Zielschmerz and other obscure sorrows

Dear community,

It is always so interesting to receive your comments to my newsletter.  I welcome all your thoughts and hope to receive more of them.  Special shoutout to Emma D.,  for entering the conversation and responding in writing! No pressure, by the way, but please keep in mind that when something is being stirred inside of you by the newsletter, I would love to hear about it.

One of the great loves of my life is words. So when I found the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, I couldn’t put it down.

Before I go on to discuss today’s theme, I would like to introduce you to a few of the words that delight me and bring a sense of relaxation to my body (a feeling of home, in a way).

• Agnosthesia(noun) =the state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your behavior, as if you were some other person—noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene amount of effort put into something trifling, or an inexplicable weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed. (from Greek “agnostos”=unknown +”diathesis”=mood)

• Midding (verb)= feeling the tranquil pleasure of being near a gathering but not quite in it—hovering on the perimeter of a campfire, chatting outside a party while others dance inside, resting your head in the backseat of a car listening to your friends chatting up front—feeling blissfully invisible yet still fully included, safe in the knowledge that everyone is together and everyone is okay, with all the thrill of being there without the burden of having to be. (From Middle English “midden”= a refuse heap that sits near a dwelling)

• Pâro=(noun) the feeling that no matter what you do is always somehow wrong—as if there’s some obvious way forward that everybody else can see but you, each of them leaning back in their chair and calling out helpfully, “colder, colder, colder…”. This one has a video, too, that you can see here: https://youtu.be/w7l2hUp0CkQ?si=561-VbBrt0N84cXB  

Hope you love these obscure sorrows as much as I do!

I had house guests this weekend, and I thoroughly enjoyed their company and our conversations. One of the themes was personal growth, and one of the  things this brought up for me is how continuing to grow and develop even in the second part of life is one of the values that I hold dear.

What does it mean, exactly, to continue to grow? According to Positive Psychology (positivepsychology.com), personal growth is a lifelong journey focused on improving self-awareness, developing strengths & realizing potential for a fulfilling life. “When we follow a journey of personal growth, we choose flourishing over languishing,  replacing a sense of stagnation in our lives with one of hope and action. We move from feeling emotionally flat, our existence dictated to us by circumstances to (Keyes, 2024):

• Holding our emotions more loosely

• Changing the stories we tell ourselves

• Becoming more accepting of ourselves and others

• Increasing our tolerance for stress and the pressures of life.

Personal growth feels deeply aligned with me now, I would even go as far as to say it is a non-negotiable value, but there was a time when it seemed bizarre or even unhinged and very often I had filed it in the “things that people who have lost their mind do.”  Because it is putting the self at the centre of one’s life, which is a scary proposition.

Isn’t that such a paradox? If we have only one wild and precious life (thank you, Mary Oliver!), what could make more intuitive sense than wanting to grow, evolve, and become more fully ourselves? And yet, for me, the very thing that feels so obviously worth pursuing feels truly frightening.

So let’s examine this!

Here are some possibilities for which personal growth feels unhinged at times:

• Conditioning #1: Orienting towards the self, and around what is true for one’s personal self vs. orienting towards other people (family, children, parents, partners, institutions, religion, career, “social expectations”) is a disruptive orientation for the current order. Thinking about “what’s true FOR ME” vs. “what NEEDED from me” is a whole new paradigm of being in the world. It feels selfish to drop obligation and turn towards one’s self, especially if you’ve spent decades being useful, responsible, loving, needed. I also have a feeling that women might relate to this statement way more than men. (And would love to hear what you think!)

• Conditioning #2: The Self is an unstable thing to put in charge. If I  say, “I am going to live according to myself and be true to myself,” which self?The frightened self? The wounded self? The ambitious self? The horny self? The resentful self? The ego that wants to be admired? The part that wants to burn everything down and move to Istanbul? (true story)

“Be true to yourself” assumes there is a singular, trustworthy Self waiting underneath all the conditioning.  (And according to Richard Schwartz, the founder of Internal Family Systems, (or IFS, and you can watch more about this here: https://youtu.be/DdZZ7sTX840?si=J1MceQ5k8eQprvmj),  there is only one Self. The Self that is calm, curious, compassionate, clear, confident, courageous,  creative and connected  (The 8 C’s of the core, undamaged presence behind all the other parts that make us)).

• Conditioning #3: Being true to oneself makes one rebellious and less governable and  these are not desirable traits.

A person who takes their inner life seriously becomes much harder to control through guilt, shame, approval, tradition, “this is what’s always been done”, “after everything I’ve done for you”, “good mothers/wives/daughters don’t…”

• Conditioning #5:  Comfort is the ultimate value to aspire to and disrupting comfort in the name of personal truth is a sign of madness.

This conditioning rests on the belief that a good life is primarily a comfortable life. Safety, predictability, harmony, financial security, and the avoidance of emotional disruption become evidence that one is “doing life correctly.”

In my humble opinion comfort and well being are not the same thing.

Comfort can be restorative, AND it can also become a sophisticated form of avoidance. How often have I found yourself  staying in a  relationship, a job, an identity or a routine not because they  were right for me, but because disrupting them would be painful, inconvenient, frightening, or socially costly? From this perspective, pursuing personal truth can look reckless or even pathological: Why would one destabilize a perfectly acceptable life?

Plus I have a huge bias here and a conflict, because I tend to be attracted to people who maintain stability, while questioning (and secretly admiring) people who voluntarily disrupt it in pursuit of something deeper.

Do You, Dear Reader,  do the same thing?

One of my deepest fears when I say “I can't keep living this way because it isn't true for me anymore,” is that I may be perceived as selfish, impulsive, ungrateful, or “having a crisis.”

