Hugamonsters have navels as deep as the Mariana Trench and friendos, this hugamonster was unwittingly exploring on the OceanGate Titan. It should be no surprise that as a result I'm experiencing The Consequences, deservedly so. But sometimes you get so wrapped up in
that you forget to slow down enough to consider why tf you're doing any of this in the first place.
Why you're doing something is more important than what you're doing, if you want to have any kind of a life worth living. Otherwise you're just making a lot of noise and checking things off a to-do list. When you get focused on the what to the exclusion of the why, you end up making decisions based on the wrong set of values. This can lead to your submersible imploding.
I realized, rather suddenly, that I've been allocating my hugamonster energy in ways that didn't support my why, which meant I've been functioning beyond capacity and adopting ideas like this:
Yes, give me more work, I have unlimited capacity and desperately need to prove myself.
This calcified into a value of prioritizing all forms of work over everything else. I've been feeling so insecure about my work - professionally and creatively - that I substituted more for what matters.
Even though there was no real reason to feel this way, I just felt this overwhelming, unreasonable fear that if I didn't meet everyone's expectations, I would lose everything. As a result, I'd taken on so much that it was impossible to meet everyone's expectations, least of all my own (which are way higher than anyone else's).
Showing you how much I can handle while keeping all the plates spinning is the way I seek approval. Being willing to work harder than anyone else because of a perceived lack of being enough is a pattern of behavior I adopted as a child to navigate having parents who rarely noticed me or, when they did, only noticed the things they didn't like.
This pattern of behavior always, always leads to a catastrophic implosion of some kind, whether it's my energy or an important relationship or a creative project or my health. Something always gives, there's a cascading series of decisions or non-decisions aligned with the wrong values, and I'm left puzzling over how I got there.
Thanks to years of therapy and cultivating some self-awareness, I'm better at spotting when I'm about to collide with The Consequences. There have been alarm bells going off for a couple of months. I'd like to say I was too busy to do anything about them, but that's just an excuse. I made myself busy enough to ignore warning signs because omg here we fucking go again with this shit. I willfully ignored what was staring me in the face.
Learning how to own your shit is hard, yall.
And so is accepting that there are bits of your psyche prone to rugging you that you can't think or therapy your way around.
This is a trap I've been falling into from the beginning of time. I've written about it before. Two and a half years after writing that article, I have a deeper understanding of this behavior pattern.
It will surprise literally no creative person ever to hear that much of what motivates why tf are you doing this is insecurity. Our identities are intertwined with our work. We use creativity to examine our inner landscapes and through that lens share our interpretation for the world. A rejection of our work, whether it is an outright rejection or simply not being seen, can feel like a rejection of our core being. Add to this a healthy dose of trauma or simply being human amidst all of this and you've got a recipe for hard times if you don't install some guardrails.
Left unexamined and unattended to, insecurity will derail every plan you try to make. You will focus on the wrong things for the wrong reasons and when you finally look up, you'll find yourself in the barren landscape of The Consequences. That, or you'll walk around feeling miserable all of the time. Dealer's choice, sometimes you're lucky and get both.
The challenge here isn't necessarily to just...have less insecurity. That would be too easy! As anyone who has ever worked on this can attest, cultivating self-worth as a default operating system is hard. Instead, we've got to set up some guardrails so that when insecurity shows up -- and it will -- we can clearly see that it's not part of the program.
Which brings us to devising Rules of Engagement, which also may not cultivate self-worth as default operating system, but can serve as a decision-making matrix which will keep you from operating from a fear-based mindset.
It's helpful to periodically review them to make sure they're still relevant. I hadn't revised mine for 2.5 years and...funny the way you fix one thing and life sends you five new challenges to work on!
Feel free to use these as a launchpad for creating your own:
I will create before I consume.
I will not work to exhaustion.
I will assess my priorities and capacity before accepting (or instigating) new work.
If it's not an enthusiastic yes, it's a no, subject to #3.
I will remain focused on my process, not the outcome.
I will (continue to) follow my interests.
I will withhold judgment of my work.
I will not take criticism from anyone whose advice I wouldn’t seek.
I will create value, not noise.
I will look for what’s working.
I will not outsource my definitions of success to others.
I will not assign meaning to neutral events.
I will remember that 99% of the things I worry about resolve themselves without my intervention.
I will create outside of the hype cycle and need to climb leaderboards or token tickers.
If you do find yourself experiencing The Consequences, it's helpful to stop everything you're doing and get back to basics. Focus on rest, sleep, touching grass, hydrating, and eating well for a few days. Be as unproductive as possible. Avoid social media and the news. Recovery from burnout is more efficient (always be optimizing!) when you allow yourself to thoroughly rest and recover.
It's easy to tell you to be the hugamonster you wish to see in the world. It's harder to be that hugamonster for myself.
But when I remember to take a pause to consider the path forward it means that when I'm exhaling work out into the world, it's my best work, not just the work I had time to do.
