Lewis Powell

My experience in therapy, at least, this most recent time I've gone, where I've found it very helpful, has had a lot of moments that felt like huge epiphanies of insight, which, when I try to explain them to other people, are difficult to relate in any way that don't basically have me telling someone else that my huge insight from therapy was something like if I stop putting my hand on the hot stove, I won't get burned as often.  This insight is true, but usually, the reaction is either for me and the other person to laugh that I needed someone to help me figure that out, or for them to worriedly inquire as to how often I was jamming my hand onto a hot stove.

This is why I'm sort of obsessed with my personal spin on the pagliacci meme:

In the original "Doctor it hurts when I do this" joke the punchline is a goof on the doctor being bad. You want a fix for not being able to raise your arm above your head, and the doctor says to just avoid the thing that triggers the pain.  But in a therapy context, I kept finding myself in the other scenario. I would be like "dating apps are making me miserable." "Well, get off the dating apps."   The Pagliacci twist to the punchline, is crucial (for me!) because I so often don't want to give up the things that are making me miserable.  They are part of who I am. And that is the joke.  I am literally making myself miserable, and so, the reason the advice seems to insightful is because it's actually difficult to see that I don't have to keep jamming my hand onto the stove, when my self-conception is the person who grabs hot things off the stove.

So, one day, my therapist was all prepared to explain to me how to identify and avoid emotionally unavailable women. She had spotted a pattern in the people I had been dating. And she asked if I thought that would be useful, or whether I needed that. I think her exact question was, "do you think you know how to tell when someone is emotionally unavailable." And I said "oh, they usually tell me, like explicitly, by saying something like they aren't ready to be dating", and she was flummoxed. Because she was assuming I would need like, help spotting the people so as not to pursue them. So she like put her stack of notes aside and said "okay, maybe you could try, when someone says that, not trying to date that person, and trying to date someone else instead?"  And I was like "hmmm...interesting."  Because that had not occurred to me.

So, that insight was "when someone says they aren't ready to be dating, don't date/attempt to date them."  That was a really big insight for me.  But it is hard to explain succinctly why that isn't blindingly obvious.  It's like saying if you stop putting your hand on a hot stove, you won't get burned as much. Hard to fault the accuracy, but wow, did you really need to be told that? (Reader: I did.).

Now, in fairness to that insight, we will eventually notice a thread running through all these insights, and so, there is a non-obvious insight lurking behind the scenes.

I sometimes felt listless and like I couldn't get myself to do the things I needed to do, and I just wanted to watch netflix or whatever instead of doing the things i was supposed to do. My therapist (this was the next therapist, because the previous one had a medical thing that required her to stop seeing patients), gave me this advice that was so good and worked so well I like wrote it down and took a picture and put it in a place so I could make sure I would have access to it when I needed to consult it again. And then next time I was feeling listless I went to look up this brilliant advice:  "if you are feeling listless and tempted to spend all day watching netflix/avoiding responsibilities/etc., ask: what am I feeling, what made me feel this way/what set me off, then do something to process/release the feeling (cry/rant/discuss)”

This one is less full-on obvious. But it does boil down to "ask yourself how you are feeling, then engage with your feelings." And again, this does not feel like super sophisticated advice.  A lot of this advice reminds me of when I started to take flute lessons in my late 20s.  The flute instructor was explaining to me how to breathe. And I mistakenly thought I knew how to breathe, since I had, after all, been breathing for my entire life.  But actually, no. I did not know how to breathe, and some very obvious things about breathing were just completely alien to me.  So, I had to learn about breathing in my late twenties. And similarly I am learning about feelings in my forties.  Like what you do when you have them (apparently "avoid them" is not the correct approach).

But doctor, I *am* do this.

I used to answer the phone whenever my mom called. It didn't matter what else I was doing.  Watching a movie at home, out with friends, etc.. Pretty much anything besides if I were teaching a class, if the phone rings, and it was my mom, I'm going to pick up the phone.  And I am very bad at ending phone calls. I don't know how to say I want to go.  I can say I need to go, if there is something that requires me to leave, but I don't know how to say I am done because I want to be done.  My therapist asked me if I was annoyed sometimes that my mom's call interrupted a movie I was watching, or something else I was doing. And I said yes. And she asked why I didn't just let it go to voicemail and then call back later, when it was a good time. And I didn't have an answer. Because I didn't know why I didn't do that. It was a good plan. I started doing that. I was less annoyed on the phone with my mom. So this insight was...to not answer the phone when it wasn't a good time to talk.

