This is an excellent comment that I received:
This story offers an insight into a problem that many people have and that seems intractable to them. There are things they need to do but they simply have no energy to do them. They berate themselves for being lazy procrastinators but the energy is simply physically not there. Plus, nothing eats energy like feelings of guilt, so feeling bad about not doing what you need to do leads to you feeling even more drained. It’s a vicious circle.
The quoted story is important because it taps into the place from which energy comes. It’s like with money. You can make savings, you can reduce your budget. But there is another solution which is to raise your income. The good news is that with energy it’s a lot easier to increase the supply than with income. Income is something other people must give you. Energy is already inside yourself. What you need is to liberate it, and this story is a perfect primer on how to do that. I’m going to refer to its author as “he” in hopes that somebody who has the intelligence to learn Latin won’t mind if I happen to “misgender” him.
The author of the story is the kind of person who learns Latin. A smart, effective person with a highly organized brain. He was always that person. He was a person who learns Latin BEFORE he did his first lesson. But he wasn’t letting himself live the life of his authentic self. Instead, he was trying to force himself into the persona that is the opposite of who he actually is. And his whole body and mind were resisting. That’s where the energy went. There was a split at the core of his self between who he was and how he was trying to force himself to live. The energy went into suturing that split. Daily, again and again. This must have felt exhausting.
The moment he redirected the libidinal power (meaning, the power of desire) away from splitting himself in two and then trying to hold the parts of the split self together, the energy became liberated.
Do you know why a neoliberal subject is always exhausted? Always guzzling energy drinks? Gulping down huge amounts of coffee just to wake up and still never feels truly energetic? This is why. A neoliberal self lives with a profound rift at the core of his being. He’s always the manager and the employee. The prison guard and the prisoner. The punisher and the punished. It’s a daily battle that eats you alive.
But when you step out of this game and let yourself be who you already are, all that energy is now free to do all sorts of things. If you no longer have to battle yourself, you have everything you need to battle the circumstances of your life that you might want to overcome.
If you are an academic who wants to publish a lot, you need to become that person BEFORE you publish a single word. And then you’ll start shooting out publications like a machine gun. I should know because that’s how I did it. You don’t arrive at being who you are as a reward for “good” behavior. You are already that person. By placing the being-who-you-are at a remove from yourself and making it conditional on fulfilling a list of obligations, you are denying your real self. You split it up and then wonder why it hurts. You can’t run a marathon with your feet tied. Stop tying your feet and then hating yourself for falling down at the very beginning of the run.
We all live in the same neoliberal reality that sets us up to feel drained and unhappy with ourselves. And it’s very hard to ditch this mentality because it’s everywhere. But once you do, like the author of the story did, you suddenly discover vast, untapped reserves of energy inside yourself that are finally going to work for you and not against you.
Thank you, anonymous reader, for this important, enlightening story. You have helped many people by sharing it.
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