Two things happened to me over the holidays five years ago: I went to rehab, and I found a cyberstalker. These were not entirely independent events. The stalker was someone in India who started following me while I was playing poker, who was convinced that we had a close personal relationship and that my tweets were coded messages to him. When I stopped tweeting for two months, they were convinced that something happened to me, so they tracked down my email and phone number and started spamming me with messages demanding to know where I was.
By the time I realized it was happening, he had already escalated to the point where I was clearly never going to respond. I started blocking him on different platforms, but he would either create another account or phone number, or find some other way. He messaged me dozens of times a day, alternating between threats and pleading. When he arrived at my company six months later to apply for a job, I found out his real name and I used it to track down an old friend of his to ask for help — but the friend told me he was afraid to intervene because he didn’t want to become a target himself. I decided there was nothing I could do from the other side of the world, and I resigned myself to waiting for him.
Only he never got tired. Years went by and I never responded, and yet he messaged me multiple times a day. The messages became more disturbing, more obscene, more violent. He told me he would find me in Berkeley and hurt me. Finally, last November, in the span of a few days, he sent me an image of his brand new passport and a visa application that he said he planned to use to travel here, and successfully extorted money from my brother by spoofing my phone number and pretending to kidnap me.
Sufficient! I thought, and immediately sprang into action. Except I didn’t. Instead, I curled up into a ball and started crying, and told the friends who had suggested contacting the police that there was no point, as long as I was here and he was in India, no one would be able to help.
But my husband was insistent that there had to be a better answer, and he asked me to let him intervene on my behalf. In short, he was in touch with the FBI, the US Consulate in India and, with the help of his friend Govind, whose family is there, the local police where the pursuer lived. The situation was resolved within a few months and he would never again set foot on American soil.
One interesting thing about all this is that there was nothing particularly inventive about the strategies adopted by my husband. They were more or less the exact same strategies I would have made if I had been put in charge of a similar situation in someone else’s life. Why did it take another person’s involvement for me to realize that I wasn’t really trying?
I think what happened is this: When the stalker entered my life, I was at a low point in personal capacity – broke, lonely, drunk, etc. My approach to him at the time (ignoring, hoping he would stop) was the only one that seemed available given my spiritual and psychological resources at the time. But my orientation to the problem settled over time at that point of low agency, and as my ability to act increased it never occurred to me to reconsider it.
I think we are all like that. People are not simply high-agency or low-agency in a global sense throughout their lives. Instead, people are selective agents.
Let’s say life is divided into three theaters: work, relationships with others (of all kinds) and relationships with oneself (physical health, introspection, emotional growth, all of it). I think it’s the rule, rather than the exception, that people are stuck in the first stage of development in at least one area. There is a stage of life where they are not really trying – where they are having serious problems with the resourcefulness of a teenager, even though they are now capable adults.
In my particular corner of the world, there are a lot of high achievers at work. These are brilliant people shaping the world through innovations in science, technology and policy. But many of them have not applied that same simplicity to their inner experiences or relationships. These are the people who can successfully launch a product in a foreign country with little instruction, but who complain that there are no fun people to meet on dating apps.
It seems that, by default, you are stuck in whatever level of resourcefulness you brought to a problem when you first encountered it and have failed to fix it.
Let’s say you tried therapy when you were 20, and it didn’t help your high levels of anxiety. When you think about your anxiety as the years go by, you think, “Tough problem, tried major solutions but didn’t work.” Perhaps you accept anxiety as a fixed trait, and your friends jokingly scold you about it, which is nice but also makes it seem like a fixed part of your identity. But you are not 20 years old anymore. You are, say, a 32-year-old CTO, and when an important project at your startup doesn’t respond to your first approach, you vigorously make a second attempt, and secondly, trying to learn from every failure. However, the same persistence and curiosity do not apply to the anxiety that plagues you at work.
Don’t think, oh i probably could,
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Take a serious look at my nutrition and sleep
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Pay attention to supplements and medication
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Invest some resources to improve my comfort and recovery
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Ask all of my friends about the best anxiety treatments they’ve ever heard of, or the best trainers/therapists they’ve ever worked with
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Research any emerging therapies designed for people like me
Instead of doing those things, you just endure it. Or, worse, you fight your anxiety by using earlier solutions that require willpower, and the exertion of will makes you feel like you’re making an effort. But the feeling of effort doesn’t mean you’re actually trying.
There is a relevant concept of the Alexander Technique that I like, “Faulty Sensory Appreciation”, which I learned about Michael AshcroftThe concept is that habitual stress distorts your sensory impressions – rigid stillness through physical tension begins to feel like “good posture”, while standing comfortably straight feels awkward, to the extent that when you stand really tall you may feel as if your back is at an awkward angle, The right way feels like the wrong way, Apparently, this is demonstrated by having Alexander’s students lie down in a position where your legs tell you you shouldn’t be able to stand up—and then the instructor says, “By the way, you can stand up from here,” and you do,
Similarly, people who are selectively agentic often have a kind of faulty sensory appreciation. maybe relationships feel hard For you, they take willpower, so it’s tempting to believe that you’re really trying, that you’ve brought the full weight of your talents to bear on the problem. You may even take some pride in the struggle. Like rigid posture, tension feels like getting it right. But struggling isn’t proof that you’ve tried everything. Conversely, a constant need for willpower may be a sign of a badly designed life.
I would recommend acknowledging that there is some area of your life where you are, without realizing it, frozen in time, and it makes a lot of sense to figure that out. Take a look at three aspects of your life: work, relationships, and self-relationships, and pay attention to the biggest issues you face. Know that you are probably looking for something that does not seem to be Issue – It may just feel like sadness or anger, Like the sadness of not being seen, or the frustration of not feeling like your work is meaningful. Once you’ve come up with something, ask yourself: Have I done my best to come up with a set of possible solutions using all the resources I have? Am I doing as well by myself as I would by a friend who came to me with the same problem? How do I know if I’m really trying?
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