Here's where things take a turn for the less obvious (or maybe you know me and have heard this, or maybe you just know how these patterns go): I've complained, before, many times, to many people, about how much I hate that my mom will answer the phone whenever it rings. It doesn't matter what is going on, it doesn't matter the circumstance, she picks up the phone.  Even just to tell the person she will call them back.  It drives me nuts. My therapist didn't point this out to me. I drew this connection myself. I was like "wait, how did I not realize I do the thing?"  I don't do it the same way, I don't answer every phone call, I don't answer in all circumstances, but it's very much the same thing. I answer the phone, especially from my mom, even when it is inconvenient, putting whatever I was doing on hold.  And my therapist was like "the solution is: don't do that."

But doctor, I *am* do this.

I mask my sadness a lot (less now than I used to!).  And I don't like to talk about my feelings, so I am very good at reflexively flipping the conversation around to what's going on with you instead of me.  I've been consciously trying to undo these habits. It's hard.  My therapist suggested that I try just telling people how I felt.  This is among the three scariest pieces of advice I think she's given me.  But again, we're still in the zone of very obvious things to try.  I was talking to my friend Julia, who is a very good friend, and often has pithy ways of putting things, and I asked her once why my friends can't tell when I am lonely or sad. Is it just that they don't care? And she was like "what do you say when people ask you how you are doing?" and I said "I said I'm doing fine" and she said, "well maybe the issue is that you're lying to them."  And I wanted to protest that I wasn't lying to them, but it was hard to dispute that given my own contribution to the discussion.  So, in this case, the advice was some combination of "tell people what's going on, and/or maybe stop actively concealing it" (sub-advice: don't hold it against people for not seeing it when you do hide it).  And again: this advice is super obvious. I've come to call this one the Princess and the Pea principle.  I can't hide my emotions under a hundred layers of mattress and then decide that my only true friends are the ones who can detect it behind all of that padding. I mean, I can, but that's is a recipe for disappointment and isolation.  It goes in tandem with another nonsense rule I had invented, which is that help I ask for doesn't count. True help (according to the made up rules I invented) is offered without being asked, and so if I have to ask for the help, it's just fake help being offered begrudgingly and isn't real friendship or affection.  So, my only friends are psychic mind-readers who know I am feeling some kind of way, and figure out what i need without being told, and then do it without being asked.  Then I feel sad and lonely and unloved, but it's not my fault! (Reader: it is a bit my fault!).

"Tell your friends how you feel or they won't know," and "ask for the help you need, or you won't get it" are, again, not earth shattering strategies to be getting from therapy, but they were things I needed to hear.


The not quite as obvious common thread through all of these pieces of advice, really, is that if you ask yourself, "who wouldn't find this advice obvious?" or more pointedly, "what would be going on with someone, where they would consistently be missing the obviousness of these things, and need to have it pointed out to them?" and to get there, I am going to talk about Grover. Specifically, "Grover Goes to School".

"Grover Goes to School" was a book I read so, so many times as a kid. It had an audio tape that came with it, so you could listen along while reading it. It may have had a record instead of an audio tape, I don't remember.


I am going to describe the plot of the book, and then you will probably get to the moral of this story well before I did.  Grover is excited to go to school, but also nervous because his new school is not on Sesame Street and he won't know anyone there. But he really wants to make friends!  He brings his new school supplies, some toys, his lunchbox full of delicious food he likes, and heads off to school. He introduces himself, and then throughout the day, other kids are like "hey that's a neat pencil case, want to trade?" and Grover thinks "Oh, I want them to like me, I better say yes." so he trades his nice pencil case, or his jelly sandwiches, or his toy truck. He offers to clean up after recess so other kids can go get snacks, so that they will like him. Then, he has an emotional breakdown and starts crying in class. (Like Grover, I had emotional outbursts in school a lot. Mine went well past the age when it was socially acceptable. I would run out of the room crying, and go hide in the bathroom. When it got to be junior high and it was still happening, I just had to make it stop, so I just sort of didn't let myself cry.).  One of the other kids asks Grover what's wrong, and Grover says he didn't want to give up his pencil case or trade his sandwich and no one saved him any snacks after recess, and he didn't want to play jump rope he wants to play jacks, and the other kid doesn't know how to play jacks but is willing to learn. So they play jacks, and have fun. And then someone asks to trade whatever else Grover has, and Grover says no, he likes what he has, and it turns out it is okay, because being someone's friend doesn't depend on giving them things to make them like you. So Grover gets home and says he had a great day because he made two friends.  And the moral of the book, which is very clear, is that Grover shouldn't keep placing his value in how he can serve others, but instead, he should more or less trust that he is a likable monster, and value himself accordingly.

