You Belong with Me

Attracted to Attraction. Averted to Aversion. Belonging in Both.

She wears short skirts
I wear t-shirts
She’s cheer captain and
I’m on the bleachers

You Belong with Me, by Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift’s pop anthem about alienation was once unavoidable, even ubiquitous. You might infer that means that feelings of Alienation are too.

That conclusion has an ironic implication: we belong everywhere, even when we bring our feelings of self-isolating self-doubt with us.

T-Swivvy’s You Belong with Me was blasting at a gas station I pulled up to the other day. I was listening to Stephen Cope’s Yoga and the Quest for the True Self, queued up to the end of one of the more esoteric chapters. It was about kundalini energy, sometimes referred to as “rizz” (chaRISma) by my Gen Alpha daughter. As in, “you have zero rizz, Dad.” Ouch, but fair. Because when I pulled up to the gas station and was confronted by this Swiftie blasting a mainstream song about Othering, I made eye contact and let my generally obscure metaphysical text’s chapter finish. 

I’m not saying I cranked the volume antagonistically, like an elitist who thinks his hipster-esque hyperfixation on spiritual awakening makes him a better person. It just was loud from the freeway—and I didn’t hide myself, ashamed, either.

In the past, I might have felt that kind of aversion. I might have felt excluded and ostracized through my own insistence on unusual interests. I’d have covered that up with snobbery, projecting my uncomfortably visceral sense of alienation onto the Swiftie and telling a story to myself that my superiority to her pop music was the source of my icky internal feelings.

Really, I’d just be feeling Bad, all by myself. I’d be in pain. Lonely. Self-averted. My knee-jerk, probably unconscious reaction would be “you loser. You can’t just like the things that would make you likable.” The unexamined thought I’d use to hide from that reflex would be, “What a shame to be surrounded by idiot normcore muggles.”

If feeling like I belong with others is expansive, that kind of self-directed shutting off is contraction.

It’s misaligned contraction. Out of balance. Unconscious and shadowy. A toxic explosion of self-aversion that could potentially be avoided.

In service of curtailing this habit, I’m learning to recognize when my body is calling for contraction earlier. The same way they say that “crying is a late sign of hunger,” I’m coming to believe that my self-loathing (or its increasingly-less-frequent superiority complex mask) is a late sign of the need to contract.

In the language of my diagnosis, Bipolar Disorder, contraction corresponds to depression and expansion to mania. 

When I’m manic, I’ve got all the creativity and ambition in the world. My pattern-seeking compulsion sucks up more and more data and makes grander and grander conclusions. To connect all the disparate data points bringing me hype, hope, joy, and a sense of empowerment, I have to zoom way out. 

From this fifty-thousand foot view, I am maximally expansive. It is inevitable the mood culminates in a messiah complex: in Plans to Achieve Enlightenment or Plans to Save the World.

Maybe I’ll develop the perfect spiritual practice, or write the perfect book, or start the perfect artist collective, or create the perfect, awakened app and all the misery, addiction, suffering, and despair in the world will finally be alleviated. Maybe I can heal the lepers.

Yet my body wants to protect me from getting crucified. I can barely even handle dismissive criticism of my art—though constructive feedback is welcome—how am I going to handle the hate and outrage that inevitably results from any degree of viral notoriety?

When my attraction to grand goals becomes too intense, my bipolar brain reverts to aversion to bring me back down to the ground. 

I’ve lived my life believing the only way I’ll ever Belong is by evoking ubiquitous, ecstatic, orgasmic bliss through my mere presence. When I don’t—when I’m dismissed, rejected, or criticized—I experience Alienation.

This is another way to frame bipolar disorder.

Mania = Expansion = Belonging

Depression = Contraction = Alienation

I am attracted to the Attraction—attracted to the Belonging sensation that characterizes the upswings in my Bipolar mood—and averted to the Aversion—the depression, shame and despair.

This may sound obvious, but there are certainly masochists out there attracted to the motivation generated by their self-averted feelings of never quite being enough. Likewise, X and Facebook couldn’t operate the way they do if people weren’t generally attracted to aversive experiences like outrage, disgust, and aggravating clickbait. 

Meanwhile researchers are lobbying to get a new DSM entry for cherophobia—a fear of happiness or aversion to attraction characterized by concern about the “other shoe dropping” or joy being a “waste of time.”

