I just want to say thank you to everyone who’s sharing their thoughts with me to the list and privately. Some of it is new for me to consider, and some of it is giving me words for the amorphous gut feelings I have so I can purposefully think about them. Kind of like how water vapor needs something to coalesce around to become a cloud you can see, and eventually fall back down to nourish the earth -- and not just a thick, suffocating humidity you can only feel. Many thanks for your thoughts.

From: Maria Bustillos
Sent: Wednesday, September 18, 2019 1:18 PM
To: Joseph Rooks
Cc: tildeclub@lists.tildeverse.org
Subject: Re: What do you do if you feel adrift?

I've found I have to wake up every day knowing that I'm devoting all I've got to work that satisfies my conscience. That sounds crazy! I know. I had to change a lot to achieve that condition, inside and out. Face my materialistic attitudes and habits, downsize in every way from house to haircuts, cut down like 80% on air travel, and take much bigger risks in my career and work.

It's a Pascal's Wager kind of reasoning; I know I'm insignificant and my contributions will likely be small, even futile... but what if they're not? Just in case?

The learned hopelessness I think is the worst part of what's happened, but the good news is, you can unlearn it.

I am sorry to hear about your having had to face difficult circumstances so early in your life. Reading your note reminded me of Francis Bacon's remark, 'The good things that belong to prosperity are to be wished; but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired.' Your perspective is good and will yield good results.

all best

Maria.

p.s. I wrote about a related aspect of Pascal's Wager reasoning here.

On Tue, Sep 17, 2019 at 3:09 PM Joseph Rooks <josephrooks@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey ~ clubbers, this is a weird one, but I also feel like I’m among fairly self-aware people here, many I am familiar with and respect, and many others who are the kind of people who would be on this list to begin with.

I doubt the question I’m posing will be lost on you. And if it goes unanswered, well, I know it’s a pretty expansive and personal question. Maybe some of you will find it relevant, maybe you won’t. At the heart of the issue is my love of making things, and finding myself with no direction that leads me toward doing so.

Think that’s enough self-conscious sandbagging to cover the bases.

I’m 33 and I’ve been self-employed as a writer for most of my adult life. I stuck with it because circumstances demanded it – I’ve dealt with a lot of weirdly evenly spaced deaths in my family, been an estate executor twice, and now I am the last of my kind. I’m good at what I do, I negotiate and organize like nobody’s business, I work hard, I’ve got intensity and grit, I am dead calm in any storm. All things I learned from being executor of two estates at 19 while attending school full time.

The problem is, I no longer know what to do with any of that. Life quieted down so much after fifteen years of utter chaos, and now I’m incredibly aware of the fact that I’ve got nowhere to go back to and nowhere I’m expected to show up. I feel like a ship without a rudder, just drifting around without any direction, on a sea that’s gone calm for the first time I can remember.

It’s got me thinking of what all of the energy I used on tragedy could go toward. How I might be even better at my work. It’s got me thinking about taking a full time job somewhere I can mitigate chaos and make life easier for others besides myself. It’s got me thinking about going off to some foreign country for a few years. I don’t know. I’ve just started taking really crazy shots in the dark lately to try to find new things I could say yes to, but I don’t have any real sense of direction.

I don’t know if there’s an “answer” that makes this adrift, dislodged, floating feeling go away, but I need to find some new way forward now that it seems none of the old rules that I’m used to apply anymore.

If you’ve felt anything like this before, how’d you deal with it?