Week 4 is media deprivation week, meaning I couldn’t read or consume any media for that time. I was convinced that when the revelations came in the absence of all this noise, they would themselves as the lush, beautiful treasures that would blow open the quagmire of my 15-year creative block.

Instead, the first, perhaps the main, emergent result happened to be the realization that I had been grieving my strangled dream of writing creatively for my entire adult life, and the realization that despite all my objective successes in academia and my career over that time, I hadn’t been able to do the one thing I’ve always wanted to do.

I wrote stories in my preteens and early teens. I never had goals or structure, I only had the implacable force of imagination that compelled me to try and give life to the visions and overheard conversations in my head. I didn’t think, I simply wrote. Although I fretted about it back then, I realize now that whether I was ‘good’ or not was not a relevant question. I was as free as I will ever be, although my young, naive self didn’t realize it at the time. It’s hard to understand a concept without knowing the absence of it.

As a budding academician in my 20s, I was always confused as to why whenever I won an award, or published a paper, or received an accolade, the first bright, short-lived burst of satisfaction always devolved into unease and eventually, a sense of despair. It only drove me to do more of what caused that despair in the vain hope that the next time might be different, that when I just got this many citations or published in that journal or won that national award, it would fill the hole in my heart.

Not doing the one thing you want to do most hurts. For me, it’s a sore spot just to the right of my sternum. Emotionally, it feels like shame and despondence. It’s an old wound, probably re-opened multiple times— when it did, I just never knew what it was or why it did. Occasionally I’d feel the chasm of my insides and not understand it.

Now I know it’s grief for the dreams I used to hold, so effortlessly and with such grace, until I lost them to ‘the real world’ and the practical considerations of getting an education and a respectable career. Maybe what hurts the most is my failure to recognize their worth, and that I shunned them so easily at the time.

My husband says I’ll never be fulfilled because I’m always looking for deeper meaning where there might not be any. In the years in which he’s known me, this seems true. He’s only ever known me in by blocked state, a grieving widow for a dead partner no one else knew about. To him it looks like I’ll never be happy creatively because that’s just my personality.

But I know better. I remember my preteen self and how she created so freely and happily, who spun realities out of the loom of her thoughts and dreams, and loved them because they were hers. At one time, I was happy in my creations simply because they existed.

I know I can be happy because I’ve felt it before. I want to find a way to access this creative freedom again— maybe not in the exact way I used to, so effortlessly and gracefully, but with perhaps the only weapon I still have at my disposal: knowing how to work hard.

We can’t get back innocence— it’s an ever-decreasing quantity. The innocence of not knowing or feeling the societal forces that would crush anything that didn’t conform to its capitalist and consumerist ideals will forever be gone. Perhaps I’ve been grieving that too.

Grief has stages, as we all know. They only progress faster if you actually know what you are grieving. I’ve been stuck in bargaining and sadness and denial and anger, cycling between them, over and over, for the last even 15 years, but not understanding why. That week of media deprivation helped me realize that I’ve been grieving my dreams. It’s finally time to put an end to the cycle, accept the death of the old dreams, and create new ones.

I’ve been soaking in the details my whole life, and what I need to do now is muster up the courage to zoom out and see the whole. My fatal flaw is overthinking, and as my true goal is to stay safe, I can overthink my way out of any situation that will have me exposing any part of myself to anyone, even if I don’t know who they are and they don’t know who I am. Must I wait for my true goal to change, or can I nudge it along in the direction I want it to go so I don’t end up having this specific regret in my deathbed?

I was much braver as a child— or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, bravery was a more natural state of being. As a child, you see something and it sparks an interest, so you pursue it. You have an interesting thought so you say it out loud or write it down. You’re imagining a story so you try to bring it into your reality somehow. You unabashedly fulfill your wishes (see: me collecting all the books in my house, stacking them as in a bookstore, cutting out money bills from paper, and going book shopping).

It’s only when we started believing the stories adults told us that our pure gestalt starts to become watered down or distorted, and we start to lose this state of pure agency, where desire flows seamlessly into action. But then we’re told what actions are ‘right’ and which are ‘wrong’ and then we have to try and edit them, and eventually edit our desires, too.

