Resistance

👋 yoooooo!

Its been a HOT minute. Okay, I guess more like 4 years? It’s a surprise I remembered how to login (I definitely forgot haha).

The truth is that I’ve been resisting this. Not this newsletter specifically — but resisting writing, resisting journaling regularly, even though I know it’s how I process. I’ve started to get more curious about the “why”. It’s a restless kind of swirly feeling, like something’s been circling and hasn’t landed. So I felt pulled back to this long-forgotten newsletter to make sense of what all this resistance is trying to teach me.

Returning is the act of integration, me pushing past the resistance to write. I’m here now, and I’m celebrating that.

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There’s been a word, or a practice, floating around in my orbit lately that I’ve come to see has a definition that splits in two: the resistance to and the resistance of. Below is my attempt at trying to tease the two apart, while also seeing where they remain connected.

Resistance to:

A recurring question I’ve been asking myself: why do we resist what we know we need, or would serve us better? The copious amounts of energy we expend to fight the current instead of letting go and flowing with it is astonishing.

We resist naming the truth, making a change, asking the question, having the difficult conversation, leaving, staying. What makes us afraid of putting forth the effort?

My hypothesis: the real fear is that trying means finding out, and not trying lets us keep the comfort of "maybe”. Once you name the truth or leave or stay, you can’t un-know it. The unlived version stays perfect only as long as it stays…unlived.

It’s simultaneously a push and pull, back and forth, to and fro. The tension between here and there.

This form is resistance as avoidance. It faces “inward.”

I’ve done my best to make sense of the split, but, as in true Lazy Philosopher fashion, I turn to the wisdom of others.

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Steven Pressfield

Resistance by definition is self-sabotage.

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Dan Millman

Pain is a relatively objective, physical phenomenon; suffering is our psychological resistance to what happens. Events may create physical pain, but they do not in themselves create suffering. Resistance creates suffering. Stress happens when your mind resists what is. The only problem in your life is your mind’s resistance to life as it unfolds.

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Steven Pressfield

Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

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Resistance of:

Now, I’m not proposing that resistance doesn’t have its merits. It’s the fuel of movements across centuries, and perhaps just constitutive of the human experience in its entirety.

We resist opposition that seeks to dismantle our power and our communities. We employ resistance as a catalyst for change.

I’ve been living a smaller version of this. I recently left a well-salaried tech role to go back to graduate studies and to be an intern, once again at the beginning, in a new and adjacent field. On paper it’s common sense that you don’t do that. And yet, I did. I chose to refuse the script. The one that says a career only moves up and forward, never back to the beginning on purpose.

We resist as a way to refuse the reality we’re told we have to believe and live in. It’s how we survive. And more than that, it’s how we become something greater than we could have imagined.

This form, I believe, is resistance as power. It faces “outward.”

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Margaret Atwood

I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, no shadow unless there is also light.

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bell hooks

I write these words to bear witness to the primacy of resistance struggle in any situation of domination (even within family life); to the strength and power that emerges from sustained resistance and the profound conviction that these forces can be healing, can protect us from dehumanization and despair.

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Nic Stone

Resist when the world tries to convince you otherwise.

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Where they meet:

And now we find ourselves at the bridge I keep circling back to. The inward and the outward meet when the thing we avoid facing in ourselves turns out to be the same thing the world is counting on us not to face. Movements thrive only when we can dare ourselves and each other to face what’s within us in order to stand up to what exists outside of us.

At this point, I have more questions than I do answers. What I do know is that either way you go, resistance requires something. A cost, commitment, sustained effort over an unknown period of time.

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Leonardo da Vinci

It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.

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So, I’ll leave you with this: what have you been resisting lately? And what has come easily? One shows you the walls, while the other illuminates the doors. Either way, both are worth exploring.

If any of this stirred up something in you, I’d love to know.

Until next time…