How Feelings Change

Your mind is lying to you

For next week’s advice column (I’m trying this out for the first time!), you may submit questions here. You’re welcome to ask anything but I’m most likely to prioritize questions around navigating emotions/life.

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I’m always astounded by how radically different I can feel about something or someone at different points in my life. How emotionally invested I was in friendships or romantic relationships, and how little I think about some of them now in comparison.

It’s almost as though the rational mind cannot comprehend the expansiveness and agility of my emotional landscape.

My life looks absolutely nothing like it did a year ago. But really big shifts can happen in way smaller periods of time as well – a week or a day even. Our feelings about things change because we change.

My mind wants me to just stay the same person and create a level of consistency in my life that can be planned around. But that is static, it’s stagnant, and it’s not how life works. I am many different people throughout the course of my life.

The same applies to places. When I moved into this house, I was shitting my pants. I could not stop thinking to myself, “what the fuck am I even doing here in this big, old house in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere??”

My house is nearly 2 centuries old and you can tell. It was filthy when I arrived, and that alone was enough for me to want to turn and run. I’m not a germaphobe, I can tolerate dirt, I just can’t live and do my work in it.

I don’t own a whole lot of furniture either, so the house is also very empty and echoey. Problems started showing up immediately. I’ll talk about this in an upcoming video I’m working on right now but everything from electricity to heating to ventilation in this house has issues and needs work.

All of these things just made this house a really unfriendly place that I felt imprisoned in. Naturally, I was intensely questioning my decision to be here at all. Why the fuck did I buy this thing? This house sucks, it’s now a full time job to take care of it, I’ve lost my freedom, I’ve lost my social life, and I’m 27. What in the fuck was I thinking?

I was feeling very, very low, and I could not see how I could ever not feel this way about this place (I was projecting my current reality onto the future).

That was almost 2 months ago. These last two months have been quite transformational for me and I suspect I’ll write a lot about this period of time in particular because it has been one of the most intense experiences of my life. Just having to confront so many situations on my own has really forced me to breathe deeply and look for a deeper part of myself that can navigate situations better than Nervous Nate. Heart over Head. That one discovery alone is life changing and something I’m now actively exploring every single day.

I used to talk a lot about planning the future. I’d have a lot of goals and visions and accomplishments I wanted to achieve by a certain age. I tried to speak into existence the fact that I would have a published book by age 25 (I said this when I was 21, I am 27 now and still have not published a book).

I’ve given the book a good go a couple of times now and failed miserably. Which is great because I seem to have to have a few failed attempts first before it works out.

My plans for the future never seem to account for this because how could they? Imagine! “…I’ll spend a year trying to write the book, go nowhere with it, put it down for a couple of years and THEN I’ll really write it…” That’s not how any of us make plans.

So, I plan for the future still but I’ve made a few modifications:

1. My timescale has shrunk (I can’t even see more than a month or two into the future anymore. Who knows where I’ll be in a year.)

2. I hold my plans more loosely so that my shoulder isn’t ripped out of its socket when things inevitably get yanked in a different direction than I thought they would.

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There are still many months of work to be done in this house, the house is still very empty, there are French men coming in and out regularly and shouting or drilling things or taking long lunch breaks. This house is a way more massive project than I thought it would be. But at least I have a foothold now and that small shift is actually a giant shift.

I don’t regret my decision. I questioned it a lot in the beginning but I’m not questioning it now, I’m just focused on what I need to do. This place is gonna be fucking awesome when I’m done, it’s just a question of patience, dogged persistence, and finances to afford the nasty surprises that keep popping up (so more patience).

But is the house an evil, horrible place? No. I just feel that way when I’m scared. I’m actually starting to like this house quite a bit. It’s got a lot of quirks but who am I to talk!

It has dawned on me that the challenges that I see as massive today are going to look tiny and distant when I look back years from now. This is not something we’re taught in school or that we see in very many places in society, but I’m learning to actually not listen to my mind, and its incredible ability to make up bullshit stories all the time. My heart/intuition/God/Guidance/whatever you wanna call it sent me here, into this situation and now I just have to trust that this is what I’m supposed to be experiencing. I’ve just gotta make the best of it.

It’s funny how feelings can change. How the things that you hate can sometimes become things you learn to love.

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Music

I enjoy writing to this ballad.

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Survey

I’m planning to expand what I offer with this Substack, and I’m curious about what you’d most like to have:

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