I have this vivid memory.
I was at my best friend’s house. I was maybe 8 years old. It was magically windy and we were playing in the street where all of these leaves were falling from the trees and swirling around us. I remember looking up at a leaf and deciding to use my mind to make it fall to the ground.
It’s like I was looking for a sign.
Nothing is wrong and yet I’m searching for God.
I concentrated on it so hard, just watching it. Waiting for it to fall. It seemed like forever had passed and so I finally decided to change my approach. Instead of wishing for it to fall, I once again concentrated hard on that same leaf and wished for it not to fall. (Even though I was still trying to get it to fall. I hope that makes sense.)
I’m pretty sure I gave up, but I remember being both filled with hope and strangely disappointed at the same time. Two emotions that have definitely held hands many times in my life. It’s weird. I think about it now — about how I tried the two approaches to getting what I wanted. And regardless of the fact that I don’t even remember how it ended, the memory still holds some eternal importance to me.
It’s because even then I think I knew that sometimes when you concentrate too much on how badly you want something you end up pushing it even farther away. When you ask the universe for something and you feel desperate about it, what you’re really doing is focusing on what you don’t have — which just ends up creating even more of a lack.
Wanting something so intensely is the same as saying you don’t have it. It’s like you’re attaching yourself to the wrong thing. That’s why things often happen when you least expect it.
In Nir Eyal’s book, Indistractable, he talks about the ironic process theory. “The ironic part of the ironic process theory is the fact that relief of the tension of wanting makes relieving it all the more rewarding, and therefore habit forming.”
This theory has also been dubbed the white bear problem, simply because when someone tells you not to think about a white bear, that’s obviously all you’re going to do. It’s this endless cycle of telling ourselves we can’t do or have something only to feel so relieved when we finally let ourselves give in. It’s so fucked up because it just keeps perpetuating itself.
Tired of fighting so I sit back and indulge, this struggle to resist just feels so detached and old.
Do you see the connection I’m trying to make? I’m not sure how to round it all out. To be honest, when I first decided to start writing this post I was going to talk about why people with eating disorders shouldn’t put restrictions on their diets. Like how bulimics and those who struggle with binge eating and even anorexics shouldn’t go on a vegan diet or tell themselves they can’t have something when trying to recover. Because when you try to make all these rules for yourself, you forget how to be intuitive about your wants and needs. It all circles back to this ironic process theory — how we start wanting what we can’t have only to give up in order to hit that temporary high.
It’s like we hijack our own brains when we put too many restrictions on ourselves. Whether that be telling ourselves we can’t have something or inadvertently creating a lack when we want it too badly. We have to be fluid.
It’s wild because it kinda mirrors love and hate. To love or hate anyone is to care strongly about them. To be indifferent is to be unattached either way. Which is what I guess this all comes down to anyway — detachment.
I guess if we just keep trying to hit that sweet spot. That feeling of knowing what we want, but realizing that we’re going to be okay whether we get it or not. And if we give ourselves the room to change and experiment, and even fail, eventually it will all fall in place.
It already is.