Now that I’m an adult myself who has seen plenty of what can go wrong when we follow others’ stories instead of our own, I would like to trust more in my own gestalt of reality. Unfortunately, it will be irrevocably tainted by the edits I’ve incorporated from my parents, teachers, peers, bosses and society at large, but I suppose that’s a common human condition and there’s no need to fret about it. I shall simply go on and do my best soaking in all the details and letting the panorama come into being, in its own time.

A while ago, I made the conscious decision to actively resist my pessimism, my so-called (by me) ‘natural state’. In fact, I used to think that pessimism and cynicism were the ‘right’ ways to approach life.

It was the classic case of a disenchanted young adult trying to make sense of why life felt so burdensome despite its possibilities and opportunities and the fact that, actually, good things did happen. It was an attempt to guard against disappointment, which for a millennial can feel like the greatest calamity of all. 

Eventually, feelings started feeling completely out of hand. I’d feel like something was building up, but I wouldn’t know what or why, in an ominous way, like those heart-stopping pauses before the jump scare. When it would inevitably come spilling out in an emotionally violent way, as it always did, I’d start wondering how it would manifest next time. Which external problems will I ascribe to my meltdown? Who will I find to blame for it, and escape accountability, yet again?

It’s hard to come to terms with the fact that we have to learn how to live well. We like to assume that we’re born with all the tools to succeed and be happy— they just need time to mature properly. That might be true. I think it’s more likely that we all vary in the tools we are lacking and need to learn. So best to assume that you don’t have any of them, and to work on acquiring them.

And the hardest tool to learn is to keep looking up when things get difficult— what Viktor Frankl called rational faith. More colloquially, it’s called optimism.

I’ve thought about faith and optimism a fair bit, mostly in opposition with it. Certainly, I struggle with not knowing the future. Many of my decisions have been fear-based, and to avoid pain. Pessimism is an emotional crutch against the worst thing that can happen.

But pessimism and cynicism borne out of a fearful self-preservation instinct is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe that things won’t work out, then it probably won’t. Faith is absolutely required to embody some kind of positive movement or action towards a better outcome.

Cynics are lazy— they don’t want to be challenged in their beliefs. So it’s easier to just not believe in anything, and stay boxed in, rigid, petulantly ignorant of the things you don’t want to see.

Humans tend to become more entrenched and set in their ways because every unique experience adds to an already unique worldview. It’s easier to confirm a belief or idea you’ve previously had rather than rebuilding the house itself. The inertia for the latter tends to be rather high.

And when people subconsciously pick and choose evidence to support what they already believe, they think it’s a result of experience, when it’s actually the result of subconscious confirmation bias over the years. 

People like me, who weren’t born optimistic or happy, tend to pick and choose the evidence of life that only confirms one’s melancholic, pessimistic, cynical view of life. Actively trying to break out of this cycle has made me realize that becoming more optimistic would be my greatest success of getting older. 

Interacting with self-professed ‘happy’ people is jarring to me, but I’m also grateful for the exemplar because it’s strong evidence against my entrenched prior that everyone is unhappy, deep down or not so deep down, and that we’re all faking it. I like the idea that some people aren’t faking it, so much so that rather than being envious of that ability to be happy, innate or learned, I’d like to believe that I can learn it, and you can’t learn without good role models. 

Sometimes I get a feeling of disquiet because it goes against my usual philosophy of keeping my expectations low. But then I realize that conversely, most things I have a good feeling about actually tend to work out well.

I’ve previously interpreted it as ‘having good instincts’ but now I’m starting to wonder if it’s just confirmation bias at work again. When I dread something, it usually doesn’t turn out as bad as I thought it would have, but it also doesn’t turn out amazing. If I had gone into it excited, maybe it would have. 

Going against your own subconscious beliefs is unbelievably hard but it’s also invigorating the more one does it. It’s a cold rush in the brain, loosening the dust and cleaning it out. It’s a chance to move the pieces around, adjust the inner picture of the world, generally making it richer, more interesting, perhaps more contradictory. But life is contradictory in many ways, perhaps naturally so. 

To my fellow pessimists— it’s ok to be scared, and even for those fears to sometimes come true. Because most of the time they’re not as bad in real life as they are in your imagination. Even if they are, you’ve likely underestimated your own capabilities of dealing with it.