Everything We Hold

And where this leaves us

ChatGPT made this with a prompt from me

As I picked up various objects, moving harriedly about the space of our new house, I imagined dropping off each item at its intended destination. You know, like Santa depositing candy into stockings.

Ugh. I even imagined that I’d be fucking jolly doing it.

If you ever see me being jolly, avoid. I don’t do jolly. It’s more likely me covering up just how not-jolly I feel. That or I have gas. In either case… best be safe.

But, back to me carrying around armfuls of random objects, my eyes darting around for more objects to “take on my way,” even as objects try to slip out of my arms. That’s when it hit me.

Christ, I’m holding all this shit.

And that realization did in this brain what thoughts do in many writers’ brains; I wondered what I was talking to myself about.

Am I talking about the objects in my arms, the places where they’re supposed to go, or everything else on my heart and in my mind at the same time? Or all of it?

I mean, fuck. It just seems true that what we hold can hold us down, depending on how much we’re holding and how much capacity we have. This seems true in every context of the meaning of the word… holding.

But it gets worse…

These objects of attention can also lock up our hearts in frozen isolation. They can cut us off from everything and everyone we care about, and what’s worse?

We can feel like we can’t set any of it down, because… what? (What, Damon?)

What will happen if I just set it all down? Will that actually solve anything? Am I supposed to believe I won’t just start picking up more shit eventually?

What’s the net-negative, worst outcome of all that I hold?

It’s how I show up for other people. Most acutely, it’s how I show up with my wife. I’m an asshole when I do this.

When I’m in this mental state, holding everything, it feels like productivity. To the people around me, it feels like Damon has turned into the Demon-spawn, and we should promptly burn him to ash or something.

Look, they’re not totally wrong. (But please, let’s set down the incendiary devices for the moment and be compassionate. For the kids. Okay, for the dogs then.)

This is the thing: What’s wise to do and what feels available to do are not the same.

Like… Hey, alcoholic, just put down the damn bottle, man.

Is this what I’m saying? Holding all of this is like some kind of twisted, best I could come up with solution, and not the actual problem. If my metaphor is right, alcoholism, then what pain is all the holding covering up?

Crap. Now I’ve gone full-bellybutton, and you never go full-bellybutton. There’s probably also something careless about getting all meta, but here I go anyway.

In my writing and in life, I want to let go of needing to be the knower. That’s not a dig on knowing or knowledge. Updating our relationship with what’s true is a precious value that often feels lost in recent years.

That said, I don’t need to be the guy who knows all the time, or most of the time. I could drop about 90% of my need to be the knower, like needing to know the answer to holding.

Worse than that is this pull into constant self-reflection.

What bothers me…

My objection is more about my own grappling with the constant pull into the navel, the place where many perfectly good essays and blogs go to die.

A friend of mine, Jim, someone who’s been a contributor to my development as a writer, once opined that we should “leave the navel-gazing to the bloggers,” an assertion that’s haunted me ever since.

I mean, I’d hate to be a… one of them. [insert: scared face emoji]

One of the hardest habits for me to break as a writer, just ask my editor, is that I constantly revert to being the knower. Professor Damon pokes his head into everything I write, smashing the story that I don’t need to be the knower, and undermining my intention to trust others.

I both hate his presence and feel powerfully compelled to defend it when it arises. It begs the question, where do I really stand? Why, too, on top of everything else, must I try to hold everyone’s interpretation of what I write?

I mean, come on.

Charitably to myself, part of me really feels like solving this holding thing will do something. A wiser part of me knows that there is something to be known in the just being with what is. Never mind that the needing to solve it is likely just another form of holding.

There is a something that it’s like to just be stuck holding, caught deliberating whether to put it all down or to pick up more. That something feels like being okay with not needing to have the answer, to not needing to get it right.

This is where I believe I’ll find what it’s like to feel resourced, where I won’t need solutions or answers, where I’ll just be able to be okay feeling stuck and unsure, and this hope is what feels most alive as I write.

How this ends…

It may simply be true that I’ll never be able to protect anyone else from my less inviting parts, like the asshole Tyrant that comes out when I’m holding too much. That might even mean I forever have to face the shame of having such parts, which feels awful when I really focus on it.

When I’m really honest with myself about this, it’s clear that I don’t know how else to be. I could try to write some snappy ending to this essay, where I let Professor Damon dole out a treatise on five steps to not holding, but it would be a lie.

I don’t know how to do it. I can’t tell you how to let go. I wish I could. At least part of me does. It would mean, at the very least, that I’d figured out how to let go myself.

What’s more true is that seasons of my life seem more burdened by everything I try (and fail) to hold, whereas other seasons seem less so. I mostly wish for the latter, at least until I can find reconciliation with not wishing circumstances different from what they are.

This is a work in progress. I'll let you know if anything shifts.

Thanks for being here.

~Damon