I read this book so many times.  It's sort of shocking to me the extent to which the lesson I am still trying to learn is the really simple, obvious lesson of this children's book that I read and loved.  The sort of person who misses all these obvious lessons is the anxious little monster at the outset of the book. The one who doesn't value themself, and who doesn't have a sense of their own worth.  The one who places their own sense of value in the approval of others, and so tries to make themselves useful and pleasing to others, and stuffs away or ignores their own happiness and desires.  They take on burdens that aren't theirs, and tell themself that they don't expect anything in return, but then resent that their needs and wants aren't being met.  But of course, they aren't telling anyone what they want or need.  So, they resent the failure of reciprocation, but from the outside, everyone else thought it was a gift, not an exchange.

And since we are talking about me, really, not Grover, when I was wrestling with a sort of half-awareness that I was upset with people for not doing things that I didn't ask them to do, or for not returning favors that they weren't obligated to return, I felt guilty about having expectations that I knew were unfair, while also not having ever addressing my original anger or sadness or whatever else was going on with my unmet needs to begin with.

When groups of friends were trying to figure out where to go for dinner, I used to not weigh in if my preference was slight, because I was worried that if I said I preferred Thai, people would treat that as a stronger vote than it was, and we'd go for Thai food when the other people weren't really excited about it.  My therapist told me that she doesn't usually give outright instructions to patients but that I should definitely stop doing that (I already knew that, before she told me, to be fair).

The thing is, it's hard to untangle your self-conception.  I've thought of myself as someone who is helpful and useful to others for a really long time. And it's not like I am aiming to replace those features with their opposites or anything, but when, in the same year, I am reading the Zhuangzi and re-discover Grover Goes to School and getting more and more of these obvious epiphanies from my therapist, and they are all telling me that I should stop placing my value in how I can be useful to others, it does seem like it is time to redefine myself.

But doctor, I *am* do this.

Here are some of the different translations of the title of Chapter one of the Zhuangzi: "Free and Easy Wandering" (Watson), "Wandering Far and Unfettered" (Ziporyn), "Wandering Where You Will" (Palmer), "Carefree Wandering" (Mair), "Transcendental Bliss" (Giles).  Obviously one of these is an odd-one-out, being the only one not to invoke the concept of wandering.  I don't have any working knowledge of Classical Chinese, so I can't really judge the relative merits of these translations.  My first exposure to the Zhuangzi was by way of Ziporyn's translation, which is what they call maximalist; but which is also reported to have the merit of capturing the spirit and tone of the work better than some of the more conservative or literal translations.

In the spirit of carefree wandering, I am going to skip forward slightly, past the story of the Sage who speaks of the Spiritlike Man ("Though the age calls for reform, why should he wear himself out over the affairs of the world?"), and go to the shaggy-dog tale that really centers my understanding of (and affection for) the Zhuangzi.

This story co-stars Huizi, the representative of the School of Names, and a friend and foil to Zhuangzi in the text.  Huizi is upset because the Duke of Wei gave him some gourd seeds, and he planted them, and the gourds that grew were ENORMOUS.  Too big, in fact, to use for the things that people use gourds for: 

Zhuangzi says, roughly, "well aren't you clueless when it comes to big things!" And then tells a *whole* other story.

In the town of Song there was a family that washed clothes, and they had a salve they used, to keep their hands from getting chapped.  They made a bit of money each year doing this laundry, which the salve enabled them to do.  A traveler heard about the salve, and offered them 100 measures of gold for the recipe. They talked it over and agreed, realizing that it would take them a whole lot of time to make that much money doing laundry.

The traveler takes the recipe to the King of Wu, who is engaged in war with Yue, and explains that he can help the army, because the salve will help them avoid dropping their weapons in battle (or something along those lines).  The army prevails, the King is grateful, the man is enfeoffed, and becomes a duke.

