Arrived
The feeling that one has arrived is an emotion that’s situated within the narrative arc of a journey. First, there is a departure. Then, there is travel, a passage away from the point of departure. Arrival is the emotion that comes when it seems that this journey has come to its completion.
Emotionally, having arrived feels like the proper ending to a story. Our arrival seems like a culmination of all our efforts so that all our problems are solved. Of course, that’s not how life really works. Often, we find that the place we’ve arrived at isn’t what we expected it to be. It begins to feel more difficult to remain in that place, as new needs arise, and new problems have to be solved. Having arrived doesn’t preclude further journeys ahead.
This episode features the insights of Regina Lark, Adam Baruh, and Savannah Hauk.
FULL TRANSCRIPT COMING SOON
Jonathan Cook:
Welcome to Stories of Emotional Granularity, a podcast about the variety of subjective moods that are available for us to experience.
Last week’s episode considered the emotion of flux, in which creative possibilities are opened up through a thawing of attachments to specific rules and roles. Flux is all about fluidity in perception, in behavior, and in opportunity. It’s a way of feeling that makes it easier to move about, though it gives us no solid ground underneath our feet. Flux is therefore an emotion we feel when we’re on the way between places.
The emotion we’ll explore this week comes at the end of periods of flux and movement. It’s a more solid frame of mind, the feeling of having arrived.
The feeling that one has arrived is an emotion that’s situated within the narrative arc of a journey. First, there was a departure. Then, there was travel, a passage away from the point of departure. Arrival is the emotion that comes when it seems that this journey has come to its completion.
The feeling of arrival, though, can’t be isolated to the destination. The emotion is about the relationship of that place with the place of departure, the difference between those two places, and the struggle that it took to travel between them.
Take as an example the experience of Regina Lark, who began her journey as an academic administrator at UCLA, but was compelled to step into the unknown when her position was eliminated.
Regina Lark:
I learned that my unit at UCLA was being dismantled and my position eliminated. I know myself to be a brave, strong person. So, when that happened, there were a few emotions riding. I'd never been out of work before. I've been working somewhere since I was fourteen years old. I was about to turn fifty. It was the beginning of a recession. I knew that the layoff, my perception of the layoff, honestly, was that the goddess of jobs had just done for me what I was not able to do for myself.
Jonathan Cook:
Regina didn’t know where she was going at first, but came upon the idea of becoming a specialist who assists people in simplifying their lives by letting go of their attachments to physical possessions. Her mind then shifted to the question of how she was going to make it work.
Regina Lark:
I left no stone unturned. I am dogged, I am relentless. I am scrappy, and I am hungry, and I just made shit up as I went along. When I sat at my desk and I thought, okay, here I have a home-based business. How do you tell anybody? I mean, how do you do that? I looked online. This is 2008, and I looked online and I decided that I wanted to serve boomers and seniors ,just because I like the literary, the alliteration, boomer and senior downsizing. I didn’t know what I was talking about.
I started looking up "senior services downsized", whatever words came to my head. Then, I started collecting email addresses of people that I thought were in my new scope of influence, and I put them all in, I put all these email addresses into the BCC line. In the subject line I said, “We're growing”. And I said, “Dear friends, it's good to be back in touch. I just wanted you to know that a clear path is expanding into boomer and senior downsizing.” I just hit send and I got a call, like within minutes. “Oh, my gosh. This is amazing. Who are you?” One thing led to the next, to the next to the next.
I would stand at the window of my apartment and go, “We’re open!” I didn't know what else to do. I put a magnet on my car and in fact, I put the magnet on my front door. I asked my roommate to take a picture, we're open, and I did a lot of speaking. My dad was in sales. So, what did I know about sales? I know that you have to hit a hundred to get one. You've got to hit a hundred to get one.
Jonathan Cook:
Regina hustled to create a new professional identity for herself. It didn’t come easily. So, a new question came into her mind. How would she know when she could count herself as a success in her new career? How would she know when she had arrived?
