//these pseudo-essays are written with minimal editing and are not meant to be polished outputs. they’re exercises in writing regularly and publishing with as few barriers as possible. tbh, your time is better spent reading something more thoughtful. for my formal writing, visit longwayhome.substack.com. inspired by @visakanv’s 1000wordvomits.

I like being at home. Time with my parents has been really good but more than that, I really like the space and the comfort of being here. The suburbs feel more like a meandering creek than dangerous rapids. I need to meander for a while. I need somewhere I can take a breath and find my footing again. I need an environment I can work to build some healthy habits and unlearn poor habits – being in a new environment jumpstarts this process but I still need to put in the work. I’m still spending too long on my phone, I’m still procrastinating and delaying and chasing cheap dopamine during the days, but I’m getting better. Slowly.

I think Shivani and I can really build an exciting lifestyle here. And by exciting, I don’t mean chaotic and full of novelty. I mean stable, predictable, routine. Something in which I can find some comfort and safety. My life has enough novelty with the travel and the work. I want some quiet. I need some time to work.

I want to find new topics that tickle me the way topics from my newsletter did. They intersected in this interesting way and felt evergreen and made me feel like there’s someone out there who could get a lot out of them. I don’t want to just keep writing journal entries. And I will have ideas. I’m just not capturing them. They’re conversations or fleeting thoughts lost to the bowels of my memory. I want to get better at capturing these ideas for processing and building later.

I feel like I’m getting closer to a breaking point where I will not be able to tolerate a life where I’m not publishing and putting myself out there online. I feel like a life where I’ve given up trying to create something and I keep sending these lame emails and taking notes in these lame meetings and keep track of who’s done or not done what. It’s just that I need to feel this fire and frustration when it matters. I need to sit and try to come up with something regularly, as a part of a routine, even when I’m not feeling inspired, because the writing comes first and the inspiration comes second. And once I’m in a routine, I can figure out how to take it to the next level and earn my first dollar online.

That’s the goal.

To hell with the rest of it.

Frustrated,
Vandan

//these pseudo-essays are written with minimal editing and are not meant to be polished outputs. they’re exercises in writing regularly and publishing with as few barriers as possible. tbh, your time is better spent reading something more thoughtful. for my formal writing, visit longwayhome.substack.com. inspired by @visakanv’s 1000wordvomits.

Part 1: What is Anger?

All our emotions share an evolutionary utility. They try to spotlight our attention on a given stimuli amidst the floodlight of perception. Understanding how various emotions contributed to our species’ survival helps us understand why we experience the emotions we do and how best to process them.

Anger is fascinating; it’s a fiery, explosive emotion that holds great constructive and destructive power. Anger can fuel and motivate us, but it can also drive us to harm ourselves and others.

Why do we feel anger? What is anger trying to signal to us about our reality?

We experience anger when we feel a boundary has been threatened. This includes both physical and emotional boundaries. This is helpful to recognize because framing anger in this way will help elucidate our boundaries for us, all of which are not obvious, or even known, to us.

Part 2: Understanding Our Own Boundaries

Consider this: you hear a burglar breaking into your home at night. You’re terrified at first, afraid for your and your family’s safety. The burglar trips over a child’s toy, spraining their ankle and knocking their head against the wall. This completely neutralizes the threat and fear fades, allowing another emotion to bubble to the surface.

Anger.

Who does this person think he is, breaking into _your_ home, where _your_ family sleeps, attempting to steal _your_ belongings, for which you have worked so hard? It’s your responsibility and your duty to keep your partner and children safe, and you feel infuriated that this thief forced themselves into your private safe space.

You’re blinded by your desire to harm them to ensure they never think about entering your space ever again.

Next, consider this: you come home after a long day at work. You tear your shoes off and throw your work bag beside them, collapsing on the couch. Your spouse enters the room and senses you feel defeated. They probe you to talk about it, but given you just got home, you request some time to vegetate and decompress before talking through the laundry list of mishaps and professional torments that characterized your day.

They feel like you’d feel better if you just talked it out with them so they push, inching closer on the couch and nodding. You’re exhausted, frustrated, and feeling incompetent. The last thing you want is to leap into an animated montage of all the hurtful things everybody said and did to you today, so you push back. They offer their ear again, this time more aggressively. They sprinkle in a bit of guilt-tripping, reminding you they’ve been waiting for you to get home for hours.

You snap.

You raise your voice, telling them to back off for the last time. You jump off the couch and storm to the bedroom, slamming the door behind you in a rage.

