Trenchcoat, lab coat, kalpa zang

When my friend invited me to speak, he told me the event was a 'a curated playlist of some of his favorite humans.' I was at once moved and at ease. Calvin Klein wishes they could provide so supportive a brief.

The talk I gave, which follows below, was about the different relationships I've had with my emotions.

I tried to be as honest and precise as I could about my experiences. When I’ve been existentially lost somewhere I didn’t know could even exist — which, being from Indiana, has happened often — the texture of experience, generously shared by others, has helped me start to find where I am.

In that spirit, I hope this might spark a moment of recognition for someone else.

Heartfelt thanks to those who have been so generous, and to Charlie Awbery, Jason Ganz, Andrew Shade Blevins, Ari Nielsen, Jake Orthwein, Anne selke, Max Krieger, Kati Devaney — and Ari Nielsen, once more, for the recording.

If you're depressed and you don't know it--

clap your hands.

If you're proud you can't get angry--

clap your hands.

If you only cry when someone dies,

if you're disembodied inside,

If you're depressed and you don't know it,

clap your hands.

I remember being eleven or so and my mom saying to me, "You're like a wall."

And I remember thinking, "Yeah. That's the point."

Being a wall works.

I've been perfecting this strategy since I was like five or six.

So it doesn't matter that I don't stand up for myself, it doesn't matter that I don't talk back anymore because I know whatever's coming at me, I can make this wall as big and as thick as I need. And I can just take it, until whatever it is, is over.

Pretty smart for a kid.

What I don't realize, of course, is I'm not just walling the world away from me -- I'm also walling myself away from myself. So by the time I'm in college, I'm completely cut off from myself.

The moment for me that really captures this relationship with my emotions is when I was 20, at Oxford, studying abroad, where I was supposed to be brilliant, charmed, and lucky, but actually I was sitting in my tiny dorm room in my even tinier twin bed with the lights off, a laptop on my lap playing 30 Rock, half a liter of ice cream in my left hand, a small cake on my right thigh, wondering with a spoon in my hand and in the dark why I could never make myself happy.

I know something isn't right with me. And somehow, I don't think it's going to be like this forever, so when my brain tells me to kill myself, I don't really take it seriously -- but I am completely lost in all of this.

And then in a flash, I find where I am.

Fast forward five years, I'm in another dorm room, I'm 25 years old, and I'm having coffee in the morning, looking out my window at like a complete blue California sky.

And feeling, dare I say as open as that sky, I'm actually kind of relaxed. And in that relaxation, a total outlaw thought can come up: I should reread that blog post Brad Feld wrote about the two recent root causes of his depression.

I have no idea where this thought comes from, but it totally changes my life, because three paragraphs in, I know he's writing about me, too.

That week I start seeing a therapist and I start a new relationship with my emotions: they're a problem! I got too many of the ones I don't want, I don't have enough of the ones I do want. And it's a problem.

And I am going to solve it.

And my solution will be an increasingly refined set of protocols, habits, minimum effective doses.

And they'll kind of work!

For me, if I actually see the sun when I wake up, if I journal until my mind seems sane, work on something I actually care about, eat, exercise, sleep, see my friends, I'm, like, not depressed anymore.

That is what it takes to, uh, stem the tide of unrelenting cosmic pain is like kind of bullshit, but I'm not complaining.

Because it works. It kind of works.

But it doesn't totally work.

Because what I thought was that depression is the opposite of happiness. But what I found is that depression is an equal opportunity emotion dampener. Which means that, yeah, the fun stuff got turned up, but all the tough stuff got turned up too, and I was not ready for that.

I was not ready for stress to go from tunnel vision and feeling wired and tired to, like, my chest, feeling like it was wiring itself shut, like, I couldn't get enough air, like, I couldn't actually do what I had to do to let go. And all I could ever do was lay on my back with my knees up, writing it out.

In those moments, what I really want is a way out. I just want a way out.

And I don't find it. What I find instead is a way in.

I find a way into that intensity, a way into where the emotions are. I find a way into my body.

Truth be told, I didn't really have any real relationship with my body until, like, a year ago. I mostly treated it like the irritatingly needy chauffeur for my mind.

I discovered this with a meditation coach and teacher called Charlie Awbery. We found that if I was having emotions and I tried to find where they were in my body, I would basically get a mental image. I wouldn't actually find sensation.

And I can remember when this clicked for me.

It's a year ago, I'm in a not great Airbnb in Brooklyn, and I am grieving in my ex's arms. I mean, I'm, like, really sobbing.

And I remember in the sobbing to find where that sensation is happening, and I do. I feel it in my throat. There's this, like, hot, raw tenderness.

And feeling it, I also feel this, like, tingling coming up my arms, because, like, I'm getting it! I'm happy! Like, I'm finding where the sensation is.

And this totally transforms my relationship with my emotions. Because they're not just problems to solve anymore. They're not things where I have to design my life, so I have some of them and I don't have other ones.

They're just raw, energetic sensation moving in my body.

And I find there's a real freedom there. I mean, there's, like, a real freedom.

And then this relationship starts breaking down.

Because if emotions aren't problems to solve, if they aren't signals of what's working, what's not working, if they're not even good or bad, then what are they for?

And as I've understood what I've been doing is I've been living my life based on what I think they are -- what am I doing?

Like, seriously, what am I supposed to be doing?

I remember sitting in Prospect Park a couple months ago with teacher Charlie telling them, "I don't really know what emotions are for anymore." And they approved very much.

And then they said something about emotions are how the inner something relates to the outer something, and I can't really remember it, but I do remember something in between my inner something and outer something relaxed. And then my emotions seemed to approve too.

I remember a couple months ago walking past Bryant Park on this beautiful, like, glorious summer day, while my life was starting to fall apart. And I mean just whole parts shearing, like glaciers, into the sea. And finding every single person I walked past to just be so attractive. And I remember having heard that one can fall in love with every nuance of reality at every moment and thinking, "Yeah, it could really be true." I mean, it can really be like that.

I remember being home alone in my friend's place a couple weeks ago, while this familiar nighttime panic that I basically organized my entire life around avoiding came on. And this time I just stepped into it, like, bang! And instantly my veins bubbled with lava, like going up my arms, down my back, into my throat. Just this languid, molten, exhilarating terror. I can't remember how long I felt like that, maybe 12 seconds, maybe a minute and a half. But I felt completely, ecstatically, disturbingly alive.

And I remember a couple weeks ago, sitting in my favorite coffee shop in Crown Heights, finding underneath that depression that had so dominated parts of my life, this soft, tender helplessness that I had basically been retreating to for as long as I can remember. And my first reaction to this made no sense to me, and it still makes no sense to me, which was to just marvel at how beautiful it is. This vast, undersea terrain that I have been creating since before I can remember creating anything.

None of this makes any sense to me.

I mean, really, like, it just does not make sense to me.

But it doesn't need to.

I mean, it doesn't need to make sense, because it can be a month ago to the day, and you can be feeling a soft clench around your heart as it breaks open a little bit. And you can be walking down Eastern Parkway and feeling that hot tenderness in your throat, because it's over now. And you can be feeling that rising tingling and a vastness, because it is over now. And you can feel a cool breeze on your left arm from the autumn, and you can feel somehow like a summer sun on your right cheek and your right arm. And you can find that hot tenderness, that tingling, that coolness, that warmth, can all be there at the same time, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with that at all. And that wrongness, that sense of there being no wrongness can turn into a rightness, not in the sense of like a correctness, but just like in the sense of a rightness. And that rightness can tumble into a fullness, and that fullness can be a total and complete wholesomeness.

Thank you all very much.