#9 Why don't I like this anymore?
Four differential diagnoses for your thing-you-initially-loved-but-are-now-not-so-sure-about.
Hello friends,
How have you been? I’ve been posting this newsletter every single week since the start of 2024, but I missed last week! I gave myself Saturday off in honour of a friend’s birthday, but in truth, had also been feeling a lurking drag around creating this work. Can we be curious about the phenomenon of new beautiful exciting things becoming heavy? Why do the initial therapy sessions sometimes feel full of promise, then slowly start to evoke dread? Why did this newsletter feel utterly thrilling to write but then start to feel like a little bit of a chore? What happens when you meet someone, think they might be the love of your life, then kind of get sick of them?
As always, if we examine such phenomena with any nuance, it depends. But here are four potential explanations for waning, fluctuating, dragging ambivalence about once-revered things.
#1 Something is inherently, genuinely off.
Sometimes it’s just a data collection issue. The thing is not really for you after all, and it’s just a matter of learning more about it over the passage of good old-fashioned linear time and realising with more information that it’s not what it seemed to be. This one made me think of this sweet, funny article I read when I was reading about the sexy exclusive Berlin nightclub Berghain for my previous post - this woman feels like she’s met the “the One” one night at Berghain, a curious, handsome, kind conversationalist with a great beard. But over a number of weeks, he slowly reveals himself to, in fact, be a weed-and-tv-enamoured homebody whom she happened to have met on a rare jaunt out of the house in his one good outfit. Turns out, beards grow out and get scruffy, and sometimes people and things just aren’t as they seem.
#2 Something was false about the beginning.
This is something I hear about (and have experienced) a lot but that seems very difficult to see and acknowledge. The thing - the project, the job, the relationship - begins with a burst of stardust, excitement and (ever-so-excessively-pressurised) conviction. We do not let ourselves notice some quiet strained tension, evidence of something being pushed, ignored, rushed past, overcompensated for. Sometimes, there is a verbose notion about how something is a marvellous idea, or a sure thing, masking a lie or a denial. There is perhaps a cult-leader-esque person encouraging (coaxing, seducing, selling) us to be involved. This sort of strain always runs out of juice because it is not self-sustaining. Nobody has read the small print. There is too much presence of an ‘if-only-I-could-be-this-type-of-person’ trying. We have lied to ourselves in the beginning about the truth, about who we really are, and we cannot sustain the lie forever.
We can be subjected to this ourselves, or fall victim to it in others. I hear about this dynamic in romantic relationships especially - slightly different to the scruffy Berghain man, the new love interest seems to slowly grow exhausted in their desperate quest to present as the person they think they should be, or wish they were, sometimes eventually vanishing all together quite abruptly. This kind of situation can be extremely hurtful for the other party, but understanding that this kind of ghosting might been a function of the unconscious, unresolved identity crisis of another person, rather than an inherent rejection of something in us, can be somewhat of a balm. Equally, if a project fails, we might do well to examine what falsehood existed in its beginning rather than seeing its ending simply as a personal failure of will, goodness or motivation.
#3 Some external force (culture) or internal force (unconscious defence, trauma, complex) running interference.
When we create something that generates light, darkness appears. I’m always most struck by this when I watch another biopic of an extraordinary musician - Elvis, Elton John or Whitney Houston, for instance. As their spectacular, Earth-shattering gifts emerge, some psychopathic opportunist always emerges and ends up with an (often disgustingly substantial) stake in their success.
I find when we’re generating light, we’re also particularly vulnerable to the forces of capitalism - a growing pressure from a sneaky, infecting intruder who enters to commodify and monetise and pillage our precious, fragile, new thing before it is ready - which is not to say it ever will be.
Similarly, when we’re creating something new, especially newly glorious we will undoubtedly be required at some point to answer to a chorus of objecting voices rising up within us with every argument for why things should stay the same. We are wired for the safety of homeostasis, and many pieces of us will need reassurance that things changing does not automatically create a life-threatening danger. In this case, we should be careful to mistake such voices for evidence that we’re actually on the wrong track. If anything, the voices are probably evidence that we’re really doing something big.
#4 Something to do with seasonality.
I am very harsh with myself sometimes about my tendency to hatch many schemes I don’t follow through on (which is weird actually when I think about how many incredibly long-term projects I am currently wholeheartedly engaged in i.e. psychoanalysis lol). Human design helped me significantly in coming to terms with this. I am a human design manifestor. Manifestors do not have consistent energy, but rather, long periods of troll-like-retreat followed by bursts of vitality and inspiration. When my schemes fizzle, it is usually as a function of having set something up in a burst of vitality, without making provision for my inevitable downswing in energy. One of my favourite human design teachers is Vaness Henry, also a manifestor, who only making offerings seasonally - a summer of readings, a short series of emails etc. Everything has an end date, not to induce some fear-based sense of urgency in her prospective clients, but because she knows her energy for certain things is finite. With this system, she is consistently and impressively generative year after year. She also often shares charming details about how her tastes, interests and aesthetic preferences change from season to season.
While human design gave me a specific language for this in my own experience, all of us have our own seasonality, even over the course of a single day. There are times for creativity, times for rest, times for discussion and times for quiet. If we can become intimate with our own seasons (and more conscious of the literal seasons in the world around us) we can be better equipped to determine whether something is truly not right for us, or just in a natural fluctuation, like all things. While these ideas would have seemed completely obvious to the average person in times passed, they can feel radical within a heavily patriarchal and commercialised culture that prizes consistency, perseverence and productivity as evidence of moral superiority and success.
So, what of my newsletter drag, you might wish to know? I suspect I am safe from #1, most susceptible to #2 and #4, and managing #3 fairly confidently (though receiving my first pledge several weeks ago - thank you kind reader - nearly plunged me off the deep end into a fantasy of endless riches as a monetised writer 😆). I promised myself when I began that I would write ten posts before taking stock of what I would like this to become - I’m almost there! It has so far been (and I’m sure will continue to be in some form) a joy to have been received so warmly in sharing this writing with you all. I suspect I might just need some experimentation in the right frequency of posting for it to stay alive and well.
In the meantime, I would actually really love to hear from you if you’ve been following along - either about your own project/work/love/therapy fluctuations, or what you would like to hear from me more (or less 😄) about. Comment, DM (Substack has DMs now!), email me (kate [at] katefinazzi.com) or write on the back of a polaroid and put it in the post. Who are you? Why are you reading? What else do you love reading? What are you writing? What would seem like a perfect individualised synchronicity if it appeared in your inbox from me next week? More magic-alchemy-witchy stuff? More about psychotherapy technique? Excessive personal self-disclosure? An advice column? I’d seriously love to hear from you.
In love, and the humble pursuit of a shared path to a greater truth,
Kate