The Joy of Forgetting Yourself Is a...

The full title of this essay awaits you down below.

Very roughly speaking, I occupy one of three states at any given time.

In the first, I’m anxious, overwhelmed, unsettled by something, and unable to discern what. My head buzzes with mild (sometimes severe) static, and my inner voice is somehow simultaneously dead quiet and unceasingly chatty. Fire burns unpleasantly in my solar plexus. Thoughts and impulses move like shadows on the walls of my mind, too fast to grab. I am running from myself, reaching for easy stimulation and preoccupation, and the awful feeling I am running from only gets louder and more incoherent in response. I itch to do something, to fix whatever has gone wrong, at least to figure out what has gone wrong and maybe find a solution—and it drives me in circles.

In the second, I am acutely aware of what’s going on inside me. A fleeting feeling moves in and out of my stomach, trying to make itself forgotten, but by its texture and timbre I instantly know where it’s come from, which part of me is feeling it and why. An internal argument kicks off and I can pinpoint the location in my head of each side. I can nearly reach out and touch the thing my mental monologue really means to say when it’s still trying to keep itself clean and presentable. Even before the real reasons for my various behaviors come into view, I can sense when my current explanations for them are bullshit. The subtlest drift in my attention registers as exactly what it is. This was an intrusive thought that didn’t pull up any mental imagery in time. This is something I don’t actually believe but I think I’m supposed to. This is why I think so. The connections happen lightning-fast. Nothing escapes me. Everything is transparent.

In the third, I’m not paying attention to myself at all. I’m absorbed in a conversation, a concert, an Ableton Live session, a dance, and I lose sight of the impulse to turn forever inward. I am in the event, in the work, in the world around me. The mental chatter quiets. The worries fade away. The condition of my nervous system becomes irrelevant. I have forgotten myself in something greater than me.

In only one of these states do I reliably feel like the best and truest version of myself. It’s here where I find the most love, the most willpower, the most clarity. It’s here where I am the best to myself and those I care about. It’s here where I am the most joyous.

…

If you haven’t guessed already, it’s the second one.

The Joy of Forgetting Yourself Is a Scam

Folks, I get it. I used to be truly painfully introspective, to the point of regularly crying and melting down over it.

I won’t pretend I’m “fully healed”; the crowd I’m writing to knows that healing is a process, not a destination. What I will say is that those crying breakdowns are now much rarer, much shorter, and much easier to go through.

How did it happen?

Well, I certainly didn’t get less aware of myself.

Those three states I described above are a gradient presented out of order; they’re what happens as my awareness of my internal goings-on gets more foggy, staticky, or altogether absent. My anxiety is at its worst when I hover in the middle. I can tell that something in me needs my attention, but I can’t hear it clearly enough. I’m trying to avoid my discomfort, but am just barely “on” enough for it to not fully work.

At the bottom of the dimmer switch? The place where I forget my worries and woes, where I stop getting distracted by my thoughts and feelings and just surrender to the moment? Dude, that’s the place where I forget to eat. That’s the place where my eyes get so strained on my computer screen that they want to tear themselves out of my skull. That’s the place where I internalize utterly toxic ideas without realizing, without having any room to reflect on them. That’s the place from whence I crash.

I try doing what all the cool people say is the way to truly enjoy life and find meaning. I abandon my self-attention in an important conversation, I set the intention to be “tuned in” during a group workshop, I give in wholly to my artistic obsessions, I follow my curiosity where it wants, I go to the big event and let myself go. Sometimes I only think about doing all that, and I’m back at the middle zone, but other times I really do get there.

And what happens?

I lose sight of the one big thing I meant to say. I get swept up in the group’s energy and cross one of my own boundaries without really thinking about it. I burn myself out on a piece of art I wanted to continue to enjoy. I spend hours researching an obscure cult and yeah, they’re fascinating, but I’ve stayed too long and now I feel utterly enmeshed in their dogma. I crash onto the bed of the hotel room and realize the past 3 hours, ostensibly an incredible time, are now an exhausted blur, and even though I feel I ought to be having a nice time winding down before bed and running my metaphorical fingers over the new memories, the memories are but afterimages, and I feel like shit.

And, inevitably, the panic mounts.

Because maybe I’m doing this all wrong, but as time goes on it seems to me more and more like “forgetting yourself” is just code for avoiding yourself in a way that reads as alive and present.

