Chasing the Wrong Horse

When what we think blocks out the way we feel.

The metaphor:

Last week, I was reading about interdependence. There were some really beautiful descriptions of communities collaborating to meet each others’ needs. But I got stuck on how hard it is to do this when we don’t always know what our own needs are. Mine seem clearest in retrospect, when I’ve already failed to meet them.

This week, I had a conversation with a friend that pointed to one reason we might miss this information: because we assume we feel something else. Like the time I thought of my job as a galloping stallion when it was more like a mule standing on my foot.

The story:

“Ok but this isn’t, like, a fun and sexy story,” my friend warned me on Wednesday.

She’d been dating someone new, and they recently agreed to just be friends. Before that conversation, my friend explained, she’d been unable to tell how much she liked the person, drained by the mechanics of maintaining momentum by text. Afterwards, instead of going silent, their text chain lit up more than ever, and my friend found herself newly interested.

“Ooh, that’s great!” I said, excited that she could feel her feelings again.

“NO, IT’S NOT!” She clarified, from the midst of feeling them.

We refer to feelings possessively – my feelings, your feelings – and it’s true, they’re ours, but that doesn’t mean we know them. If something keeps us from paying attention to or expecting them, like the assignment in the Basketball Awareness Test, then even important feelings can go unnoticed by our earnest, mistaken minds.

Or at least, that’s how it goes for me sometimes. Like when I took an offer ten years back that I thought of as a dream job. I’d been applying to graduate school to learn how to do this type of job. I got the offer two days before a deposit was due to hold my spot in the program I’d planned to attend. It was revolutionary: I could get the job I wanted without doing the degree. I accepted and moved across the country, bought new business casual clothes and did a lot of power pose-type preparation.

Then, for the next nine months, I struggled to find my footing. I loved my coworkers and the organization’s mission, but perpetually felt new and not quite up to speed. I put in longer and longer hours that kept not paying off. When friends asked about it, I compared my job to a beautiful horse that I could see running along the horizon but couldn’t figure out how to get on. Then I got accepted to a leadership program that paired me with a coach. I explained my determination in our first meeting, my quest to feel the soaring sense of success I’d found at past jobs.

“You know,” my coach told me, “I don’t think you like this job.”

Confused, I re-explained that I loved it, I just needed to figure out how to make it work.

“Yeah,” she said. “I know you think that. But I think you hate it.”

She told me later it was the biggest risk she had taken as a coach, but it seemed like nothing less blunt would cut through the layers of narrative I’d woven around myself. Well, “layers of narrative” is my phrase. She called it “bullshit.” She was right.

A few weeks later, I was still reeling from this news about my feelings, who’d given up trying to contact me and found someone else to understand them. My boss, who I still really wanted to impress, told me that a job had opened up in the operations team and she hoped I would apply.

This felt very fraught: I was grateful that my boss wanted me to be in the right role, but freaked out she thought my current job wasn’t it. It wasn’t, but I didn’t want her to know that. Moreover, I had never worked in operations and it scared me. That was a field for people with real skills, like math and logistics. I was a chronically late English major who’d only recently learned to call my skillset “project management.”

I applied anyway. Then I loved it. Actually loved it. The maddening ambiguity of the last role fell away, and I was flooded with the high of achievement as I completed one concrete project after another. There were lots of big, meaty questions about how to manifest the nonprofit’s values, and my liberal arts brain loved chewing on them, while staying rooted in tangible tasks. It wasn’t a perfect job, but it was a really good fit.

It was wild to realize how dramatically my expectations had distorted what I thought I felt. Left to my own devices, I would’ve kept doing something I hated in the name of love, and avoided trying something I loved out of fear I’d hate it. It’s not unlike a moment in my childhood when I told my grandpa I’d definitely had pineapple before and didn’t like it, because it looked so weird and yellow. He prevailed on me to try it anyway and it turned out to be delicious. It became my favorite fruit. My mom still announces when she sees pineapple that I love it and will eat it all.

My friend’s feelings aren’t as clear cut as mine were with the pineapple. She still can’t quite trust her emerging interest. It could be the way she’s felt all along, newly accessible now that the sense of pressure has lifted. Or, it might be a reaction to the newly unobtainable, wanting what she suddenly can’t have. Her real feelings are out there, doing their best to get through to her, but that doesn’t make them easier to find. There’s looking for love, and looking for a job, and then there’s looking for your own damn feelings, just trying to make them out above the noise.

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