The Deterministic Deadlock

daniel jacob self
Jul 29, 2023
3 min read

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❣️ Are you a current client? First time here?

I'm self conscious

I want to take a moment to talk about what you're going to hear here.

This is a place where, through the medium of heightened, poetic prose music, and sometimes even dance, everything from the minutia of day to day neuroses — so often written off as petty or melodramatic — to the depths of isolation and despair — so often obfuscated, lest it show us to be weak or sick or incapable — can be given voice without judgment.

Many of us silence these parts of ourselves, but especially, ironically, those of us who facilitate healing for others.

All of the philosophies and practices I share in my writing and my facilitation are the fruits of my own lifelong healing journey. The wisdom that I've been gifted by mentors and family and friends. The community around me and the community within me. All the parts of me: the angry, the hurt, the joyful, the resilient, the despairing.

So much of what I'm able to offer to those I work with comes from some initial moment of pain or discomfort in me that has led me to seek out greater wholeness. Which I'm then able to share with you: my community and my clients.

So often we see the fruits of a healing journey, but don't get any insights into the labor: the twists and turns along the way.

We see the shiny outcomes, but not the pain that often motivated us to seek the healing out in the first place, or keeps us committed to the work of collective healing.

So Self Conscious is, in essence, the place where I honor my 'uglier' sides. The parts of me, that in my journey of learning to care for them, have proven that old Leonard Cohen quote so very true.

"Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in."

Self Conscious is also the place where I honor my inner angsty teen and, let's be real, my inner angsty adult! I hope it might speak to yours as well.

However, please know that the monologues in Self Conscious, while based on my own experiences, are works of artistic expression.

Some of them come from different parts of my life. Some of them were written when I was much younger or are about experiences when I was much younger. Some of them are amalgamations of different moments in time, sometimes told with different details for the sake of the heart of the artistic expression of each piece.

As Pablo Picasso once said,

"We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie. That makes us realize the truth. At least the truth that is given to us to understand."

So my only request in breaking with the norms that would encourage me to keep this form of artistic expression very separate from the rest of my work in this world is this:

If you are someone I work with in a coaching, therapeutic, or facilitating capacity, please take a moment to discern for yourself if you would like to hear these more vulnerable parts of my journey.

For some, it can be radically humanizing and affirming to hear being able to see the humanity and vulnerability of someone who holds space for us and offers guidance. For some, it can feel off putting or distracting: taking away from our experience of having a place we're able to go that can be wholly and fully about our experience without the complexities that can come from the awareness of another person's struggles, feelings, differences, and similarities.

So I ask you to give yourself the gift of discerning for yourself.

What would be most in alignment with your own healing journey right now?

And to remember that what you do here will not necessarily be current time, literal truth, but artistic expression: drawn from experiences across my lifetime— some of it expanded or shifted for artistic purposes.

All that being said... if you decide, you'd like to listen. I hope you enjoy.

I encourage you to listen with the parts of yourself that perhaps have always felt too melodramatic, or too much, too sensitive, or all alone in parts of your pain.

I hope you can laugh with me at the neuroses and perhaps cry with me at the moments of hopelessness. Some perhaps relatable and some perhaps very different to your unique travels through this sometimes beautiful, sometimes painful journey of life.

If you do proceed, thank you for receiving these vulnerable parts of me.

If you decide not to proceed, thank you for honoring what feels right to you right now.

If you do proceed, I hope if nothing else, these pieces resonate with and help certain vulnerable parts of you feel they deserve expression. No matter how small or how large.

And as always, please join in by commenting below.

I'd love to hear what you connect to, what you feel moved by, and what comes up for you as you listen.

Because ultimately...

I don't know.

What do you think?

I'm self conscious

Why is it that change feels so inherently terrifying?

When I was younger, I used to scoff at those who professed such a proclivity: experiencing fear at the notion of changing.

Sadly though, if I'm being fully honest, I think I used to scoff at most earnest admissions of reticence. I was, after all, conditioned to see the acknowledgement of the experience of fear of any kind as either weakness or else some sort of dour defeatism, and therefore sought to distance myself from such unabashed concessions at any and all costs.

But nevertheless... I used to think I lived for change, thrived on it.

It took me until far more recently than I'd cared to admit to become humbled in the light of the revelation of the reality that for me... the change I actually fear the most is a cessation of the ceaseless parade of consistent inconsistency that characterizes my day-to-day existence in this world.

I don't think it really gets to count as change if it's always happening.

I'm pretty sure that's actually just cleverly disguised stagnancy: a hamster's wheel illusion of movement. The ego affirming, comfortably paced treadmill like trappings of true inner activity.

A great modern poet once wrote that her....

"opponent was always on the go and won't go slow, so as not to focus,"

....and, she noticed...

"he's no good at feeling uncomfortable, so he can't stop staying exactly the same." *

Those lines hit really close to home.

On some subliminal level I fear I must be terrified of the deep true motion I feel sure will emerge when I grow strong enough to grow still.

Which returns me with newfound humility to the question of why change — that which is outside a given ongoing sense of somehow comforting normalcy, however partially or wholly undesirable that normalcy might be — is so very scary.

If I think about going from a state of pain — so familiar as to feel normal — to a state of lesser pain — so new as to feel largely unknown... why would that feel any way but desirable?

And yet it does seem to me that for a very fundamental part of me, even a painful but predictable normal is less existentially terrifying than a truly unknown new experience.

What's that phrase?

"Better the devil you know?

Recently... I found myself enthrall to this beguiling philosophical notion:

Determinism.

It seems to state, not that we can't choose, but that we can't choose our choice. We are in essence, at the complete and utter mercy of the genetic environmental causal sphere into which we're born.

Think about it...

Every action we take: what if it's the only action we possibly could take given absolutely everything that has led to this precise crossroads of the great weaving of all that's ever been, which we are experiencing as this singular moment?

I feel as though I often find myself actively making choices I wish I didn't want to make.

It's not that I don't choose: that I'm controlled by some evil puppet master hoisting my limbs and jabbering my jaw up and down while I silently scream in abject refusal, trapped inside my own head.

No.

In that moment, I want to make the choice... I want to do it. And so I do. All the while thinking about how much I want to not want to do the thing I want to do.

I find myself blown away by the fascinating duality of two mutually exclusive truths existing side by side in my head:

I want to do this...

I don't want to want to do this.

And so...

When facing the prospect of change in my life, which feels so desirable but so unfamiliar and therefore so inexplicably yet undeniably terrifying, I suppose what I can say is that I want to want to change.

I just don't always actually want to.

And so oftentimes, I don't.

Enjoying the comfort inducing hamster wheel of perpetual false motion while all the while wishing so earnestly that I actually wanted to stop staying exactly the same.