Hi! I’m Andee, and I teach humans how to operate their brains differently so they can transform their lives. If you’re a new subscriber, welcome! I write stories- mainly about my life in NYC, the inner landscape, and how the human brain fucks us out of being able to do cool shit. I also write about love, consciousness, and best practices for not telling someone to go fuck themselves. (Hint: Wait three days.) Great to have you here!
Before I met him, I didn’t recognize the reality of that.
I didn’t recognize the feeling of being drug by my hair from “one thing to the next” without any pausing, any “stopping,” any moments where absolutely nothing occurred. All life was for me was a series of highly emotional events stacked one on top of the other.
I grew up in psychological chaos, and I’ve spoken pretty openly through the years about what that looked like.
My basic needs were always met—food, clothes, shelter. Hell, even when we were very poor, my mother always made sure we had toys and cable TV. I come from fantastic providers and remain grateful for them and their work ethic, which I observed and still embody.
Yet, psychologically it was a shitshow. It wasn’t “safe.”
Outwardly, the “mess” of life looked very orderly. There was no “complaint” I could serve about it or get people to understand. I was fed, clothed… I wasn’t sexually assaulted or beaten.
Yet there was a survival current beneath it all, demonstrating to me that life was a big race, and we weren’t “fine now.” We had to rush to “get to be fine” because we were always one step away from possibly losing everything. (We lost a house… noteworthy detail.) You have to rush, get there, get to the destination. THERE IS ONE AND YOU ARE NOT THERE.
Also, the possibility of being “happy” was utterly impossible most of the time, because some event always kept one from “happiness.”
Back then, I didn’t understand or recognize what “survival” looked like because when you’re provided for, it doesn’t necessarily equate.
I was raised by people who were in “survival emotions.” They never left survival.
I saw this a lot from people during the pandemic—people I knew going into “survival emotions” because they were unemployed. Even when the government was cutting us (myself and many of those said others) a check each week for $1100, they were in that state of utter terror because, psychologically, their nervous systems couldn’t handle not having a job.
“Survival” is a nervous system thing. It can happen even if your world is perfectly safe.
We cannot create from a state of survival. All we can do… is survive.
I left home in survival. I was first trying to heal and survive from the years of living in that toxic obsessive-compulsive machine, recovering from things I experienced and things said to me. Behaviors. Mental illness from my father… and from others who are still living that I won’t name.
For me, the most important thing was to be “the best,” so I could “get a good job after college” and be “saved from the hell of where I grew up.” But then, I graduated wholly burned out with a mountain of debt; the recession happened right after, I moved to New York, and dammit, I was not going to fail at living there. So I worked hard… made money. The more I made, the more my loan companies wanted to take… the more I paid in taxes, the more I worked.
The rat race began. “Survival.”
What is completely weird is that inside of those survival emotions, I could not see any possibility for myself. I managed at one point to go to graduate school, but even after that, I was always so afraid I wouldn’t “have enough money to live,” a belief I inherited, that I didn’t make new choices. My fear kept me from taking any risks.
And then there was drinking to turn off my anxiety, turn off my emotions.
By 2017, when I was fatter and more unhealthy than I’d ever been. I remember sometimes getting out of work, smoking my cigarette, and slipping into “observer,” watching myself walk to O’Lunney’s (a bar I was a regular at) and not really knowing why.
I didn’t want to drink…. my body was oh, so tired—but something had me walking those same steps every day while silently puffing my menthol cigarette. Within two minutes, my brain was dull with my first sip of beer. My eyes would fixate on a spot on the wall, and … I could stare in contentment.
I could scroll my phone and feel…. nothing. Then I’d tumble into a cab, into my bed, and back awake the next day to repeat the cycle of “safe” because… well, if I stopped doing that, I’d for sure be “dead in a ditch,” a phrase I now often say to clients and friends.
“You’re not gonna be dead in a ditch.”
Back in the days of survival, everything knocked me off center.
Does every little thing knock you off center?
You’re cut off in traffic. Your credit card information was stolen. Your boss is a tyrant. You got fired. You had a fight with a partner. Donald Trump got elected. Do these things knock you off center?
When my life was in constant motion, everything triggered my survival emotions. If anything went even slightly unpredicted, I was knocked off center.
And the thing is, shit happens all the time in life! Babies get born. People die. Earthquakes happen. People get sued. But does it have to knock you off center? Is it a thing that, when presented, derails your whole experience?
I think a lot about that, looking in hindsight at how horrific an existence like that truly was.
Last year, I wrote a piece called “Crisis, trauma, disease, diagnosis, betrayal... Or... 😴”
In it, I wrote:
Do you want to lose 50 lbs?
No seriously... Have you wanted to lose 50 lbs for like 15 years?
Have you ever met that person who loses 50 lbs all at once, randomly, after not having any success for .... decades?
Why do you think it's so?
