Adaptive Part 1: Personal History
Someone you're not
What I write below is about me, but also… not. Find yourself in it. Find others.
“You might wake up and realize you’re someone you’re not.” — My Chemical Romance
Nothing is as effective for becoming more of what you are as being horrified and enraged at discovering just how long you have spent pretending to be somebody else.
I stand in the bedroom and I look at my running shorts. Should I put them on? I want to run.
But if I go downstairs wearing my shorts, they might see me. They might think something about me wanting to go for a run. They might think I should be at my computer, hacking away at articles.
Or, maybe they will think I am trying to fit in with an elite culture of runners, that I am stupidly valuing things modern culture tells me to value, like being in shape, getting enough exercise, being thin. They could hate me for not valuing what I should value.
And what should I value? It’s definitely not running or being in shape or exercising until my lungs burn. How do I know that? How do I know what I should and should not value? Who determines what I should value? Who chooses?
I stop. I breathe. I check. I flare with rage. I want to go running. Why? Who the fuck cares? What criteria must I filter my wants through in order to get approval? And whose criteria are they, really? It seems like they come from the outside, but come on: Every single one of these criteria is circulating in me. Where did I get them? Why did I take them on?
And who the hell holds the keys to this prison?
I go downstairs. No one asks a thing. I am so relieved. I go outside.
How did it come to this? I am in my thirties. A grown man psychologically negotiating permission to go for a run. Insanity.
If you occupy an adult body and you are being adaptive to people, organizations, institutions, etc., it is not the first time. It started long ago…
In kindergarten, us six-year-olds stood each morning, turned our attention to the flag of the United States of America that hung over the doorway, and recited the Pledge of Allegiance:
“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
What did it mean? I had no clue. I knew the words long before I understood them.
This is how we became a thing called “American.”
As far as I remember, it never occurred to a single one of us not to stand and pledge. I do not remember any of us ever sitting down or saying: “Nope, I won’t do it,” or even, “I do not want to.”
That means that by the time we were six and had entered school, we were already trained to be indoctrinated, which is French for being adaptive. We were already trained to take what was being presented to us from an outside authority and to recite it without questioning it, without considering if we wanted to do it, without considering if we liked doing it, without even knowing exactly what it was we were parroting.
Where did we learn to do that? Before school starts in, we learn what our parents teach us. We learn it through direct instruction. We learn it through living, breathing example. What did your parents give their lives to? Whose values? What didn’t they question? What didn’t they stand up for? How did they bend or mute themselves when what was happening wasn’t ok?
This is not an indictment. There were moments in your childhood when you saw your parents do the heroic, when extraordinary love flowed through them, when you witnessed them as guardians, as angels, as artists, as creators, as healers, more. But the other thing was also so.
I don’t know what human beings actually have a right to in this life. But it seems to me that if they have a right to anything, it is that their lives be their own and no one and no-thing else’s. And even if it is not a right—that your life could be your own—it is a possibility.
By modern culture training, the vast majority of human beings survive in the world by being completely adaptive to the people, culture, preplanned life paths, opinions, ideas, etc., that are presented before them. They are trained to be oriented toward fitting in.
Their lives are not their own. They do not dictate their lives as People of Agency.
It is possible to become a Person of Agency. That is, a person with free attention, free will, free of shoulds, who can freely choose to be in integrity with the values that dwell in and wish to express themselves through their Being.
The biggest challenge of beginning down this path is that you have to be willing to discover, at the outset, that your life, the one you’ve been defending, might just be… a sham.
I am in my twenties.
I sit in the midst of a giant sales meeting at a giant corporation in hypergrowth. I am a marketer/PR person, not in sales, just there to document all the “excitement.”
The CEO comes on stage, wolfish, hands raised, yelling to the applause of hundreds, purpled by the lights, some kind of stadium music playing from the loud speakers. For the next hour, he speaks in terms of war. He calls the new locations we’ve opened globally “beachheads.” He says we are in “enemy territory” as we enter Dublin, where one of our competitors originated. He talks of “battlefields,” “frontlines,” “trenches,” and “blitzes.”
The sales team yells, screams. It’s all very gladiatorial.
I sit there, as an outsider. I see the people around me, seeming to care. And I wonder: “What would it take for me to be one of them? To care about this?”
