Imagine that you own a house that’s riddled with black mold behind the walls.
You can’t see the black mold most of the time, you don’t know exactly where or how extensive it is, and despite years of spot-cleaning it, nothing you’ve tried has gotten rid of it for good. All you know is that it’s increasingly starting to make you sick.
You may need to burn down the house and rebuild.
This idea is terrifying—emotionally painful, expensive. You live in the house. You love the house. You hate the idea of burning down the house, and you don’t want to do it.
But you are not the house, and you will survive its destruction.
There are lots of decisions in life that feel like your mold-riddled house: You have a problem where no decision you can take around it feels right. No matter how many times you turn things over in your head, you can’t seem to find the right path forward.
You have a sense that there’s something about the problem you’re missing, something that’s causing you to go in circles, but you can’t figure out what it is. This missing piece seems really important, but it slips away every time you try to grasp at it, and you find yourself spinning back over the same old arguments again with no actual resolution. You feel hopelessly stuck.
This stuck feeling comes from holding tightly onto a load-bearing belief framework that’s so important to you, you’re not willing to consider that you might need to burn it down completely to move forward; a stack of beliefs about who you are and what you need that are so deeply threaded into your self-conception that you shy away from even looking at them.
This is the house you’ve built for yourself to live in. Feeling consistently, hopelessly stuck in it is a pretty strong indicator that you’ve got an issue with mold.
Here are some examples of being stuck that might sound familiar to you:
A novel you’ve been tweaking for a decade, but which you can’t bring yourself to publish or abandon because it’s not quite there yet.
A prestigious job which you can’t bring yourself to leave for a startup because the money is just too good.
A habit of avoiding social functions because you think most people you meet are boring, but which still leaves you with a sense of sadness when you don’t go.
Lots of people would look at these scenarios and say, “You need to do the thing you’re avoiding. You’re just afraid. Follow your dreams.”
But this isn’t yet another post telling you to publish your book, quit your job, and just go put yourself out there. It’s not always that simple.
You have a good reason you’re feeling stuck, and you’re not being honest with yourself about what it is. Doing a thing that doesn’t feel right might just be another way to avoid dealing with the mold problem that’s been slowly creeping up your foundational belief structure.
The sense that this action may not be the right action is exactly where the stuck feeling is coming from—you may know deep down that taking this action isn’t going to resolve the real problem you have, and moving forward without examining that feeling might wind up creating more problems for you than it solves.
Successfully burning down your belief structure to get at the mold that’s making you sick requires examining the deeply-held beliefs you have about yourself that underpin the whole way you’re looking at your problem. It’s hard—these beliefs are undoubtedly serving a vital need for you, since they make up the frame you find yourself living in. But if they’re hiding your real problem, you need to get them out of the way to make the right decision.
Maybe you don’t want to publish because what you actually want is acclaim (whether it comes from a novel or not), and you know this book won’t get it… but working on it in perpetuity gives you an easily defensible excuse for why you aren’t chasing it elsewhere. Publishing won’t give you the validation you’re seeking.
Maybe you want to leave your prestigious job to do a startup because deep down you’re just afraid that you’re not as smart or talented as your coworkers, and it’s easier to run away than deal with that fear. Changing jobs won’t fix your insecurity.
Maybe you wish you were the type of person who likes going to parties even though you’re not because you think those people seem cool, but it’s easier to tell yourself other people seem boring than admit that you want to feel cool (and don’t). Forcing yourself to go to parties you hate won’t fix your self-esteem.
Or maybe none of this is true, and the conventional narrative does apply. In that case, you should just publish the damn book, quit your job, and go to the party.
The point is that you can’t know if you’re solving your real problem without asking if you’re just avoiding considering something that would be really inconvenient for you if it were true.
Honest self-examination is how you tell the difference between pursuing your real dreams and getting yourself wedged into cracks down misguided paths toward cope. You have to be willing to question your entire self-narrative to have confidence that you’re seeing things clearly.
This process can be incredibly painful. It might mean accepting that a dream you’ve worked toward for years isn’t actually something that you want. It might mean facing that you’ve hurt people in ways weren’t actually as justified as they seemed like they were at the time. It might mean you have to accept things about yourself that you really, desperately want to not be true.
But if you want to have any hope of permanently banishing that persistent, nagging, stuck feeling that’s making your problem feel impossible to solve, you’re going to have to do the hard thing and burn down the mold-infested house that’s getting in the way of your ability to be honest with yourself.
You are not the house, and you will survive its destruction.