Regina Lark:
I began to develop talks about it and got to hit a hundred to get one. So, if I could get in front of ten people, there's my ten. If I can get in front of another ten, there's twenty. It's been an incredible journey. Now, have I arrived? I've published three books. I just did a TED talk. I have fourteen hourly employees. Full transparency, I sent an email this morning to a therapist that I saw during COVID just to check in and prove to myself I'm in great shape. I want to go back into seeing her for a few sessions because I want her to help me understand if I've arrived, because I'm in constant motion, and sometimes I go down the rabbit hole of comparative analysis, comparing myself to others in my field or industry, and it's not good.
I'm not walking in anybody else's shoes but mine, so I can't hope to think that their lived experiences and their journey to where they are today is anything like mine. It's perceptions. So, I want to move away from having perceptions that don't serve me because what I can control here, the only thing I can control on the whole planet is my perception of the thing. I can't control for anything else.
Jonathan Cook:
An arrival at a physical destination is a concrete thing. When a train arrives at a station, we get off, and there we are. The emotion of having arrived is not so certain. Regina is working with her therapist to figure out what it might look like for her to have arrived.
As Regina suggests, motion is relative. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the distinguish between making progress toward a destination and feeling the landscape shift underfoot.
The shapes our paths can take through life are variable. Regina is undoubtably making an ascent in her new career, but what kind of new height does she want to achieve? Does she have to reach the top in order to feel that she has arrived, or is there a plateau of stability and self-respect that will be good enough?
I live in the northeastern United States, near the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. The Appalachians are an ancient mountain range, which means that they’ve had plenty of time to erode down into smooth, rounded forms, covered with trees all the way to the top. I can remember many times as I’ve been hiking up one of those mountains when I’ve become confused about whether I’ve reached the top. It’s not like climbing Mount Everest. The gently curving arc of the peak doesn’t always make it clear when you’ve arrived.
Some people might ask why a person would bother to climb a mountain, if they don’t reach the top. For others, the struggle itself is itself the goal of the climb.
Adam Baruh, the leader of SuiteCentric, spoke with me about the relationship between his experience of struggle and the feeling of having arrived.
Adam Baruh:
I'm Adam Baruh. I'm kind of a serial entrepreneur. For the last six years, I've been running a consulting agency called SuiteCentric, which is a NetSuite solution provider and implementer. My career over the last seventeen years has really been kind of focused around the NetSuite platform. Then in 2021, kind of following a very kind of personal self-awareness, discovery kind of that was dealing with a lot of anxiety and some mental health issues, and just running my company and the stress and anxiety behind that, I kind of had a journey of self-discovery and got into, out of that kind of manifested a podcast that I started hosting called The Change, which is about servant leadership and mental health in business.
Jonathan Cook:
Many people would describe owning your own business as a sure sign of having arrived, but for Adam, it didn’t feel that way. Something felt wrong beneath the surface of his success.
Adam Baruh:
I started working with an executive coach, Kristen Taylor, who's fantastic and I love her, in March or April of 2021.
The decision to hire my executive coach back in April of ‘21 came from some profound revelations I had all kind of tied up to this traumatic event from when I was six years old that I mentioned, and some very profound revelations I had in my life, which really was the catalyst for this healing journey that I've been on since really, you know, that April of 21. And, you know, it's still a journey. I'm not done and I don't think I'll ever be done, but. But it's really, you know, changed so much of my life and where I'm at today.
Jonathan Cook:
Working with his new coach, Adam found the courage to face some traumatic events that contributed to his anxieties about himself and his work.
Adam Baruh:
When I was six years old, my parents were fresh off their divorce, and my mom would have this babysitter come over, this teenage boy. He would come over, and as soon as my mom left, this guy would lock me in my mom's walk-in closet, barricade the door, and the light switch was on the outside of the closet, shut off the light. So, it's pitch black dark in there. I could right now, I could feel the terror. I could remember that terror that I had of being locked in that closet.
