#52: your worst-case scenario may end up being the best thing that ever happened to you
training through hard times instead of training for them
Above is an audio recording of me reading this post for those who prefer listening. Thank you for being here!
I met Zoe in the coziest hotel lobby. Fireplace ablaze. Laptops scattered. People drinking their morning cups. We’d been introduced over email by Chris, who we’d both met at separate dinners in the weeks leading up. Something about his interactions with the two of us made him think, “These two women should know each other.”
We were both the New York ~10 mins late. Zoe texted me that she was wearing a blue sweater, sitting to the right of the front door when you walked in. Great minds. I was wearing bright green so I could send the same text.
Zoe had a carry-on suitcase with her so I thought she might be headed to the airport or train after. Nope. Within that suitcase was her typewriter. She was headed to the Met after to write custom poetry outside for strangers.
This is Zoe’s story. She’d been living in Tacoma with a good journalism job 3 years ago. Covid hit and she got laid off. As a relatively risk-averse person, she never could have imagined moving to NYC without a job. But she had the cushion of deep friendships here and the courage that follows your worst-case scenario becoming a lived reality. So she jumped. She moved here without a definitive plan and somewhere along the way, she started writing custom poetry on her typewriter in public places.
Strangers give her a prompt or a theme and she writes for them, something tailored, timely, and almost eerily a propos. It was in her early days as a street poet when Zoe met LA Marks, founder of ArsPoetica, who welcomed her into their agency and made it possible for Zoe to pursue something wilder than her craziest creative dreams in her twenties.
Not only did this propel her onto a path to creative fulfillment, but it also acquainted her with a community of creative people who would lay the foundation for a profound feeling of belonging.
I learned so much from Zoe in one cup of coffee (which turned into a 2-hour discussion and hopefully lots more creative intertwining to come).
First, she reminded me that your worst nightmare may actually be the best thing that ever happened to you. Her just-fine journalism job could have been the golden handcuffs that held her back from finding and living out an even truer creative dream.
Second, there are superconnector people in our lives who believe in us before we are able to see it ourselves. Those people are magic in human form. LA is an example for Zoe. Chris is an example in introducing us. Ed, who I will get to in a second, was another for me.
All it takes is one person. One conversation. One moment in which you are in the right place at the right time and the right person or idea walks into your life.
It’s easy to stifle ourselves from this type of energy when we’re going through the motions. Which is okay too. We don’t always need to be in a super high-flying, creatively inspired, connected place.
I needed to be reminded this past week of how we can not only survive our worst-lived realities, but they may actually be the greatest gifts we could ever receive.
Not always immediately. It takes time for the dust to settle and for people to heal. You can’t speed up your own or anyone else’s timeline. But you can rest assured that on the other side of the worst, there is an unthinkable amount of safety, resilience, peace, creativity, and fulfillment to be found.
We spend so much of our time living in subtle (or sometimes loud) fear of what’s to come. And we often try to control for uncertainty by avoiding painful stimuli or giving ourselves small tests to be sure that we’ll be ready to endure the worst of the worst if it is to materialize. Where we go wrong here, though, is that we end up overstrengthening our will and self-restraint at the expense of our creative freedom.
We think that if we hold close our self-control, then we will have the ability to respond to any circumstances that arise. But there’s actually a real physical downside to this type of toughness. I wrote about this previously on #46: the girls are training like soldiers.
Very fit people store tension in different areas of their body. As a result, when they do compact exercises, stress runs unevenly through their body and compounds over time, often leading to pain and injury. The same is true of the mental rigidity.
The people who actually cope best with unforeseen circumstances are those who have the flexibility and presence of mind to be able to sit in discomfort without clenching up. And that comes not just from pain tolerance but from the pleasure response on the other side, too.
If we just microdose on pain for the sake of teaching ourselves that we can tolerate it, we are left feeling empty and often addicted to the self-flagellating loop of self-restraint, reward, self-restraint, ad nauseam.
This made me wonder if we should train through hard times instead of training for them.
I had coffee with the aforementioned friend and mentor, Ed, the other day and his story gave me clarity in this line of questioning.
Like Zoe, Ed reminded me that the worst is not within our control. It comes (or doesn’t) on its own accord. And we can’t always train for it. But we can train through it.
That’s what Ed did.
In the early days of starting his company, Ed’s tech lead pulled out and one of their main sources of revenue simultaneously dissipated. He had about 3 months to get it together before having to lay off some of his closest friends and most trusted employees. I can’t even imagine that amount of stress.
His saving grace, he said, was waking up every day and going to Crossfit. Before his mind had the chance to entangle him in a web of anxiety, he’d have a dumbbell hoisted over his head. Intentionally putting stress on the body physically helped keep him at bay psychologically. The difference here is that he wasn’t doing this as a mechanism to prep for the potential arrival of future stress. He was doing it as a means of placing one foot in front of the other during one of the most challenging periods of his life.
