Don't stumble over something behind you

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Because the biggest thing holding you back is you, and your shit.

I stuck this quote to my monitor this week.

Don’t stumble over something behind you
- SENECA

I’ve been doing a sort-out in the office and, just like any sort-out, it wasn’t long before I found myself on the floor, in a stack of papers and memories, reviewing things I’ve done, planned and half-finished.

This quote was scribbled in a notebook from November last year, and I stopped for a second after I read it. Like most Stoic wisdom, it’s good advice - but easier said than done, right?

Old wounds

We’ve had a death in our family recently, which I wrote about in last week’s Friday Flurry:

Grief and loss are awful enough in isolation. But in families, significant moments - births, deaths, marriages - can act as lightning rods for dysfunction. The stress and heightened emotions trigger the worst in everyone, and at a time when people should be leaning on each other, life can seem lonelier than ever. In families like mine, riddled with pain, blame and misunderstanding, a death or a wedding is a reminder of everything else that’s wrong, the legacy of wounds that tear us apart at the seams.

I saw Gabor Mate speak last year, and this line from really stuck with me: Your deepest wounds show up later, when something touches them. Oof.

This week’s ‘something’ was the death of my uncle, but there’s been plenty of other somethings in the last few years. For a while there, I was baffled: why was all this stuff bothering me now? My entire adult life, I’ve been proud of how well I turned out “despite everything” - why was it biting me in the ass two decades later?

It turns out, all those old wounds decided to show up later. They’d waited until the conditions seemed safer, and now every time something touched them, I’d spring back in pain and surprise, hurt afresh.

Handling the moment

If we don’t deal with things as they happen, they get stuck in our body. In Willpower Doesn’t Work, Benjamin Hardy writes that “A cell is a machine for turning experience into biology.”

Science supports this. Trauma creates inflammation. Our cells harden and close in response to danger - which is temporarily fine, but problematic if it persists. If we don’t process the experience, we get stuck like that. If we stay like that for a long time, our immune systems suffer. We’re also at increased risk of high blood pressure, obesity, artery-clogging deposits, and neurological changes that underpin anxiety, depression and addiction. Yikes.

If you don’t deal with stress at the time, it will stick around for the long-term and make you sick. (If my experience is anything to go by, it might also make you an unreasonable asshole.) Which means the smartest thing to do is handle things in the moment. Animals are great at this - they literally shake it off. Humans, not so much.

If you’re stressed, disappointed, betrayed, embarrassed, hurt or guilty, it’s easier to avoid it. To tell yourself it’s fine, busy yourself with distraction, avoid the interpersonal conflict or internal reckoning, and rock on.

But doing that doesn’t make it go away. It converts your experience into biology, and affects how you show up later on - which you may not even be conscious of. If it’s safe to tackle tricky things at the time (and I want to be clear: it isn’t always safe to!), then your mind, body and future prospects will thank you for it.

Processing the past

It’s all well and good to start dealing with difficulty head-on. You can’t stumble over something in the future, if you eliminated it in the moment.

But what about your past? The shameful failures, the painful rejections, the people who broke your trust or hurt you, the regretful decisions, the missed opportunities?

You can’t deal with that stuff in the moment anymore - but here’s something interesting: your body doesn’t seem to know that. Every time something touches the wound, your body will attempt a do-over, trying to resolve the initial problem, and sending you into no-feeling or big-feeling territory (and rarely a level in between.)

You can’t change history. That requires time-travel, and if movies have taught us anything, it’s that even if.you can change the past, you shouldn’t. There’s too many interwoven pieces of you and your life that need that history to have happened.

But you can release the energy that holding on is costing you. You can become a bit of self-detective, work out how your unprocessed stuff is showing up in your present, and work through it bit by bit. Feel that stuff. Get some therapy. Do the work.

What mine looks like

I’ve done a lot of introspection this week, as the storm of family drama swirls overhead, and I’ve had to constantly remind myself of a few key things:

When I act out, it’s my nervous system trying to get a do-over at something that happened in the past
There’s literally no action I can take that will change the past
If I’m angry, irritated, overwhelmed, anxious or being an asshole, I’m probably sad
It’s safe to be sad now. I may as well just do that for a bit, and see if the internal chaos and external moodiness resolves itself.

After a lifetime of avoiding being sad, it turns out that it’s better to just do that.

(As opposed to, say, stuffing it down and having a meltdown further down the road, risking or damaging my business, relationships, friendships or self-care. Hypothetically speaking.)

I’ve got about a 50/50 hit rate, but I’m getting there, and every time something like this week’s drama sets me off, I try and do a better job of it.