sitting with that discomfort
most meaningful things take effort, and time, and (a whole lot of) discomfort.
For the past few weeks I’ve been pretty much drinking water from a hose. I have decided to give this science communicator goal of mine a more serious shot, and so I’ve got some related (and not so related) projects lined up that I’m very excited about.
For the sake of context, I’ll mention some of them here — and try to keep it short:
I’m auditing a science writing course and a photography course at UC San Diego. I’m actually doing all the coursework and readings as a regular student would, and it’s been SO fun being back in school, and engaged in so many discussions and readings. Definitely learning a lot from that, and I love having projects to turn in that are going through rounds and rounds of critique.
I’m presenting my first poster at the California Seaweed Festival symposium!
I’m halfway through my PADI Divemaster training, and I had my first dive briefing two weekends ago!
I am two months into my Yoga Teacher Training!
I am onboarding to help make content for NOAA’s accounts.
It is arguably a lot going on, on top of my daily demands. I’ve definitely sat down to try to digest information in different ways, from journaling to discussions to just sitting quietly with my thoughts, but I am constantly worrying that most of it has escaped me in one way or another.
I realize I’m a lot less anxious when I’m consistently producing content because it feels like my way of digesting information, but it gets a bit more difficult to attempt to document all my learning when there’s too much going on. And my anxiety slowly builds up the more input I begin to receive. I picture it as a sort of bottleneck — regardless of how much content I consume, I can only turn it into output so fast. And the more anxious I become, the more attractive it becomes to only produce easy content, as opposed to things that take time.
Earlier this week, I read Ava Huang’s “you can’t fake the core” newsletter post — and now, as I’m writing my own newsletter post, I can only laugh at how painfully accurate what she writes is. You set on a mission to write a thoughtful newsletter post about a and b, and as you begin writing, your ideas start taking a different shape, and now you’re writing about x and y.
In a way, I don’t feel complete control over what I write, and I find myself feeling frustrated when what I’m saying does not seem to go the way I want it to. For the most part, I just let it happen, because I do not want to stop the flow. But I worry, what am I missing out on writing when I choose to write about what I write instead? It’s as if my discomfort is grief for the thoughts not written, lost at the expense of what I wrote.
I also think, sadly, the things I really want to write about sometimes take a bit more effort that I haven’t pushed myself to endure. I immediately feel my brain resisting any more effort than what goes into writing something as effortless as this reflection. Naturally, you could replace “writing” with “doing” in the sentences above, and the same problem persists: what am I missing out on doing when I choose to do the thing I do instead?
I used to think that maybe a feeling of effortful-ness when attempting to do a task signaled I was doing something wrong, or that maybe the thing I was doing just wasn’t for me. This can probably still be the case, but I’m starting to become more comfortable with doing things that take a whole lot of effort — with pushing past that initial discomfort. And I like the person I’m meeting on the other side of that.
I’m meeting someone that I can only describe as incredibly flawed and incredibly real. In talking, participating, creating, and writing more, I’ve come to find my voice trembles when I speak in front of a crowd (even a small crowd). I avoid eye contact and look at the floor, sometimes I start a sentence that makes sense, and then I lose my train of thought halfway. Sometimes the words I speak or write only half align with the thing I really wanted to say, and sometimes I have no idea what I’m saying as the words come out of my mouth. I’m not as good a writer as I want to be, and I only know the most basic concepts in photography, Marine Biology, and anything, really. I have to ask a lot of questions in class, and sometimes my execution of an idea falls way shorter than what I originally planned out.
I think a lot about what I want to say prior to a presentation, and I always say a little less than I wanted to. I get nervous when I have to explain something to someone, and I get hung up on wanting to be perceived as knowledgeable. I’m scared of not being able to produce a single original thought, and I’m terrified that maybe I don’t have it in me to do anything more than imitate.
It’s easy to read essays, watch movies, look at photographs that other people create that almost seem to run parallel to a concept you had in mind, and think “I could’ve done that.” It’s harder to face the reality of trying to do something and realizing, maybe you’re actually not that good (yet).
For better or worse, I grew up in an environment where anything I did was praised. My parents were very supportive like that, which was great, but perhaps it is now my responsibility to learn to do without it. I think some things, perhaps the most meaningful, simply take effort without no sort of praise, and maybe that’s all of the fun.
So, sometimes when I set out to write about a and b, I end up writing about x and y because it’s easier. But I think sometimes the things we really want to do are not meant to be easy.
Putting stuff out there makes me feel good because it takes time and effort and discomfort to make something that you put a lot of meaning to, that is imperfect, but that you send out to the world anyway. And this thing is infinitely better than the hypothetical thing in my mind that could be life-changing. Most things, once I make them, aren’t life-changing in the way I imagined them to be, but they are life-changing in that each time I make something new, I believe a little bit more in myself, in my capacity to get things done.
I don’t want to spend my life doing x and y because I couldn’t lean into the discomfort of attempting to do a and b. I’ll be the first to admit that the fear I feel in my stomach when I’m doing something I don’t think I’m good enough for is unbearable and leaves me in a constant state of alertness and uncertainty — but to feel that alive? It’s a feeling I miss when I’m feeling nothing.
Thank you for reading, see you next week!
Much love. 🌊
If you liked this post, you might enjoy The art of slowing down and Prioritizing, and attempting (?) to downsize hobbies
Some content worth sharing✨
Stanford Graduate School of Business, Last Lecture Series: “How to Live an Asymmetric Life,” by Graham Weaver: Complements this post very nicely, and may even be what somebody out there needs to hear. It’s a 33-min long lecture but the TLDR; Do hard things, do your hard thing, do it for decades, and write your story.
From Ava Huang’s “you can’t fake the core”:
“Like Shedler points out, I often just want to keep doing what I’m doing but feel better about it. I justify it to myself: this is okay. And then I’m disappointed when I eventually realize that’s impossible … You can’t fake the core. The truth that lives there will always come out.”
Excerpt from essay “Six Thousand Lessons,” published on collection Embracing Fearlessly the Burning World, by Barry Lopez:
“I began with an intuition, that the world was, from place to place and from culture to culture, far more different than I had been led to believe. Later, I began to understand that to ignore these differences was not simply insensitive but unjust and perilous. To ignore the differences does not make things better. It creates isolation, pain, fury, despair. Finally, I came to see something profound. Long-term, healthy patterns of social organization, among all social life forms, it seemed to me, hinged on work that maintained the integrity of the community while at the same time granting autonomy to its individuals. What made a society beautiful and memorable was some combination of autonomy and deference that, together, minimized strife.
It is now my understanding that diversity is not, as I had once thought, a characteristic of life. It is, instead, a condition necessary for life. To eliminate diversity would be like eliminating carbon and expecting life to go on. This, I believe, is why even a passing acquaintance with endangered languages or endangered species or endangered cultural traditions brings with it so much anxiety, so much sadness. We know in our tissues that the fewer the differences we encounter in our travels, the more widespread the kingdom of death has become.”