He looks back now with full clarity that his company’s success is not in spite of that moment but because of it. It made them fearless. When the worst scenario happens and you survive it, you stop living in a daze. There’s a sobering that transpires. A lifting of the veil that makes you simultaneously more grateful for the position that you’re in and less afraid of what’s to come. If you made it through the worst, one dumbbell thrust overhead at a time, you are apt to deal with any of the other challenges that you may face.
Sure, Ed was already the type of person who would reach for Crossfit as a coping mechanism instead of other less healthy forms of stress management. And that is a result of him having a healthy relationship with doing hard things on a consistent basis. However, the nuance that I want to add here is that there’s a difference between doing hard things for the sake of proving that you can versus doing hard things on a path to a challenge that has other pleasurable rewards.
Where we go wrong is when we forget that we’re doing hard things not just so that we can make it through the worst but actually so that we create more surface area for pleasure, for the best.
At the risk of sounding like a gluttonic hedonist, my observation is that we tend to swing from holding down the dopamine lever for too long to lead footing on pain-induction without really reminding ourselves what it is that we are actually striving for.
We fear the unknown and try to train for it. But Zoe and Ed’s stories reminded me that sometimes our greatest fears are realized and they lead to better outcomes than we could have ever fathomed.
On the other side of living through your worst lies the freedom, creativity, and chance encounters that can fundamentally change your existence.
As we enter the late fall/early winter and start preparing for the new year, there is a tendency to want to hunker down and kick your ass into gear. I have definitely been feeling that lately and it’s easy to let that slip into the territory of overcorrection. We confuse willpower with “readiness.” We think that the tighter, leaner, and stronger we are both physically and psychologically, the better adapted we will be to stress. But Ed and Zoe’s stories add perspective to this.
Neither of them trained intentionally for the arrival of their worst-case scenarios. They were actually only able to reap the rewards by being present and flexible enough to put one foot in front of the other. Training through hard times is so much more rewarding than training for them.
They lived through the discomfort of being laid off and needing to keep their business afloat but not as a test of will. It came from a place of true meaning, desire, and purpose. And on the other side of their pain was an immense amount of creativity and fulfillment.
It’s not willpower. It’s not restraint.
It’s faith in our creative direction that keeps us going.
It’s knowing that our fears and our creativity live side by side. So instead of creating painful circumstances in life and stifling yourself off from joy in order to make sure “you’ve still got it,” this week was a reminder to do bigger challenges. Take more risks. Position yourself for failure not as a test of will but because you want to try something so badly and the only thing holding you back are your big baby fears.
To borrow from Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, you have to want something so badly that you will eat your own shit sandwich and the other half of theirs too in order to get there.
There is a real relationship between pleasure, pain, fear, creativity, and fulfillment. It is true that doing challenging things can feel really damn good. But the types of challenges that you are taking on matter. Training for some future ambiguous circumstances will do little more than create uneven stress on either side of your body. But training through a challenge that is a full-body-fuck-yes for you is the path that actually leads to all of the things you are looking for.
Resiliency, fulfillment, and a whole lot of joy.
I will leave you with one of my favorite questions to ask people:
What is something in life that you want to experience but you are also afraid of?
Your answer to that question probably has some information about the types of challenges that you should take on in the coming months and years to introduce intentional discomfort into your life, for the right reasons.
That’s all for today! Thank you for getting Caught Up in Char’s Web this week and I will catch you here next week.
With love,
Charlotte
Art Curation by Xandra Beverlin
Thank you to my brilliant curator and friend, Xandra Beverlin, for tying this whole newsletter together with her recommendations of George Condo and Pipilotti Rist this week! She blows my mind with the artists and images she pulls to match the theme of each newsletter. Here are her notes this week:
Ok honestly maybe I’m biased but I’m inclined to say Raqib Shaw for this - he’s this absolute visionary painter who works exclusively with enamel paint and acrylic liner to create these fantastical worlds that essentially act as portals to worlds within worlds
Fantasy was one of the first things that came to mind with your prompt of:
"What is something in life that you want to experience but you are also afraid of?”
My brain goes directly to my wildest strangest ambitions, like living on a farm somewhere in Europe, or acting in films when I was a lot younger
Remodeling old castles in France
I feel like his depictions of all these worlds wrapped up in themselves and the profound beauty is to me like how we have all these dreams/ambitions inside of ourselves regardless of what we end up doing with our actual lives — and I feel like those stories you have above are perfect examples of that, of how people got in touch with those alternate realities
Less motivational speaker-y vibes from me today, more fantasy 🔮
Char’s Web Song of the Week
in honor of seeing her live last week— top 3 fav shows ever.
All past issues of Char’s Web are available for reading here. A few samples below…
#1: A first of many.
#43: the slobs I peeled off the street
#49: we have to be orderly on the instant
#50: the soundtrack of “Up”
So resonate with this Char ...
and so happy you will be continuing, as getting caught up weekly in your web is truly a highlight xx