In both these examples, boundaries were violated. Vastly different boundaries, but boundaries all the same. One we can see, the other we can’t. One we can easily explain (and legally defend), and the other is fickle, transient, and conditional. We’ve all had our emotional boundaries violated at some point, driving us to behave aggressively in an effort to protect ourselves from harm and make us feel safe again.

We’ve also violated others’ emotional boundaries, driving them to do the same. We sometimes are taken aback by their strong responses, bewildered by their aggression. We just stumbled onto someone’s emotional boundary. It’s entirely possible they themselves were entirely unaware of it too.

Infringing a physical boundary is straightforward. There are walls, property lines, and tangible bodies to help us understand physical boundaries. People can lay claim to things in a way we all understand, resulting in a finite number of ways a physical boundary can be threatened.

Our emotional universes are infinitely more complex. Where we have laid claim to territory in our familial, social, and professional lives is much more abstract and challenging to parse. We are almost guaranteed to infringe on others’ emotional boundaries unknowingly, just as they are guaranteed to infringe upon ours.

Part 3: Setting New Boundaries

As children, many of us live our lives as per the whims of the adults around us. As we enter adulthood, we try to develop our own value system, our own operating system of sorts. This requires as much unlearning as it does learning. We all have unhelpful beliefs and perceptions of reality that impede our progress, regardless of the goals we set out for ourselves. Inherent in achieve these goals is doing things differently than when we were kids.

The most terrifying thing about growing up is having the courage to establish our own individuality amidst other adults who expect us to continue thinking, feeling, and behaving in accordance with how we were as children. This brings disappointment, confusion, and in many cases, relentless admonishments about what will happen if we don’t live the life these adults envision for us.

After all, most adults in our lives love us and want to protect us. It’s always well-intentioned.

Many of us fall victim to this pressure, interrupting our lives and denying our natural inclinations along the path of least resistance. We are unhappy and resentful, living our lives for our parents, their teachers, and their bosses.

Adults like this never learned how to set their own boundaries, the consequences of which are monumental and everlasting.

Establishing boundaries is fundamentally conflict-prone. A boundary needs to be established because some desired territory is not ours, it’s someone else’s and we want it back. Setting a boundary requires us to consciously expand our boundary to the point of contact with someone else’s, and then continue to push, advancing ours forward and forcing theirs back.

As we have already established, when a boundary is infringed upon, the result is anger. And the distance the boundary has been pushed is directly proportionate to the anger. It’s like a metabolite the process. Pushing a boundary backwards releases anger, like an exothermic reaction.

We see visceral reactions to our efforts to establish boundaries in our lives and we get frightened and back off. We think the conflict isn’t worth it or maybe we need to try another strategy, instead of recognizing that although there are possibly more or less inflammatory ways of establishing boundaries, anger will always be a byproduct.

We should mentally prepare to be met with anger during these difficult conversations and resist the temptation to mirror back that energy. Anger at anger leads to an eruption, not a cooling. We should keep in mind the cost of not establishing the boundary, which is living a life lacking individuality and devoid of personality. It’s impossible to feel at home in a body that solely works for other people, and never feeling at home is floundering in the abyss and deeply incompatible with happiness.

So identify where your boundaries are through what makes you angry, push back on other people’s boundaries through asserting yours, and prepare for the fight.

Angry,
Vandan

//these pseudo-essays are written with minimal editing and are not meant to be polished outputs. they’re exercises in writing regularly and publishing with as few barriers as possible. tbh, your time is better spent reading something more thoughtful. for my formal writing, visit longwayhome.substack.com. inspired by @visakanv’s 1000wordvomits.

My parents and I clashed a lot when I was in high school. Things always felt kind of tense – a universal teenage experience with parents. I did the usual: I stayed up late talking to friends, I made tons of weekend plans instead of staying home with my parents, I talked back. I was also dating a girl, the unforgivable sin. Of course, dating wasn’t acceptable in my household. Forget permissible, dating wasn’t even a concept.

The largest fights I had with my parents, probably even to today, was regarding this girlfriend. It made our home fraught with tension. My parents would try to stress how inappropriate something like this was, especially at my age, and I’d deny something like that was even going on at all, all the while staying up late talking on the phone, and staying late at school to hang out.

Having a high school girlfriend helped me understand at-home chaos and stress in a way I never understood before. My parents were afraid of losing their child to something they couldn’t understand and control, and I was afraid getting caught doing something I knew I shouldn’t be doing (by their standards). This dissonance was crippling.

This, of course, is an extremely common experience for anyone coming from a traditional household. In my high school of mostly South Asian teenagers, “secret” relationships were commonplace. Everyone was disappointing their parents, one way or another.

