War

My “story brain” is malfunctioning this morning. Drawing a blank at the prompt. The critical voice in my head is having a field day. It’s only day four and you’re already failing. How predictable. Time to retreat.

Nah.

As I’ve been mulling over my theme this week—commitment and my rocky relationship to it—something’s occurred to me. In my mind, a commitment is a declaration of war. It’s a promise to wage battle against self and world, along with a willingness to pay any price necessary for victory. At least, that’s how it’s always felt.

In the past, when I’ve geared up to make a major commitment in my life—perhaps to make a big push in my business, or to start eating better and exercising more, or to finally get right with money and spending—I always did so with the mind of a general preparing for siege, making elaborate plans and backup plans, stockpiling resources, giving impassioned speeches to my inner warrior to steel him for the carnage ahead, to inspire him towards the victory we will surely achieve together.

But truth be told, I don’t have the constitution to wage lifelong war against myself, or against the world. I know it’s possible, as my mom has told me countless times. That’s how she got right with food, she tells me, and it’s what I have to do. It’s the only way. But with a lifetime of bloody battlefields behind me, I cannot stomach a future of infinite fighting. It seems an impoverished way to live, a squandering of the gift of being alive.

There’s a book I’ve had on my shelf for years called Metaphors We Live By. I’ve never actually read it, but damn the title grabs me. When I started reading about Megan’s conceptions of the art paradigm and business paradigm, and how the business paradigm is rooted in metaphors of war, something clicked for me. My attempts at business have been underpinned by unconscious battle metaphors, but so has the rest of my life. My relationship to food and exercise and my body is a war. My relationship to creative work is a war, where the only way to be victorious is to win the approval and adoration of the masses. Maybe if everyone loves me, I’ll be able to love myself. Hell, even all of my attempts at spiritual and psychological healing have been grounded in war, collecting tools and modalities so that I might obliterate that thing within me causing all this suffering. It’s war all the way down. I didn’t choose it, but it truly is the metaphor I live by.

About three years ago, I was walking down a Brooklyn sidewalk with the founder of a startup I was working for, and I had a bizarre spiritual experience. We were talking about moving our email list to Substack, so that our writing could be in conversation with that entire ecosystem, and I was suddenly possessed by an insight, like it dove out of the sky and landed in my chest. For a moment, I felt as if I had the Answer to Life. The phrase “everything is a conversation” was rattling around in me, and I remember trying to articulate why it felt so profound, so grounding, only for it to leave my mouth as a series of banal platitudes. The guy I was walking with was like “yeah, conversations are nice.” I said no more about it, but the insight hasn’t left my mind or heart since. I was gifted a new metaphor to live by.

Earlier this week, another insight popped into my head. Commitment isn’t about declaring war, but about staying in the conversations that matter, even when they get uncomfortable. The next few weeks are going to be challenging for me. I’m in the process of moving, just landed a writing client, and am working a 12-step recovery program as if my life depends on it, because it does. Life has gone from zero to sixty in a short span, and that’s often when my commitments start falling through the cracks, and I start retreating from what I perceive to be battles I can no longer win. But this writing challenge is a conversation that I want to be in, and stay in, until the end. And one thing I love about conversation as a metaphor to live by is that perfection is never required for a conversation to be beautiful. You never need to say exactly the right things, in exactly the right order, to be connected to the Other and to end up somewhere you could not have planned. You just have to show up, share what’s alive in you as best you can, listen deeply, and respond. So that’s my plan in the weeks ahead. End the war, but stay in the conversation.