Some people I know seem to have given in to this idea that the cycle of get really worried > forget yourself in something beautiful > ride the wave of peace and enjoyment until you get worried again is, just, how the show goes. That it’s normal for the solution to be so temporary and repetitive, and that it’s normal to treat the mind as an adversary in it all.

And if that’s you, then I ask you—

What if you’re more than that?

What if you tried remembering yourself?

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In fact, why would we expect the process of becoming more to entail such a diminishment? What makes being “too self-aware” all that different from being “too much”?

I know better now. What I needed was never less self-awareness. It was more patience, more kindness, and in some cases even more self-awareness.

I know that sometimes I can be more particular with the meanings of words than is useful, but if you are “so self-aware” that you don’t feel what you’re actually feeling, I’d like to posit to you that you might not actually be that aware of yourself.

Why do you think I used to have a hard time discerning when I was pushing myself too hard with my introspection? It’s because I kept ignoring my inner alarm signal. I don’t think I even knew what it sounded like.

Now, I know, and I listen to it. When I’m in that second state, with the switch all the way on, I can catch it even when it’s shy. I can ease onto the brakes before things actually start getting bad.

Actually being self-aware, of course, means being aware of when parts of self don’t want to be probed with questions, when they don’t have the answers yet, when there’s something they’d rather keep private or a mystery they’d rather preserve. And actually being self-respecting means listening to that.

And also… after having put in the work not just to notice what’s happening inside me, but to build trust with it—to be loving, kind, understanding, patient, encouraging, unpressured to fix or solve and so down to just be present with—the internal lines of communication have become clearer. I know myself better because I trust myself with information I didn’t use to.

Just so we’re clear on this point: Loving and caring for myself better has made me more aware of myself.

What’s more, the more of that self I’m aware of—both the worries and the impulses and the mental chatter and the bedrock of grace and capability that lies underneath it all, not just one or the other—the more resourced I find myself to engage with the outside world.

The more I am with myself, that is, the easier it becomes to do everything that was promised to me if only I would “forget myself.”

The easier it becomes to be responsive to a lover, to have a good time in a group setting, to speak my mind and save myself from a bad deal, to enter a fun and generative state of flow and come down from the high with ease and care, to act on what I know deep down is best, to feel wind on my skin and earth under my feet.

When I feel more, I think more. This doesn’t surprise me at all. I don’t know how else things could be. Every “reject self-analysis, embrace feeling your feelings” source I’ve seen understands that, as Brené Brown puts it, we cannot selectively numb our emotions. How, then, could we numb (or otherwise dismiss, disparage, dissociate from) our thoughts and expect our feelings—internal or external—to come out intact?

Self-awareness, in my many years of experiencing a hell of a lot of it, is only distracting and distressing when it is incomplete: Clogged-up, poorly wired, foggy, and trying really hard not to be. But when the picture is clear, the inner and outer worlds stop vying for what illusorily seems to be a scarce store of attention. They start, instead, to coalesce.

Again, it doesn’t surprise me in the s l i g h t e s t that this is the case, and it shouldn’t surprise you either, because—

*deep inhale*

—that experience you want to be present with is happening inside of you!!

!!!!!!

Like, really, where do you think the felt experience of joy you want out of “losing yourself” would even be, if not in yourself?

If not in the very person you keep trying so hard to get out of?

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I have been careful to phrase most of this in very 1st-person terms, because that’s where I know this.

I also want to preface that building this sort of self-trust wasn’t always easy, and I didn’t do it without help and time. By God, don’t rush yourself here.

But I do have to say that, with all of that in place, I’ve made some incredibly close and beautiful internal friendships with parts of self that once screamed at me, wanted nothing to do with me, sent me into negative spirals, even visualized a special room to go into just to punch the ever-living daylights out of me.

And I don’t think I’m the only one who can do that.

I’m so grateful I chose not to take that inner antagonism as a given. I’m so glad I never threw my hands up and said this is what it means to be a person, and that reprieve from the suffering can be found only outside oneself, only in self-forgettance. In choosing instead to remember, I have found incredible reserves of strength, wisdom, and love for which I’d trade nothing.

In choosing my own company, I have been given back the world.

To my fellow auto-analyzer and “over”thinker: Don’t let them talk you out of it. The choice between thought and feeling is a false one, and there’s a reason they call it being out of your mind. Don’t beat anybody to the punch of forsaking any part of you.

Make your ways beautiful, instead, and walk them, all the way back home.