An Ode to Hank and John Green

Purveyors of fine safe harbour, inspir-ducation and feeling less alone across multiple media and tens of years. If Ada Palmer's hive concept (she also fits in that category for me) was something we could all start doing right now, I think they'd be Utopians and I'd be right in there with them.*

Hank wrote about finding relaxing a challenge in a recent newsletter. Relatable. And something I've made some headway on in the past few years. I'll quote him because I'd like to respond:

I enjoy his honesty here and the subtlety. Yes, fundamentally, we could say that we are producing ourselves, our joy and our less favourable feelings, just by existing. They occur, we excrete feelings without having to actually 'do' anything. So we can say 'hey, don't worry, we're sort of producing, actually' as a nod to the part of us that wants to produce, but it feels like a hoodwink, a sleight of hand, a hack, and I don't know about your internal family system, but my parts don't roll over so easily.

Joy arises. The only production we can do is to help create the conditions. But you can't demand it. Many things in life are similar to the way that a sphincter works - from poops to sleep to having babies - the thing works when the conditions have aligned such that the natural rhythm plays out. You can't click your fingers and will it. Joy is a natural consequence of conditions conducive to joy. Like ground-water finding its way up through a widened seam in the rock. Among the likely conditions, as with the sphincter analogy, is feeling safe. It is argued that much of the cause of extended labouring and pain delivering mothers experience is the pathologising of childbirth. Sterile, fluorescent-lit hospital beds, stirrups and strangers staring at your junk don't do much to ease the justifiable fear that can accompany giving birth. Not dropping a baby when your system is on fear-alert makes evolutionary and practical sense, so there's an inbuilt mechanism for stopping it from happening and it isn't 'holding it in', you don't even get that say.

I think relaxing, or feeling joyful, are similar. They are not on-demand.

What I have discovered is that there were several things running under my inability to lie still or focus on a book, or some other quiet task for me, although it seems Hank has the advantage there because he does go on to describe being able to enjoy a dense philosophy book.

One aspect was momentum. If I've been moving at a pleasingly fast intellectual clip all day on my laptop, I can't transition straight to lying down quietly. There's a kind of whiplash. There's a resistance to the stopping also because the accumulated pain and emotional debris of the day that were tucked away while I was busy braining the brain out of whatever I was at, will want to be attended to. The downshifting from a pleasingly semi-anaesthetising activated focus mode such as you might use to write, or perform, or do accounts or admin, into what is called ventral-vagal, the cosier, more open, but still alert mode (not to be confused with paralysed-on-the-couch stimming via repetitive snack-ingestion, one of my own default post-production settings for many years), is a little like clearing the cloud turbulence as the plane ascends or descends. The bumps can be physically uncomfortable.

You can get a surge of tears, yawning, anxiety, shaking, dread, emotional flashbacks of boredom times from childhood, fear of any of a number of feeling states that might appear next. Staying on the momentum treadmill is a useful technique for maintaining predictable experiences, which is efficient and the body-mind enjoys that and enjoys feeling in control. The bit we seem to be missing in our current western culture is that you can actually trust your body to trip the release and relax sphincter-switch, by offering it the correct conditions and building trust over time with repeated exposure to those concrete, caring steps.

The approach with care and curiosity is half the battle. Parts of you have reasons for holding back on letting go, they've learned their strategies. If you want them to let go, you have to treat them with respect, which includes not 'hacking' them. The turbulence becomes less of a barrier the more accustomed to coming through it you get. Even just realising what it is makes it that bit less costly to the system. Instead of a story starting up around 'what am I anxious about', you can just recognise, ah, I'm transitioning from one state to another and I find that unpleasant, but it will pass. Like all the other state-shifts I've learned to tolerate in my life, such as showers, cold water, getting out of the car, disengaging from writing to go decide what to make dinner. Life is one big transition party. It's a topic this autistic trans guy knows a thing or two about.

So, to the part of Hank that wants to produce, that wants to do the thing that makes the good feeling and fulfils the criteria ('secret mind rules' is the phrase Nick coined for this), that Must Be Fulfilled before resting is possible, I hear you, I see you, I thank you (I benefit greatly from all of Hank's wonderful (and so does the world!). I also wonder if you know, really know, that you're not alone (I've got a bunch of guys Just Like You inside myself), and that it is safe to stop, but only if you know there's another way of offering comfort and feeling okay to stop than the one you've learned.

I'm going to try to say this as simply and jargon-freely as I can. The momentum and the searching for that One More thing that will make us feel good, can be eased by talking to your body and offering it soothing. We are not taught that in western culture. When I need to come out of Do Mode, I do some of the following, sometimes all, sometimes just a few: lie down, breaths into my belly with a humming or voo sound on the way out, rubbing down my arms/belly, orienting in the room by looking around slowly and taking in that I'm safe, slight rotation of my hips, shaking, speaking to myself in a kind way - the same way I'd speak kindly to anyone who was in need of settling (no bs, no performative mindfulness teacher voice), singing, massaging around my ears, down the sides of my throat (where the vagus nerve and TMJ nerves all influence each other), cup the base of my skull with my hand, ask myself what I want or need and actually listen and go do it (eg. hot water bottle, colouring in, watching cartoons - the answer is often surprising but salient).

It’s not a quick fix to rebuild trust after a long time in a culture that tells us we should ignore or suppress our bodies and the parts of us that we find irritating or that are not toeing the party line. But the party line is a poor substitute for operating from a well regulated, easeful, authentic self, free from the tyranny of well-meaning Shoulds or Jusss one Mores that are the hallmark of nervous systems that have been trained to stay slightly on rather than risk riding the turbulence.

So anyway, I love you Hank. And John, too, but that's probably its own separate essay. And almost in tribute to that fact, although I'm writing this a few weeks later, the very first video that was watched in the van, on the first day I took Nick out in it, was an episode of Ask Hank Anything with Brennan Lee Mulligan (another absolute gem of a human). It's a banger, check it out. So, in the spirit of Boaty McBoatface, we played with Vanin Van Vanivan for a bit, but it wasn't it (I couldn't remember it every time I tried to say it). Then I tried Hank Vanigan and we both instantly lit up... this van issss a Hank! And I love that he's named for two hilarious, sweet, decent, smartpants best boys, because those are the kinda boys I wanna be!

* I'm loath to offer a link to something about these books if you don't know anything about them because the joy for me was going in Without A Clue, but here's a bunch of folks who also want to be Utopians if you want a flavour.

Here’s Hank and John’s newsletter if you like what you’re hearing: https://werehere.beehiiv.com/

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