What we carry, and what we do with it now

In my last essay, How Did We Get Here?, I ended on a question. If the ladder you've been climbing was handed to you, who handed it to you?

I've been turning that over ever since, and the answer is a little unsatisfying at first. Nobody did. And pretty much everybody did.

Let me show you what I mean, and you can tell me if it fits.

Last time I asked for your curiosity instead of your verdict. I used that word, verdict, kind of in passing. This time let's stay on it for a while, because I think that's where the ladder starts.

Where it starts

You were four, or seven, or eleven, and you had no way of knowing it was happening. Somebody was measuring you. How smart you were, how you looked, how well you behaved, how you stacked up against the other kids. A parent, a teacher, the kids in the schoolyard. We all went through it. Too loud. Too quiet. Not as quick as your sister. Good at math, so that's who you are now, and who you're going to be from here on.

And here's the part that matters. None of that came through to you as an opinion. It came through as a feeling, and over time the feeling settled in as a fact about you. A belief, in other words. A verdict on who you are, and one you probably can't remember picking up.

I'll give you one of mine. When I was a preteen I started putting on weight. It was the 70's, and I don't think anybody ate well back then. I became the chubby kid. Somewhere in there I took on being fat as who I was, and it stayed with me for a good part of my life.

As a young father I got myself down to 140 pounds. When I look at the photographs now, I was very skinny. But when I looked in the mirror back then, I saw the chubby kid looking back at me. I'd look at my stomach in particular and see fat. The facts had changed completely, and the belief, the verdict I'd come to about myself, hadn't moved an inch. I was a grown man with a family, and that preteen was still telling me what I was looking at.

I've healed most of that. I feel quite healthy now, and accepting of my body, though there are still a few remnants of that old belief around.

So how does an opinion about a kid turn into a fact for a grown man? Chalmers Brothers, in a book called Language and the Pursuit of Happiness, makes a distinction I've found really useful. He separates two kinds of statements. An assertion is a fact, something anybody can check, i.e. "The door is two metres high." An assessment is somebody's opinion, i.e. "That door is too low." Two people can stand in front of the same door and disagree, and he says something about assessments that I've never forgotten.

"Assessments belong to the observer, and in many ways reveal more about the observer than they do about the thing being observed."

The trouble is that most of us lost track, a long time ago, of which of our beliefs about ourselves were facts and which were somebody's opinions. An opinion hardened into a fact, and from then on we stopped checking. So that's what I mean by a verdict. An opinion that forgot it was an opinion.

One thief, a few different coats

What keeps a verdict in place is judgment, and I've come to think of judgment as a thief. One thief, wearing a few different coats. What it steals is the plain enjoyment of your own life.

There's comparison, where somebody else becomes the measure of your worth. There's competition, where for one of us to win the other has to lose. There's desire with no pleasure in it, the kind of wanting that never gets around to enjoying what's already here. And there's the language of judgment, the shoulds and oughts and musts, good and bad, right and wrong. If you read Essay 1, How Did We Get Here?, that's the voice that starts the list before your feet hit the floor.

I want to be a little careful with the first one. Emily Nagoski, in her book Come Together, makes the point that when people say comparison is the thief of joy, what they usually mean isn't the comparing, it's the judgment that comes riding in on it. In her words:

"Judgment is the real thief of joy."

I think she's right. You can compare two things and simply notice the differences, even get curious about them, and come out understanding more than you did.

When the thief moves in

This is also how a life that was handed to you starts to feel like a weight you have to carry.

Think about that last coat, your language, the shoulds and oughts and musts. At some point we take somebody's verdict and turn it inward, and we start to should on ourselves. I should be thinner. I should be further along. I should have figured this out by now. And once that happens, nobody has to stand over you anymore. The thief lives inside, and you carry the verdict around all by yourself, judging yourself before anybody else gets the chance.

In How Did We Get Here? I asked whether you chose your life or whether it was handed to you. I've realised since that there's a third answer, a combination of the two. It's the life you think is demanded of you.

Notice the word think. The demand is still somebody's opinion. It stopped feeling like one a very long time ago, because by now the voice making it sounds exactly like your own.

No blame, and full accountability

So who handed it to you? Here's what I've come to.

I first ran into the work of a man named L.S. Barksdale back in 1991, at a weekend program I attended in my late twenties. He spent about thirty years on this, and he wrote a thin little book called Building Self-Esteem, eighty pages or so, pretty hard to find these days. In it he made a list of where these verdicts come from. Criticism and condemnation from parents, teachers and the other kids. Being compared, out loud, to a brother or sister or a friend who was doing better.

