Do you have the Meta-Pain?

On the compounding effects of long-term stuckness—and what's on the other side

It’s miserable to feel like you’re fighting yourself to eke out minimal progress in your work day after day.

But this first level of pain isn’t the only type involved in long-term struggles to use our talents.

There is also a second level: the cumulative and compounding pain created by the way we view the duration of the struggle itself.

I call this the meta-pain. To explain what I mean by this, I’m going to use my example, because I’ve recently escaped a serious case of meta-pain when it comes to this novel I’m writing

I’m not sure exactly when I started to think about this project, but it was definitely before COVID. And in the intervening years, I’d made almost no real progress until recently. Over and over, I’d pick the project up and try to make fresh start with a different approach or schedule or plan. And every time, the attempt would peter out in days if not hours, and I’d abandon it again.

Meanwhile, I was building up notebooks and Word docs and Scrivener files filled with bits and pieces from these attempts, which went back for almost a decade.

It’s true that I was busy. I was being a prof and a coach and dealing with personal stuff as we all do. But I also knew that I wasted time every day I could have used on that book.

Eventually, the sheer number of years that had passed and attempts at progress I had made started to feel painful in their own right. When I looked at the amount of files and notes I had, I felt defeated. Frankly, I felt humiliated. I didn’t think, Look how I’ve kept chipping away at it. I thought Look how many times you thought you were going to do it, and then you just fucking didn’t.

To get anywhere near the project, I had to crawl through this excruciating pile of evidence that I had been trying and failing over years, which just got bigger as time went on. That pile indicated that for me trying was failing, because it seemed like proof that if I was going to succeed it would have happened by now.

That feeling of being humiliated and defeated by the accumulated evidence of every previous failure to make progress? That’s the meta-pain.

It’s the pain of every judgment we have about how long it has taken, why that is our fault, and how we are already too late, too behind, too far from the goal to succeed. It’s the pain in registering the countless iterations and extended duration of our struggle, which we take as proof that we cannot win.

Here’s the thing that I learned as I’ve cleared the path to writing my novel.

The meta-pain is what happens when our refusal to give up gets weaponised against us by our own brains.

Every single time I dragged myself through the pain AND the meta-pain to work out one tiny plot point or think about one character’s background, I was banking some little sliver of engagement with the project, some of which has even turned out to be useful.

But even if I’d scrapped every single idea or image or phrase I’d generated in those stuck years, the reading of those attempts delivered via the meta-pain would still have been a lie.

Here’s why I think that’s the case.

Many things got me to the point of being able to have an amazing writing trip to Paris last week—most importantly having cleared away much of my resistance already before I came back to the project. But underlying all the shifts I’ve made in my brain was the fact that I never gave up on being able to write the way I wanted to. Without wanting it that much, I wouldn’t have kept going until I found what worked.

And that pile of evidence my brain wanted to use against me—all those failed iterations and attempted fresh starts—is just what not giving up looks like.

God knows it’s not pretty. It’s messy and full of fails and dashed hopes. But that’s what happens when you keep running into doors over and over until one of them fucking opens.

I know if you’re reading this you probably have your own pile. And I know the meta-pain can feel like overwhelming proof that there is no way to get to the other side.

It’s not easy to see it differently. But take a moment to try on this other perspective:

The pile isn’t proof that you can never do it. It’s proof that you want it enough to keep going until you can.