Q&A: How to stop making every wrong thing into a grand story?

A drawing for every ouch.

Dear readers,

This newsletter is an audio recording and transcription of my answer to a reader submitted question. Sharing myself in an audible format feels more vulnerable than usual, but on the other side of that is also a feeling of more intimacy. I’m curious how you feel, I’d love to know what you think.

Thank you for listening and/or reading. It has been almost six months of Unsupervised, and I feel my desire to work here deepening. I think it is mostly due to the amount of trust you give me. The feeling is incredibly mutual.

It’s interesting to reflect on when I first started this project, to see myself crafting up something very structured with little flexibility. At the time, I modeled my new practice and its goals based on what I saw other people I respect with similar practices doing. I set up a schedule that prioritized engaging with consistent frequency, I imagined lots of order and reliability just like theirs. What’s typical Anna, however, is that even though I have not tried to prioritize my natural creative rhythm, or actual vs. feigned inspiration, or my commitment to sustainable work and anti-hustle culture — they’ve all taken over anyway.

Now I really have no idea when the heck I post or if there is any pattern to it. I hold myself to appear in your inbox twice a month, but I don’t know when, and that’s it. That’s me, regardless of what everyone else is doing or what “best practices” Substack likes to remind me of. It should come as no surprise that my total surrender to the unpredictable whims of my creativity has left me feeling more excited than ever to keep doing it. Take the pressure off, wherever you can.

Here is today’s letter. Please note that going forward, posts like these will be for paid subscribers only. Upgrade your subscription, why not. It’s a cappuccino, and I love it. Thank you for being here.

Q: How to stop making every wrong thing into a grand story?

Audio:

Transcription:

“Hi everyone, good morning. It is a Tuesday morning in October, the week of my birthday actually. My birthday is on Friday the 21st, so if anyone wants to send me a love letter or, you know, profess their undying love for me, at any point between now and Friday, or just indefinitely, this is an open invitation.

I’m sitting in my room in central California, and it’s a beautiful morning looking out at the trees and the lavender plants, listening to bees and flies and birds and woodpeckers. I’m drinking chai for the second day in a row because I haven’t been sleeping very well lately. No matter how early I drink my coffee, it doesn’t seem to make a difference. It just interferes with my sleep.

I have to go to pole dancing class in forty minutes, so I’m going to do what I can this morning and then get to it. Today I’m going to answer a question that I got on Instagram last week when I did an open Q+A. The question is: How to stop making every wrong thing into a grand story?

First of all, I want to stress the importance of compassion in this situation. Having compassion for yourself when you feel that you want to make something into a grand story, or that that’s kind of like your knee-jerk reaction — just knowing that that’s just one of the ways that we as humans translate our experiences. For some people I feel like it’s a lot simpler maybe? Like, there’s more of a face-value way of interfacing with the world and processing, and then they can just move forward more easily. But I think for sensitive people or people dealing with trauma, or older, more embedded thought patterns, it can be harder for the mind to take a different route.

Based on this question, it sounds like theres a little bit of an ouch there, a discomfort, like you’re interpreting what happens around you sometimes as wrong or a dislike, something to be avoided. That is not really a pleasant state to be in as a human, so I first want to say that I have compassion for you and how you’re feeling. I hope that you can feel it and I hope you are taking time to have compassion for yourself and for where you’re at.

Story is something I think about a lot — personal narrative, the stories we tell ourselves, the stories we tell other people. In fact, the last newsletter I wrote is kind of all about this: me questioning the importance of my telling stories and talking.

I’m a thinker, I’m a thinking person. There’s a lot of thoughts in my head, which is not to say I have more thoughts than the next person, but it’s really all about how we each individually deal with our thoughts, and that is just about who we are. My personal constitution tends to be more neck-up vs. neck-down, and then I think a lot of my thought patterns are a result of frankly having a pretty chaotic, inconsistent, unreliable, and oftentimes unsafe childhood. So living in an environment that was not validating or comforting or stable or empowering, for me it often felt very fragile or volatile. It created a lot of insecurity and anxiety in me if I look back and I think about the emotional states that I had.

So in order to survive, in order for my brain to do the things that made me feel like I was more likely to survive, I became an over-thinker, as if over-thinking my way through something would bring an answer to an otherwise unanswerable situation or would bring me closer to safety or a feeling of control in an otherwise uncontrollable situation.

Survival in my adult life, it looks different now, but as a child you’re literally just thinking in terms of like: Am I good? Am I alive? Are we good? So I think being hyper vigilant of an environment in order to ensure survival can create thought patterns that tend to lean more on the over-thinking, grand old story side of things. If I’m constantly thinking, then I feel as though I’m interpreting the data and that data is my way of gathering as much evidence as I can in order for me to figure out the best way for me to move forward so that I can survive.

But the thing about that is that I’m the one downloading the data, which means that nothing coming in, nothing I’m translating in about my lived experience, is going to get through this gauntlet of my bias or my wounding, my baggage, my story — unless I really step back and use the power of inquiry.

