simple things; risk, simplicity, patterns
My third instalment of 'simple things'; short reflections on simple wisdom, with nuance
Hello! I am Lauren McQuistin, a musician, the author of No Lost Causes Club and the creator behind @brutalrecovery. I write about recovery not as a before and after, but as an ongoing process of imperfectly growing up and learning what we missed the first time around.
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“There is a certain reassurance in woe. Misery is company. Melancholy never lets you down. The human capacity for the mind to burn in its own hell knows no limits” On Mysticism - Simon Critchley
Riveting yourself to misery has the same certainty as reaching for a mood-altering substance or behaviour. The allure is in the sense of predictability rather than a sick satisfaction, though the inevitable has a comfort of its own. Comfort, even miserable, can feel like the safer choice. Sadness is something we can more reliably believe in, it doesn’t require our effort to feel, especially if you have a more depressive temperament.
The reassurance of woe lends itself well to catastrophising, and here you can even convince yourself of a sense of mastery by preparing yourself for all the ways everything would be for nothing. We become skilled at handling premeditated disappointment by pitching a tent there. Dreams become irrelevant, which can feel like a mercy because hope for better can be a terrible thing if you have evidence of feeling foolish in the face of a perceived failure.
Before I started making my writing public I was already mourning my career as a failed writer, a bid for security that protected me from success, and in a way, actual failure. In inertia I could at least claim potential, without risking anything.
So many writers I admire have written about risk.
Rilke writes in Letters to a Young Poet how extracting risk out of making loving connections takes away something of the essential essence of love:
“society in its wisdom has found ways of constructing refuges of all kinds, for since it has been disposed to make the love-life a pastime, it has also felt obliged to trivialise it, to make it cheap, risk-free and secure, as public pleasures usually are.”
Melissa Febos in Bodywork speaks about how an honest look at your life and creative alchemy around it can actually be frightening in its transformative power, as opposed to self-indulgent:
“Navel-gazing is not for the faint of heart. The risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery. To place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent, broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you.”
But my favourite of all the meditations upon risk can be found in Simone Weil’s work:
“Risk is an essential need of the soul. The absence of risk creates a kind of boredom that numbs in a different way from fear, but almost as much. Moreover, there are situations that create a vague anxiety without specific risks, transmitting both diseases at the same time.”
To love, to know myself, to express myself and to live in line with my soul was what my hungry heart was asking for, underneath all of the ways I attempted to numb its wanting. If I was going to find any sort of embodied or meaningful existence I was going to have to risk - risk trying, risk failing and risk my self-perception of someone who was doomed to sadness. I had to risk a different outcome, and I had to call upon my bravery. I couldn’t default to believing I was built to exist in a certain way and anything else was beyond me, or make that assumption without giving an alternative an honest try for a persistent, extended period. I couldn’t quiet the voice once with truisms and platitudes and be done with it, I had to wrangle with it, and challenge the belief. That meant sacrificing a comfort I’d grown accustomed to, and actually doing something about it.
