Field Notes on Being Human™: The Ethics of Coming Home to Yourself

I had intended to write an essay called The Ethics of Coming Home to Yourself.

It was going to be about belonging. Not belonging to a place or a person, but to one's own interior landscape. About the moral responsibility of returning to ourselves after years spent abandoning pieces of who we are in service to other people, institutions, expectations, and obligations.

I still believe in that essay. I just hadn't considered what might be waiting for me when I got there. Or, more precisely, what might not be.

What if you come home to yourself and discover that you don't entirely know who lives there?

What if so much of what you have called self has been constructed around what you produce, what you know, what you fix, what you accomplish, and who needs you?

What if you remove all of that furniture and find yourself standing in a nearly empty room? Who are you then?

I have been sitting with that question this week. Not voluntarily, exactly.

Several of the identities through which I understand myself have felt strangely unstable lately.

I am a mediator and a teacher of mediation, but I have found myself feeling increasingly peripheral to work in which I once had an unquestioned place.

I am also someone who has spent much of her professional life building systems, creating programs, solving problems, establishing expectations, and figuring out what to do when nobody else seems to know what to do.

There is satisfaction in being that person. There is also exhaustion. There is an exhaustion particular to being the person who notices what isn't working.

Eventually, noticing becomes fixing. Fixing becomes managing. Managing becomes reminding. Reminding becomes following up. Following up becomes documenting. And somewhere along the way, you can begin spending enormous portions of your finite human existence keeping systems moving that seem perfectly content to stop moving the moment you stop pushing them.

This week, I have found myself wondering how much of my life force I want to spend doing that pushing.

And then there is my writing.

Two rejections for my first novel arrived over the past two weeks.

There is nothing particularly remarkable about this. Rejection is part of the publishing beast. More importantly, I haven't even queried the book in months. I am substantially restructuring it, which means those rejections belong, in some sense, to an earlier version of the manuscript and an earlier moment in my life as a writer.

I know all of this. And still, somewhere beneath the rational explanation, something whispered: Maybe you're not a writer either.

This would be a curious conclusion to reach considering that I have another completed novel currently with beta readers.

Apparently, one can write an entire novel and still wonder whether one is a writer. Human beings are talented that way. We can possess overwhelming evidence of something and still allow a single absence of external recognition to overrule it.

Which is perhaps why I found myself staring at the cancellation page for Publishers Marketplace today. I have been cutting expenses. I have canceled subscriptions and other things that no longer justify their cost. Most of those decisions have been exactly what they appear to be: financial decisions.

Publishers Marketplace wasn't. It is, objectively, a subscription. That's all. A recurring charge for access to information about the publishing industry.

Canceling it would not delete the novels from my computer. It would not erase the thousands of hours I have spent writing them. It would not recall my current novel from my beta reader or somehow prevent me from ever querying my first novel again.

And yet my finger hovered over the cancellation button as though I were being asked to declare something.

I give up. I am not really a writer. I no longer belong here.

It startled me how quickly a financial decision became an existential one. And I began to wonder how many ordinary things in our lives are quietly performing this function. How many subscriptions, titles, offices, degrees, calendars, memberships, responsibilities, inboxes, projects, and people who depend upon us have become evidence in a case we don't even realize we are arguing.

See?

I matter. Look how much I do. Look how much I carry. Look how many people need me. Look how busy I am. Look what I have accomplished. Surely all of this means I have earned my place here.

Perhaps that is why I have felt so profoundly disoriented. Too many exhibits have been removed from evidence at once. And without them, I am left with the terrifying question beneath all the others:

What remains of me when usefulness is no longer available as proof that I deserve to exist?

So, I jumped into a shower, a quick scrub off of the sense of being adrift. And somehow, while I was in there, I found myself scrubbing the shower floor. Because apparently even my existential crisis needs to be productive.

I laughed when I realized what I was doing. And then I didn't. Because there it was. The whole thing. I had entered the shower to care for myself and almost immediately converted the experience into an opportunity to accomplish something.

Clean the floor.
Improve the environment.
Make good use of the time.
Make the time count.

Even care had become productivity.

I have written before about productivity as punishment, about the ways we learn to moralize output and become suspicious of rest. But I think there is something underneath even that.

Perhaps productivity doesn't merely tell us whether we have used our time well. Perhaps, for some of us, it has become the mechanism through which we establish that we are worth the time we occupy.

I am useful, therefore I matter. I accomplish, therefore I belong. I help, therefore I am necessary. I produce, therefore this day was not wasted. I achieve, therefore this life is not wasted.

