Destabilization & the Frequency of Values

(This essay is a little shaky, a little unstable, and feels somewhat like two related essays jammed together. This is, um, a literary device. It’s intentional, to match the subject and the style — to show how during transformation, it sometimes feels like you’re two different people, and it can be hard to tell which is which. Trust me, I studied literature in college. This is all incredibly sophisticated stuff.)

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Where to start this story? Maybe it's best to start with my takeaway, so you know that I have a point to all this. My takeaway, or the one I'm talking about today, is that how you hold yourself during destabilization sets the tone for who you'll be when stability finds you again. This is incredibly important to realize and live by while you're destabilized, not just looking back on it or anticipating it.

A few months ago, I went through a period of concentrated chaos and destabilization, especially in my personality structure. It shouldn't have been a surprise, and in many ways it wasn't, but the experience of something is always different from the expectation of it.

I'm writing now for a few reasons, though I'm a bit reticent to talk about this part of my life again (even though I feel very positively towards this period of my life, I'm aware of a possible interpretation that I'm whining). Mostly, I'm writing this because:

• I think the collective has begun going through (and will continue intensifying) a period of destabilization, where our old strategies not only don't work, but are literally not available anymore — and I think individual examples of the same pattern can yield insights on that process.

• I believe that the pattern of what I went through isn't terribly uncommon for others who do a lot of contemplative work and encounter destabilizing life events, and I want to share what may be helpful to them about it — hopefully so something about it sticks if/when such times do find you.

• I also have had 3 conversations recently where someone inquired deeply into this topic — and usually when that happens, I take it as a signal that I should write it down somewhere.

With that said, I'll start with the story of my personal destabilization, then move along to the takeaway I mentioned above.

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There's not much mystery as to why I was destabilized last year. I'd been diagnosed with a thyroid disease, and suffered symptoms ranging from simple and unpleasant (cold legs) to existential horror (my brain dissolving into psychedelic goop, leaving me unable to function or contemplate much beyond the fact that I was trapped in a buzzy viscous hell realm for days at a time). My 5 year relationship ended. I was unable to work or make money for months at a time, from a mixture of brain fog, heart break, and unpredictable days where I couldn't stand up without collapsing. I started discovering and re-integrating disowned parts of my personality, unfelt emotions, and visionary experiences. I realized I'd organized much of my life around seeking connection in ways that didn't actually lead to connection. I got into a couple of romantic entanglements that did my stability no favors, and I spent a couple months in a hospital in Delhi. I lost 80 pounds and lost all my usual strategies for comfort or stability.

I also, and this is a hard one to describe, but I spend a lot of time kinda fainting? Or like, I'd stand up too fast, get super dizzy and go blind for a minute, and sometimes fall to the floor. (In a couple cases, I fell to the floor twitching and seizing for a minute or so until my body chemistry evened out.) Each time this would happen, I had the odd experience of losing my entire personality, and watching it slowly come back online, piece by piece. I got into a process of patiently waiting for basic facts about myself to become available again. It was a way of grounding myself into the re-constitution. I would lie on the floor, thinking "Okay, I'm American. I'm 33 years old, I think. I'm in... India? Yes, I thought Vienna for a second, but that was last month, now I'm in India. Wait, I'm American, why are so many of my touchpoints places like Vienna and India and Vietnam?..."

I mention this because it's maybe the most direct inroad to the type of chaos I was immersed in, how it functioned and what I did with it. This repeated dissolution of my personality — and my repeated observation of both the space behind it, and the ways that it came back online bit by bit — gave me a difficult-to-describe view of and attitude towards my... me. Towards what a personality is, how it works, what its function is, and how it changes.

There's an idea I think I picked up from Robert Kegan, the idea of an "evolutionary balance" in your personality structure. Or maybe it was “evolutionary truce.” The idea, as I remember it, is that your personality is made of many different dynamic forces, all pulling and pushing in different ways. For most of your life, those forces find an equilibrium. You have certain pulls towards love, integrity, satisfaction, power, safety, on and on and on — and those pulls manage to come to a truce, over time. There's a tensegrity there, where the structure is held in place precisely by the many many pressures in different directions, all evening out to a workable, dynamic structure made of mostly-stable centers where the forces balance.

Until something changes. Until one of those pulls disappears, or strengthens, or suddenly connects to a part of the structure it hadn't touched before... any number of things could happen to shift the calculus. And for me, they did happen, all at once: all the pushes and pulls that had relied on my long relationship with my partner? gone; the strengths that relied on my having relatively stable biochemistry? gone; my self-image as someone who doesn't get angry? gone; my reflexive pull away from pain and discomfort? massively softened; my drive towards change and transformation? multiplied; my self-concept as a characteristically stable person??? vaporized.

