Untangling the Knots
Like Jon Snow, We usually know nothing (or at least, less than we think we do). Luckily, this is a fixable problem.
I’m a firm believer that things aren’t always what they seem. When I was in school, I spent a good chunk of time studying folklore and mythology — pretty much the O.G. vehicles for themes of self-deception, illusion, and transformation. But the more time I spend as An Adult In The World™, the more I’m interested in the way that the stories we tell ourselves about our own experiences form labyrinths around the truth and affect how we move through our lives. (Prepare yourselves. This will probably be a recurring theme in what I write.)
Obviously, major traumas cause tectonic shifts in how we see the world. But small things — even little knots in the thread that aren’t even traumas to begin with — can powerfully affect the way we knit together our experiences and make sense of things. In my view, one of the greatest acts of service we can perform for ourselves is to learn how to detect those knots and unravel them before they create bigger problems for us down the line.
Let’s start with a story.
When I was in college, I fell hard for a guy we’ll call Dan. Dan was everything I thought was perfect for me at the time. He was tall and good looking; we had similar backgrounds; he’d spent time doing humanitarian work abroad; we ran in overlapping circles. You can guess where the story goes — I pitched head over heels into the heady throes of infatuation. Dan, for his part, was ambivalent about me romantically but wasn’t in any rush to lose the attention. For a full semester, I hung around, sacrificing time and energy out of the misguided hope that he’d fall for me, too. He didn’t. Emotionally, it stung, but logically I was pretty stoic about it. You can’t fault someone for not feeling the way you want them to. Most of us have been on both sides of the equation; sometimes, it just is what it is. So I let it go.
Except... I didn’t. Throughout the summer, the relationship-that-wasn’t lingered like a raw scrape of unresolved resentment that wouldn’t close, painful to the touch and oozing quietly in the back of my thoughts and feelings. Frankly, I was as distressed and humiliated by its persistence as I was by the initial rejection. Not returning my feelings doesn’t automatically make someone an a**hole. Dan didn’t owe me anything, romantically. Why, then, couldn’t I think of Dan without feeling like he had somehow wronged me?
As the summer drew to a close, Dan and I ended up in the same city and made plans to catch up. The day before we were supposed to meet, I was a gibbering mess. Everything I’d been feeling for the whole summer was welling up in me; I felt powerless, angry, and very small — the stereotypical Jilted Lover. I couldn’t stand it. I also couldn’t stand the idea of cancelling because I couldn’t handle rejection with grace. How ridiculous.
I later realized that this was essentially Socratic questioning — a time-honored process in both education and psychotherapy. Go me. At the time, I just felt like a fool.
I didn’t know what to do. Fiercely proud and desperately frustrated, I did the only thing I could think of. I took myself to a coffee shop with a few blank sheets of paper. Feeling rather silly, I wrote down what I was feeling. Then I asked myself why I felt that way, and wrote that down, too. Then I did it again. And again, and again, until I realized something profound.
I wasn’t actually that upset at Dan for rejecting me romantically. That was old news, and didn’t bother me anymore. I was, however, upset at him because I’d sunk a significant amount of effort into helping him cross the finish line on a major project, pulling multiple all-nighters in the sterile basement of my least favorite building on campus to edit his work and support him with coffee, snacks, and camaraderie. In return, he’d promised to do the same for me on my own project. When my deadline rolled around, he showed up drunk, circled two grammatical errors, and brought me a banana.
That a**hole.
The realization that the kernel of bitterness I couldn’t let go of around Dan actually stemmed not from romantic rejection but instead from a very real instance of him behaving like a jerk felt like clouds parting after months of rain. When our meeting rolled around the next day, I was positively bouyant; confident, poised, and just a little bit salty when the conversation turned to academics. My transformation clearly took him by surprise, and I felt a distinct shift in the power dynamic between us. While it was satisfying to score a few points for my pride against a lover-that-wasn’t (take that, Dan!), untangling the real source of my feelings around him was immensely more valuable. It relieved me of a complex tangle of emotions that had been quietly sabotaging my confidence for months, and would likely have continued to do so into the future. It also allowed me to deal with the right problem — the fact that he’d promised to help with my project and then let me down — and return to friendly terms with Dan.
What we don’t resolve, we tend to carry with us. That’s enough reason, in my mind, to pay attention to two things: first, the little emotional knots we pick up from our relationships — with friends, with lovers, with work, with family. Recognize when something’s catching. Do what it takes to smooth it out, because it’ll keep showing up in various disguises and derailing your efforts until you do.
The second, and perhaps more interesting, thing to pay attention to is this: when you have a feeling you can’t seem to shake, but also can’t seem to understand — that nagging feeling of discomfort, that pernicious feeling of doubt — pause. The fact that that you don’t understand it means it’s likely not coming from where you think it is, and it’s worth digging into what else the experience may be bringing up. If your feelings were coming from a straightforward place, you likely wouldn’t feel so confused. Our emotional landscapes are complicated, messy, nuanced; they can also royally sabotage us if we aren’t careful.
So, the take-away is this: the next time you can’t shake some nagging feeling that something’s not right… get thee to a coffee shop (or sit at your desk, or get under the covers with a flashlight — whatever it takes) and start digging. I bet you’ll find something you didn’t expect.