That’s been my question all along. I pretend to love technology. I read Gizmodo and Mashable every day. I watch on livestream as Apple unveils the watch in September, the thing Silicon Valley has been abuzz about the last few months, and which I am learning to perform my own abuzzness about.
“We are changing the world,” the CEO claims. We know it’s a lie. We all must know it’s a lie. Mustn’t we? But if you squeeze yourself hard enough, you can believe anything. That’s my approach, at least.
The lights come on. I rush back to the office and hammer out a press release. I make up fake, sanitized quotes from the CEO that I’ll send to the CEO’s secretary and wait for her to send it back to me with microscopic edits. Then we’ll publish the thing.
The years go by. I can do this job. I cannot seem to do more than perform passion. I begin to wonder, if I were not getting paid to do this, what would I do? What would I really want to do? All that comes to mind are long naps on white-sand beaches among the coconut trees. Maybe I’d go back to school. Or write. How did I become so very passionless?
When I ask the people around me that question—what would you do if you were not getting paid for this—they come back with the same answer as me, or their variations.
Are we all so passionless? Are we all so exhausted?
How can it be that we know ourselves so little, so little as to believe that without the money, we’d just kind of spend our lives… hanging out?
Something else begins to dawn on me: What if it isn’t the money at all that is keeping us here. What if it is the fact that without this anchor—a socially acceptable place to show up each day and put in some hours, a place and work and people to adapt to—we would be adrift? What if that is what terrifies us, that we know ourselves so little, that if we left this life, that if we no longer merely needed to survive, there would be nothing there, no new place to occupy?
What would we become then?
Being adaptive has its price and its perks. You will pay the price for those perks until the pain of surviving (rather than living) becomes so intolerable that reflexively, you can no longer be adaptive.
I am nine.
I sit on the dojo floor with the other kids. Sifu discourses at us, recounting some old story about himself or about a Chinese master or Musashi or who knows what. I am sitting slightly apart from the other kids. I am sitting in a perfect meditative posture, knees bent beneath me, hands on my knees, spine stiff, looking directly at Sifu.
Somebody laughs. Two of the other boys in the class, looking at each other, bending over. Giggling. Sifu gets pissed and snaps:
“It is incredibly disrespectful, doing what you are doing, you know?” he says. “To not listen to an elder. You think it’s funny. To not be respectful. To mess around like jerks. That’s not the kind of kids we are trying to create in these classes. That is not the way of this dojo.”
The boys are sheepish. Then Sifu turns to me. I have not stopped staring at him, tight as a hunk of wood. Under his gaze, somehow, I tighten more. He looks at me, but speaks to us all:
“Do you know how I know Devin is listening? Because he is looking right at me. He is sitting tall. He is present. He isn’t making a sound. He isn’t goofing off. He is just… here.”
I am frozen. Should I nod? I just keep staring. I don’t know what to do. Because the crazy part, really the craziest part, is that I was not even listening to him just now. That’s why all of this is so shocking. I was not even here. I was thinking of something else. I don’t care about what he’s talking about. I’ve heard it all before, about the old masters, and now I want to be home, reading, but I’m here, I am here, I am here, I am performing well enough, well enough to get the attention, the accolade, the other kids look at me and they hate me or they admire me, they all think I am doing so well, that I am so invested, but I am no one, I am not here, I am not here, I am being acknowledged, I am not here. The perk: approval. The price: I can never be me.
A year later, I receive a new belt, a green belt. I have become the incarnation of performative solemnity. I approach the stage and stand before Sifu. He hands me the belt and whispers: “You know, it’s ok to smile sometimes.” I did not know that. From there on out, I sometimes choose to smile.
You do not outgrow adaptiveness.
Because it worked well for you, because it helped you survive from the earliest childhood on, your adaptiveness is here to stay. You won’t outgrow it. It won’t just slough off. Not until you decide to do something about it.
That is what “Adaptive: Part 2” is about.
Devin, I am glad to be in the context you create every time you write. I am glad also about the voices you get to use in your writing to deliver distinctions, the ellipses, the speeds, that let me search and find what you are talking about in myself.
Six year old kids standing daily and reciting a pledge while facing the American flag... Sent shivers down my spine. I had no idea.
Thank you Devin for the truly devastating pictures you paint.