Truth + Crisis

At some point, most of us will face a crisis. Not necessarily the clichéd midlife version—the sports car, the bucket list, the desperate attempt to recapture youth—but a genuine crisis in which the things through which we've known ourselves stop working, disappear, or simply run out of road.

This week's email comes from a 53-year-old woman facing exactly that. Her marriage is ending after discovering her husband had been having an affair for fifteen years. She spent the last decade caring for people around her who were dying. She couldn't have the children she wanted. She's sick of her career and is quitting. She has friends, a dog and a cat. If you looked at her social media, she says you'd think she had everything together. On the surface, she's having a splendid time. Underneath it, she says she has zero meaningful purpose.

Her question is simple: How did I get here?

There's something people often don't realize when they communicate authentically about their lives. They think they're telling you their story. They're not. They're revealing its structure.

Think about it. Fifty-three years of being alive. Thousands of people, places, conversations, successes, failures, ordinary Tuesdays and extraordinary Saturdays. Yet of everything she could have told me, she chose these particular things. They aren't random. They're the milestones that carry weight and organize the landscape of her life.

I have an analogy I've used for more than twenty years called Yellow Car.

Imagine buying a bright yellow car. Suddenly, everywhere you drive, you see yellow cars. There's one. There's another. There's one exactly the same shade as yours. Before long you're thinking, There are fucking yellow cars everywhere.

No. They were always there.

What's changed is that you can see them now.

But that's only half of Yellow Car. The other half is what you're no longer seeing. As yellow becomes increasingly available, everything else begins to recede: other colors, other possibilities, other outcomes, other ways the world might occur.

The same thing happens with life.

At a young age, we come to some pretty firm determinations about ourselves, other people and life itself. We don't experience these as conclusions we've reached. We experience them as reality: this is simply how things are.

Then we go out and live.

People come and go. Things work and don't work. We succeed, fail, love and lose. Certain events light up like yellow cars because they're consistent with the view already there. Eventually, we've accumulated decades of what appears to be incontrovertible evidence that this really is our life.

At the same time, we spend enormous portions of our lives trying to overcome those original determinations. We pursue marriage, family, success, belonging, careers, being needed, being useful. There's always somewhere to put ourselves, something to accomplish, someone to love or care for.

Until the project runs out of road.

For this woman, the marriage is over. The people she cared for are gone. Motherhood didn't happen. The career has exhausted itself. Everything through which she knew herself—and everything she pursued in the project of overcoming herself—has become insolvent.

What's left is what I call the bankruptcy of self.

Our instinct at this point is usually to look away. Find another relationship. Reinvent ourselves. Travel. Write a book. Become a painter. Start a business. Find a new purpose. None of those things is inherently problematic. The problem is what we're recruiting them to do. If they're simply the next attempt to escape the same familiar experience of ourselves, we're rebuilding the same project with different materials.

Maybe the first thing isn't to move at all.

Don't avert your gaze.

Because what appears to be the catastrophe might actually be the greatest possibility of your life.

Nietzsche wrote of rediscovering “the seriousness that one had as a child at play.” When a child is genuinely at play, there is only play. The fort is the fort. The game is the game. They're completely given to it—and twenty minutes later they can abandon the entire thing and play something else.

Maybe that's what's available now.

Not another identity. Not another answer. Not another thing that finally fixes what's missing.

Play.

Express yourself. Expand yourself. Invent. Imagine. Try something. Drop it. Become fascinated. Change your mind. Make something simply because you want to discover what it's like. None of it has to become who you are or what your life is about.

The facts don't change. The past remains the past.

But the view can change.

And when the view changes, what's available changes.

You're here.

Now what?

Go play.