Episode 04: The Abyss
Today... we’re gonna look squarely into the abyss. We’ve all got one. Let’s talk about it.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Episode 04: The Abyss
Emily Nagoski: [00:00:00] Hey everybody. It's Emily Nagoski-
Amelia Nagoski: [00:00:08] and Amelia Nagoski-
Emily Nagoski: [00:00:10] And you are listening to the Feminist Survival Project 2020. Before we get started today, let us quickly review our basic approach to wellness because we have recently discovered that it's really quite different from what a lot of other people use.
This is the, like, one pager user instructions for the survival tool kit we're trying to assemble with the podcast.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:00:32] First: Wellness is not a state of mind or a state of being. It is a state of action. It is moving freely through the cycles and oscillations of living in a mammalian body. What this looks like in practice is granting your body the opportunities it requires to rest and to work, to connect and to be independent, to feel stress and to find its way to safety. That's number one.
Emily Nagoski: [00:00:58] Two: The cure for Burnout is not self care.
Self-care is the fallout shelter you build in your basement. This is the metaphor we use because you know, it's your job to protect yourself from nuclear war.
That's why the cure instead is simply care. It's all of us caring for each other. What this looks like in practice is when you think you need more grit or persistence, will you really need is more help. When you think you need more discipline, you need more kindness. And when you look at others and think they need more grit, what they need is more help. And when you think they need more discipline, what they need is more kindness.
That's two.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:01:45] And third: These two ideas are part of a larger solution, not just ways to survive while we work on the solution. When the needs of our bodies take up as much space and time as they require and when we turn toward each other's needs with kindness and compassion, we are already rejecting the forces of white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal, wildly exploitative and post-industrial capitalism. It's a mouthful to name the horrible shit show that is the 21st century. Sorry. So this is good news that these are part of the solution and bad news because it means the system has a vested interest in preventing you from doing either taking the time you need to take care of your body, or turning toward anyone else's needs with kindness and compassion.
Emily Nagoski: [00:02:32] It will try to block you. It will try to steal your body's freedom to rest, to love, to feel safe, and a lot of what we're going to talk about in the podcast is how oppressive systems sneak into our lives and especially into our ability to practice care and what we can do to eradicate it.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:02:53] So. Wellness is a state of action.
The cure for burnout isn't self-care. It's all of us caring for each other. And when we embrace those things, we're not taking a break from fixing the world. We are already fixing the world.
Emily Nagoski: [00:03:07] In short, it is not about leaning in or out. It's about leaning on and lifting up. That's what we're here to do.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:03:15] Today, we're going to look squarely into the abyss. We've all got one. Let's talk about it.
The question we're starting with is fundamental to the very nature of burnout itself, which we define as: feeling overwhelmed and exhausted by everything you have to do, yet somehow still feeling like you're not doing enough.
Emily Nagoski: [00:03:33] How can it be? When we're so overwhelmed and exhausted we can barely function, we're still worried that we're not doing enough.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:03:40] Which inexorably leads to the question: what even is enough?
Emily Nagoski: [00:03:44] There are two answers to that question depending who you ask and how you ask it, because there are two kinds of enough.
And the abyss is the unbridgeable chasm between the two "enoughs." So. There is a gap, nay, a chasm between who you are and who the world expects you to be. In Burnout we describe it as a difference between you and "expected you," the culturally constructed aspirational ideal of someone who is pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others. The perfect human giver we talked about in the last episode. At some point in your life, I don't know when, but it was probably pretty early... For me, I was 11 or 12.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:04:33] Yeah, I was definitely not older than six.
Emily Nagoski: [00:04:36] Wow. You became aware. Of this gap between you and "expected you." You began to recognize that some parts of you were more welcome than other parts and not long after that, you probably began to make deliberate choices about which parts of you showed up when, in order to shrink the apparent gap between you and "expected you". But those deliberate choices were really just a more sophisticated version of something you've been doing subconsciously for as long as you've been alive.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:05:06] I have really explicit memories of being in the second grade and saying something that I thought was that was just perfectly natural. I don't even remember what it was, but it was a just a thing that like a second grader might say and being chastised and really thinking consciously there's things that I feel true that I'm just I have to hide.
