Reliving, Retelling
A Conversation with Karissa Lang
Another New Calligraphy: The concept of a normal day is increasingly implausible but were one to occur, what sources of frustration would you invariably encounter?
Karissa Lang: I feel as though most frustration comes from an inability to control something or someone, and from not having one’s expectations met—driving behind someone going below the speed limit, not nailing my to-do list, being dissatisfied with something I create, not saying what I truly want to say in every instance, engaging in a psychic power struggle disguised as something benign and innocuous, the weather.
There is so, so much going wrong today; it understandably overwhelms us, but then there are voices telling us it's okay. Be overwhelmed. Feel small. Hate the driver ahead of you and not these terrifying situations around the world. How do you manage the daily problems without losing sight of the things we should be concerned with? At what point do you recognize you've fallen into a pattern of negative responses, a pattern likely representative of some greater internal issue?
Day-to-day problems aren’t necessarily inconsequential, but we can somewhat get addicted to them because they anaesthetize us to actual threats to survival (such as climate change). Focusing on smaller challenges can be a way of distracting oneself from bigger themes, so it’s important to zoom out and widen one’s perspective from time to time. I have a friend who’s step-dad worked for NASA and she once told me about the psychological challenges astronauts face when returning to Earth—something I’d never considered. She said something to the effect that coming back to all these problems we’ve put so much weight into, here on Earth, all the problems we’ve unnecessarily CREATED for ourselves, after having experienced something so otherworldly, can be very difficult to contend with. Getting away from Earth and experiencing that we’re not the center of the Universe, and then coming back to a society that is greatly under the impression that we are—that’s frustrating. I think it’s important to stop giving daily problems so much energy and redirect that energy to what really matters. There’s just a lot of shit you can actually let go of, in reality. We like to create problems where they need not be, and ignore the work that actually needs to be done, because we’re afraid of how daunting it appears to be. I notice when I fall into negative responses I sort of get into a mental loop about things and start to feel cloudy/heavy and unclear. Being stuck in this cloud I’ve created, unable to simply step away in order to see differently, clearly.
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin both struggled after NASA, but in their own ways; they were very different men. Childhood events shape the way we perceive our world and ourselves within it. Some of us spend our whole lives trying to overcome the faults we developed in our earliest years, or the messaging we were provided with. You can be sitting on the bus or walking on the moon. Either way, youth is somehow present. We've created quite a world for ourselves, and many of the problems stem from our general inability to manage what are quite plainly personality disorders. Trauma compounds generationally. It takes a lot to step out of the cycle and attempt to resolve those issues, if you can even acknowledge them in the first place.
I agree—our perception determines how we respond to the world and this is greatly developed in childhood. And yes, acknowledgement of trauma is the key. However, it’s so difficult to even see or understand much of the time! Much of it is so complex and buried, and as you’ve stated, inherited generationally. It requires a certain type of detachment to gain that insight—not detachment from yourself, others, or even the facts of events, but detachment from the story of trauma that you keep reliving, retelling.
Going back to NASA for a moment: we have much to discover from studying the universe, but it's been disheartening watching those efforts quickly pivot to determining how best to profit from the unknown. We don't even fully understand Earth, not to mention the consequences our actions have had upon it. While the capitalists salivate over the moons of Saturn, what are we missing here? We tend to lead isolated lives, not just from each other but from nature as well. Most people expend little energy in considering the world around them; entire ecosystems elsewhere on the planet are an abstraction at best. What lessons are to be learned from shifting our perspective back to the truly real world?
This patriarchal competition consciousness, emboldened by a scarcity mindset, makes us feel like we have to conquer everything at the expense of others and our environment. We fail to realize that we’re all connected and that the harm done towards anything outside of ourselves is really inflicting harm upon oneself in some roundabout way. Instead, a spirit of cooperation could serve us well. Also, taking responsibility for how our choices and behaviors affect the collective. I think seeing our reflection in nature and in others will lead us back to where we need to go, to something much bigger than our individual selves—which could potentially eliminate the chronic alienation most of us are suffering from. I think we could learn that we actually live in an abundant universe and that there are unlimited possibilities at our disposal if we work with the universal flow as opposed to against it.
What do you personally do to keep yourself in check, and how did you develop your routines? It's a lifelong process, but where are you now?
