Givin’ Up Feels Good
When I first heard Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, I felt understood, vindicated. Hell yes, I thought, Kendrick reads Eckhart Tolle, too. I was surprised to hear Tolle’s voice throughout the album—he’s one of the few spiritual wizards that have actually made sense to me. Being a skeptic at heart, I’ve always had a staunch aversion to the realms of spirit and self-help. It took me a while to warm up to Tolle, and I only made the time because my therapist had asked me to. She had me read A New Earth. It’s one of two self-help books I’ve actually finished, the second being The Artist’s Way. Both have their flaws, major ones that had me cringing and questioning why I was bothering with the material. But they also contain infinitesimal seeds of ideas and shifts, potent ones that bloom with time and reflection. It made the difference.
Tolle’s teachings on “dis-identifying” have been significant in shaping my life in a positively reverberating way. Its echoes are far-reaching, and tumble into me when least expected. One of my favorite lines from A New Earth:
“Going beyond ego is stepping out of content. Knowing yourself is being yourself, and being yourself is ceasing to identify with content.”
“Content” is many things—defining, labeling, judging, conceptualizing. We like to attach ourselves to content, using it to create stories about ourselves and others. We take comfort in these identities (I’m a runner, I hate mangos, I love books, I’m a Scorpio-sun-Scorpio-moon-Gemini-rising, I play the oboe, she usually, he often, they won’t). Tolle’s thought is, content narrows our experience of life; personally identifying with or as things is a distraction as well as the underlying cause of unhappiness. If we can let go of the story, only sticking to the facts, we find ourselves free and in the present moment. In this way, life itself becomes limitless.
Retreat from the Storm, Jean-François Millet, ca. 1846
Did I lose you?
No? Excellent. Onwards we go.
Tolle writes, “Attachment to things drops away by itself when you no longer seek to find yourself in them.” I read A New Earth back in 2019. The anger and pain eating me alive—once I understood it as content that shrank my world-view, my own freedom—I simply let it go. And that was that. To be clear, arriving at this understanding wasn’t an easy or straightforward path; I did fuck ton of writing and meditating and was consistent with my weekly therapy sessions. But as soon as I arrived at that clarity, the effects of dis-identifying were immediate. It led to huge shifts in my life.
I don’t know about you, but I find being wrong one of life’s greatest pleasures, especially when it comes to myself. I believe we are always evolving, always learning, outgrowing. I thought I’d outgrown dis-identifying things. As in, I’d successfully dis-identified everything for myself (so long, and thanks for all the fish, Eckhart!). Nope. Absolutely not.
The problem? Art—the role I thought it played in my life. Art—the thing I clung onto so fucking hard that I couldn’t see it for what it was: another attachment. Art was such a joy that it was pain. It was such a pain that it deeply depressed me. Never having the motivation to make the art I thought I craved, I believed there was something very wrong with me. I felt like a failure, an asshole, a liar. One of my initial reasons for going to therapy was to find joy in making art again. Painting, sculpting, cutting, gluing, it didn’t fucking matter. I was an artist. So why the hell wasn’t I making art?
Recently, I was supposed to go to ceramics, and did not want to—I hadn’t wanted to all month. And I didn’t go. Such a waste. The familiar feelings of failure/asshole/liar bubbled up, this time reaching an unbearable point. So I pulled out my journal and wrote about it, like I write about everything every morning (thanks, Artist’s Way!). What I wrote down surprised me, like Tolle’s voice materializing on Mr. Morale, now in my very own journal.
What is it about freely creating that pushes me away? … What am I avoiding? Am I avoiding anything? … Do I just hate creating? Do I just draw a line in the sand, declaring I don’t like creating and don’t want to create? What am I without it? Why have I held onto this identity for so long? … Wouldn’t I want to do the thing I desired? I don’t think I desire art … For god’s sake, I quit art school. I wanted to focus on art history, didn’t I? Do I not need art? What am I left with then? What is under art? When I peel back my misplaced passion for it, what am I left with?
And there you have a small piece of my unfiltered brain in the middle of an identity crisis, on display for all to read in case it rings true for someone. In the end, several pages of writing later, I had an seismic breakthrough—full clarity on how to move forward, total confidence in releasing my artist identity. No longer failing it, no longer letting it define me, no longer allowing the firmly entrenched story to constrict and monopolize my life. As I’ve done time and again, I let it go.