Legit Insecurity

Most forms of insecurity can be salved by a shift of perspective, aka reframing.

For example, I'm pretty much bald at this point. I could "pop in a tape", so to speak, and turn it into a peevish sore point or even a teeth-gnashing existential crisis. It could be the thing I chew on; the characteristic to which I attribute all worldly headwind. "They'd be nicer to me if I had HAIR!" I might sullenly insist.

But I don't indulge in that sort of tedious, counterproductive rumination. I blithely accept the obvious fact that humans come in all varieties, and we see bald people all the time, and it's absolutely unremarkable. Nobody really cares!

I first learned this lesson after losing 35 pounds and discovering, much to my astonished "duh", that the world was as indifferent to me as ever, because, as I wrote at the time, "it turned out that people encounter lots of thin, reasonably muscular guys every day, and I was just another one of them."

You can't regrow hair even with great effort, but you can make follicular paucity a non-issue via an easy choice of attention placement. Less than a hand wave.

Same for graver insecurities, e.g. financial insecurity. I see it all over this rich First World, but it's never really about money, it's about maintaining one's perch. You - yes, you! - are obscenely wealthy, and could drop four notches and still be vastly more comfortable and, well, secure, than like 99% of historical humans.

I've seen friends react to the potential loss of their really nice car or really nice apartment the way my great-parents reacted to the news that another pogrom had begun to smash and burn their shitty Eastern European slums. Suboptimality, however, is not tragedy (unless you're an aristocrat...which you are).

Once again: nearly all insecurities are easily dispersed via a shift of perspective. A reframing.

Except a couple of them.

Health insecurity: I've had doctors, who, with no evil intent, just the high-handed officiousness of their profession, have left me in precarious situations I couldn't finagle my way out of. Twice, for example, I needed to tackle non-conspiratorial conspiracies of pharmacists, insurers, and harried medical office staff thwarting my increasingly frantic efforts to renew prescriptions which literally keep me alive. This is the one-paragraph cartoon view, but actually put yourself there. Not fun.

You can't relax into that. Or reframe yourself out of it. Not being "small stuff", you absolutely must sweat it.

You know the Serenity Prayer? (I wrote about it once, here)

The average American ought to shoot for an accept/change ration of about 10,000 to 1. But sometimes acceptance is unviable. Here's how to recognize such situations: you stop bitching and go straight to action. People Bitching About It (PBAI) never have bona-fide problems. In fact, they've clearly marked themselves. By their bitching ye shall know them.

You've seen dramatic, entitled people waste precious Alive time behaving as if their hair was on fire? Well, sometimes you really need to act that way! Every once in a while (it's rare, because we're living in Utopia), you may be forced to coddle, manipulate, scream, pull rank, throw fits, call in favors, thunder "do you know who I am" and generally make yourself flamboyantly NEEDY, because you actually are needy. Ain't that a kick in the head?

Take it away, Dino:



Another bona fide insecurity: housing insecurity. As a young jazz musician/food writer averaging $23,000/year, I moved whenever told to get out. I was like a feral cat permitted to cozy up until the humans needed to do a thing, or a lonely owner found a romantic partner, or the wind blew some other way. I made it through because I expected it. Recognizing myself as societal flotsam, I felt no entitlement to housing security. I rolled with it!

But the moment I got paid for Chowhound, I had expectations, which, again and again, have been puckishly flouted by a churlish god. Remember the couch?

I recently went from a nice house to a barebones two-room AirBnb, with no end in sight. No problem! It's safe and stable. Hey, I can handle ups and downs! But I was briefly homeless during the transition (with no assurance, at the time, that it would be brief). If I'd relaxed into that housing insecurity, I might have frozen to death.

Remember my "Two Recent Glimpses of Ridiculous Death", one of which found me outdoors in a t-shirt in sub-zero freeze with a 200 pound ceramic barbecue inextricably stuck on my arm?

Still calm, firmly certain there was some resourceful way out, I applied all my ingenuity, and...nothing. Worse, the flavor of that nothingness was deathly. Doing nothing meant - not to be dramatic, but - likely death. Death was a suddenly horrifying single step away; the default result unless somehow actively prevented. Death ten feet from my doorway (I imagined the obituary) wearing this absurd green thing on my freezing arm.

Yeah, reframe that, motherfucker!

Sorry. I may be a yogi and writer with fleeting delusions of sophistication, but at my core I'm a vulgar jazz musician, so I talk that way and it can't help leaking out.

I needed to actually do stuff - external, busy, difficult, painful, energetically-sustained stuff - to get myself out of that predicament. Perspective had nothing to do with it.

However, I can certainly reframe the entire sticky wicket, in retrospect: The world wants you to play the World Game. No matter how far you back up for a broad view (aka "transcend"), some persistent exigency will appear that's more than mere Karen-bait. It will challenge not your entitlement, but your very existence. So engagement is mandatory! Transcendence, in other words, may be a potent and transformative magic trick, but it is not, alas, an all-purpose Maslow Hammer.

This was all to explain the astonished recognition of a comfortable 21st century American that not all insecurities are fake. I suppose if you're perpetually gripped by indulgent fake drama, this seems like an uproariously banal insight. But I'm coming from the other place, and am not trying to be relateable - just entertaining and errantly insightful.

If this wasn't too shaggy-dog, the rest goes a step deeper (it's in italics, making it optional!):


I watched my mom's life get smaller and smaller until it was crumb-like. A lady in a chair, staring into space, albeit happily. She, like I, never lost her palpable sense of relief at escaping fraught anxiety (here's where we diverged: she blamed the things that made her anxious, while I blame my needlessly anxious response to mere Things).

While tragic-seeming to outside observers, she delighted in an expansive sense of comfort. I "got" her.

But one night, she had taken to bed, feeling ill, and I absolutely needed her to sit up to take essential medication. She couldn't get up; her abdominal muscles were too frail from long inactivity. I asked her to hold onto me as I pulled her up, but her upper body strength, too, was wanting. She grew increasingly vehement about not wanting to get up. I was upsetting her by forcing her to do this thing she did not want to do, and which required effort.

She might have appeared like a woman out of her mind; reverted to childish id; bereft of reason. But I understood what was happening. She was trying to relax into the anxiety and unpleasantness of it all; to transcend it. But that's not the move when you actually need to DO something! I needed her not to transcend/dilate/accept/find comfort. I needed her to try! To fight! To contract!

It very much recalled the daunting lesson I'd learned once atop a 25 foot ladder:

I was up on a high ladder. Teetering on the top step, I needed to reach upward with both arms. Bulletproof mofo that I am, I hadn't felt deep fear in years. But in that moment an icicle of dread began forming in my gut. So I did the reframing move that never fails to shower me with bliss, erasing melodramatic delusions of peril: I relaxed and let go. And, naturally, I started to fall off the 25 foot ladder.

Woops!

Pause for a moment and imagine how horrible it is when your tried-and-true go-to move not only fails, but fails when the stakes are likely paraplegia. There'd been an impulse to panic, and the antidote popped up on cue, and, for the first time ever, that trusty countermeasure was, ahem, ineffective.

This is the yogi's dilemma. Nearly anything can be processed and transcended via reframing (after recognizing this, you'll spend years observing just how widely it applies; 99.99% of stress stems from fake Rich People Problems; this truly is Utopia). But even in a world of Karens not-just-standing-there-but-DOING-SOMETHING, insecurity can be warranted, and truly compel actiony action.

It's supremely hard to come to grips with for someone who's shifted beyond that mode of behavior. Again: the yogi's dilemma.