And yet, I can see the other side, too. 

The opposite conditioning,  assuming that discomfort automatically means growth, feels  equally dangerous. Not every restless feeling is a summons to burn down the house!  Sometimes discomfort is simply discomfort, and sometimes staying put is an act of wisdom rather than fear.

I am guessing solving this problem requires discernment- learning to distinguish the discomfort of truth from the avoidance of discomfort.

I will throw in one more idea in this soup: losing the discomfort of being a passenger is a steep price to pay and for some people not worth it. However, how does one fully inhabit one’s life if they are not in charge (meaning, they are not living in alignment with their own truth?). It’s assuming that the role of being a passenger is something that was assigned at birth and is not a variable that can be changed. (Again, I believe this applies mostly to women, who have been assigned the “passenger” role through most of human history).

And now, let’s look at the other side.

What happens when a value that is genuinely life-giving becomes so important that it starts creating its own form of rigidity?

You can remain completely committed to growth while questioning what counts as growth, who gets to define it, and whether growth should always be the goal.

• Counterargument #1: Personal growth can become another form of self-rejection

The personal-growth worldview says that one can change, become more conscious, heal, expand and in all honesty that sounds amazing to me! But underneath it all sometimes lurks the belief that I am not acceptable or enough the way that I am.

I am having a hard time seeing myself as full and complete and perfectly lovable the way that I am. And what do I do with myself if there is nothing wrong with me that needs to be fixed?

• Counterargument #2: Growth can become an addiction to meaning

I know people who distract themselves from life with Netflix, some other people with work, some with alcohol or shopping, and some of us (meaning yours, truly) distract ourselves from simply living by constantly trying to understand, process, transform and evolve, because there is always another layer, another pattern to uncover, another childhood wound to heal, another belief to question, another level of consciousness to attain. And it all becomes an escape from ordinary life. (let me not even go down the rabbit hole of what "ordinary" means)

• Counterargument #3: Growth can make you intolerant of people who aren't growing in the same direction.

If personal growth is one of my highest values, I will naturally be drawn toward people who share it. But eventually the one of the problems to be encountered is:  What happens when someone I love doesn't want to grow? Or, more precisely, doesn't want to grow according to my definition of growth? Possibly because they may value stability over transformation and a quiet life over an expansive one, or they may not want to examine their childhood or they may be perfectly content with their beliefs. And, from the perspective of someone deeply committed to growth, that can look like stagnation.

The hidden assumption here is that movement is inherently better than stillness. Does a  tree become more evolved because it grows taller every day. 

• Counterargument #4: Community requires tolerating people who don't share your values. I  often think belonging comes from finding “our people,” people who share our values. But what if real belonging  requires learning to remain connected to people whose values are different from mine? 

If personal growth is my non-negotiable value, I may inadvertently create a community based on self-selection: people who are curious, who read the books, go to retreats, talk about  consciousness, are willing to examine themselves etc.

Nothing wrong with that, I say, until I realize that I actually  start believing that my way of relating to life is not simply my value but the more evolved way to live. And this is when I become the judge of who is more developed or more evolved. And is this really who I want to be? 

• Counterargument #5: There is  a social cost to becoming too different. When I  began questioning inherited beliefs, I have  gained freedom and started losing belonging. Personal growth involved rejecting the life that my family expected you to want, not believing what everyone around me believed, wanting something different and not organizing my life around obligation. And that is definitely liberating, HOWEVER,  humans are tribal creatures and belonging has historically depended on some degree of sameness.So here’s  another paradox: The more individuated one becomes, the harder it can become to belong to the group one came from. And then one has to build a new kind of belonging, one that doesn't require one to abandon oneself and from personal experience, I declare that's much harder than simply finding people who agree with oneself.

• Counterargument #6. What if the highest form of growth is becoming less attached to growth? Early growth often looks like acquisition of more knowledge, more awareness, more tools, more healing, more experiences, more capacity. Later growth might look like subtraction: less certainty, less judgment, less fixing, less proving, less striving, less need for everyone else to evolve.

Let me examine one more thing I said, that personal growth is a non-negotiable value. I can see the irony in this!

If personal growth is truly one of my highest values, then I have to be willing to grow beyond my current definition of what personal growth means.

So then,  what if flourishing sometimes means becoming more, and sometimes means becoming less? (Less ambitious, less defended, less certain. less interested in optimization, less interested in changing other people, less interested in turning every experience into a lesson).

And even less interested in becoming someone other than the person who is already here. 

This all feels a little anticlimactic, so I will leave you with another obscure sorrow, that is touching on what I am feeling right now: 

Zielschmerz (noun):

• Definition: the exhilarating dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream.

• Meaning: It is the pain or fear of putting your true abilities out to be tested, leaving behind the safety of youthful illusions and comfortable delusions.

• Etymology: Derived from the German words Ziel (goal) and Schmerz (pain) 

With love, (a tiny sprinkle of) rage, and reverence, Your disorganized, recovering people-pleaser, community-dreamer, hope-filled activist in the making, deep-sleeper, clean compliment giver and receiver, not-a-true-exhibitionist, 21-day resetter, recovering prostitute, courageous by practice, trusting by skill, always with my head in the clouds, but loving my feet on the ground, soul worker (!), inner voice listener, pleasure list maker, Aquarium sleepover organizer, beginner-level meditator, wabi-sabi contemplator, self-fascinated observer, giving-up-machismo supporter, hot soup-slurper, enthusiastic and tired traveler, death by Yellowjackets antidote and higher consciousness dreamer, aspiring human rights warrior, zielschmerz-stricken,

Corina