Zhuangzi goes on to note that the giant gourd could have been used as, essentially, a sort of raft, to lazily and gently float one's way down a river or around a lake. But Huizi was too busy trying to make it work like a ladle or a small bucket.  Zhuangzi suggests that Huizi's head is maybe too cluttered to think of these things, and Huizi retorts:


But you can't insult Zhuangzi by calling him useless. Because uselessness is a virtue for Zhuangzi: 

Now, we'll come back to useless trees, specifically, a bit later. Carpenter Shi (or Stoney, in the Ziporyn translation) will be the foreshadowed carpenter who passes a giant tree that is not fit for chopping and whose wood would not be good to use in any carpentry.  But the statement here from Zhuangzi is clearly too strong. Right before the bit I quoted we get some allusions to animals, and obviously in the animal kingdom, harms befall animals all the time.  And prey animals are not being useful in the sense that we are seeing condemned here, I don't think. So it will be worth unpacking this.  But the central idea being expressed here, seems to be: If you are useless, no one can use you, and you can't get used up.

This anecdote has a lot more going on, because the clever traveler makes himself useful and becomes a Duke.  In the story, this seems to be celebrated as a clever way to use the salve. However, we already saw (in the last discussion), that a sage knows better than to get involved in politics.  So, why use the example of political machinations, and political reward?  In fact, the folks who seem to have won big are the launderers, who sold the salve and no longer have to bleach clothes all winter.  There is something puzzling, at least, about the story, even once we have gotten past the superficial level of the analogy.

But this also reinforces the theme, which I have again noted, but not truly explored, of the sage's remove from the affairs of this world ("Though the age calls for reform, why should he wear himself out over the affairs of the world?").  But here, at least, we are getting more insight into why this is the recommended stance.  In the anecdote about the imitator of the dead, it was because you make more of a hash of things by trying to fix things.  Here, it is because you are a tree.  You can either flourish as a tree, or get converted to lumber.  But in addition to the harms that befall you in getting converted to lumber, lumber is used to manufacture the materials of the conventional world, and the conventional world is the problem you were dissatisfied with.

I am not sure I am fully grasping the Zhuangist rationale, here, to be honest, but a) fear not, this theme is not going away, and b) I think it is okay for me to allow my thoughts to wander some, so long as they are unfettered. 

At least, now, it should be clearer why the keystone tag for this post-series is "learning to be useless".  For me, I have really largely tried to be useful.  Sometimes far too much, sometimes without it being asked, sometimes in ways that were, it turns out, unwelcome busy-bodying.  Definitely in ways that have, on balance, been frustrating to me and have taken a toll.  When I first got into this text, it did feel like the work was yelling at me personally. Both in that I have been the imitator of the deceased who made a giant mess by rushing to the kitchen, and because I have been useful in ways that led me to get used.  I have found it to be, if nothing else, a good corrective to think hard about the value of unlearning the impulse of usefulness, and seeing if that can help me to flourish.

When I moved into my house (in 2016?), I was given a money tree as a housewarming gift:


It is possible that I have never taken care of a plant before? But a money tree is relatively easy to take care of. The directions on the card that came with it said to put two ice cubes in with it once a week. I would periodically rotate it, and I had tried a few different locations for it, so that I could get a sense of how much light/how direct of light it needed. At a certain point, the pot it was in seemed insufficient, so I went to home depot and bought the next size up and some potting soil and re-potted it. Eventually, it seemed to be getting too big for that pot (the one pictured above). I thought about going to Home Depot again, but remembered that my friend Alexis makes pottery. So I asked her if she takes requests.

Alexis was very gracious and said she would be happy to take this on! She said she'd be enjoying putting text on her pottery, and asked if I had any text I'd want on the pot. I'd been thinking a lot about trees lately, because there are a number of places in philosophy where trees turn up as pivotal examples. When discussing identity over time, John Locke talks about a sapling growing into a huge oak, and being different matter, but remaining the same tree the whole time. George Berkeley says he will rest his whole case for his philosophical system on the question of whether it is possible for his opponent to imagine a tree that is not even so much as being thought of by anyone at all in the universe. Margaret Cavendish wrote a poem in which a man has a conversation with the tree he is chopping down, trying to convince it that it would be great to be turned into a boat or the walls of a castle, and the tree is not having it. Zhuangzi has a somewhat recurring motif of a useless tree. Here is the relevant part of the Zhuangzi, it involves a master Carpenter and his apprentice, and a giant tree. This translation is by Brook Ziporyn. You can see a different version of the translation here by Burton Watson, if you like:

 

As you can see this is a very nice upsize for my tree's home. Here are some close ups of the new pot with text visible:


I was extremely moved by this. I found myself crying when it arrived, and after I had repotted it.  I'm going to spend some time unpacking that at some point, but mostly right now, I want to share the artistry/craftwork with others.  Here are some pictures of the tree, in its new home: