David R. MacIver's Blog

Returning to the World

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/returning-to-the-world.

Hi everyone,

I wrote a follow up to last week’s post, but it ended up having the wrong tone for a Sunday post (I’m not sure what that tone is yet, but this was clearly the wrong tone), and it was something I was likely to want to send to people, so it’s turned into this coming Wednesday’s free post and you’ll get something else.

It is not so difficult as we had supposed

There is a passage from Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell that all but brings me to tears, and I don’t know that I can explain to you exactly why. The thing that makes me cry is certainly not literally in the text.

The passage is this:

“Your second task is . . . Your second task is to take a message to all the magicians in England. Do you understand me?”

“Oh, yes! But . . .”

“But what?”

“But there is only one.”

“What?”

“There is only one magician, sir. Now that you are here, only one magician remains in England.”

Strange seemed to consider this for a moment. “My pupils,” he said. “My pupils are magicians. All the men and women who ever wanted to be Norrell’s pupils are magicians. Childermass is another. Segundus another. Honeyfoot. The subscribers to the magical journals. The members of the old societies. England is full of magicians. Hundreds! Thousands perhaps! Norrell refused them. Norrell denied them. Norrell silenced them. But they are magicians nonetheless. Tell them this.” He passed his hand across his forehead and breathed hard for a moment. “Tree speaks to stone; stone speaks to water. It is not so hard as we have supposed. Tell them to read what is written in the sky. Tell them to ask the rain! All of John Uskglass’s old alliances are still in place. I am sending messengers to remind the stones and the sky and the rain of their ancient promises.

Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, chapter 56, page 858

The line “It is not so hard as we have supposed” repeats over and over again in my head, although it usually transforms itself into “It is not so difficult as we had supposed”. I had never thought it hard, it would be the easiest thing in the world if only it weren’t impossible.

What is “it”?

I don’t know, exactly. Perhaps everything.

There’s something about me you may or not know. I mention it from time to time, but it’s weird and mostly not that important so it doesn’t come up that often: I know how to fly.

Not how to fly a plane, just how to fly.

There is a mental movement, a pushing away, where your mind latches onto the ground and you shove, and at the same time you jump, and something catches and you are free from gravity and you soar.

This doesn’t work, obviously. People can’t fly like that. I am under no illusions that I can in fact break loose from the shackles that bind me to this earth.

But I know, at a deep level, that it actually does work like that. I remember it working like that, from a legacy of a thousand flying dreams as a child.

It’s not even that I’m doing the wrong thing. I’m doing the right thing. I make the flying movement and then I… don’t fly. I know how to fly, but the world does not respond when I do. The problem is not me, it is in the world.

Perhaps I’m just waiting for someone to show me that it is not as difficult as we had supposed.

I want to reemphasise again that this is not how flying works.

But you know what does work like this? Creativity.

In Pandemic Moods, I said “I reach for the place where words come from and there is nothing there.”

Sometimes, writing is as hard as flying.

Other things work like this too. Joy, contentment, laughter. Creativity. Happiness. Love.

Depression is a world of constricted possibilities, and waking up from it feels precisely like realising that things were not nearly as difficult as you had supposed.

Another line from shortly later in this chapter always hits me like a wave each time I read it. I can explain why this resonates even less than I can the above.

“Lord Magician,” gasped Drawlight. “You have not told me what the third message is.”

Strange looked round. Without warning he seized Drawlight’s coat and pulled him close. Drawlight could feel Strange’s stinking breath on his face and for the first time he could see his face. Starlight shone on fierce, wild eyes, from which all humanity and reason had fled.

“Tell Norrell I am coming!” hissed Strange. “Now, go!”

Tell Norrell I am coming.

Growing Old

Another line that has stuck with me, from a very different book, is from Ken MacLeod’s “Newton’s Wake”:

‘I should bloody hope so. I was twenty-odd then. I’m only fifty-something now. What’s it like living, what, five times longer than that? Do you get wiser as well as older?’

Amelia shook her head, curls bouncing. ‘You get cannier. Mair cunning. That’s it. I think a lot ae what folk used tae call maturity was just fatigue poisons.’

Amelia is in many ways entirely wrong. The reason she didn’t become wiser isn’t because she’s immortal, it’s because she’s a gangster, and it’s not exactly a profession that rewards the development of wisdom - if nothing else, survivorship bias means that if you haven’t quit the profession after 250 years of it you’re probably not that wise.

But I still think about the idea that maturity is just getting tired. I think about it a lot.

I think about it for two reasons.

The first is this: You know how you hit thirty and everything hurts and you’re tired all the time because you’re old now?

Yeah, sorry, that’s not being old, that’s you not having taken care of yourself. By a lot of measures you’re at your physical peak when you hit 30. By some measures you may not even have hit it yet.

(No judgement, this was 100% my experience too)

The other reason is that a lot of the time you think you’re tired, you’re not tired you’re just dissociating from an emotion.

In Burnout as Acedia I talked about how burnout might be a protective response to caring and not being able or willing to act on that care. You care too much, until you stop.

You might have noticed, but burnout is exhausting, and this is not a coincidence. When you have some strong emotion that you are avoiding feeling, often what you feel instead is tired.

A lot of that tiredness that you feel as an adult is probably not “fatigue poisons”, it’s you dissociating from the things that you think you’re now too mature to want.

We learned that they were “unrealistic”. We embraced a sour grapes attitude that said that actually the thing you used to want wasn’t a good thing to want and is probably impossible anyway. Childish idealism, unrealistic fantasy. As a proper, pragmatic, adult, you are far too sophisticated for these things.

Anyway, I am sorry to report that we are lying to ourselves. Everything we used to think was good and “grew out of” is actually good, and deep down we know that. I have experienced a certain level of giddy teenager emotions in my late 30s, and they’re every bit as good as the teenagers say they are. They are, if anything, even better when experienced with people who have a full adult complement of communication skills.

But it is hard to find these things, and we have obligations that get in the way, and it is scary to go looking, and it is hard to deal with the disappointment of not finding them. It feels much easier and safer to just decide that we’re past that stage and retreat from the desire for it.

Unfortunately, telling yourself that the things you want are bad doesn’t magically make the desire go away, it just puts you at war with yourself. These wars are exhausting, and even if you win them you also lose.

Waking Up

There is a thing I have experienced twice that I remember, which I might call something like “post-depression creative surge”, but I’d rather think of it as waking up.

The first time I remember this happening was right after quitting Google. I was so depressed at Google. I was already pretty burned out prior to joining Google and was hoping that moving to a different sort of company would fix the problems that were burning me out, but no all the problems were ten times worse and most of the upsides were gone.

Anyway, in the immediate aftermath of leaving Google it was like a fog had lifted and creativity poured out of me. This was when I wrote Hypothesis (and, more importantly, Stargate Physics 101). It was great.

Then, well, I fell back into being depressed. I made a number of critical… I won’t necessarily call them mistakes, because I think they were on the face of it and based on who I was and what I knew at the time reasonable decisions, but lets say decisions with bad outcomes that I would not choose to make again.

By the end of it the PhD was, in its own way, probably almost as bad for me as Google. I was not quite as acutely depressed (a fact I credit largely to a combination of the relationships I built during this time and the fact that not doing nearly as much work on the PhD as I was supposed to gave me a lot of space to work on things I found actively beneficial to my mental health instead), but in many ways that was worse. It was more insidious, certainly.

During the PhD I spent a lot of time learning to be the best version of myself I could be while in possession of an overarching project that I desperately didn’t want to be working on. Everything I did had to be something I could pretend was productive towards that project, or helped me dissociate.

I spent a lot of time on Twitter. I’ve been recently discovering just how much of my day Twitter eats. I don’t think I could have discovered that during my PhD, because I think if I had not been on Twitter I would have found another way to dissociate. I wasn’t not working on my PhD because I was on Twitter, I was on Twitter because I didn’t want to be working on my PhD, and that desire would have come out some other way.

But I don’t need to do that any more. My time is my own, I can spend it as I like.

I’m still figuring out what that is, but as you’re seeing some of in the private issues of this newsletter, one of the things I am spending my creative surge on is learning how to figure out how that works.

I’ve been pretending I don’t know what my goals are or what I want to do with my life, but actually now that I think about it this too was a lie I was telling myself. My goal right now is very simple: to learn how to be the best version of myself available rather than falling back into the half-asleep state I’ve spent most of the last decade in, and to the degree I can to help others learn how alongside me.

This is wildly optimistic, and might be impossible, but I’m starting to suspect that it is not so difficult as we had supposed.