I’m an emotional dude. When things aren’t going right in my personal life I tend to do a terrible job compartmentalizing it. I get paralyzed by the need to fix problems of emotion in my life and relationships. I get so caught up in fixing a fucked-up situation or fixing the fucked-up parts of myself that I completely lose sight of simply getting my work done. I get fixated on healing. And often I find myself trapped in a quagmire of my own making, struck on figuring out how to heal/resolve/fix a situation, fixated on that instead of getting shit else done. Not ideal for a writer.
Starting my little landscaping company side-hustle this past year has been a mental and financial liferaft. It gives me somewhere to go to get out of my head and make a few bucks along the way. But this is one area wherein I am terrible at exercising discipline in and am actively working to get better.
To help me in this endeavor I’m re-reading Steven Pressfield’s seminal book The War of Art for the hundredth time. And he has a fascinating passage in there about healing. He writes,
“What are we trying to heal, anyway? The athlete knows the day will never come when he wakes up pain-free. He has to play hurt.
Remember, the part of us that we imagine needs healing is not the part we create from; that part is far deeper and stronger. The part we create from can’t be touched by anything our parents did, or society did. That part is unsullied, uncorrupted; soundproof, waterproof, and bulletproof. In fact, the more troubles we’ve got, the better and richer that part becomes.
The part that needs healing is our personal life. Personal life has nothing to do with work. Besides, what better way of healing than to find our center of self-sovereignty? Isn’t that the whole point of healing?”
This reminds me of one night last spring when I was in in Cocoa Beach, Florida, eating dinner at Kelly Slater’s house. I was down there with him and his girlfriend, Kalani. We’d gotten into some deep shit that night. That was the night that he told me about a time when he was much younger and had just lost his world championship, broken up with his fiancee, and realized that he’d somehow slipped millions of dollars into debt. That was the night he told a journalist for the first time that he once stood on top of his apartment building in Australia and thought about taking the leap, just to make all the anguish go away.
Later that week, across the country, we left a meeting in Beverly Hills and we were driving down the 405 from Los Angeles to his home in San Clemente. That dark night of his came up again as we drove. That was ten world titles and many other relationships past. Now the love of his life napped in the backseat of our car; he’d been with her for 14 years.
I asked him about healing, and what it meant to heal from the things that had plagued him for most of his life. We’d spent a ton of time talking about all he’d done over the decades to unpack his pain and learn how it was affecting him and then do something to become a healthier human being as a result. We’d talked about life and career and ambition and love.
What it all boiled down to wasn’t healing, exactly, but something else.
“I’ve spent close to 30 years now with some sort of therapy trying to help me unpack and see that,” he said. “And it’s good, what you learn about yourself. You understand things. They calm you inside, when you start to understand them.”
That reminded me of something he’d said a few nights before. “You never really fix it, right?” I said. “You just learn to accept it.”
He nodded. “Yeah. You just find a way to be able to understand it. And then, understanding it, and then accepting it, is fixing it.”
That seemed to be the entire point. Not ridding yourself of your fucked-up parts, but understanding them and accepting them.
Loving them, in that way.
“That causes you to be less reactive,” Slater said. “And less unconscious about your life.”
What always helped Slater was taking to the waves. Whatever was ailing him, whatever pain he felt in his heart, he’d go to the ocean and surf. That’s where he put all of it. That was the center of his self-sovereignty.
This circles me back to Pressfield and The War of Art and his passage about healing. I’m starting to find a lot of merit in his philosophy of just sort of giving up on healing and doing your work despite your fucked-up-ness. Pressfield describes a terrible moment earlier in his life that led to something profound. “I washed up in New York a couple of decades ago,” he writes, “making twenty bucks a night driving a cab and running away full-time from doing my work. One night, alone in my $110-a-month sublet, I hit bottom in terms of having diverted myself into so many phony channels so many times that I couldn’t rationalize it for one more evening.”
This led to two hours of Pressfield forcing himself through “the most painful exercise I could think of”: sitting down at a table in front of his typewriter and doing the one thing he really wanted to do, which was write.
Now keep in mind: Pressfield is now some 80 years old, and he’s written numerous bestselling books that have become perennial bestsellers and movies and all sorts of other magic.
One of my favorites is The Legend of Bagger Vance, about a struggling golfer who gets some help from a mysterious sort of mystical caddie.
The movie version has Matt Damon playing the golfer and Will Smith playing the mystic. In one of my favorite scenes of all time, when Damon’s struggling, Smith tells him to line up his next tee shot so that he launches it straight out of bounds. The whole idea is that Damon’s trying so damn hard to be so damn perfect that he needs to just go ahead and fuck up as badly as possible so he doesn’t have to worry about fucking up like that anymore.
Anyway. That night in New York, forcing himself to write, that’s where it all began for Pressfield. That’s where he got on the teebox and launched a shot into nowhere.
After those two hours “torturing out some trash that I chucked immediately into the trashcan,” he was done. He goes on to say that he hadn’t written anything good, and “it would be years” before he actually did. Moments later, however, “for some reason,” he felt energized enough to do something about the ten days’ worth of dishes piled up in his sink.
“I had turned a corner,” he writes. “I was okay. I would be okay from here on.”
Go do your work. You’re going to be okay.