There's things that feel true that I have to hide.
Emily Nagoski: [00:05:30] By whom?
Amelia Nagoski: [00:05:31] Grandpop.
Emily Nagoski: [00:05:32] Wow.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:05:33] Yeah, I mean but I but in that moment that it happened with Grandpop, that's when I knew, like, "Oh, this is with everyone all the time. This isn't just at school and in public. It's with my family."
Emily Nagoski: [00:05:45] So even when you're a very small child, you're rewarded for some behaviors and punished or ignored for others. And so you shaped your behavior to whatever is going to make sure you get your needs met-
Amelia Nagoski: [00:05:56] Whether consciously or unconsciously-
Emily Nagoski: [00:05:57] Exactly.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:05:58] At a certain age it does become conscious, doesn't it?
Emily Nagoski: [00:06:00] Yeah. So your social - we were socialized feminine and so, we were rewarded for being pretty, happy, quiet, generous, and attentive to the needs of others. In the fourth grade, I was really angry and Mom said, "You know, you look really ugly that way."
Amelia Nagoski: [00:06:14] Jesus.
Emily Nagoski: [00:06:16] So you changed your behavior. I received the feedback that I looked ugly and I was only 9 or 10 at that point and I still was, like, "No, that's bullshit. This is how I actually feel and it's bullshit to tell me that I look ugly with this feeling in my body."
It took me a few more years before I started feeling like I'm bumping up against the wall so hard tht I need to start changing and shaping my presentation of myself in order to not get hit so hard. I was just trying to get my needs met and feel safe and protected by the adults around me. And the older I got, the more I explored who I am, like who who I truly am, who I truly am, and as I explored I learned, like, the parts that match the landscape of what was acceptable in the world and which parts are outside the bounds of what's acceptable. And I learned about some of the things the world expected to be true of me that were not.
That's where the gap, the empty places start to build up. I got this false sense of missing pieces because the world said you're supposed to have, like, you're supposed to have a tail, everybody supposed to have a tail. So we all start walking around pretending we have tails and also feeling like we're missing a tail. And then at some point you actually feel it. You feel the unbridgeability of the chasm that you don't have a tail and you're never going to have a tail. The chasm between who you are and who the world expects you to be. You're forced, however, brief the moment, to recognize that you could never and would never be what the world says you should be. And you're looking for a moment directly into this difference between you and "expected you." That is the abyss.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:08:11] We've talked a lot in earlier episodes about separating your stress from your stressors.
The process of dealing with stress itself is almost always separate from dealing with the process of dealing with your stressors. And trying to heal your stress by dealing with your stressors is like trying to aid your digestion by doing the dishes: The shit has to get done but it does not give your body what it needs to be well.
The abyss is a special kind of stressor, because it's one where dealing with it can deal directly with the stress it causes. It's an internal stressor. When you're feeling overwhelmed and exhausted, looking directly into the abyss and recognizing it for what it is both deals with the cause of your stress and grants an opportunity to complete the stress response cycle.
Emily Nagoski: [00:08:56] On this organizing and decluttering podcast, I heard the story of a woman who literally looked at her house and started crying in despair that her home would never look the way it was supposed to. And as I listen to this story, I was immediately thrown into high school listening to our friend Suzanne say that she cried in the shower that morning looking at her thighs because she realized that her thighs would never be what they were "supposed" to be.
So these are both examples of women who are grieving looking into the abyss. They're never going to have the body or the home they've been taught that they should have. What jars me about these stories though, is that neither of these women are comparing themselves to the real world. They're comparing themselves to the aspirational ideal of magazines and television. Suzanne was sitting next to me in history class as she told this story and my thighs have always touched all the way from knee to groin, no matter how my body changes, no matter what my posture, is my thighs touch all the way.
