Everything Is F*cked

NEWTON’S THIRD LAW OF EMOTION
Your Identity Will Stay Your Identity Until a New Experience Acts
Against It
Here’s  a  common  sob  story.  Boy  cheats  on  girl.  Girl  is  heartbroken.  Girl
despairs. Boy leaves girl, and girl’s pain lingers for years afterward. Girl feels
like  shit  about  herself.  And  in  order  for  her  Feeling  Brain  to  maintain  hope,
her Thinking Brain must pick one of two explanations. She can believe either
that (a) all boys are shit or (b) she is shit.
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Well, shit. Neither of those is a good option.
But  she  decides  to  go  with  option  (a),  “all  boys  are  shit,”  because,  after
all, she still has to live with herself. This choice isn’t made consciously, mind
you. It just kind of happens.
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Jump  ahead  a  few  years.  Girl  meets  another  boy.  This  boy  isn’t  shit.  In
fact,  this  boy  is  the  opposite  of  shit.  He’s  pretty  rad.  And  sweet.  And  cares.
Like, really, truly cares.
But  girl  is  in  a  conundrum.  How  can  this  boy  be  real?  How  can  he  be
true? After all, she knows that all boys are shit. It’s true. It must be true; she
has the emotional scars to prove it.
Sadly,  the  realization  that  this  boy  is  not  shit  is  too  painful  for  girl’s
Feeling Brain to handle, so she convinces herself that he is, indeed, shit. She
nitpicks  his  tiniest  flaws.  She  notices  every  errant  word,  every  misplaced
gesture,  every  awkward  touch.  She  zeroes  in  on  his  most  insignificant
mistakes  until  they  stand  bright  in  her  mind  like  a  flashing  strobe  light
screaming, “Run away! Save yourself!”
So,  she  does.  She  runs.  And  she  runs  in  the  most  horrible  of  ways.  She
leaves him for another boy. After all, all boys are shit. So, what’s trading one
piece of shit for another? It means nothing.
Boy is heartbroken. Boy despairs. The pain lingers for years and morphs
into shame. And this shame puts the boy in a tough position. Because now his
Thinking  Brain  must  make  a  choice:  either  (a)  all  girls  are  shit  or  (b)  he  is
shit.
Our values aren’t just collections of feelings. Our values are stories.
When our Feeling Brain feels something, our Thinking Brain sets to work

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constructing  a  narrative  to  explain  that  something.  Losing  your  job  doesn’t
just suck; you’ve constructed an entire narrative around it: Your asshole boss
wronged you after years of loyalty! You gave yourself to that company! And
what did you get in return?
Our  narratives  are  sticky,  clinging  to  our  minds  and  hanging  onto  our
identities  like  tight,  wet  clothes.  We  carry  them  around  with  us  and  define
ourselves by them. We trade narratives with others, looking for people whose
narratives  match  our  own.  We  call  these  people  friends,  allies,  good  people.
And those who carry narratives that contradict our own? We call them evil.
Our narratives about ourselves and the world are fundamentally about (a)
something  or  someone’s  value  and  (b)  whether  that  something/someone
deserves that value. All narratives are constructed in this way:
Bad thing happens to person/thing, and he/she/it doesn’t deserve it.
Good thing happens to person/thing, and he/she/it doesn’t deserve it.
Good thing happens to person/thing, and he/she/it deserves it.
Bad thing happens to person/thing, and he/she/it deserves it.
Every  book,  myth,  fable,  history—all  human  meaning  that’s
communicated  and  remembered  is  merely  the  daisy-chaining  of  these  little
value-laden narratives, one after the other, from now until eternity.
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These  narratives  we  invent  for  ourselves  around  what’s  important  and
what’s not, what is deserving and what is not—these stories stick with us and
define us, they determine how we fit ourselves into the world and with each
other.  They  determine  how  we  feel  about  ourselves—whether  we  deserve  a
good life or not, whether we deserve to be loved or not, whether we deserve
success  or  not—and  they  define  what  we  know  and  understand  about
ourselves.
This network of value-based narratives is our identity. When you think to
yourself,  I’m  a  pretty  bad-ass  boat  captain,  har-de-har,  that  is  a  narrative
you’ve constructed to define yourself and to know yourself. It’s a component
of your walking, talking self that you introduce to others and plaster all over
your  Facebook  page.  You  captain  boats,  and  you  do  it  damn  well,  and
therefore you deserve good things.
But here’s the funny thing: when you adopt these little narratives as your
identity, you protect them and react emotionally to them as though they were
an  inherent  part  of  you.  The  same  way  that  getting  punched  will  cause  a
violent  emotional  reaction,  someone  coming  up  and  saying  you’re  a  shitty
boat captain will produce a similarly negative emotional reaction, because we
react to protect the metaphysical body just as we protect the physical.

