Get Out of Your Way

How to break the pull of "self-gravity"

Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash

The most challenging part of the human experience is grappling with our own excuses. When we break our word or don’t follow through on the things we said we would do, we can tell our boss, our friends, or our parents anything we want. Most times it will go over smoothly if you’re genuine and you apply a little social grace. “Great,” you say, “I got myself off the hot seat.” Deep down, you know the problem is still there.

The reactions of those around you serve as a mere symptom. A social alarm telling you that you’re not fulfilling your promise. That your words are not aligning with your actions. After all, nobody promises that they’re going to be late to work, or skirt responsibilities in their relationships. When all the excuses have been said, and everybody goes home at the end of the day, it’s just you and your word. The person most affected by your behavior is you.

Every lie we tell ourselves adds mass to that part of our psyche. Over time, this warps our reality until we find ourselves trapped in an orbit of our own making. I call this experience Self-Gravity. Inspired by astrophysics, the term describes how an object’s own gravitational pull affects itself. The most extreme example is a black hole. When an object can no longer resist the strength of its own pull, it caves in on itself. This is called a gravitational collapse.

Gravity itself is a neutral force. It doesn’t have an agenda. It isn’t conspiring against you. It does what it has always done; it pulls. Your own brain doesn’t have an agenda either. It bends according to the curvature of its pathways. Just as space bends around mass, our brains bend around repeated thoughts, carving deep neural highways. A good example of this is a system in our brains called the Default Mode Network. It’s the software your mind defaults to when it’s at rest. Think of it like lane assist, it activates when your mind is idling so you don’t have to consciously make every micro adjustment on the road. Pretty neat, right?

Well, what happens if that lane assist isn’t calibrated? Instead of keeping you safely inside the lines, it might jerk the wheel toward oncoming traffic, or steer you into a ditch. Now it isn’t so neat. The Default Mode Network can just as easily be wired for negative outcomes as it can for positive ones. I have been on the receiving end of those negative outcomes for most of my life and I never knew it. With some old fashioned detective work and the help of a licensed therapist, at the age of 22 I discovered my lane assist was not properly calibrated

In the twilight of my college experience, months before graduation, most of my peers were day drinking and doing photo ops. I was peeling back the layers of my psyche. The same kind of manic research I would do at four AM in the campus computer lab when I was a freshman. Endlessly searching for an existential secret. Some kind of key to the universe. It was this obsessive quality that often caused me to come up short in life. Whether it was handing an assignment in on time, showing up for friends and family when they needed me, and surely other things I can’t remember.

After a few weeks holed up in my shoddy little college townhouse scouring through every Reddit forum, medical journal, and wellness article I could find, hesitantly, I reached a conclusion. I got on the phone with my therapist that week for our regular session, and revealed my findings. I told her, “I’m fairly confident I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.” Her response felt like something out of an M. Night Shyamalan movie.

“I know.”

I was befuddled by her answer, but I didn’t let it ruin the validation it gave me. To know that I wasn’t just choosing self-sabotage when I rolled out of bed everyday. It helped me make sense of my experience. Why it felt like I was living with a sticky gear shift in my head. All of my irrational hangups and unproductive fixations. I could have known about this condition far earlier, as I had been seeing her for nearly two years at that point. Yet, I’m still glad she let me figure it out for myself. In the end, It feels far more validating to know that I did my own research.

I learned an invaluable skill because of it. Metacognition; the ability to rationally observe one’s own thinking. If it wasn’t for these sessions, I likely would have thought nothing of my circular thought patterns and irrational obsessions. I would have figured I was just a high-strung individual with some detrimental habits. Now I aim to look at myself with the same cool detachment she was able to. The patterns were obvious to her, and when she walked me through them, I couldn’t believe how I missed it.

That substance right there, is gravity. It lives in between the lines. Like the matrix, it shapes your entire reality until you finally learn to see it. It’s invisible, imperceptible, and yet it shapes the very foundation of our will.

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