10/25/23
I was just mindless scrolling Instagram reels this morning because I wasn’t sufficiently awake to seek out more meaningful information in my life and I came across and interview with Andy Sommers of The Police talking about their song “Message in a Bottle” and how it was a turning point of their career.
So I decided to listen to the song again and was struck immediately by the contrast from this very fast, high energy song and the deeply melancholy lyrics. And it was clear to me in that moment just how much I relate to what Sting was expressing in those lines.
For the past dozen or so years in my life — from roughly around the time I began the Montaigne Project — I’ve had this gnawing sense that I have an artistic sensibility and some ability to convey the thoughts and feelings that are bursting to come out, but I have absolutely no one to share this with. And I don’t really know if most people get what a lonely experience that is.
When I discuss the concept of loneliness with my therapist, I’m always deeply frustrated, because it veers into this semantic discussion about being alone versus feeling lonely, and I get back a lot of garbage about “filling my life up” so I’m satisfied with myself. I know the good intentions behind this, but it doesn’t strike a chord with me. If I’m so inclined, I can fill up my time an amuse myself.
What I’m actually seeking, however, isn’t a collection of pastimes. I’m looking for a particular type of connection that’s purely lacking for me, from people who are interested and curious enough to pay some attention to what I have to say.
So I’m constantly engaged in this exercise of trying to cultivate that audience, while at the same time having integrity in what I’m creating — being fully honest about my thoughts, feelings and experiences, at the risk of making people uncomfortable at times, or deciding it’s all overly intellectual in spots. Simply put, I’m not seeking entertainment in my life and neither am I interested in entertaining anyone else.
But it all ends up feeling like Sting sitting on a beach waiting for a response to his message in a bottle, it’s a very hopeless feeling to carry around. I simply don’t know what else to do than to just carry on and hope. Sting would say I need to find an up-tempo way to convey the same thoughts and feelings, I guess.
Work, in a sense, has become the up-tempo expression of me. There’s this strange double bind in my life involving my work, where I’m so overwhelmed right now that I really need time off … but I’ve so thoroughly decimated my personal life, that the only meaningful interactions I have are through work, so I’m driven to keep involving myself in projects to have interactions that ultimately frustrate and exhaust me. But if I ask colleagues to give me a break from it all, they disappear. They don’t just stop coming to me with work, they ignore me entirely.
In some ways that’s nice so I can focus and complete tasks I can only do alone. But it would be better for someone to just check in and ask how I’m doing. That’s how transactional my life has become. If someone can’t get something from me, I feel like I don’t exist.
This approach feels like a dead end to me. I don’t feel appreciated for my work, it exhausts me, and the pay does nothing to increase my security or comfort. Perhaps the solution is to just stop taking on so much at work and pull back to giving them as much in value as they are paying me.
I suppose I could then have more time to engage in activities that at least bring more enjoyment and connection in life, and those things are valuable. But I will still be left with that missing element, that sense that I should be doing something else with my life, but I’ve missed my chance in life to create in a way that expresses what I want to come out and has the potential of reaching other people.
Carl Jung believed that these kinds of double binds are actually essential in life, they create moments where you just have to crush your ego and let the true you, in all disappointment and failed expectation, emerge in whole. So I guess that’s something.