She didn't wish you had a thigh gap or think she was supposed to have one because the girls around her had thigh gaps. We didn't. Never. She wanted it because there were pictures in magazines and advertisements of people with thigh gaps.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:10:14] We had a book on human anatomy in the house that had, like, a whole page of illustrations of the things that are considered feminine and the things that are considered masculine and the thigh gap was featured as a feminine trait and I was like, oh I don't-
Emily Nagoski: [00:10:31] I still have that book.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:10:32] Oh God.
Emily Nagoski: [00:10:34] I'm not going to put a link in the show notes because who fucking cares-
Amelia Nagoski: [00:10:37] 'cuz that's bullshit.
Emily Nagoski: [00:10:38] Yeah. So Suzanne was a long-distance runner. She was on the varsity track team. Like her thighs did amazing things and yet she cried in the shower because of how they looked. That's the abyss. It's this hopeless, helpless sense that you will never be what you are supposed to be.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:11:01] The worst part about the abyss is the power of the promise the world makes. The world says, "If you can reach this deliberately unreachable goal, you will finally definitively and permanently belong within the human family. You will be loved and lovable. You will be safe. People will stop judging you, which automatically means you will stop touching yourself."
To recognize the unbridgeability of the chasm is to accept that you will never be what the world says you should be. So, when we look at the abyss, we might have some feelings.
Emily Nagoski: [00:11:36] Grief is a big one. We mourn for the self we seem to have lost. The self we will never be. We mourn for the life we will therefore never have. The love and acceptance we were promised and may now never receive.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:11:54] In the last episode, we talked about human giver syndrome, which says it's our moral obligation to be pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of others and if we fail and fall short of that ideal, we deserve to be punished. And if there's no one around to punish us, we will just go ahead and beat the shit out of ourselves.
Emily Nagoski: [00:12:12] That place of grieving is you beating the shit out of yourself, believing, of letting go of human giver syndrome's script for who you're supposed to be and settling into the reality of who you really are.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:12:24] So there's grief. And there's also rage. There's rage. Because even though some part of you is grieving the loss of a life you might have had if only you had been more like the you you were expected to be, another part of you may well be aware that "expected you" is a bullshit construct invented to keep you in chains trying to fix your body, trying to perfect your home, trying to get the right degree or the right job or the right spouse, or get your kid into the right school, or make the right income, or somehow all those things at the same time.
Emily Nagoski: [00:12:58] So there's rage and there's grief. And maybe above all, there is a self-critical feeling that we are not enough. And we know by this far into the episode that the feeling of not enough really just means that we've noticed that who we are is not a match for who the world expects us to be.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:13:17] In a perfect world, recognizing that you and "expected you" are not identical would just be an emotion-free acknowledgement of the truth.
It's just true that you aren't that and you never will be. But that's not a problem, it's just reality. I mean, it's kind of bullshit that the world expects such absurd things from you, but it's the world's fault for having those absurd expectations. It's not your fault that you didn't meet those absurd expectations.
Emily Nagoski: [00:13:43] What we need you to know is that because we do not live in a perfect world, and there is an emotional weight that comes with this realization that who you are is never going to match who the world expects you to be, you're going to feel not enough as a form of intense emotion, and we need you to know that when you feel like you're not enough that's actually just a mask that loneliness wears.
Feeling not enough is a form of loneliness when you're in the abyss, what you're feeling is loneliness and the way out therefore, is to connect. The function of the abyss, the reason it exists, is to devalue who we are, make us feel like we're not enough, so that we're constantly striving to be something we aren't, all the while pretending to be what we aren't and disguise the abyss that we each carry around inside us. The social masks we wear. Some of the social masks we wear are just to make life a little easier. Be polite and smile and be nice when you're talking with a checkout lady and the line is going slow.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:14:52] You're in a bad mood. Just be nice. It's fine.
Emily Nagoski: [00:14:54] Yeah, you just want lubricant. Even if you're, like, standing in there and you want to scream, some of the masks we wear -
Amelia Nagoski: [00:15:01] It's socially appropriate.
Emily Nagoski: [00:15:03] You go home and scream. It's not toxic. Yeah. Yeah. Some of the masks we wear our because we actually believe that if people saw what was behind the mask they would shun us, hate us.
