#64 - The fear of no longer being cornered

When I was younger, I struggled with what felt like depression. My early twenties were bleak - colored with forlornness and desperation. Dramatic, I know, but most teenagers are like that. Except, it wasn't merely a phase that I'd outgrow. The inner me on a daily basis was screaming: "you have to get out of this place!" The thought of looking back five years later and still seeing myself there terrified me to the core. I know for a fact that something were wrong, that I wasn't supposed to be this miserable.

That feeling of being cornered by circumstances - on the bright side - drove insane focus. A kind of intensity that only an animal backed into a cul-de-sac, mind flooded with fight-or-flight chemicals, can muster. I was constantly alert and restless. There was a metaphorical beast chasing me from behind, and I was determined not to let it win.

When you're facing imminent danger, your vision tunnels on whatever can help you survive. In this case, surviving meant achieving sufficient professional success so that I could escape poverty (quite literally). Most of my waking hours were spent on work, in hopes of affording a better life. Work was filled with one difficult problem after another, and so was my mind. I learned a useful trick: when you live with a problem long enough, a solution usually appears, hence why people say "where there's a will, there's a way." That tenacity gradually opened an exit for me.

My way out was to keep hammering at seemingly insurmountable obstacles day after day, week after week, month after month. It worked before when I tried to master a tough subject during my undergraduate years. It worked when I faced challenging software engineering problems. And it kept working when I faced uncertainty as a Product Manager. It has always worked.

It wasn't just doing the same thing repeatedly, though. That would just be crazy. It's the relentlessness of the mind trying new ways to tackle a problem. For as long as I can remember, if I keep directing my will at something, I eventually will find a way.

I was never particularly smart or gifted. What I had was a refusal to stay where I was - because where I was wasn't survivable. That refusal taught me how to endure, how to work, and how to become someone I could live with.

As I garnered a moderate amount of success, resources and wealth, the mud beneath my feet slowly turned to soil. I was climbing out of that sinkhole, one step at a time. Until one day, I realized that I'm in a much better place than I used to be. In every sense of the word, I got out.

You know how some rappers always yap about making it out of the hood? It felt like that. I grew up in a poor neighborhood, so the analogy isn't far off. Of course, I didn't get rich with a capital R, it's just that life became less intolerable, and eventually comfortable. My nervous system learned to transition out of constant restlessness. This must be what normal people feel like all the time, I thought. Calm. Relaxed. No longer hunted. I no longer felt like I had to get out.

However, an unexpected problem arises: I no longer felt like I had to get out! The metaphorical beast - unable to catch up to its prey, is disappearing into the background, nothing more than a haunting memory. That means the threat is no more. I'm like a gazelle who was just within a hair's breadth of a leopard's jaw, now standing there agape at the miraculous escape it just pulled off.

Suddenly, I find myself with the remnant of acute hyperarousal alertness. The state that once characterized my existence is all but gone. As the last of its remains fade into the distance, I am plagued with a ridiculous thought - will I no longer be able to reach greater heights, now that I don't feel cornered anymore?

I do recognize the sheer ingratitude in that question. It is remarkably greedy, and is probably why Adam and Eve got kicked out of heaven, but lately that thought has been irking me too much to ignore. I call it, as the title says, the fear of no longer being cornered: when the hardship that once forced you to grow is gone, and you catch yourself fearing that your growth is going with it.

It turns out that desperation can give you the adrenaline to escape danger, but it cannot be the underlying engine for a good life.

There's an Aristotelian approach where a good life is associated with human virtues - integrity, kindness, justice, temperance, etc. I have nothing against these virtues, but they describe the content of a good life rather than its structure. There's also an Alexandrian approach to a good life which is through coherence - that is, the extent to which distinctive parts of your life reinforce one another and strengthen the whole. I like the second approach more, because it allows individuals to live different kinds of good lives so long as coherence is present.

A good building isn't a collection of well-made rooms sitting side by side, it's a place where the light, the proportions, the way one space opens into the next all strengthen each other, until the whole feels more alive than the sum of its parts. A good life, in a similar manner, isn't a list of things you're doing well, but a life whose parts feed one another, holding together into something you'd want to live inside.

That beast I've been describing gave me exactly one center: get out. Everything else - friendships, rest, curiosity, whatever I might have wanted for its own sake - got subordinated to it, or starved. It organized me the way a fire organizes a room: powerfully, and by consuming everything else. That's the thing I never understood while I was running. The beast gave me a direction, but a direction is not a life. It pointed me, and called the pointing coherence.

Once I got out, the ember went out with the beast. What I'm calling the fear of no longer being cornered is really the moment the fire dies down and I finally see the room it left behind. The space once consumed by the blaze has gone quiet - and I mistook that quiet for emptiness. But it isn't empty.

About two and a half years ago, I launched the Breaking into Product Management course with my friends. It grew out of a desire to build something on the side, and more importantly, to give others the access to experience and connections I never had when I was starting out. Around the same time, I started my own newsletter - the one you're currently reading - out of a long-lived passion for writing and knowledge sharing, which is why I've increasingly turned to long-form essays that push me to crystalize my thoughts.

My friends and I also built digital products together, with varying degrees of success. We built A Little Optimism to help people practice gratitude more consistently; it found a small, loyal group of users before we decided to let it go. Some things worked, some didn't, and we learned to release the ones that didn't.

What surprised me wasn't any of these on its own. It was the way they began to feed each other. What I learned taking the course from nothing became the essays; the essays brought people to the course; the lessons from building products found their way back into both, from content to mindset. None of it was chasing anything. For the first time, the parts of my life were strengthening one another instead of starving each other out.

Which is when I understood I'd had the fear backwards. I was afraid that without the corner I'd stop growing - that my growth was leaving with the beast. But the beast never grew me. It only pointed me away from things, and kept the room too hot to build anything in. Nothing was ever going to grow while the place was on fire. The quiet I mistook for emptiness is just the first time there's been room. Room for wholeness, for coherence, for aliveness.

A room that, for the first time, is mine to arrange - and maybe, finally, one I could live in.

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

- Love After Love by Derek Walcott