Causing this household tension at that age, and witnessing first-hand how my actions affected my parents, disincentivized me from acting out in the future. When I went off to university, I was relatively tame. It felt like the rebellion was flushed out of my system. I just wasn’t excited by the notion of doing anything that felt wrong or unacceptable by the people who loved me. It wasn’t fun.

The same can be said for my peers who had their own Grand Rebellion earlier in life.

A Grand Rebellion is characterized an act, or a series of actions, in which the rebeller is fully aware of their delinquency. It’s a decision they are consciously making that has and will continue to have very material consequences for their life. Grand Rebellions are often kept secret from the rebeller’s close friends or loved ones out of self-preservation or a sense of shame, and are typically executed in one of the following three domains: relationships, careers, or hedonism to the point of self-destruction.

I think we all need a Grand Rebellion. We feel the rush, we feel the rewards, and after all is said and done, we mostly realize that the forbidden fruit is not so sweet. In fact, we realize there may have been a good reason to avoid it after all.

We all have friends who were insatiable partiers when they were younger, or dated a guy/girl of whom their parents would vehemently disapprove (i.e., outside their culture), or disavowed their parents’ wishes and went to theatre school instead of becoming an engineer. We all have friends with crazy stories that make you cock your head and say “You did what?”.

In university and beyond, we come across people who continue to act out. They feel constrained by rules and feel a childish thrill when engaging in risky behaviour. Often times, these folks never had a Grand Rebellion in which they came face-to-face with the very real-life consequences of rebelling. For them, it’s always felt like a game.

Although these adult offenders are rebelling, they never had their one life-altering hurrah. They’re not afraid of everything being snatched from them because of an error they’ve made. They lack a sense of ownership over the direction of their life. Life, for them, is still a series of tiny rebellions, hoping they don’t found out.

I’m still working through how and why, but it seems like having a Grand Rebellion is crucial for healthy development into adulthood. It provides a strong sense of maturity and responsibility. Those that have Rebelled deeply understand their actions have real-world consequences and they aren’t derailed by cheap thrills. They’re thrilled out. They’ve had their fun.

Now, they’re looking to build the life they’ve always wanted, one calculated decision at a time.

Rebelling,
Vandan

//these pseudo-essays are written with minimal editing and are not meant to be polished outputs. they’re exercises in writing regularly and publishing with as few barriers as possible. tbh, your time is better spent reading something more thoughtful. for my formal writing, visit longwayhome.substack.com. inspired by @visakanv’s 1000wordvomits.

Many healthy relationships are comprised of two individuals who lean in opposing directions as a general way of being.

To illustrate: one person may be more of a spender while the other a saver, one may be more of a talker while the other is a listener, one may be more anxious while the other is spontaneous. The Spender doesn’t always want to spend, but the Spender may be able to more easily rationalize spending in a way with which the Saver might struggle. The Talker can also listen, but talking feels more natural. The Anxious one can be spontaneous, but it takes more self-talk (read: self-soothing) to counteract their natural inclinations and enjoy the experience.

When we move through our lives as individuals, our internal dialogues often embody both sides of these tensions (and there are an infinite example of such dichotomies). We recognize behaving in any extreme way all the time won’t lead to the best results, so we go back and forth in our minds, mulling over decisions and ultimately making one we feel is best for the situation.

We find stability and security in partners who tend to lean in opposite directions from us. On a sub-conscious level, we realize discussing everything with someone who thinks differently may be more taxing, but it leads to be better decisions for all.

Interestingly, being in these relationships can push us further toward our natural end of the spectrum. Finding a partner with whom to discuss can actually prompt us to dig our heels in when arguing our side, radicalizing us. The more sound the opposing logic, the more passionately we argue our side, desperate for concession.

Yes, our partner is right, but so are we.

Alone, our conscience would voice the exact discussion points brought forth by our partners, but being in a relationship allows us to externalize this back and forth. We outsource our reasoning and allow our internal conflict play out through discussion in front of us. If the other person didn’t exist, we would find ourselves arguing the exact points they’re voicing, but now, there’s no need to hold ourselves back.

This isn’t a bad thing. It allows us to lean more into our tendencies overtime, developing a reputation of being the Spender, the Talker, and the Spontaneous one. Being in such a relationship allows us to actualize the the highest version of our tendencies without needing to impede the process with “weighing both sides” since we trust our partners to play that counterbalancing role. Observing ourselves play a consistent role in discussions develops within us a stronger self-concept. We build confidence in knowing what we like and dislike, and we can more reliably predict how we’d behave in various situations.

I don’t know if all that’s true, but sounds about right?

Arguing,
Vandan