At the same time, I had also been finding a lot of new things about myself, about the person I'd become without much noticing over the past several years, as well as the person I became when in collapse.

For one thing, I was passionate; there were things I deeply wanted, and I had a drive to go after them. I was very spacious; I had the ability to leave lots of emotional space around difficult experiences. I was needy; my whole life had fallen apart, I had nothing to hold onto, and I was reaching out for anything, anyone to grip onto. I was loving; I'd never had so much room in my life to just nakedly love my friends and let them know how much I loved them, and every time I made more space for it, I found I could fill it. I was picky; as I kept running into the energy limits of both my hypothyroid body and my overworked emotional system, I found that I didn't have the patience to spend significant time with anyone who wasn't a fuck yes for me to spend time with. I couldn't do tasks that weren't a fuck yes to take part in.

So within a very short time, my entire system had lost a lot of its usual pushes and pulls and pressures, and gained a lot of new ones — and then been thrown into new situation after new situation (traveling around Eurasia, attending social events and meditation retreats and medical treatments and managing new social/romantic connections…).

My evolutionary balance didn't just get shifted, it detonated into a mayhem of raw wrenching heaves to and fro, up and down, pulled by unpredictable needs and feelings and instincts that had never needed conscious attention before, because they'd always been kept in check by a dozen other needs and feelings and instincts. Now, everything was up for grabs. Anything could happen.

During this period, I half-joked to my friends that I had multiple personality disorder, to try and explain to them why I was so erratic, why my moods were all over the place. When I scheduled a call with someone, I had no idea what version of River was going to show up on the day of the call. When I went for a walk to get dinner, I didn't know what version of River would arrive at the restaurant.

One day in Vienna, I left the apartment while sobbing, to go get food; I continued crying while I ordered a felafel and I sniffled and blew my nose while I ate it on the way back home. I did this because I knew I had a call starting in 20 minutes. It felt rude to cancel or be late, but I had to eat and I had to cry, and I knew both of those were going to take about 20 minutes. So this felt like the obvious most efficient route, to simply cry and eat at the same time, so that call could take place without interruption.

This mixture of anguish, tact, and practicality was pretty indicative of how my days were looking at that point. The instability had become a familiar home.

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Throughout this process, I had the imagery of evolutionary balance in my head. One of these images was like a massive cavern filled with ropes and pulleys and anchors, tons of lines of force pulling in all different directions from all sorts of centers and anchors. One moment it was stable, a tensegral stillness — and then, the next moment, 3 cables all broke at once, sending everything else jerking around, which then snapped a few more cables, sending even more jerking around, continuing until the whole cavern was an erratic hyperdimensional poly-pendulum of destruction.

The other image was of a crystal. There was a nice-looking crystal that had lost its molecular structure and dissolved into goop. And somehow or other, I knew that the goo could either stay goo, and then harden into a puddle-shaped rock... or, I could vibrate the goo at certain frequencies, and those frequencies would vibrate its molecular structure in particular ways, such that when it hardened, it would be an even clearer, even more beautiful and durable crystal than it had been before.

This, to me, became a critical image.

My personality was the crystal, my personality was the goop. The purpose of the destabilization was to make the crystal malleable again so that I'd have a chance to turn it into something else, some shape and form that would be more true and useful and fit to the tasks I'm here to do, the life I'm here to live.

The vibrations, it was clear to me, were certain virtues and ways of being. Certain frequencies I could hold my soul at, and let them shape my soul while it was malleable. The way that you can rub a magnet against a paperclip and make it magnetic too — I could rub my personality against love, care, integrity, truth, and beauty to magnetize my soul with them. I could let my soul resonate with humility, courage, lyricism, and zeal, and watch the goopy molecules of my personality crystallize into those shapes. I’d have to do it over and over and over again, almost constantly, if I wanted it to sink in. But I could do it.

This process is by no means finished, and it's really too soon to say what effect the whole thing has had.

But I don't know man, I've changed a lot. I can handle situations I couldn't handle before. I don't want to make any special claims, but it does seem like organizing my attention in particular ways has had an effect, it's moved the needle somewhere.

Which — and now we're getting closer to my takeaways from the experience — seems like it carries a lesson for the collective destabilization.

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Our Collective Destabilization

I'm a bit allergic to talking about current events and politics and so on. It just never feels worth it, when saying the most anodyne factual statements is so often received by screeching defamations from the stygian roil. I'm just tired man.

That said... the world doesn't feel... like it's the most stable lately, does it? Kinda feels like some of the old norms stopped working? And like some of the structures and institutions that were relied on in the past aren't doing the whole Be Reliable thing anymore? Or like the culture, the voters, the general sentiment and psychosphere are on an even keel? Kinda seems like some stuff has been getting increasingly odd for the past decade, and like maybe Covid and the lockdowns shifted some stuff we still haven’t reckoned with? Kind of, um, seems like the rhythms of nature aren’t in the range where we normally would have expected? Feels like some stuff is going on with the youth, their moods and attitudes and relationships with one another and the world? And a whole other set of similar dynamics for other age groups, notably the older ones? And it seems like people’s relationship to the idea of work, and what it’s come to mean for most people, has been on the move?