Well, now here I am as a forty six year-old, having claustrophobic anxiety attacks. My nervous system, the seeds were planted in that experience for what resulted then, forty years later, in these claustrophobic anxiety attacks. Where the shame came from was one of the times that I finally was let out of the closet, this kid had invited a bunch of his little teenage friends over and they would party while it was locked in the closet and be doing pretty hardcore drugs and stuff like that. I remember as a six year-old finally being let out of the closet and seeing these kids passed out with needles around rubber hoses around their arms, as a six year-old. Then anyways, one of the times I was let out and I was molested. So, that's where the shame came from.
Jonathan Cook:
Having confronted the abuse in his childhood, Adam examined his sense of shame. As a result, he’s been able to solve some of the problems that underlie his anxiety. Adam says that he’s arrived at a pretty good place.
Adam Baruh:
I had for many years smoked a ridiculous amount of pot to just escape that feeling and just escape negativeness and just escape in general. You know, I think I was an alcoholic for many years, not like hardcore or whatever. I mean, just could easily polish off a bottle of wine. It wasn't really a challenge to polish off a bottle of wine every night, you know? I just had this revelation and everything made sense in that moment and that revelation started a profound journey for me and healing myself, and now, deciding that I also wanted to share my story and as much as I could be there to help heal others by just vulnerably telling this story. So, that's kind of where I'm at today. I think I've gotten to a really good place, but I know my journey is not over. There's still a lot of work to do.
I've talked about in my journey since April of 2021, how it feels to have close the gap between who we ought to be and who we are. That journey that I've shared with you, I think reveals that that feeling of arrival, of feeling like I'm finally at a point in my life where I could look at things with curiosity, with a sense of just acceptance. What I've come to conclude at the end of the day is like, my purpose for existence really is to be curious and to have fun and to hopefully have a positive impact on anybody that I come in contact with. So that that's my story of arrival and it's an important one and hopefully we all can get there.
Jonathan Cook:
Adam is feeling better. He’s more in control of his life. That doesn’t mean that everything is perfect, though. As Adam puts it, although he’s in a really good place, his journey is not over.
Adam Baruh:
It is a journey and it's something that's happened over a period of time. But, you know, when I had that revelation in April of '21, the rest of 2021 was the most magical time of my life. The healing journey has been a rollercoaster ride in and of itself. I mean, it hasn't just all been great since I had this revelation. One of the things that I recognized was I'm not a great communicator. Maybe I come across that way, but, I'm better now, but one of the things I recognized was I had a really hard time communicating my feelings to anybody. Most importantly, the effect of it was with my current wife, because we would run into these relationship challenges and I knew a lot of that had to do with the fact that I still just hadn't learned the tools yet for how I needed to communicate.
It's still a work in progress, to be honest, but, you know, it was not pretty in 2021, despite the fact that it was still like I felt more magical and more empowered and good about things forever. 2022 then hit and it was a really not fun year. Like out of the gate, 2022, my business. we had a really rough year, to be honest. I had to really dive back into SuiteCentric and shake a lot of things up to get us back on track, which we did finish the year strong. I attribute that to my team members, but I'm going to pat myself on the back with that one too, because I was able to recognize what needed to be changed and not have any fear or hesitance with just doing it, despite the fact that I knew people weren't going to be happy about it. My wife and I were in kind of a not great place in 2022. We had a lot of fighting, and stuff like that. So, that was a dark time. It was almost like, you know, January 1st, 2023 hits and I just felt optimistic.
Jonathan Cook:
Emotionally, having arrived feels like the proper ending to a story. Our arrival seems like a culmination of all our efforts so that all our problems are solved.
Of course, that’s not how life really works. Often, we find that the place we’ve arrived at isn’t what we expected it to be. It begins to feel more difficult to remain in that place, as new needs arise, and new problems have to be solved. Having arrived doesn’t preclude further journeys ahead. So, even though Adam felt he had arrived, he also felt that his arrival was still a work in progress.
The author Savannah Hauk has experienced her own challenges maintaining the feeling of having arrived.
