One of the recurring themes of this part of the internet is agency1.
This is an exciting topic for many of us, which, reading between the lines, means that a sizeable portion of us have felt deeply disempowered for most of our lives.
Earlier this week, when I asked him for writing advice, Sasha Chapin told me that my core issue is an absurd amount of throat-clearing. He read my newest post and neatly diagnosed a recurring pattern across various creative endeavours, but also life more broadly — the need to self-justify, self-soothe, to hedge, to acknowledge flaws and imperfections, get in there quick and admit that I probably shouldn’t be doing this, that I’m dull, that I’m shit. That is, to live in a space of disempowerment, a quaking fear of taking up space.
Really, the throat-clearing is me reassuring myself that it’s ok for me to be here, and that my experience is real. Really, it’s me desperately hoping to receive this reassurance from others in such a way that it rewires my nervous system and I can finally feel safe.
“Is it ok that I’m here?”.
“Do you approve of me?”.
“If I take up space, will you be bored, disinterested, will you sneer, will you hear me?”.
“Are you going to shoot me down?”.
“I know I’m dumb, I know this idea is stupid”.
“I know I shouldn’t be here”.
In addition to my writing, the throat-clearing energy shows up in the amount that I do, that I share. For example, there’s my digital scrapbook that shows all the thinking I’ve done each day for months. “Look how much I’m doing!” “Look how much I’m trying!” “Am I worthy of love?”.
Sasha hit the nail on the head so cleanly, surfacing a pattern that shows up in every area of my life, and as such, I fear that “stop throat-clearing!” may be easier said than done; I fear that throat-clearing is a fundamental part of my character.
But then, I have learned things that can help, and I know I can change. Let me plant this flag in the ground - soon after this, no more. Let’s have this be the final time I explain myself.
So, for the final time: why the constant need for self-justification? It’s simple, and sadly, it’s that classic mix of eye-roll-inducing banality, so predictable, so gauche, but also heart-wrenching to live.
I have lived for 29 years without real parents, without role models. My family are shell-shocked and staggering, refusing to let their eyes alight on all the ruined territory.
By “nuclear family”, I mean radioactive and decaying
I’ve been disempowered by a toxic home environment
I grew up in a chronically invalidating environment - it’s called England. The working-class, emotionally illiterate subregion of England, to make things worse. In a family where the parents glossed over their relationship troubles and adopted a traumatised child before “trauma” had entered the lexicon, split up a year later, and never had the resources or gumption required to clear the rubble, the father moving to the next village to live alone and have us on weekends, the mother remaining in the recently happy home with a heartbroken 8-year-old son and a 6-year-old adopted daughter, this shattered family unit and newly conflict-ridden home a nervous-system-poisoning environment to grow up in, nowhere safe to go for 10 years until I stumbled off to university and discovered how broken the whole thing had made me.
In working-class, emotionally illiterate England, people are suffering, and it’s very important that you contort yourself in such a way to not remind them of this fact — to plaster on a smile, load up on small-talk topics, a cheery veneer to hide the horror. Work hard to suppress the ever-present thought - “How can you live like this?”
As such, I have not had a straightforward relationship with a parent since I was eight, no heartfelt genuine interest or quality time in a safe space, as the traumatised child they should not have adopted was always in tow, and even if we spent time alone, the disastrous life they had inflicted on us was always the profound elephant in the room. “How can you have done this?”
And so, it was up to me to pretend that everything was ok. This is fine, this is life now. What other option was there for any of us? Who in emotionally illiterate England could throw up their hands and admit to having made a profound mistake, to having brought cheerful thoughtless naiveté to a game with the highest imaginable stakes, and to then do the deeply brave and painful thing of admitting to having inadequate emotional maturity to raise a child who was a thousand times more difficult than promised, “we are humbled, forgive us, please take her back”.
No, the best option in working-class England is to act as if everything’s ok, knowing that friends and family members will be happy to do the same; this such a vital part of the cultural script, after all. And now, we would-be happy parents must cast aside large parts of our internal worlds, emotional depths and natural curiosities to ensure that we can carry on without bumping into the very obvious fact that we did profound damage to ourselves, our child who we love so deeply, and a child in desperate need of a happy home who we robbed of the opportunity, and who was already robbed of the opportunity by her birth family. This shame is something that we can never face, so now we contort and carry on.
So, that’s one part of this: childhood and teenage years of eggshell walking, no one to validate my anger, my heartbreak, because we can’t talk about it, we’re in it. I had to subjugate my feelings to protect my family for the most formative years of my life, and they’d like me to keep doing this. Even as an adult, the dynamics remain unchanged: to talk about it is believed to be futile, and I am oppressed by thoughts of “well, how can I complain, I’ve been luckier than the rest of them, after all”.
So yes, the impulse to self-justify and hedge is taking some unlearning, and the bravery to refuse to play along anymore.