I’m not saying anything about the end of the world or the fall of the west or whatever else these things usually get recruited for. I’m simply pointing at an evolutionary truce that seems to have broken down — and that feels like it’s going to break further before it finds the next truce. A lot of the pushes and pulls and centers we've gotten used to (as a society, for generations) seems to have frayed, snapped, or been redirected.

Which, if I’m right that the pattern of my past year or two is relevant here, is of course a bit scary — but much more than that, it’s fucking exciting.

Yes, the world might faint and collapse to the floor in spasms. It might have even more mood swings. It might cry in public more often than expected, and it might (metaphorically) have to figure out a blend of thyroid hormones that don't spark daily body horror and panic attacks — but on the other side of all this, if we handle the process right, it might just be happier and more skillful and better than ever.

Writing about cocoons, but with a wisdom that extends much much further, Pat Barker wrote "The process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay." But what makes the difference? When is decay the royal road to transformation, and when is it just decay? I have a few suspicions, a couple things that seem clear and worth sharing to me. I just want to share a couple things that feel like they’ve been critical to my own path through all this.

Let go of outcomes

Over and over and over again, I had to keep giving up my ideas of how things should be. Of how I wanted my personality to be shaped, or how I wanted a relationship to look, or how I wanted an event to turn out. Only after I let go of any real push for an outcome was Life free to unfold something unexpected and awesome around me.

The first step to a transformed world (or a transformed life) is a tough one: we have to give up our ideas of what the transformation looks like. To surrender our visions of preferred outcomes. Trust me, whatever actual transformation comes out of living with Reality day by day, it’s going to be much better than whatever plans your current ego has for things. It’s going to make your plans and visions and ideas look childishly and adorably inept, an elementary school art gallery of crayon utopias.

It's like a caterpillar holding onto a vision of being a bigger, jacked caterpillar with cool hair and a six pack. He, uh, he was never gonna be that. It's a very stupid thing to want to be. And there's zero chance he could imagine the butterfly, or even BEGIN to imagine that he could somehow become it — let alone realize that the butterfly is already latent inside him, already a bundle of cells itching to grow and emerge (and, let's be honest, it's probably for the best that the caterpillar can't imagine how those cells are basically going to devour most of his body in order to become a butterfly body).

I'm imagining crowds of caterpillars, they storm the streets with picket signs, they hop on computers to argue on catertwitter, each of them screaming at the others about whether the right move is to transform into a hawk or an ash tree (a few think they should turn into a fresh-baked croissant, which everyone thinks is a lovely thought but no one is going to throw away their vote on a minority party like that). There's a school of thought sweeping through the university scenes that the optimal solution, on a societal level, would be for everyone to tuck into their cocoons and emerge as raspberry bushes, but no one aside from a few academics and twitter anons really understand the argument.

It's an absurd little image, so deliciously useless. We all know, of course, that none of those caterpillars is ever going to be a hawk or an ash tree or a croissant. (I have it on good authority that they can become raspberry bushes, but it's very complex, you probably wouldn't understand all the maths.) The only thing the caterpillars can do is help each other to feel safe and secure enough to go weave their cocoons and step into the unknown; help each other find or make spaces where their cocoons will be safe, hidden from predators and pests; help each other let go of any expectations or fears that might lead them to clench and hold themselves back from the process.

There's so little to be done except let go, follow one's nature, and unfold what needs to happen moment by moment, even in the midst of dissolution and Mystery. I am no longer talking about caterpillars.

Recognize and live our values

Let's rip the bandaid off right now: this does not mean getting everyone else to live your values.

The number-one-by-a-mile way that people avoid living their values is by going out into the world and telling everyone else how important those values are and how everyone needs to be living them. (I swear to god if you point out the irony of me writing this I will slap you, I will slap you through the internet tubes, I will slap you in the throat I will not apologize I will slap you.) One problem with this is when it stops you from taking the time to live those values — when it scratches the values-itch and makes you feel like you've done something, when all you've done is convince yourself that your values are universal rather than specifically your responsibility. You've created a bystander effect for your own fate. (This is a not-insignificant reason I’ve been publishing very little for a long time, and why I haven’t talked about my current personal practice on here or twitter much since early last year.)