And suddenly the inability to be productive is not merely uncomfortable. It is annihilating. Because if usefulness has become evidence of worth, then the loss of usefulness does not feel like rest.

It feels like disappearance.

Maybe that's why ordinary existence can be so frightening.

Add to this that I finished reading a book this week that unsettled something in me. It raised the possibility of simply living a plain existence. No grand narrative. No cosmic architecture arranging everything into meaning. No guarantee that all the suffering and striving eventually resolves itself into a story in which everything makes sense.

Perhaps there is no final scene in which someone hands us the answer and says, See? This is what it was all for.

Perhaps a life can simply be a life.

I find that possibility strangely peaceful. I also find it devastating. Because I have spent a tremendous amount of my life becoming. Becoming educated. Becoming accomplished. Becoming credible. Becoming useful. Becoming someone whose expertise mattered. Becoming someone who could walk into chaos and create structure. Becoming someone who could teach, mediate, lead, research, write, advocate, fix, and help.

There is nothing wrong with any of those things. I love many of them.

I do not want to renounce ambition or pretend that accomplishment is somehow spiritually inferior to simplicity. I still want my books published. I still want meaningful work. I still want to teach things worth teaching and build things worth building and contribute something useful while I'm here.

But I'm beginning to wonder whether there is a difference between accomplishment as expression and accomplishment as evidence.

Writing because I am a writer is expression. Needing publication to prove that I am a writer is evidence.

Teaching because I have something I want to give is expression. Needing to be indispensable to know that I matter is evidence.

Building something because I believe it should exist is expression. Building because stillness makes me afraid I am disappearing is evidence.

Perhaps the problem was never ambition. Perhaps the problem was asking ambition to answer a question it could never answer: Am I enough?

No achievement can settle that question permanently. There is always another credential. Another promotion. Another publication. Another project. Another person to help. Another mess to fix. Another shower floor to scrub.

The evidence has to keep coming because the verdict never holds.

And this brings me back to the essay I meant to write. The Ethics of Coming Home to Yourself.

I thought coming home meant returning to some authentic interior self I had neglected while tending to everything outside of me. Maybe it does. But I had imagined the return too romantically. I imagined homecoming as recognition. There you are.

I imagined relief.
I imagined finding something solid waiting for me.
I had not considered that coming home might involve discovering how much of the person I thought I was had been built from usefulness.

I had not considered that the house might be quieter than I expected.
I had not considered that I might have to sit there without immediately renovating it.

Maybe the ethical responsibility is not merely to come home to ourselves. Maybe it is to remain. To stay when there is nothing to accomplish. To stay when nobody needs anything. To stay when the title disappears. To stay when the institution no longer recognizes us. To stay when the rejection arrives. To stay when we don't know what job comes next. To stay when the book is finished and there is nothing left to do but wait for someone else to read it. To stay when the day has produced nothing worth reporting. To stay when we are not impressive. To stay when we are ordinary. To resist reaching immediately for a hammer, a manuscript, a spreadsheet, a degree, a project, a person who needs saving, or a goddamn scrub brush.

And simply remain in the room.

I don't know how to do that yet.
That matters.

I don't want to turn this disorientation into a revelation before it has earned one. I don't want to manufacture a tidy lesson about how I have finally discovered that I am enough without accomplishment.

I haven't.

Some days, I'm not sure what I am.

That is what makes this uncomfortable. But perhaps being human occasionally requires allowing the question to remain unanswered.

Perhaps there is no extraordinary professional destination waiting to explain my life to me. Perhaps there is no eventual validation that will make every strange turn cohere.

Perhaps I will publish novels.
Perhaps I won't.

Perhaps the next chapter of my professional life will finally have a name.
Perhaps it won't.

Perhaps I am a portfolio person trying to exist in a world obsessed with categories.
Perhaps I’m simply a person.

And perhaps an ordinary human life does not become meaningful only after we have done enough with it.

Maybe a life is not an argument. Maybe I don't need to spend mine assembling evidence for the defense. Maybe the opposite of failure is not success. Maybe the opposite of failure is being alive without requiring your life to make a case for itself.

I'm not certain I believe that yet. But I can at least see the possibility.

There is someone here even when she isn't useful.
There is someone here when she isn't teaching.
There is someone here when she isn't fixing anything.
There is someone here when nobody has chosen her manuscript.
There is someone here when she has no idea what comes next.
There is someone here when the shower floor is dirty.

Perhaps coming home to yourself is not the moment you finally discover who you are. Perhaps it is the moment you decide that whoever is there doesn't have to earn the right to stay.

Turns out, I was writing The Ethics of Coming Home to Yourself after all.