable.

These two things seem to come as a package deal: life as a child is both mesmerizing and terrifying. I think there is something fundamental here. It’s the same reason why when people take LSD, they will either describe it as the most blissful experience of their life, or the most harrowing—and often both. Someone asked recently whether babies are tripping all the time. I’m sure they are.

a child’s experience is an endless explosion of vividness. Slowly we start to make sense of the world, we start to notice repeating patterns, we start to establish boundaries between “me” and “you” and “this” and “that”, and we get better at predicting what will happen next. Life becomes a little more manageable, but a little more dull. Our ideas about experience harden into rigid stories we can’t shake.

There are two ways to make the world more mesmerizing: to seek out new and increasingly intense experiences, or to loosen the filters that make ordinary experience “ordinary”. You can go skydiving, or you can meditate for long enough that walking feels like skydiving.

Where does the line fall between the parental responsibility for loving and caring for a child that you've forced into existence, and your own personal responsibility for growing as a person? I wish I knew.