Dissonance, Depersonalization, Integration

It didn’t feel all that long ago that I was expressing disorientation over it already being April. And now I’m preparing to blink and see Christmas decorations. I have nothing new or interesting to say about time passing quickly. But damn, it’s sure felt accelerated this year for whatever reason. Maybe it’s the nature of being the parent of a 20 month old — I’m all the more attuned to the rate of change and all the more sentimental about wishing I could preserve the moments, hold them for a little longer, stop the train at the station. But life ticks on despite my best intentions.

Dissonance

A few weeks ago, I came across an essay on the topic of taste that I found compelling. I admired the writer’s insight, so I subscribed to their Substack: Wild Bare Thoughts by Stepfanie Tyler. Upon selectively reading a few of her subsequent essays — particularly one on conscious consumption — I developed a deepening appreciation of their perspective. I had no idea who Stepfanie Tyler was, but I conjured up an idea of a writer who values compassion, care, beauty, and curiosity, someone who is uniquely sensitive to the world and gifted with language. My mind started, subconsciously, orienting Stepfanie within a a web of connections to writers that I believe to cover similar grounds: Maria Popova, Alain de Botton, Cheryl Strayed, Anne Lamott. This all being an attempt to make sense of the person behind the words.

Sharing a few passages of their writing to give you a sense:

On taste

...taste requires subtraction. It means not participating in every viral moment. It means not resharing something just because it’s getting attention. It means opting out of the churn. That doesn’t mean being contrarian for the sake of it. It means noticing when the culture’s default setting no longer reflects what’s true for you—and walking away. This is intelligence. Not in the IQ sense, but in the "I know what matters" sense. In the "I know who I am without the algorithm telling me" sense.

Curation is care. It says: I thought about this. I chose it. I didn’t just repost it. I didn’t just regurgitate the trending take. I took the time to decide what was worth passing on.

On conscious consumption

The difference lies in recognizing the distinction between dopamine and depth. Dopamine-driven consumption leaves us wanting more of the same—it creates cycles of craving without satisfaction. Depth-oriented consumption changes us in some small way—it adds to our capacity for understanding, connection, or creation.

Training your attention becomes like training a palate. You begin to notice subtleties that were previously invisible: the difference between content that challenges you productively versus content that simply overwhelms; between humor that expands perspective versus humor that diminishes it; between complexity that illuminates versus complexity that obscures……Stop consuming reactive content and expecting calm.

On rest

Choosing to be fully present, to resist the constant demand for optimization and efficiency, becomes a quiet form of rebellion. In a culture that measures our worth by our productivity, insisting on our right to simply exist feels almost revolutionary.

I was enjoying all this, regularly opening their essays as they appeared in my inbox and developing a deeper connection to their writing.

But then, a moment of significant dissonance. I discovered that Stepfanie supported Trump in 2024. And to pour fuel on the fire, they have an active X/Twitter profile that is constantly “shit posting” rather cruel and reactionary takes. Upon this discovery, I thought I must have clicked on the wrong link, or maybe this was a hack, or maybe that X/Twitter account is actually just a bot that stole the writer’s name and profile picture. I sought every possible excuse to not have to stare directly into the blinding dissonance.

I almost couldn’t bear it. How could someone who writes about care and beauty, who writes about James Baldwin on the topic of human connection, who writes about the radical act of rest, support a political movement completely at odds with these values. How could someone who thoughtfully advises their readers to “stop consuming reactive content” be simultaneously spewing troll-ish takes on X/Twitter? It all feels utterly irreconcilable. And Stepfanie is clearly aware of this.

Stepfanie claims to have been a Democrat her whole life, but shifted to Trump in 2024 due to “calls to defend reality, progress, and the principles that have defined America for generations.” I’m not here to unpack the details of her political beliefs. But given the immense and blatant cruelty of the Trump regime, it must take some serious mental gymnastic for Stepfanie to quote Toni Morrison while wearing a MAGA hat.

So what to do with this dissonance? What to do when the idea of someone you’ve built in your mind becomes fractured, split in two? I frankly don’t know, beyond writing about it here. It all brings forth that often-asked question of whether we can separate the art from the artist. To what extent are we willing to compartmentalize others? Like that famous Walt Whitman quote, I believe we humans are all walking contradictions, and therefore I try to carry around a decent well of grace. But grace has its limits. Some contradictions are much easier to swallow than others.

It’s a relief when acceptance of contradictions are applied to the self, but can be uncomfortable when applied to others — as we (I) often desire for people to fit within some holistic narrative. So maybe this is partly on me, a naive craving for coherence that makes it challenging to sit in conflict.

Ironically, I’m sure Stepfanie would actually have something quite interesting to say about all this. But could I receive her words the same way anymore? Or has this irreconcilable dissonance resulted in a permanent fault-line, dooming us to forever be on shaky ground?

On a related note, today I received a notification that my favorite podcast Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso just posted a conversation with David Mamet — a celebrated American writer who’s had a complex / unfortunate (depending who you ask) rightward political shift. If I trust anyone to navigate this particular form of dissonance — exploring the art while respectfully critiquing the artist — it’s Sam Fragoso. His words from the opening:

I know there are some who have preemptively objected to sitting with Mamet in the first place. I don’t share that objection, just as I don’t share most of David’s politics. If you listen through the end of this episode, I think that will be abundantly clear. But I do think, for better or worse, this exchange is representative of exchanges I’ve had, heard, and seen since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, which are freighted, frightful, and delivered at a fevered pitch. How that fever breaks? I don’t know. But I do know that I tried to reach David, even when he didn’t always exactly want to be reached.

There are worst things to hope for than trying to reach one another.