You might read that list and think, well, there you go, that's who did it.

But then he says what changed it for me. A child, he says, is neither their awareness nor their actions, and can only act as wisely as their awareness at the time allows.

Sit with that for a second, because it applies to everybody in the story, and not only the child.

Most of our parents were working with the awareness they had. So were theirs, and theirs before them. They handed on what had been handed to them, mostly without knowing they were handing anything on at all. Some of it definitely isn't even learned. It gets passed down in the body, from people who never got to choose it either.

And if I can go one step wider, people built our schools and our workplaces and the whole economy we live inside, working from what they could see at the time. That doesn't make any of it fine the way it is. It means blaming them won't be what changes it.

The same goes for AI, which I wrote about in my last essay, How Did We Get Here? I said AI is an amplifier, that it meets you where you are and gets you there faster. It will do the same with your beliefs about yourself. If you haven't really thought about how you bring AI into your life, and what you're teaching it about yourself, it will pick up your shoulds and oughts and musts and feed them right back to you. And more broadly, anything that learns from what we've all written down is learning our judgments right along with our words. Handed on again, and nobody really decided that either.

So I've come to a place where I don't believe in blame. Not of them, and not of you.

I want to be careful here though, because this could sound like letting everybody off the hook, and I don't mean that at all. Some of what gets handed down is real harm. Some people did know better, and I can't see inside anybody's heart to say otherwise. If you were hurt, you were hurt. Understanding where something came from doesn't excuse it, and nobody needs to forgive anything on my say-so.

I didn't choose what was handed to me. But as an adult I'm 100% responsible for everything I think, say, do and feel, and for what I pass on from here. Just because there's no blame doesn't mean I get to absolve myself. These are things I think of on a daily basis, in my relationship with my partner, with my children, with my clients. With anyone for that matter.

No blame, but full accountability. There's a lot more to say about that, and I'll come back to it in a later essay.

If this sits a little heavy

How Did We Get Here? ended in a curious place, at least I hope it did. This essay may feel different. Once you start to see where your beliefs about yourself came from, you can't go back to not seeing it, and that can be unsettling for a while. It certainly was for me, and some days it still is.

What I offer is this. It was never your fault that you believed what you did. You were a child, doing what children do, which is believe what the people around them say about who they are.

I've been talking about a thief, but I think what got taken is still there. Your sense of who you were, before anybody measured you, got pushed into hiding. And what's been pushed into hiding can be brought into the light. For me, that's the hopeful part of all of this.

Where to begin

If you want a place to begin, I invite you to start with that last coat, the language of judgment, because it's the one you can actually hear. And if you listen closely enough, you can feel it too. Quiet yourself for a moment and listen. How does it feel to be should on?

Now, I'd be contradicting myself if I told you that you should drop your shoulds! So I'll tell you what I learned years ago, and what I'm still practising. Listen for should, ought and must, for good and bad, right and wrong. When you catch one, say it again with a different word. Try replacing those words with need, want or consider.

"I should go to the gym" turns into "I need to go to the gym," or "I want to go to the gym." Or sometimes it turns into "I don't actually want to go today, so I'm not going," which is certainly worth knowing as well. And "you should call her" turns into "you may want to call her," or "you may want to consider calling her."

It's a small change, and I've found it isn't small at all. A should comes with a judgment attached. If you don't do it, there's something wrong with you. Need, want and consider drop the judgment and leave you with a decision, and you can feel the difference in your body. One puts the brakes on and the other gets you moving.

The others, comparing, competing and wanting without enjoying, tend to ease up a little on their own once you can hear the voice that's driving them. We'll come back to those in a later essay.

So here's invitation number two. Same as last time, it's an invitation, not homework.

Pause for a moment. Quiet your mind. Then write down one belief you hold about yourself, the first one that comes up. Underneath it, write down when you first remember hearing it, and who you might have first heard it from. Then ask yourself, gently: is that a fact, or was it somebody's opinion?

There's no wrong answer here either. Notice what comes up and write it down. If something stronger comes up, that's okay too. Take a few slow breaths, set it aside for a while, and if it's more than you want to carry alone, talk to somebody you trust.

That's plenty for now. I'll leave you with the question I'm taking into the next essay, and it's the one I'm most looking forward to. If the verdict was only ever somebody's opinion, what was there before it?

This is the second essay in a series. If you landed here first, it starts with How Did We Get Here? and it'll make more sense in order. If you'd like the next one by email, you can sign up at www.releasedynamics.com. No pitch, no schedule. Just the next piece, sent once.