Projects, and "publish or perish", are interpersonal relationships
Your relationship with projects is emblematic of your relationship with relationships.
If you're considering a project as your be all and end all, it’s because you feel you're in serious danger:
Consider the truth of that.
Sometimes it's true.
Sometimes it isn't.
Do I really need to rush this project out the door? Will the validation I need elude me if I wait a few days? Will this gravely impact my career?
Ideally, we always work on all the projects of our life in tandem. We don’t sacrifice one project for another. We press publish when we’re done with it, from a place of love, and not from a place of fear.
Our core drive in life, and so our core-self service, is to improve our character. Our character is defined by our ability to meet our needs efficiently. We do this by taking baby steps to improve our actions as conflict with them arises in the moment. One day at a time. When we sacrifice that goal to win at an individual game, we may seem to fail to serve ourselves as efficiently as possible.
We are always doing our best, and we’re always doing better. We’re inevitably driven to do whatever is best for us, like water running over stone.
Sacrifice
In a hostile world, sometimes you have to make sacrifices to keep going.
You should be aware of the sacrifice you’re making, in order to determine if it’s what you need.
If you feel the need to rush to publish; to make sure you secure the validation; the project is doomed to instability. Extra threats, ones you could safely navigate but don’t, undermine your ability to consent to relaxed exploration of the task. You therefore can't fully complete it authentically.
The world is a constant push and pull, and that includes the world of information. The conflict of ideas is a real exchange. It’s a matter of determining, “is there a step I can take in this moment to better serve my goal: the goal to improve my character, which is, to create a self that serves the self more fully?”
Interpersonal Relationships
This is especially true of people you're attracted to. You best let what comes come by being yourself, instead of seeking it out by becoming the other. When your goal is to appease, you fawn. You cut a part of yourself out and put them in it: a puppet in your orchestra attempting to get their support. Mirroring them, and erasing your own reflection from the world, instead of enhancing eachother together.1
Sometimes, we have to fawn in order to survive. One can reach a point where one no longer needs to fawn to survive.
In the process of fawning, one is doomed to instability because one loses sight of ones self, and therefore one’s actions. Fawning does this in service of a fear: the fear that one’s true self is unlovable.
Trauma, or The Best You’ve Got?
We may have received this fear in real conflict that threatened our ability to thrive in childhood; to grow up, well fed, in a loving environment. To show our true selves at home and at school. We may have had to hide that which, if exposed to our peers, constituted a serious survival threat.
Even today, we may receive this fear. If we can’t arrange our lives in a way where it’s safe for us to show our true selves, we are forced to fawn. To be an out queer, to be an unmasked neurodivergent person, to show our body language, our way of speaking, our basic autonomic reactions safely, is a serious struggle for adults today. These societal problems are more noticeable with minorities, because we’re more noticeably different, but they speak to the danger of nonconformity in contrast with the pressure to conform as a whole.
These pressures may come from professional or academic environments (a common association of “publish or perish”) or any other environment.
If we have to be around these pressures every day, they shape our self, in that they shape our behavior, and encourage us to contort and diminish our authentic selves to address the pressure.
What makes that self feel inauthentic? Stress, disassociation are indicators. Ultimately, the precipice of in-authenticity crashes down on us when we’re faced with the idea that there’s something we could to do improve the situation, but we aren’t doing it.2
The situation includes the whole and the self in tandem. We are naturally driven to account for the entire organism, and our entire habitat3, because it responds to our actions.
By gaining awareness of this dynamic, we can begin putting steps in place to curate a habitat that allows us fuller self-expression.
We can write out these chess pieces of our life in a document, start tracking our process of arranging them: making the process conscious—and begin orienting our day-to-day thinking to a larger plan in service of ourselves.
Baby steps in the cycle of love and conflict.
Sometimes, our actions in response to a stressful pressure are the best thing we can reasonably do in the moment. Sometimes, they aren’t. You can begin to feed awareness to yourself, and determine this for yourself.
If you don't love your true self, you spend energy in conflict with it. You struggle to harness it to do the maximum good, because it’s currently being harnessed by someone else, to your distress.4
Sometimes, conflict prevents us from expanding. Sometimes, it doesn’t have to. Sometimes, we can work with that conflict, and enact change.
In the moment, we sense conflict between our actions and our environment. We constantly respond to that conflict and attempt the best way we know to harmonize it.
You can notice this more and more every day. Awareness, and developing more reliable behavior, is a slow, iterative process that takes baby steps, and is always ongoing.
[…] psychic incest — what you call “unboundaried bonding” — where the parents, instead of mirroring their child, use the child to mirror themselves. You say that most people don’t realize how damaging this psychic incest is.
Woodman, Marion (1993). Conscious Femininity: Interviews with Marion Woodman. Inner City Books. p. 139. ISBN 0-919123-59-7.
Lyrical excerpt of Morning Mr. Magpie, from album The King of Limbs (2011) by Radiohead.
The song addresses a horrific, imposing threat that is diminishing the self.
In this world, the trees look just like my friends
Bending time to see how far I can bend
Humming habitat will open its ears
I see two of me, I see two of me
Did you know that I could grow to this size
The hand in the sky, can always taste my bite
Everybody keeps smiling at me
I'm too good with the game, too good with the game
Casting shadow puts my figure in place
Lyrical excerpt of Habitat, from album Two Of Me (2020) by Momma.
The song is about growing to the size of the environment, and desiring a more honest habitat.
I don't wanna be your fucking dog
That you drag around
A collar on my neck tied to a pole
Leave me in the freezing cold
I'm not a prop for you to use
When you're lonely or confused
I want a love that lets me breathe
I've been choking on your leash
Lyrical excerpts from Your Dog, from album Clean (2018) by Soccer Mommy.
“The song is about the anger and relief of the singer finally admitting she was being used in an emotionally abusive relationship.” (annotation from Genius.com)