Savannah Hauk:
I've written two books about cross-dressing. They are both called Living with Cross-Dressing. The first is Defining a New Normal, and the second is Living with Cross-Dressing: Discovering Your True Identity. They are tackling relationships that are tackling cross-dressing one on one. Why you cross-dress? Should you cross-dress? Like, kind of get rid of some of the myths out there, and misconceptions about cross-dressing is. Those are up on Amazon and other outlets. I am also in the middle of the third entry of Living Cross-dressing, the third book, which is going to talk about some things we talked about: Self-concept, self-awareness, why are you who you are?
Jonathan Cook:
Savannah’s books center around complex questions of identity. Her initial question, why are you who you are, presupposes another question: Who are you? This question can’t be answered merely by stating your name. Identity isn’t just a simple point of data. Identity is dynamic. It shifts over time, and so the identity a person has arrived at in one point of their life may not be an identity they want to maintain at a later time.
Savannah struggled with her identity for some time before arriving at the decision to enter a space that can hold two identities, allowing her to become dual gendered.
Savannah Hauk:
When I moved from New York, which was the genesis of the creation of Savannah as a whole entity, and that developed over from like 1995 to 2012, let's say, and that was me building, and then building. I went to the closet. It came out of the closet went back in the closet. You know, I didn't have a very supportive partner toward the end of that relationship specifically. So it was a rollercoaster of all sorts of problems. I thought I had arrived. I thought I was coming into my own. You know, I had gone from clubbing in the nineties. I had arrived then, then met up with people that were not clubbing people. So that took a back seat and, you know, kind of made me more stay at home and kind of lost the energy of the femininity I was embodying. And so, just a roller coaster up and down, arriving, you know, receding, coming out, going back in.
Arriving in South Carolina after that initial fear and being trepidatious of even being seen in the world, once I got past that, once I decided that it was important for me to be visible and be true to me on a very public way, that I felt that the chasm of who I wanted to be and my self-concept and who I am started to close. We all, in our self-concept, have an idea of what we want to be, who we want to be, and we know who we are today if we're self-aware enough, but there is that ground between that. As you get closer to your truth, you've taken steps towards that.
I feel that coming to South Carolina in that fire, kind of forged in fire, made me realize that this is the one life I have. I can't rely on others and protective bubbles to carry me through. I had to become my own person. Knowing that and realizing that and being self-aware of that made me really strive to close that gap and be that person and to really say I have arrived. I mean, I've never said I have arrived because it seems like no matter what all the barriers put in place and all the things we learn and unlearn and relearn keep us from truly arriving at the destination. But, if you keep if you keep on the same path and keep on the true path, then you're always going to be arriving. You're always going to that next stop, it's the next to arrival. And if you're on a train and you have a hundred stations between now and the end of your life, every station you stop is a new arrival. Whether you decide to get off because you feel like that's the best place to buy a tract of land and build your house and live the rest of your life, that's fantastic, but there are still, you could keep arriving with every new thing you learn.
Jonathan Cook:
When an arrival is affirmed by the dominant culture around us, it’s easier to sustain. When the people around us say that we’ve come the wrong way, and that we don’t belong where we are, we can find ourselves turning back down roads that we had hoped never to travel again. Savannah had the courage to arrive at an identity that defied social expectations, but it took several attempts before she could remain at her destination.
There is only one final arrival in life, and that’s death. Until death, nothing is final.
It makes us feel safe and secure to think that we belong in a place, or even more than that, to think that a place belongs to us. We like to feel that having arrived, we are entitled to remain where we are, but nothing lasts forever. Everything is in motion, even when it seems to be still and rock solid.
The transitory nature of our existence undermines the idea of permanent achievement, but that doesn’t mean that our achievements are worth nothing. Even if it doesn’t last, in the moment, our arrivals are worth celebrating. The fact that everything passes away is what makes our passages worth paying attention to. Achievement without any end would soon become pointless.
We have now arrived at the end of this episode of Stories of Emotional Granularity. Next week, we’ll have a special episode that deviates from the typical format to discuss a problem with the podcast that’s been pointed out to me by a couple of listeners. I’m hoping that some of you can help me resolve this problem.
Until then, thanks for listening.