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Our  identities  snowball  through  our  lives,  accumulating  more  and  more
values  and  meaning  as  they  tumble  along.  You  are  close  with  your  mom
growing up, and that relationship brings you hope, so you construct a story in
your  mind  that  comes  to  partly  define  you,  just  as  your  thick  hair  or  your
brown  eyes  or  your  creepy  toenails  define  you.  Your  mom  is  a  huge  part  of
your  life.  Your  mom  is  an  amazing  woman.  You  owe  everything  to  your
mom . . . and other shit people say at the Academy Awards. You then protect
that piece of your identity as if it were a part of you. Someone comes along
and  talks  shit  about  your  mom,  and  you  absolutely  lose  your  mind  and  start
breaking things.
Then that experience creates a new narrative and new value in your mind.
You,  you  decide,  have  anger  issues  .  .  .  especially  around  your  mother.  And
now that becomes an inherent part of your identity.
And on and on it goes.
The longer we’ve held a value, the deeper inside the snowball it is and the
more  fundamental  it  is  to  how  we  see  ourselves  and  how  we  see  the  world.
Like  interest  on  a  bank  loan,  our  values  compound  over  time,  growing
stronger and coloring future experiences. It’s not just the bullying from when
you were in grade school that fucks you up. It’s the bullying plus all the self-
loathing and narcissism you brought to decades worth of future relationships,
causing them all to fail, that adds up over time.
Psychologists don’t know much for certain,
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but one thing they definitely
do  know  is  that  childhood  trauma  fucks  us  up.
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 This  “snowball  effect”  of
early values is why our childhood experiences, both good and bad, have long-
lasting  effects  on  our  identities  and  generate  the  fundamental  values  that  go
on  to  define  much  of  our  lives.  Your  early  experiences  become  your  core
values, and if your core values are fucked up, they create a domino effect of
suckage that extends through the years, infecting experiences large and small
with their toxicity.
When  we’re  young,  we  have  tiny  and  fragile  identities.  We’ve
experienced  little.  We’re  completely  dependent  on  our  caretakers  for
everything,  and  inevitably,  they’re  going  to  mess  it  up.  Neglect  or  harm  can
cause  extreme  emotional  reactions,  resulting  in  large  moral  gaps  that  are
never  equalized.  Dad  walks  out,  and  your  three-year-old  Feeling  Brain
decides that you were never lovable in the first place. Mom abandons you for
some  rich  new  husband,  and  you  decide  that  intimacy  doesn’t  exist,  that  no
one can ever be trusted.
No wonder Newton was such a cranky loner.
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And  the  worst  thing  is,  the  longer  we’ve  held  onto  these  narratives,  the
less aware we are that we have them. They become the background noise of
our thoughts, the interior decoration of our minds. Despite being arbitrary and
completely made up, they seem not only natural but inevitable.
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The  values  we  pick  up  throughout  our  lives  crystallize  and  form  a
sediment on top of our personality.
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The only way to change our values is to
have experiences contrary to our values. And any attempt to break free from
those values through new or contrary experiences will inevitably be met with
pain and discomfort.
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This is  why there is  no such thing  as change without
pain,  no  growth  without  discomfort.  It’s  why  it  is  impossible  to  become
someone new without first grieving the loss of who you used to be.
Because  when  we  lose  our  values,  we  grieve  the  death  of  those  defining
narratives  as  though  we’ve  lost  a  part  of  ourselves—because  we  have  lost  a