Or the person who is in that horrible relationship, the one where you just beg and plead and hope they'll "wake up and see the light." Then something happens and all of a sudden, they're single, gorgeous as all hell, doing TEDx talks on "narcissist recovery" or whatever the fuck, and you're pretty sure that they just signed a deal with Lululemon for an ad campaign...
What the hell happened?
Crisis, trauma, disease, diagnosis, or betrayal.
Most people live their lives completely unconscious until something horrible wakes them.
I've noticed it first-hand, and sometimes, despite my best efforts, I realize I am talking to blank shells of human beings who filter out everything pertinent to wake them in favor of doing the same thing over and over, saying they're doing "work" but are really just rearranging furniture, moving the couch to the window, back to the other wall, back to the window.
"All lies and jest
Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." 🎶
Crisis, trauma, disease, diagnosis, or betrayal
These things are powerful enough to infiltrate someone’s chaos. They were powerful enough to infiltrate my chaos. Before my ex-boyfriend dumped me at an airport in the middle of the night in January 2018 without a flight home, nothing was powerful enough to wake me up from the program. Nothing. I was so stuck in the loop that you couldn’t pry me from that bar every night or get me to make a different choice.
I wouldn’t take a risk. I wouldn’t “try something new.” I was utterly terrified of almost everything.
Of course, you know the story… at 32, I lost 52 lbs, quit my 18-year smoking habit, and ran my first 26.2. At 34, I stopped drinking. Also at 34, I started my own business. At 38, I am just now reaping the rewards and benefits of a professional network I neglected to build for over a decade… but then did. The last four years have been rich.
I was told yesterday that I work very hard, but… I don’t feel like I do. I learned many secrets, and one of those secrets is space.
“Space. The final frontier.”
Can you infiltrate a person’s chaos?
That’s a complicated answer, and I’ll start with “no,” and also “maybe.”
Earlier in my career, I encountered a few situations in which clients of mine had a trigger event that put them back into survival mode. No matter what I said or did or how pressing or present I was in voice or notes, I couldn’t shake them out of it.
I’d like to believe that now I have tools that are more advanced, tools that access the brain in different ways and are of better service, but the deeper the knot, the harder it is to untie. The person has to be willing to look and has to hard-interrupt their own patterns of rushing into whatever loop their survival state feels most comfortable with.
People who are in practice to observe themselves will have a better fighting chance at knocking themselves out of the loop.
I’d say if you’re just talking about average Joe or Sally who is in a horrific relationship, or drinking too much, or is in a control spiral of overworking… no, you can’t snap them out of it.
They won’t even hear you. They can’t.
What you can be is the light. You can be a source of peace and calm for Joe and Sally. Some people are just too deep into the shit, and regretfully, they will need a “rock bottom” of crisis, trauma, disease, diagnosis, or betrayal to wake them.
WHEN that happens, they’ll remember your light.
But what if it’s you? Maybe you’re in the barrel, and you’ve been tossed around for five, six, ten years, and it seems like each and every life event causes a traumatic upset, and your emotions go hog wild with every little thing that comes up.
Maybe it’s time to embrace the space.
“Space” truly is the final frontier.
Set a timer.
90 seconds.
And sit… In the space. In silence.
There’s a famous quote by Blaise Pascal that says:
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
If you find yourself resisting these 90 seconds because you’re “too busy,” too busy for 90 seconds, too important,” too hurried…” And there’s “too much” happening for you to consider it, and it’s “stupid,” and it “won't do anything,” my friend… you’re in the loop.
Give yourself the gift of space, and see how much peace comes forward.
You are OK.
Stay beautiful.
Andee
This causes trouble with partnerships too. I was married before, and I'd feel that undercurrent of stress. Stress to move on to the next stage, that relationship rat race, to keep knocking things off the list (changing homes, family planning, visiting family on weekends). Bunch of FOMO fuel. Can we just chill, or be?
Wonderful post! Great message. In an insane world stepping out for any length of time–even 90 secs–seems like a wise thing to do. Here my notes:
–"Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens." Talking Heads
–"My basic needs were always met–" "Yet, psychologically it was a shitshow." We would all be benefitted by diving into the "Behavioral Sink" and Calhoun's experiments with rats and mice, primarily because all of their material needs were met and there was enough food to support a population of several thousand of both species in these mouse and rat "utopias." More importantly, the population of both studied groups, after exploding near the beginning reached 0 in a relatively short time.
–"menthol cigarette": the root of all evil...LOL
–"If anything went even slightly unpredicted, I was knocked off center"–says a lot about the solidity of the foundations under our feet...(and yes, most of us R like this)
–"blank shells of human beings"–the Zohar (Kabbalah) refers to qlippoths, taken from the Aramaic word for "peels", "shells", "husks;" they R the representation of evil or impure spiritual forces in Jewish mysticism.
–Cool Simon 'N' Garfinkel quote...
–"work very hard": it's easier to work if you serve others, ain't it?