The other problem is that as far as I can tell, everyone is given different values to live by. Different questions to live into. Different gods who live in their chest. Different combinations of natural concerns that balance out very differently. So no, western culture doesn't depend on a resurgence of masculine courage: if that feels important to you, either your life and integrity depend on building masculine courage, or you've just listened to too many podcasts from someone else whose life depends on it. And no, the fate of the world-soul doesn't depend on building a culture of togetherness, connection, and non-hierarchical institutions: if that feels important to you, your soul depends on cultivating love, connection, and care in your life and with the people around you.

This doesn't mean everyone's values are a totally isolated individualist concern, they're not at all. But the question is one of resonance, of creating and/or following beacons to Find The Others and connect with them. But this is a pretty much unrelated project to the way this usually goes, where people try to brainwash others into their values and then find as many ways as possible to force or brainwash others into buying in to their version of what those values means. I'll be writing more about this, but I can't emphasize enough that these are unrelated projects, and the one that everyone tries to do right now is extremely caterpillar-activist-coded.

We need dojos

None of this comes easy. Letting go of outcomes is hard. Repeatedly returning to your values and acting by them is hard. Articulating yourself well with others in stressful situations is hard. Even giving and receiving love in mutually satisfying ways rarely comes naturally.

I've spent most of the last month or so in an intentional "Love Dojo," a relationship where she and I very specifically spend our days with an intention of loving each other better; where we practice — literally practice, usually for a couple hours in the early afternoon — caring and clear communication; where we figure out how to create a secure, smooth, and joyful connection (which, importantly, is a very different task from just trying to have that type of connection); we practice how to be honest and have fights in ways that make us more connected, not less.

Basically we're doing relational R&D and getting in reps on what we find works. And uh, it's working. Even outside of this relationship, I've been able to show up in importantly different ways in other relationships since we started.

These types of relational and values-driven R&D dojos are great. I've participated in a few versions of these over the years, and they're always hard but I always leave with something I didn't arrive with. Any opportunity to practice with a way of being that doesn't come naturally — and especially an opportunity where there are real stakes, where other people are in it with you — is something that should really be available to everyone.

And honestly... they are. Is the weird part. Like, some of the dojos I've been to have been planned international events, or ones with weekly schedules and a payment plan, sure. But others are just a matter of finding someone you want to practice with and making dedications to each other to do it. Crafting situations that allow you to practice more fully, and sticking with that in whatever way you can.

Finding the values and principles you live by isn't always easy. Giving yourself opportunities to live by them and make them a default reflex can be brutally hard. But writing them down, sharing them with the people around you, having them do the same, and then all of you practicing coming together in loving, supportive presence, not to call each other out on your fuck-ups and inevitable hypocrisies, but to share with honesty and vulnerability the desire to keep honing the craft and doing better — this is attainable. It's largely a matter of just getting it in people's minds as A Thing They Can Do.

I never would have gotten this much juice out of living my values if I didn't have friendships, relationships, and little dojos to practice in over the past year. I couldn't have white-knuckled it on my own, that's just not how change like this works.

Craft our attention

I said a lot of what I have to say in this essay on attention as worship, and I'll be talking about it again and again for quite awhile, I think. So I don't need to repeat it all here. But in short, unifying your attention and putting it on things that you feel a real, wholesome, attractive force towards — it transforms your attention, which transforms your world, which transforms how it makes sense to act and think and be in the world, which transforms the core of who you are.

If you find your values, if you manage to bring forth what's within you, rather than just buying into the shoulds and ersatz values from this or that political theory or Asian spiritual lineage — craft your attention in the direction of those values. Focus on words and actions and communities that emanate and enact them. Take up hobbies that pull on you for reasons you don't fully understand. Give up anything that scatters your attention, let it cohere more and more into a force that can drive and shape the core of who you are. Because it's going to have to — and not just that, but the collective attention of those who are able to focus like this... they're probably going to have an outsized effect on how the world/culture crystallizes after all this falling apart. And I want the type of people who read blogs like this to be very heavily weighted in that process.

The ability to magnetize your soul with love, with courage, with cleverness, with honesty, with whatever else — it takes commitment and focus. There’s not really a multi-tasking-friendly way to do it. You can’t have YouTube on in the background.

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I've wandered around here, but that's fine. I feel like I wrote 1.7 essays and then jammed them together, but I can't quite find the seam where I would separate them. It's fine.

Last time I felt a big idea-complex trying to come through me, 2 or 3 years ago, the process felt similar. My writing was clumsy and haphazard, there were connections that felt sloppy, ideas that were connected in ways I felt like I wasn't articulating properly... and in the end, I just had to trust the process, let things be incoherent for awhile, and they slowly cohered into a few of my favorite pieces of writing I've ever done. I'm just going to have faith that the same process will make its way this time too.

So here's signing off, and here's hoping that if any of you are in a process of decay — or seeing one around you — that it's the kind that leads to transformation. And that something I've said here helps you crystallize that transformation the right way.