So, we separate the real us sometimes even from the people we love most. Sometimes even from ourselves, for fear of being abandoned. We are still trying to make sure we get our needs met and we don't get rejected.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:15:31] This is why the feeling of being "not enough" is a form of loneliness.
Emily Nagoski: [00:15:34] By definition
Amelia Nagoski: [00:15:35] By the standard of the externally imposed, culturally constructed, aspirational ideal, you are not enough and never will be, by design. It is by design an unmeetable standard. The takeaway here is not "don't compare" - you're going to compare. Go ahead and compare. Comparison isn't evil. Kindergartners compare belly buttons and we all think it's cute.
Emily Nagoski: [00:15:56] Right
Amelia Nagoski: [00:15:56] Comparison is not the problem. Judgment is the problem. And judgment does not follow from comparison, necessarily.
Emily Nagoski: [00:16:05] When you notice differences or similarities, that doesn't inevitably lead to an assessment of those differences or similarities as making something better or worse. You can just notice the difference, go, "Oh, huh. Neat!"
Amelia Nagoski: [00:16:19] The same way you turn toward difficult feelings with kindness and compassion, you can turn toward those differences with kindness, compassion, some curiosity. "Well, hey, look at that."
Emily Nagoski: [00:16:29] The takeaway is also not
Both: [00:16:31] "Authenticity."
Emily Nagoski: [00:16:34] Full authenticity of actual you without any artifice, with none of the social masks has a time and a place. We do not advocate for radical authenticity all day, every day, in all contexts, because the consequences of not conforming with the ideal are real.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:16:51] You will be punished
Emily Nagoski: [00:16:52] We don't pretend to be something we're not just for the fun of it. We do it so we can get by in the world. We do it to survive. One of my favorite Instagram profiles is @professionalblackgirl, which is this celebration of the ways black women in the professional world survive the professional white supremacist world and still celebrate their culture of origin and their blackness in their hair and their bodies.
It is a delight. And if you're a white lady who's, like, doing the work and trying to be a better white person to people of color, follow @professionalblackgirl because it will help you understand how much work goes into being a person of color out in the world.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:17:37] Yeah. Black people are aware that their code switching and their awareness of doing that reminds them that there's an authentic self behind the switch and behind the mask and that reminder is enough just to feel a little safer.
Emily Nagoski: [00:17:53] We do advocate for having a person or two, maybe even three in your life with whom you can share the least acceptable parts of yourself. One of my favorite comedians is Maria Bamford, who has unwanted thoughts syndrome, which is where a person has deeply disturbing thoughts that have nothing to do with what they actually want to do in the world, but they have fear, a really standard fear is, like, you're at a tall building and you have this fear that, like, you're going to jump. I'm going to jump off this building. I'm going to jump off this building and die and all these people going to watch me die. That's a really, like, common and fairly benign example.
But those are not things that you share with almost anyone. Yeah, you only share those least accessible parts of yourself with a very select number of people. That's where authenticity belongs.
But our main goal in normalizing talking about the abyss is to recognize that we all feel it - we all we all have the abyss - we have this raw open wound inside us where we feel this chasm between who we truly are, which that's like solid ground that we feel comfortable on. And then there's who were expected to be, which is this far distant place, this destination, this fantasy-
Amelia Nagoski: [00:19:13] That we probably have mixed feelings about ever reaching anyway. Like, "oh wouldn't it be nice? That'd be so much easier if I could just conform and also it would suck to have to be that limited person." Yuck. Yeah.
Emily Nagoski: [00:19:26] And it's okay to have an abyss. It is not actually dangerous for us unless we believe we're really supposed to be that "expected us" and if we fall short we're truly failing at some core aspect of being alive.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:19:40] That means the cure to feeling "not enough" is not to tell yourself, "You are enough."
Emily Nagoski: [00:19:46] "I am enough."
Amelia Nagoski: [00:19:46] If you're the one telling yourself you're enough, you're still alone, isolated. Telling yourself anything rarely does what you need it to do. Instead the cure is to connect with your people.