Deep terror at having my awkwardness acknowledged
I’ve been disempowered by not having the tools to escape my trauma
I spent the first eight years of adulthood deeply socially anxious, probably suffering from something like cPTSD (three therapists concur). Where the lucky few (or perhaps the lucky majority?) will have enjoyed university, I was mostly a strange and difficult presence, profoundly awkward, rigidly contorted to reduce the attackable surface area. The first year of university was where I discovered my shellshocked nature, the first time living away from home, seeing myself in the mirror of housemates who seemed bizarrely easeful and able to just, like, hang out.
I developed a knack for self-deprecation in order to signal my own self-awareness, to apologise for my lack of comfort, and so that no one could surprise me. “I know I’m fucking weird, I know I’m trapped in this calcification, you can’t disapprove of me more than I disapprove of myself”.
Even post-kensho, post-social anxiety, the stories remain. It’s like I’ve unlocked deep okayness but still live in the shadow of those terrible years, like enough time has not yet passed to give me stories to tell without having to acknowledge how bad the majority of my life has been. At Ship It Week, I mostly skirted around the edges of connection, of group conversations, I stayed quiet, head down, always on the move. I know I shouldn’t really be here, I know I’m not fun enough, that my energy is bad, that I’m boring, a severe deficit of stories that I don’t need to caveat with “back when I had no agency and lived in the ruins”.
Dreams, un-faced and un-encouraged
I’ve been disempowered by a lack of adequate safety to follow my dreams
There’s a familiar cycle of yearning vaguely for something, and this yearning manifesting in various ill-conceived abortive projects, juggling too much, and a lot of confusion about what “my thing” is.
And then, years later, once I have expanded my agency enough to finally break through the aversion and realise that what I wanted was blindingly simple all along (e.g. to write, to express what it is like to be me), I think “holy shit, if only it felt safe enough to do this, I don’t know, ten, fifteen years ago”.
And then a further process of gradually learning that what I’ve been forcing myself to do (e.g., making money by working in startup internal operations) bears very little resemblance to what I actually care about.
Two reasons for the vague yearning.
One - the dreams seem impossible, they don’t fit the mould of modernity. Let’s say, hypothetically, that the dream is to be an artist. In emotionally illiterate working-class England? No chance in hell. So, the automatic, obvious move is to toss this dream aside without a second thought, “just a childish idea, I know I must get a real job”. “I’d love to do an English Literature degree, or a Philosophy degree, but no, no jobs there, I suppose I’ll do… Biomedical Sciences”. Cue ten years of forgetting that I love to write, to think, ten years of feeling off, without passion, like I missed the boat but can’t quite remember what boat it was.
Two - I had no one to talk to about my dreams with. Neither parent knew a thing about me; they were too busy trying to avoid their own shame, they couldn’t let themselves look at me fully, for fear that they’d see what they lost by their own hand. I was a forgotten child, my mother now obsessed with how difficult my adopted sister was, driven mad by this, and my father now drifted away into his work and beer and his own concerns. I was left alone. I lived in my room, door shut, years passing in a haze of video games and homework, unseen.
As a result, the dreams were memory-holed, left to gather dust on a forgotten shelf. I signed up for a Biomedical Sciences undergraduate degree, and when I looked through the STEM frame that now encased my life, it appeared that I had no dreams at all.
But the undercurrent of wrongness kept me searching, blindly, unskilfully, and eventually I was lucky enough to receive wisdom from kind souls and was reminded that this isn’t reality, it’s a particular way of viewing reality, and hey, didn’t you use to have other frames? Remember when your soul would shimmer and sing?
And then, once I was lucky enough to stumble across my (vague) dreams again, and once I’d recovered from the existential cringe of “oh fucking hell, I knew this ten years ago, how could I forget?”, I could then take halting steps to embracing the dreams, reintegrating them, wiping the dust away and humbling myself to begin again, twenty-nine far too old to be publicly bad at things I care about, but then again I’ve exhausted a couple other ways to live, taken them to their conclusion, so now there’s nothing to do but begin.
No more
This has been a gloomy post; my hope is that I can stop living in the gloominess now that I have explained myself one last time.
I was disempowered by a toxic childhood environment.
I was disempowered by not having the tools to escape my trauma.
I was disempowered by a lack of role models and support.
The strange gift in all this is that the suffering has provided me with an absurd amount of fuel, that my disempowerment story is the shadow side of a shimmering and unbelievable empowerment story, and that this in many ways is only the beginning.
I’m destined for excellence unheard of in emotionally illiterate working-class England. I have been gifted a passion for agency and growth and reaching new heights after a life of stubborn and often blind struggling against this poisoned current. I have crafted the tools necessary to climb out of the mud; my upward trajectory knows no bounds. Let’s climb together, I’ll race you.
See e.g. Cate Hall’s substack and upcoming book (co-written with Sasha), Rival Voices’ “You’re not powerless, you’re under attack”, this Romeo Stevens thread, “Things I tell myself to be more agentic”, “dead planet theory”, etc, etc