I can be very militant and hard on myself when it comes to managing my progress. I’m talking schedules, diets, and trying out various practices to achieve a desired result. I’m very disciplined, focused and strategic, always wanting to understand myself, my “issues,” and pushing myself to transcend them in the most efficient way. I have very high expectations for myself and am relentless in trying to meet them. But I’ve recently come to find that this may not be as productive as I once thought. In fact, it just exhausts me and eventually leads me to mental and physical burnout. I’m realizing that a softer approach is much more successful, with less effort—however this doesn’t mean it’s necessarily easier, as it’s counterintuitive to the way we’ve been taught to approach ourselves. Instead of being so much in my head about staying balanced, I’ve started going into my heart. So my “routines” are more focused on surrender, as opposed to “doing” anything in particular. I surrender to my inner wisdom instead of always seeking out some external solution. It’s a struggle, but I’m trying to stop wrangling myself by force. Instead, I do so by finding my own natural rhythms and achieving balance with ease—something that is very difficult for me to trust at times. But I do so through pausing, resting, feeling, and accepting things as they are. When I feel off I create, I play, or I go out of my way to do something I enjoy and this usually leads me to an idea or experience that rectifies things. If I had to state a hard fast method, I’d say going outside in nature and just being tends to do me a world of good these days. There’s something about nature that makes you more receptive to homeostasis. It’s like it reawakens that part of yourself that just intuitively knows how to get you back on track and make you feel better.
It gets to a point where you realize the discipline you've attempted to apply to yourself is merely a different expression of the rigidity you were trying to overcome elsewhere. Acceptance of our faults does indeed feel counterintuitive, but it's just as challenging to make peace with the flaws of those around us. It's a paradox; we are most eager to change the people and situations we have little control over, while we often turn a blind eye to ourselves. If you're engaged in honest self-improvement, it can be awful watching others continue to make the same poor choices. If it becomes too much to embrace, the uncomfortable question arises: is a relationship worth the pain it brings? Working toward the type of peace you've described can be at least temporarily undone by interacting with someone you perhaps tolerated or even enjoyed in the past. The healthier you become, the clearer their problems are; depending on the situation, it may even reveal quite a bit about your past and what you were oblivious to in the moment. You may ultimately feel grateful for the work you've put in, but the satisfaction comes at a cost. This is especially true with family members, who are often the source of whatever hurt you're attempting to move beyond.
Oh boy, you’ve struck a nerve. I’m currently doing a poor job of navigating the fine line between acceptance and tolerance of other people’s questionable behavior. Accepting others is very easy for me, maybe too easy, but I have a history of feeling as though I’m also required to engage with, and ultimately enable the dysfunction of others, which helps no one. Losing your peace is never worth it. That’s my perspective now. Sacrificing your integrity for those who have no intention of improving will only hurt you in the end. But I guess it also comes down to the question of whether or not the pain is helping you to grow or if it’s keeping you stuck in an unhealthy cycle. They say what we don’t like about others or what we seek to control in others is really what we need to address in ourselves—the whole idea of mirroring each other. To a certain extent I think that’s a valid take, using other people as a gauge for your own evolution.
It can also work the other way, like "What's their secret?" We of course all have problems and ways to hide them, some better than others, but you can tell when someone is authentically okay. Do you feel like you had good examples to follow in your youth, or did it take a while to see some type of ideal? Speaking personally, the people who resonate the most are those who use their creativity to process what they've been given. The tortured artist trope is beyond tired and attempts to excuse a lot of nonsense, but some of the most transcendent work is born from such conditions. It gives you a beautiful model of what's possible, while illuminating how universal our problems really are. The recent death of David Berman was devastating. What he was able to do with his illness, through his illness, was incredibly meaningful for so many living in a similar place. Then it just became too much to carry. Such a forceful reminder of depression's permanency can definitely set you back when you're unprepared; there's no planning for such a distressing message.
