Threshold Thursday: What Are You Playing and What Is Playing You

The whole previous month was demanding for both of us. Anna and I finally did the thing we had been putting off - we went through our store one attunement at a time, one manual at a time, and read what we have been selling.

It was harder on me than I expected, and not for business reasons.

The feeling had a taste I remembered from being a kid. You have a hero. You idolize them, idealize them, you want to be like them when you grow up - and then one day you catch the second part of who they are. The part that was being played. Performed, and built with some care, so you would think of them exactly what they wanted you to think. The cape doesn't fall off. Worse: the cape turns out to be most of the person.

Things came off the site. A few founders came off it entirely.

I will tell you why in the plainest words I have at the moment.

Manuals that discourage you, in one tone or another, from doing anything your way. Follow exactly. Don't modify. Don't combine it with anything. Don't trust what you notice if what you notice disagrees with the page. And so on.

Manuals that steer people away from medical care. Sometimes softly, by positioning the system as the real cure while doctors only manage symptoms. Sometimes not softly at all.

Quick fixes sold on the promise that they work just because they work. No mechanism, no conditions, no limits, nothing that could ever fail to be true - and seemingly no interest in whether the person receiving it could tell the difference.

And the machinery of over-consumption that has been flooding this field for years now: the same thing rebuilt and resold, season after season, faster and cheaper each round, on the quiet assumption that whoever is buying will keep swallowing it and will not notice it is the same thing in new packaging. That assumption is the part I find hardest to forgive, because it thinks of the reader as an idiot who is just mindlessly swallowing this whole repackaged crap.

One more, and it was the instant delete, no discussion: work lifted from other people, and unethical boundaries taught as method and charged for. That one deserves a post of its own and it is going to get one.

Now the thing I did not expect, which only shows up when the list is in front of you at once.

Almost none of it was malice. What those manuals had in common was that their authors did not seem to have much to say about their own creation. Not what it does. Not how. Not what it doesn't do. Not who is on the other end of it, or what that person's life looks like on the day they open the file.

If you know what you made, you get specific. Specificity leaves the other person room - here is what this does, here is where it stops, here is the part you will have to work out yourself. If you don't know what you made, being specific is dangerous, because specific things can be checked. So you instruct instead. Follow exactly. Don't deviate. Trust the system, not your perception. The less you have to say about your own work, the more you have to say about how the reader should behave.

Instruction moves in to fill the space where knowing your own thing should be.

I could write the rest of this angry. I had it written, angrily, in my head, for most of the summer.

I stop here, for two reasons.

The first is that nobody plays the one-who-knows for years to an empty room. The role is commissioned. It exists because there is an audience casting it, paying for it, and asking for the next act - and I have been that audience. I came into this field as a student, receiving systems from people I had decided knew better, reading the same preachy claims everybody reads and thinking: fine, this is how the field talks, it is what it is.

The second reason is my own record, and I have been circling it for six paragraphs.

Some of what came off the site this summer had been sitting there long after I had outgrown it. It stayed because it was selling. Not enormously - this is still a small business - but reliably, and every time my eye landed on it I found something else to look at. That is not a lapse I can date. It went on, and it was uncomfortable the whole way through, and the discomfort did not do anything.

So when I say those manuals had nothing much to say about their own creation - for three years I did not have much to say about my own shelf either. Last month was the first time I could say something specific about each thing I sell. Three years in. And the reason certain things stayed is not a mystery either: I was being told too. By the sales.

Which is where the grace runs out, and where it doesn't.

Thin work gets grace. Someone learning in public, publishing something half-formed because that is how anyone learns anything - that was me, that is most people here, and there is nothing wrong with it. It stops being that at one exact point: when work that doesn't know itself starts instructing. When not knowing what you made turns into telling somebody else how to live with it, or what to do about their body. That is where a beginner stops being a beginner and starts being a cost that someone else pays.

Telling comes in many shapes. Told by a channeled entity. Told by the reader. Told by the master, by the teacher, by the influencer with the good grid. Told by ancient wisdom, which cannot be argued with, because it is ancient. Told by anyone at all who knows, because I do not - and that last clause is the engine of the entire marketplace. Not their knowing. My "I do not."

Energy work is the perfect greenhouse for this. It is strange and hermetic enough that almost nothing has to survive contact with anything. The telling can't be checked, so the teller can't be caught, and the one-who-knows cannot be wrong in any way you could put your finger on. Which means being told never has to end. It can only be outgrown.

So why do we want to 'be told' this much?

Because the world is wild. Unpredictable at every scale that touches you - the body, the money, the people, the plans. And a person who feels lost does not reach for what is theirs at the time. They reach for guidance. The distinction is small and it decides everything: we are not looking for structure. We are looking for someone who will make the structure for us. We go to the structure master-teachers because they know how and we have decided we don't, and hardly anyone stops to ask why we want our structure built by somebody else in the first place, to their plan, on our ground.

Many people do not want to be inspired. Inspiration is work - it hands you material and then leaves the room. What people want is to have it GOOD. Now, and every time.

And every time is generously supplied. No money. No direction. No sense of purpose. The relationship coming apart. The family thing that never resolves. The job gone. Your hairdresser gave you a shit haircut. Every one of them arrives with the same whisper: this would be a very good moment to be told.

Try to have it good every fucking time - every gap filled, every crisis answered within the hour - and you have built the perfect conditions for your oldest patterns to run the show. The manipulative ones. The distorted coping you know by heart because it has been rehearsing your whole life. Reaching to have it good does not bypass those patterns. It switches them on, feeds them, and hands them back to you better trained than they were.

And no, the point is not to have all your patterns good. Nobody has all their patterns good. Often it is enough - fully enough - to be conscious of one while it runs.

Because a crisis is, to a larger extent than we like, an occasion. Not a lesson. An occasion, a stretch of time in which you can try coping differently than you cope, for as long as it lasts. Temporary counts. Clumsy counts. It does not have to hold and it does not have to become your new way. It has to be yours. The fact that we deal with it ourselves is the point. However it is done.

However it is done is still better than the other road, and the other road is what I spent a month reading. Playing someone you are not, so you can have it good and sell it good. It works for a while. It also comes with a tenant - a low, constant sense of wrongness that moves in under the role and never fully leaves, because underneath the costume you know. And then either the day arrives when you see whose cost the performance runs on, or the day never arrives, which is worse.

Both questions in the title turn out to be one question.

What are you playing?

Whatever gets you told you are doing it right.

What is playing you?

Whoever you have hired to do the telling.

There is a way out and it does not require the costume - not the teller's, not the told's. It does not ask you to burn your manuals, unfollow anybody, or announce your sovereignty in a story post. It is smaller and much more private than that. Next time it gets hard, answer first. Before the reader, before the master, before the ancient wisdom. One attempt of your own, however it is done.

That is all it takes to have something to say about your own life, which is the only thing any of this was ever supposed to give you.

Nobody can sell you your first attempt. Nobody can play it for you either.