Emily Nagoski: [00:19:59] This is the moment where I'm going to bridge between dealing with our individual abyss and the Feminist Survival Project 2020's goal of helping feminists survive 2020. That is connecting it to our ability to change the political world. This project of making the world better, of being a part of the solution, that project is bigger than any of us can accomplish on our own.
Each of us - I have this visual of each of us standing at the edge of the ocean with a bucket in our hands, trying to move the shore, one bucketfull at a time each individual, man, you're standing there with your bucket, you start to feel swamped by the enormity of the task and your smallness in the face of the shore and the ocean and that task... But when you look to your right and you see all the people all down the shore with their buckets doing the work and you look to your left and you see even more people with their buckets all joined in with you doing the work, then you begin to recognize how your "not enough"-ness to do this by yourself doesn't matter.
What matters is that all of us together are what make enough to change the world. You showing up and doing your part is enough. This is the other definition of enoughness. There's the enough that comes from human giver syndrome telling you how you're supposed to be and there's the enough that is actually you. Your enoughness derives not from your individual efforts, but from your shared participation with us in something larger than yourself.
We're going to talk about that in the next episode. Please see the "Meaning and Something Larger" episode coming up next.
Your labor to make the world a better place is enough, not because you by yourself are going to make the world the way you want it to be, but because your labor happens in connection with our labor and other listeners' labor and your neighbors' labor and when you feel like you're not enough all you have to do is connect with your people.
PS: You are doing it right now. Yay!
Do you feel a little better? That's the goal. Call or text a friend. Just say hi. Just get together and eat something delicious. Just snuggle. Go to a meeting of your people. Doesn't have to be political, could be an organizing event or it could be a religious service or game of Dungeons and Dragons. Just be with your people, working toward a shared goal. Read a book or watch a movie or play a game that reminds you of the ways humans work together and make the world better.
You may even find it helpful to make a list of the people, the places, the books and movies and games that help you remember that participating in something larger than yourself really does, all by itself, create the change you're looking for.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:22:55] And the change is necessary. It is legit. It's bad out there.
The world needs you to stay well so that you can stay in the fight. Self-care has been getting some well-deserved flack as a neoliberal scam to make individuals responsible for the damage done to them by cultural forces.
Yes. And the solution is that it's not about self- anything. It's just care. All of us caring for each other. Work a little harder than feels comfortable and then connect with your people. That's enough. You are enough.
Emily Nagoski: [00:23:29] Back in I think 2011 or 2012, I saw Kate Bornstein speak and what she said was that postmodern theory can save your life.
How?
Okay, dig this. What she says is we're all constructing and reconstructing ourselves, our "who" based, alas, on what she calls the "hierarchical vector of oppression" - class, gender, race, sex, religion and all the things - as we try to find a "who" that best attracts the people we want to attract. And we do this when we allow our attempt to create a "who" for which fewer people will give us shit, rather than a "who" based on what makes life worth living.
That's your identity. The who are you. For whom do you want to be a role model? What makes life worth living for real is your identity. That's the "who" are you, the who you truly are. For whom do you want to be a role model?
There's your desire, which is whom do you want to fuck? What is your goal? And then there's the third aspect of what actually makes life worth living and that's power. Having access to the resources you need that make life worth living. Kate Bornstein's approach comes from her own experience with thinking about dying and even killing herself. Those thoughts can be giant important taps on the shoulder from her point of view. So when you're feeling loneliness, when you're feeling despair, helplessness, isolation, hopelessness, notice that as a tap on the shoulder that who you are trying to be, that's the part of you that's ready to let go and not exist anymore.
Your physical self isn't - it's not about your body not existing anymore. It's just an opportunity, a moment to notice that you're going to shed an identity. That's how postmodern theory can save your life. You recognize who you are in the context of the larger power structures.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:25:35] Who knew?