I didn't have any good examples about anything, ever—ha! Anything I've learned about myself or about other people has been through trial and error—heavy emphasis on error. And being a quiet and reserved person, I've learned a lot through observing other people's mistakes. I'm still trying to figure it out, to be honest. But I feel as though my discernment has gotten stronger the more I've gone within to eliminate my own self-deception and illusions. That way, I have a clearer lens through which I can see the truth about others—whether or not they're being authentic or are hiding behind a mask. For me, there's no greater way to combat my issues than creativity. It gets you in touch with your power. It's like, maybe I can't completely get rid of my sadness or control my life's circumstances, but nothing can take away my ability to imagine something different and to at least attempt to manifest it. Using my pain creatively has been my number one life strategy since childhood. I was a very isolated child, kind of left to my own devices to fend for myself, and I spent all of my time being alone with my creative projects. When I didn't receive love or attention or nurturance, my creativity helped me to feel special. It helped me to gain a sense of self-worth and taught me to value myself even if other people didn't.
Everything you described sounds frighteningly familiar. Imagine a society in which children were taught the skill of silent observation, or at least not characterized as abnormal if it was how they chose to interact with the world. Creativity is deep within us all, but kids receive so many negative messages about what counts as art and who's talented or not. It's terrible to hear a nine-year-old say they don't know how to draw or that they can't write about their feelings. We are all born with these abilities and obviously some of us can do more with them than others, but it very quickly becomes an exclusive club; those without membership lose what self-expression can bring. Even if we grow up taking advantage of our creativity or feeling relatively secure on the periphery of public life, it can still be challenging in adulthood to trust ourselves in depending on those gifts. Neither are accepted, but what a world it could be if they were. You talked about benefiting from an observance of nature; few of us take the time to observe the people around us or even ourselves. It sounds unbearably corny, but if more people knew how empowering it was to make something--take an abstract concept in your mind and bring it to life--we would be in a much different place, collectively. The exact opposite is true: we tend to measure the quality of life by what we can take, and live in pain as a result. The solutions are so simple it's ridiculous, yet coming close to maintaining any of them is a daily struggle even at the personal level. You think it will get easier with time, but something new is always there to push you that much harder.
Creativity has become a product that has to be packaged a certain way, and useful. But it’s actually a gift, one we give to ourselves and to others, freely. It’s unlimited and doesn’t necessarily have to be a means to an end. It’s about the process moreso than the result. We are all creative beings and it’s unfortunate that many of us have blocked ours due to some stupid ideologies. But being the utopian person that I am, I have faith that we will return to the ideas and practices that truly empower us and make the world a less ridiculous place.
Karissa Lang: I feel as though most frustration comes from an inability to control something or someone, and from not having one’s expectations met—driving behind someone going below the speed limit, not nailing my to-do list, being dissatisfied with something I create, not saying what I truly want to say in every instance, engaging in a psychic power struggle disguised as something benign and innocuous, the weather.
There is so, so much going wrong today; it understandably overwhelms us, but then there are voices telling us it's okay. Be overwhelmed. Feel small. Hate the driver ahead of you and not these terrifying situations around the world. How do you manage the daily problems without losing sight of the things we should be concerned with? At what point do you recognize you've fallen into a pattern of negative responses, a pattern likely representative of some greater internal issue?
Day-to-day problems aren’t necessarily inconsequential, but we can somewhat get addicted to them because they anaesthetize us to actual threats to survival (such as climate change). Focusing on smaller challenges can be a way of distracting oneself from bigger themes, so it’s important to zoom out and widen one’s perspective from time to time. I have a friend who’s step-dad worked for NASA and she once told me about the psychological challenges astronauts face when returning to Earth—something I’d never considered. She said something to the effect that coming back to all these problems we’ve put so much weight into, here on Earth, all the problems we’ve unnecessarily CREATED for ourselves, after having experienced something so otherworldly, can be very difficult to contend with. Getting away from Earth and experiencing that we’re not the center of the Universe, and then coming back to a society that is greatly under the impression that we are—that’s frustrating. I think it’s important to stop giving daily problems so much energy and redirect that energy to what really matters. There’s just a lot of shit you can actually let go of, in reality. We like to create problems where they need not be, and ignore the work that actually needs to be done, because we’re afraid of how daunting it appears to be. I notice when I fall into negative responses I sort of get into a mental loop about things and start to feel cloudy/heavy and unclear. Being stuck in this cloud I’ve created, unable to simply step away in order to see differently, clearly.
