A few days ago, I found myself digging in deep with my therapist, Monica. We waded through the discomfort of transitions and grappled with the looming question: "Have I wasted time?" Essentially, we were circling ideas and feelings around the worth of what I've built and what might come next. She then cut to the core of it, asking, "So, Jeremy, why are you here?"
I hesitated, offering some canned responses: I'm here
to build communities,
to create,
to connect,
to disrupt,
to imagine.
“How do you feel about those?” asked Monica.
I laughed.
“They’re all about productivity,” I said.
"What about 'I am here to love. And be loved?'" she asked.
Honestly, I struggled to find words for that. My identity, both personal and professional, is intertwined with a sense of needing to do things to have value. That’s the capitalism talking. That’s the “starving artist” talking. That’s the son of middle class folks talking. That’s the achiever in me talking.
Enter Tyrell, Monica's intern, with these zingers:
"Productivity has been your only teacher,"
and
"It's allowed you to survive, but not be alive."
Not long after my session, I crashed. Hard. Like fall asleep in my office in the most uncomfortable position imaginable hard.
This crash triggered a thought: when you're not in a constant state of 'fight or flight' or relentless productivity, your body seems to shut down for a while. And it's okay. My fluctuating energy levels lately—being a sleepless zombie one moment and then facing unexpected crashes the next—tell me that my body is finally exiting its survival mode. It's releasing tension that it's held for more than a decade.
Learning to say 'no' has been pivotal in this transformation. It's a daily struggle, mostly with myself. But it offers a different kind of relief, quite unlike the dissociative state that I used to mistake for rest. It's a form of release, one that's weirdly comforting even if unfamiliar. And so, even as I grapple with my deep drive for productivity, I'm learning to see the value in simply being. It's a slow, uneasy shift, but it feels good—like I'm catching a much-needed breath after running a never-ending marathon.
But I have to be honest with you, the switch from doing to being is not at all like what the self-help, Buddhist, Christian mystic monk-types say in the books. To me, they all sound romantic. And I’ve been such a romantic in the past. In the throes of difficulty and personal trauma, there is nothing like the allure of “being” to put you into a kind of gauzy relationship with the world. That’s not a bad thing for a while, and it certainly helped me.
For me, the “release” or shift from doing to being has had a lot to do with letting go things I’ve held central to my identity for a long time. Being a professor. Being a founder. And while not being on alert is good — and my body recognizes this as a kind of safety, I think — there is a lot of grieving involved. A lot. I don’t know what to do.
Some days recently, I’ve given into the temptation to do stuff again. I have a handsome to-do list that has driven most of my daily activity for a long time. It is my brain some days, capturing everything from little tasks like responding to a specific email all the way up to “hey, I should really make some progress on that dream of mine.” When I give in too much, I resent the work that keeps me from living. When I’m living, I’m afraid I’m not being productive enough. It’s a dance or a slowly unfolding train wreck. Or maybe both.
If I accept Monica’s offering, however, all starts to become well — so long as I can remember it. What if I am here to love and be loved? This invitation requires me to be and to do very different things. It de-centers the vaunted to-do list and centers relationships. I send emails to different people for different reasons. I teach ways of being over mere content delivery. I create with people instead of creating at them. I take care of myself — not as a project of productive self-improvement — but as an expression of care itself. This is necessary when grieving, I think.
My work and creative lives do not often speak this new language of mine. I’m choosing to be an alien in some of the places I have most belonged. There is grief here, too. But it is right.