Emily Nagoski: [00:25:37] The word "namaste," it gets a lot of shit, appropriately in, you know, the western world.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:25:42] Yeah, culturally appropriated, misunderstood-
Emily Nagoski: [00:25:45] it roughly translates as, "the infinite divine in me recognizes the infinite divine in you." Well, the abyss in me - the infinite sucking vortex of failure to be who the world expects me to be - recognizes the abyss in you.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:26:06] You aren't a perfect match with the cultural expectations and you have an abyss of uncomfortable feelings about that. I'm not a match with the cultural expectations and I have an abyss of uncomfortable feelings about that.
Emily Nagoski: [00:26:19] You really have an abyss?
Amelia Nagoski: [00:26:20] I legit - no, the thing is that I've had the abyss since I was very, very, very, very, very, young and only recognized it as like, "Oh, maybe that's not how I have to actually live my life." Maybe in my 30s.
I really took for granted that the abyss was, like, a necessary reality for a long time.
Emily Nagoski: [00:26:40] So for some people listening, what we were doing is naming a feeling you've noticed before, giving you a little bit of language and giving you permission. And for other people, we might be naming a thing that you have been denying for a while.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:26:57] For always.
Emily Nagoski: [00:26:59] And just telling yourself that you are enough, you're enough.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:27:02] Oh my God, here's news. You don't have to conform to culturally constructed norms. Did you know that? I didn't know that for a long time.
Emily Nagoski: [00:27:13] So when you say "I'm enough, I'm enough," let that be a reminder that it is the expectations that are bullshit.
When you say, "I am enough" what you're saying is that script I got handed is all full of lies. Yeah. Lies. Let it remind you to grieve the ways you've been rejected for not meeting those expectations.
The damage that has been done to you by bouncing against the walls of other people's insistence that you perform according to their expectations. And let it remind you that part of you is wise and that wise part of you is the part that always knows to be kind to the part of you that is wounded.
And I feel like that's a pretty downer way to end the episode.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:27:59] Well, it's a it's a downer thing. Like, you have this abyss and the abyss is not going to go away. Yeah, but you can manage it by connecting with everybody else who's also got abysses.
Emily Nagoski: [00:28:08] Yeah.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:28:10] Like, there it is.
Emily Nagoski: [00:28:11] So it's a good thing there's a song.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:28:13] This whole thing made me hopeless, so I wrote a song about it.
Emily Nagoski: [00:28:17] And how this is going to happen is we don't ,like, separately record. Amelia's literally going to sit in front of the microphone right now and annnnd sing it.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:28:24] Okay.
Emily Nagoski: [00:28:25] Should we do it before or after the credits?
Amelia Nagoski: [00:28:28] We should do it before the credits.
Emily Nagoski: [00:28:31] Okay.
Amelia Nagoski: [00:28:32] Mmm. I've changed some things. I'll just try to remember on the moment. Okay?
🎵🎵Who does the world say that I should be and what do I do if I don't agree? Rational me says that I am enough. My primate brain says not fitting is rough.
🎵🎵Solutions are clear. I should be myself. Then deal with the world when it puts me through hell or easier still is to be what they say. That only requires I give my soul away - to the abyss. Abyss.
🎵🎵Two opposite goal stand and ask you to choose. Whichever you pick there's something to lose. But you're not alone, we're all on this road and going together is a journey of hope through the abyss, abyss.
Emily Nagoski: [00:29:41] We did it! I hope this helped if it did and you find yourself wanting to have a conversation about it with other people, please share this and I hope you'll join us next week for another Feminist Survival Project 2020.
If anything was written here was written by us. I'm Emily Nagoski
Amelia Nagoski: [00:30:06] And Amelia Nagoski.
Emily Nagoski: [00:30:07] To the extent that it was produced, it was produced by my marital euphemism. All the music by Amelia.
You can follow the podcast on Instagram or Twitter at @FSP2020 and email us at feministsurvivalproject2020 at gmail.com. Kindness always welcome. Tell us when you recognize the gap between you and who you're supposed to be-
Amelia Nagoski: [00:30:28] was it just this minute, just this right now?
Emily Nagoski: [00:30:30] And what do you do to manage it?
We're going to come back next week and talk about your something larger.
Please join us then. Bye.