Depersonalization

There’s a personal form of dissonance that I was all too familiar with throughout my twenties: Depersonalization. It’s a word that sounds plucked straight from the pages of the DSM. But to not overcomplicate it’s essentially a symptom of anxiety where you’re living your life but nothing feels real. It can be intensely frightening, particularly due to how nebulous, elusive, and confusing it is, making it difficult to understand what’s happening.

I spent far too many hours journaling about this experience in an attempt to pin it down and gain some semblance of control through understanding. I searched for language: numbness, unmoored, adrift, dissociated, untethered. I obsessively highlighted passages of books that appeared to capture analogous experiences — which I do even to this day, like when recently reading Virginia Wolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (don’t ask me why). For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t recommend Virginia Wolf for therapeutic advise.

But these attempts at sense-making, to a certain extent, were the first part of my healing process. And as Eckart Tole describes in the context of alienation, we often turn to writers to help us navigate those emotions we don’t fully understand.

Alienation means you don’t feel at ease in any situation, any place, or with any person, not even with yourself. You are always trying to get “home” but never feel at home. Some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, such as Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, recognized alienation as the universal dilemma of human existence, probably felt it deeply within themselves and so were able to express it brilliantly in their works. They don’t offer a solution. Their contribution is to show us a reflection of the human predicament so that we see it more clearly. To see one’s predicament clearly is a first step toward going beyond it.

Thankfully, I found my second step through good therapists. One of the most effective treatments, was addressing OCD through Exposure and Response Prevention therapy. This is difficult work, but one of the core insights you learn is that the uncomfortable feelings / thoughts are not the main issue. The problem arises when one develops an attachment to trying to get rid of those feelings / thoughts. This then creates a nasty loop: bad feeling > compulsive attempts to get rid of that feeling > (maybe temporary relief) > feeling comes back stronger due to the amount of attention being given to it > double down on compulsions…. off you go.

Many people have dissonant feelings / thoughts. A brain with OCD is just more likely to latch on to them, sharpen their teeth, and get locked in the compulsive dance. At the risk of trivializing, you can essentially boil it all down to: what we resists, persists.

So the path through is accepting the discomfort. Sitting in the dissonance. Not requiring certainty in order to live your life, but living life alongside uncertainty.

One of my earlier therapist was a Russian women who sort of took no bullshit, which I needed at the time. I’d often try to overcomplicate things (surprise!) or somehow claim that my experience was unique. I needed a little tough love: you’re not special, it’s OCD, welcome to the community. This therapist shared the Buddhist story of Mara with me, which I still often think about. The story goes that in Buddha’s attempts to meditate, the demon Mara would pester the shit out of him. Rather than trying to ignore or get rid of Mara, the Buddha instead chose to calmly acknowledge Mara’s presence, saying, “I see you, Mara” — and ultimately would invite Mara to sit for tea. Mara would stay for a while, but then eventually get bored and leave.

It’s a nice short-hand for practicing acceptance of those things which suck to accept: I see you Mara, come have a seat.

Integration

In a way, this form of acceptance can be considered a type of integration. It’s not necessarily that you need to reconcile everything or force connections, but it feels important that we at least try and become comfortable allowing disparate truths to co-exist. Sometimes those differences create a surprising harmony (though clearly not always - see everything above).

One interesting harmony is the necessary balance between left and right brain thinking. I half-read an essay from the blog Not Boring that explores how society has recently become far too left-brain dominant, and the unfortunate downsides of this hyper-rationalism. While I don’t at all agree with the political argument being made, I appreciated some of the insights about the importance of integrating left and right brain.

Our left-brain is narrow, analytic, grasping. Our right-brain is broad, contextual, alive. We need both, but in a healthy person (or a healthy society), the right-brain is the Master, and the left-brain his emissary. When the left-brain is in control, intuition dies. It’s not a lack of reasoning; it is in fact a hypertrophy of rationality, in which everything that is intuitively understood has to be painfully and laboriously reasoned out from first principles….. Whether we continue to let the left-brain play Master or return the right-brain to its rightful role will determine whether we live in a world built by and for machines, or one built by and for humans.

This is also emphasized in early childhood development, and well covered in the book Whole-Brained Child (I’m trying not to over-do it with the parenting books, but this one genuinely seems helpful)

We want to help our children become better integrated so they can use their whole brain in a coordinated way. For example, we want them to be horizontally integrated, so that their left-brain logic can work well with their right-brain emotion.

Healing from a difficult experience emerges when the left side works with the right to tell our life stories…. To tell a story that makes sense, the left brain must put things in order, using words and logic. The right brain contributes the bodily sensations, raw emotions, and personal memories, so we can see the whole picture and communicate our experience. This is the scientific explanation behind why journaling and talking about a difficult event can be so powerful in helping us heal.

There’s nothing that profound here, but yet it’s often hard to accept the diverse (sometimes conflicting) components of ourselves. It’s easier to over-index those parts which are more palatable within our current culture, but then we must ask: what are we not accepting?

Closing quotes

Two this time, each serving as poignant reminders of accepting what’s here, now.

It helps if you can realize that this part of life when you don’t know what’s coming is often the part that people look back on with the greatest affection. - Ann Patchett.

I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them. - Andy Bernard

A parting song

The antithesis of cruelness: Mister Rogers. While we try to limit Nina’s screen time, we’ve been turning to Mister Rogers for those moments when we need 20 minutes of rest. I might be enjoying these episodes more than Nina (my heartbreaks with forever gratitude to PBS).

On a random Tuesday evening, the episode featured You Are Just Fine As You Are. Sitting on the floor, staring up at the screen, something blew into both of my eyes.

May the world be filled with more like Mister Rogers.