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin both struggled after NASA, but in their own ways; they were very different men. Childhood events shape the way we perceive our world and ourselves within it. Some of us spend our whole lives trying to overcome the faults we developed in our earliest years, or the messaging we were provided with. You can be sitting on the bus or walking on the moon. Either way, youth is somehow present. We've created quite a world for ourselves, and many of the problems stem from our general inability to manage what are quite plainly personality disorders. Trauma compounds generationally. It takes a lot to step out of the cycle and attempt to resolve those issues, if you can even acknowledge them in the first place.
I agree—our perception determines how we respond to the world and this is greatly developed in childhood. And yes, acknowledgement of trauma is the key. However, it’s so difficult to even see or understand much of the time! Much of it is so complex and buried, and as you’ve stated, inherited generationally. It requires a certain type of detachment to gain that insight—not detachment from yourself, others, or even the facts of events, but detachment from the story of trauma that you keep reliving, retelling.
Going back to NASA for a moment: we have much to discover from studying the universe, but it's been disheartening watching those efforts quickly pivot to determining how best to profit from the unknown. We don't even fully understand Earth, not to mention the consequences our actions have had upon it. While the capitalists salivate over the moons of Saturn, what are we missing here? We tend to lead isolated lives, not just from each other but from nature as well. Most people expend little energy in considering the world around them; entire ecosystems elsewhere on the planet are an abstraction at best. What lessons are to be learned from shifting our perspective back to the truly real world?
This patriarchal competition consciousness, emboldened by a scarcity mindset, makes us feel like we have to conquer everything at the expense of others and our environment. We fail to realize that we’re all connected and that the harm done towards anything outside of ourselves is really inflicting harm upon oneself in some roundabout way. Instead, a spirit of cooperation could serve us well. Also, taking responsibility for how our choices and behaviors affect the collective. I think seeing our reflection in nature and in others will lead us back to where we need to go, to something much bigger than our individual selves—which could potentially eliminate the chronic alienation most of us are suffering from. I think we could learn that we actually live in an abundant universe and that there are unlimited possibilities at our disposal if we work with the universal flow as opposed to against it.
What do you personally do to keep yourself in check, and how did you develop your routines? It's a lifelong process, but where are you now?
I can be very militant and hard on myself when it comes to managing my progress. I’m talking schedules, diets, and trying out various practices to achieve a desired result. I’m very disciplined, focused and strategic, always wanting to understand myself, my “issues,” and pushing myself to transcend them in the most efficient way. I have very high expectations for myself and am relentless in trying to meet them. But I’ve recently come to find that this may not be as productive as I once thought. In fact, it just exhausts me and eventually leads me to mental and physical burnout. I’m realizing that a softer approach is much more successful, with less effort—however this doesn’t mean it’s necessarily easier, as it’s counterintuitive to the way we’ve been taught to approach ourselves. Instead of being so much in my head about staying balanced, I’ve started going into my heart. So my “routines” are more focused on surrender, as opposed to “doing” anything in particular. I surrender to my inner wisdom instead of always seeking out some external solution. It’s a struggle, but I’m trying to stop wrangling myself by force. Instead, I do so by finding my own natural rhythms and achieving balance with ease—something that is very difficult for me to trust at times. But I do so through pausing, resting, feeling, and accepting things as they are. When I feel off I create, I play, or I go out of my way to do something I enjoy and this usually leads me to an idea or experience that rectifies things. If I had to state a hard fast method, I’d say going outside in nature and just being tends to do me a world of good these days. There’s something about nature that makes you more receptive to homeostasis. It’s like it reawakens that part of yourself that just intuitively knows how to get you back on track and make you feel better.
It gets to a point where you realize the discipline you've attempted to apply to yourself is merely a different expression of the rigidity you were trying to overcome elsewhere. Acceptance of our faults does indeed feel counterintuitive, but it's just as challenging to make peace with the flaws of those around us. It's a paradox; we are most eager to change the people and situations we have little control over, while we often turn a blind eye to ourselves. If you're engaged in honest self-improvement, it can be awful watching others continue to make the same poor choices. If it becomes too much to embrace, the uncomfortable question arises: is a relationship worth the pain it brings? Working toward the type of peace you've described can be at least temporarily undone by interacting with someone you perhaps tolerated or even enjoyed in the past. The healthier you become, the clearer their problems are; depending on the situation, it may even reveal quite a bit about your past and what you were oblivious to in the moment. You may ultimately feel grateful for the work you've put in, but the satisfaction comes at a cost. This is especially true with family members, who are often the source of whatever hurt you're attempting to move beyond.
