Writing by Erin Gallagher

Is it Protection or Preemptive Suffering?

Oct 28

Updated: Oct 29

Recently, I stopped myself in the middle of a ritual I've performed since I was a little girl.

Scanning.

And I don't mean the kind of body scan that somatic practices teach us—the intentional act of moving our awareness from head to toe, noticing sensations and reconnecting with ourselves.

It's a 360-degree mental scan of my entire life.

Looking for threats.

Searching for vulnerabilities.

Identifying everything that could possibly go wrong.

What I recognize now is that I do this most often when things are going right.

When there's something I'm excited about.

When an opportunity presents itself.

When I find myself looking forward to something.

When possibility begins to emerge on the horizon.

When I allow myself to want.

It's almost as if my nervous system interprets the presence of joy as a signal to prepare for pain.

Because wanting makes us vulnerable.

When we allow ourselves to desire, we also open ourselves up to the possibility of disappointment.

Of rejection.

Of abandonment.

Of loss.

And when you've experienced those truths often enough, you believe that the safest way to move through the world is to prepare for them.

So that's what I've been doing.

For years.

I've been counterbalancing my joy with suffering.

Allowing myself to feel excited about the potential of something only if I am simultaneously imagining what it will feel like if it doesn't happen.

Experiencing hope while quietly bracing for disappointment.

Anticipating invitations while readying myself to be rejected.

Welcoming belonging while preparing to be abandoned.

It's as if I've been keeping one foot in the pain so that—should it arrive—I won't have as far to fall.

I thought I was protecting myself from future suffering.

But I was intentionally creating it—where, in many cases, it would never actually exist.

And I have a name for that now:

Preemptive suffering.

The practice of experiencing pain in anticipation of pain.

The habit of rehearsing disappointment before disappointment exists.

The instinct to prepare for abandonment before anyone has abandoned you.

But here's the problem with preemptive suffering:

Sometimes the thing you're afraid of does happen.

But often, it doesn't.

And so, since you've already begun experiencing the pain, you suffer either way.

You carry the weight of a possibility as though it were a certainty.

You experience the grief of an imagined loss while what you desire is still very much alive.

You compromise your capacity for joy in an attempt to protect yourself from its potential absence.

And—perhaps most painfully—you begin to distrust the very thing that makes life expansive:

Desire.

Because to experience desire is to practice vulnerability.

To want is to acknowledge your lack of control.

Desire is information.

It tells us something about who we are, what matters to us and where we might want to go.

A relationship.

An opportunity.

A creative expression.

A different way of living.

It is one of the ways our intuition communicates with us.

But when wanting becomes associated with the possibility of losing, we can begin to suppress our desires before we even allow ourselves to acknowledge them.

We convince ourselves that we don't really want the thing.

That it doesn't matter.

That we'll be fine either way.

And sometimes that's genuine freedom.

But often it's fear masquerading as indifference.

Sometimes we're so afraid of what it would feel like to lose something that we refuse to admit how much we want it in the first place.

And I don't want to live that way anymore.

I want to be able to desire wholeheartedly.

I want to experience excitement without immediately searching for the disappointment that might follow.

I want to receive abundance without looking over my shoulder for the loss that might be coming.

I want to experience joy without feeling compelled to counterbalance it with suffering.

I want to let possibility be possibility.

And I want to trust that if something painful happens, I will be capable of meeting it when it arrives.

I don't have to experience it in advance.

Which brings me to today.

This morning, I was experimenting with a new tarot deck.

As I shuffled, several cards jumped out.

Two of them hit me in the chest like a ton of bricks.

The Ten of Wands and The Fool.

I held them beside each other and immediately recognized myself.

In the Ten of Wands, a woman is hunched over—carrying an enormous bundle of wooden staffs.

Her head is down.

Her shoulders are rounded.

Her arms are wrapped around everything she's carrying.

She can barely see what's in front of her.

Her entire body is organized around the responsibility of holding everything together.

And beside her is The Fool.

A woman standing at the edge of a cliff, her face lifted toward the sky.

Her shoulders are open.

Her arms are extended.

Her body is light.

She is standing at the edge of the unknown—seemingly delighted by the possibility of what might come next.

Her entire body is organized around the possibility of receiving what is coming her way.

One woman is carrying all responsibilities.

The other is receiving all possibilities.

And I realized that these two images represent the journey I've been on.

For much of my life, I have been the woman carrying it all.

Carrying responsibility.

Carrying expectations.

Carrying the emotional weight of relationships.

Carrying the burden of anticipating what other people might need, think, feel or do.

Carrying the possibility of rejection.

Carrying the fear of abandonment.

Carrying the pain of outcomes that haven't happened.

I became so accustomed to carrying everything that the act itself became part of my identity—the embodiment of the roles I play.

The Tireless Worker.

The Top Performer.

The Selfless Mother.

The Fierce Protector.

The woman who could anticipate every possible outcome and prepare for every possible disappointment.

And I was proud of her.

I still am.

She learned how to survive.

She learned how to persevere.

She learned how to achieve.

But somewhere along the way, the very strategies that once helped protect me began to restrict me.

The identities that helped me survive became the cages that prevented me from fully living.

And now I'm learning another way.

I'm learning to become The Fool.

The woman who can experience possibility without immediately preparing for loss.

The woman who can desire without rehearsing for disappointment.

The woman who can experience joy without anticipating pain.

The woman who trusts that she can meet whatever comes next.

I haven't abandoned my ambition.

I haven't abandoned my creativity.

I haven't abandoned my purpose.

I haven't abandoned my fire.

I've been renegotiating my relationship with all of them.

I'm learning that ambition doesn't have to require exhaustion.

That creativity doesn't have to require performance.

That responsibility doesn't have to require self-abandonment.

That love doesn't have to require loss.

And that protecting myself doesn't require preparing myself to suffer.

I'm learning to move through the world

without constantly carrying the weight of it.

Because the freedom I'm experiencing—and continuing to work toward—isn't about caring less.

It's about no longer defining myself by how much I carry.

And perhaps that's the core of identity transformation.

Recognizing the ways we've learned to survive, honoring the versions of ourselves who developed those strategies and giving ourselves permission to choose differently.

The Ten of Wands is numbered ten.

The completion of a cycle.

The Fool is numbered zero.

A new beginning.

And as I held those two cards beside each other, I realized something.

I don't need to know what happens next to put down what I've been carrying.

I don't need to prepare for every possible loss to trust myself to survive disappointment.

I don't need to suffer in advance to prove that I'm capable of surviving.

I can let joy be joy.

I can let desire be desire.

I can let possibility be possibility.

There is freedom in unlocking the cage—that once protected us from the outside world—from the inside, where we no longer consent to be trapped.

Writing.

I Skipped 16 Years of Voting

Democracy is not something we achieve once.

It's something we consent to with our actions every single day.

The things we're fighting for out there

become the way we're living in here.