When I read this question, the first thing that came to mind was this person named Byron Katie. If you aren’t familiar with their work, I highly recommend you stop what you’re doing and check it out. Her book called Loving What Is is pretty great and sort of sets the foundation for the work she’s been doing since writing it. Her website is even thework.com, which I think is really amazing.

There’s a quote on her website that leads with “I discovered that when I believed my thoughts I suffered, but when I didn’t believe them, I didn’t suffer”.

So speaking to that, Byron developed this method of inquiry that asks us to observe and question our thoughts, and she breaks it down into this framework of four questions which I have found incredibly useful in my personal life.

The questions:

1. Is it true?

2. Am I absolutely certain that it’s true?

3. How does it feel to have this thought or belief?

4. Who would i be without this?

It sometimes feels sort of silly to just kind of sit down and go through step by step, but I can really put story onto other people and situations in my life when I feel uncertain. I’ve found these questions really helpful in their radical simplicity. It pulls me away from my habit of using this over-processing and projection as a coping mechanism and helps me create new ones (mechanisms) — frankly, ones that feel a little bit more rooted in possibility and curiosity and leave room for me to not know or have all the answers, and to find peace and serenity in that. Sometimes we can’t know what’s going to happen or what another person is thinking or wanting or about to do. It’s not easy, it doesn’t come naturally, but these questions help me cultivate that.

I think getting clear on the things about your current life or your former life that maybe push you in this direction to tell story and project and craft narrative might also be illuminating for you.

I also want to say that if you’re experiencing your day to day life and you’re feeling that there’s a lot of wrong happening around you or to you, I would try to get really curious about what “wrong” means to you. Who or what behaviors or events pass the test, and which ones don’t? My guess is that the things that fall into the wrong category are things you don’t like.

I think it’s important to remember that just because something causes us suffering does not mean it is wrong. It doesn’t mean it’s true, it doesn’t even mean it’s happening to you. There are so many reasons our mind does the acrobatics it does as it interprets what’s going on around us, and so for me it’s really crucial to be a keen observer of my mind instead of just following its every whim and judgment and decision and categorization of things.

I know it can be hard, especially when other people's behaviors affect us in ways that feel unwanted or like an ick or an ouch. But again, I’m going to say it again: just because something makes me feel a certain way, doesn’t mean that what has happened or what a person has done is wrong. It just means that I’m having feelings, and acknowledging that honestly helps me practice taking full responsibility for my feelings.

I think that sometimes creating grand old story and narrative is sort of a way to eschew the simple and radical act of taking responsibility for how we feel. It’s sort of like saying, “Here. I made this big old story so that it can hold or explain these feelings. I don’t want them! You hold it, story!” But can our reactions just be as simple as: That’s an interesting thought — and it may not even be true!

When I take step back and look at the thoughts that I’m having — the ones that stir things up for me — with more calmness and equanimity, I find it empowering and I can see them for what they are. They’re not fact, they’re not always true, they just are what they are: thoughts, and I have thousands of them a day, and so do you.

Along with compassion, I think patience is important and understanding that while awareness is the first step, it’s not the last step. There is an intentionality that you can set forth in your life to actually change the way you’re experiencing your life in your head.

I think of my mind as this landscape with all these little estuaries or canals running through it that have been there forever. They’ve been formed by years and years of my thoughts carving out the same groove over and over again. If I think of my thoughts like water, they’re going to go more easily where water is already flowing instead of trying to forge new ground, so I have to have patience and intention and be realistic that changing the way I think is going to take time and effort.

What is one thing you can do the next time life throws you an ouch or an ick? And then the next time and then the next time? Maybe it’s carrying Byron’s four questions around and answering them briefly no matter where you are. Sometimes it’s as simple as just distracting myself, and I’m careful not to gaslight myself away from thinking about something that I’m sensitive to, but sometimes I really do need a good distraction or to stop taking things so seriously.

Lately, and I posted about this recently on Instagram, I’m in a new relationship, and it’s triggering. I had this great idea: What if every time I’m crafting an elaborate story of doom for myself as it relates to this new person, what if I draw a picture of them instead? I was getting such a kick out of the idea of this massive room, full floor to ceiling of drawings of my partner based on every time I was triggered.

My personal favorite is noticing nature audibly, so when I catch myself going down a river in my canoe of misery on an old thought pattern, I tend to just look up, I raise my gaze and I look up at what’s around me. If I’m near a window or outside, I just start to be like, “What a beautiful tree”. I really notice and appreciate the world around me. I take myself out of the equation, it helps.

Thanks for listening and please let me know if you enjoyed this, if you prefer it when I just write essays in response to questions. Those take much more time because writing is a completely different practice than just speaking into my phone while I’m drinking chai.

I’m incredibly grateful for anyone listening to this and anyone who is reading what I’m posting. It just makes me want to be here now, more. So thanks and have a great week.”

Love,

Anna