Oh boy, you’ve struck a nerve. I’m currently doing a poor job of navigating the fine line between acceptance and tolerance of other people’s questionable behavior. Accepting others is very easy for me, maybe too easy, but I have a history of feeling as though I’m also required to engage with, and ultimately enable the dysfunction of others, which helps no one. Losing your peace is never worth it. That’s my perspective now. Sacrificing your integrity for those who have no intention of improving will only hurt you in the end. But I guess it also comes down to the question of whether or not the pain is helping you to grow or if it’s keeping you stuck in an unhealthy cycle. They say what we don’t like about others or what we seek to control in others is really what we need to address in ourselves—the whole idea of mirroring each other. To a certain extent I think that’s a valid take, using other people as a gauge for your own evolution.
It can also work the other way, like "What's their secret?" We of course all have problems and ways to hide them, some better than others, but you can tell when someone is authentically okay. Do you feel like you had good examples to follow in your youth, or did it take a while to see some type of ideal? Speaking personally, the people who resonate the most are those who use their creativity to process what they've been given. The tortured artist trope is beyond tired and attempts to excuse a lot of nonsense, but some of the most transcendent work is born from such conditions. It gives you a beautiful model of what's possible, while illuminating how universal our problems really are. The recent death of David Berman was devastating. What he was able to do with his illness, through his illness, was incredibly meaningful for so many living in a similar place. Then it just became too much to carry. Such a forceful reminder of depression's permanency can definitely set you back when you're unprepared; there's no planning for such a distressing message.
I didn't have any good examples about anything, ever—ha! Anything I've learned about myself or about other people has been through trial and error—heavy emphasis on error. And being a quiet and reserved person, I've learned a lot through observing other people's mistakes. I'm still trying to figure it out, to be honest. But I feel as though my discernment has gotten stronger the more I've gone within to eliminate my own self-deception and illusions. That way, I have a clearer lens through which I can see the truth about others—whether or not they're being authentic or are hiding behind a mask. For me, there's no greater way to combat my issues than creativity. It gets you in touch with your power. It's like, maybe I can't completely get rid of my sadness or control my life's circumstances, but nothing can take away my ability to imagine something different and to at least attempt to manifest it. Using my pain creatively has been my number one life strategy since childhood. I was a very isolated child, kind of left to my own devices to fend for myself, and I spent all of my time being alone with my creative projects. When I didn't receive love or attention or nurturance, my creativity helped me to feel special. It helped me to gain a sense of self-worth and taught me to value myself even if other people didn't.
Everything you described sounds frighteningly familiar. Imagine a society in which children were taught the skill of silent observation, or at least not characterized as abnormal if it was how they chose to interact with the world. Creativity is deep within us all, but kids receive so many negative messages about what counts as art and who's talented or not. It's terrible to hear a nine-year-old say they don't know how to draw or that they can't write about their feelings. We are all born with these abilities and obviously some of us can do more with them than others, but it very quickly becomes an exclusive club; those without membership lose what self-expression can bring. Even if we grow up taking advantage of our creativity or feeling relatively secure on the periphery of public life, it can still be challenging in adulthood to trust ourselves in depending on those gifts. Neither are accepted, but what a world it could be if they were. You talked about benefiting from an observance of nature; few of us take the time to observe the people around us or even ourselves. It sounds unbearably corny, but if more people knew how empowering it was to make something--take an abstract concept in your mind and bring it to life--we would be in a much different place, collectively. The exact opposite is true: we tend to measure the quality of life by what we can take, and live in pain as a result. The solutions are so simple it's ridiculous, yet coming close to maintaining any of them is a daily struggle even at the personal level. You think it will get easier with time, but something new is always there to push you that much harder.
Creativity has become a product that has to be packaged a certain way, and useful. But it’s actually a gift, one we give to ourselves and to others, freely. It’s unlimited and doesn’t necessarily have to be a means to an end. It’s about the process moreso than the result. We are all creative beings and it’s unfortunate that many of us have blocked ours due to some stupid ideologies. But being the utopian person that I am, I have faith that we will return to the ideas and practices that truly empower us and make the world a less ridiculous place.
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