The unexamined life is not worth living? In that case, I’ll become a self-taught expert on my own Bipolar Disorder. 

Behold the sine curve of my mood!

Attraction

0. Recuperation: Recovery from depression. Like a field left fallow where nothing is grown for a season so the soil can replenish its nutrients. A kind of pleasant rest and recovery where I am beginning to recognize the seeds of an upswing.

1. Creativity: Expansiveness exemplified. It’s characterized by a metric ton of pattern-seeking: a combination of all my happy, profound and proud insights. Everything desirable. Everything I’m attracted to.

2. Ecstasy: Simply a gnosis of Belonging. It feels like my crown chakra has burst open and my energy body is overflowing with divine light. A connection to Self, to Community, to Truth, and to Source.

2.5. Overconsumption: A kind of doomed, yet desperate and stressed, productivity or substance use in an attempt to extend the ecstasy of Belonging for as long as I can.

Aversion

4. Anxiety: Shame about the past. Worry about the future. In general, self-doubt.

5. Self-Aversion: Self-loathing generated through pattern-seeking. I’ve now cooked up a narrative that is a combination of all my Anxious moments and memories.

6. Agony: Total contraction. Total Aversion. Like being trapped in a shrinking glass cube that is slowly crushing me into a gory pulp. The visceral sensation is bizarrely similar to Ecstasy—all the buzzy vibrations rippling through my tingling body—but the Aversion is so strong that I can never seem to allow myself to face it, much less enjoy it.

Then return to 0.

You Belong with Me: A ritual for Over-Consumption.

Here’s a recipe that works to assuage my impulse toward Over-Consumption. It’s this urgent feeling, like I’m desperately bailing water from the boat, but sensing its sinking as the winds rise. And the higher I climb through consumption, the deeper the pit of Agony I fall into. Rhythm compensates. A pendulum swings as far backward as it’s pushed forward.

In this stage of my cycle, I am already beginning to see the currents of self-doubt bubble up from memory. Times I’ve put my foot in my mouth, wronged others, or been rejected. I try to cover that torrent up—I try to bail that Anxious water from the boat—with behaviors that help me feel Expansive just a little bit longer, but the fix is always fleeting. Eventually I will contract.

Instead of leaning on that habitual pattern of attempting to extend my Mania, lately, I’ve been practicing this little ritual. It seems to soften my mood swings.

1. I wake up to the fact that I am telling a story of self-doubt by remembering a shameful memory or worrying about my capacity to deal with an upcoming challenge.

2. I label this process as "My pattern-seeking brain is seeking evidence to draft a narrative that can be described as self-loathing" or simply “seeking evidence.” It’s like this is something I’m forced to do by neurochemicals and somatic emotions, rather than an authentic expression of my true beliefs. Something I would like to peel away to reveal the infinite brightness of my core, innate lovingawareness. 

3. I plant myself in the present moment, feeling any physical sensations that are available. Particularly those that arise alongside my narratives of self-doubt.

4. I root myself in the community of which I am currently a member. I remind myself that even my feeling of not being good enough, not belonging, and being overwhelmed by social anxiety is untrue. Because I am in a space, I must belong there. Even bringing the energy of feeling othered and unworthy is perhaps what the community of a space presently requires.

5. I reframe my self-doubt by thinking or saying the mantra "I belong here." 

6. I become open to the potential consequences of this ritual. Do people talk to me more? Do I feel warmer to my surroundings?

7. I note how steps 5 and 6 affect my interoceptive perception of my visceral and somatic experience.

Back to the gas station, where Taylor Swift was blasting

During the Aversion half of my Bipolar cycle, I would have been tempted to put on the air of an elitist: “Ugh, pop music. How trivial.” Or perhaps I would have been struck by a sense of Alienation, “Why am I drawn to yogic awakening when I could be singing along to You Belong with Me?” 

If I had stretched out the Over-Consumptive phase, these thoughts would be grim and overpowering. 

But what happens when I allow myself to believe I Belong?

After all, when I am in a space, be it a gas station, a dog park, in traffic, in Target, or just hiking the sidewalk, I am part of the community of that space. You are never “in traffic,” you “are traffic.” When you are in a space, you are in a space. It’s a tautology. How can I put myself outside of the community of any space I inhabit? Even my sense of being Othered within it is still within it.

When I encounter these bipolar cycles and begin to feel my productive Attraction-based energy diminishing, I’d rather welcome it gratefully as an opportunity to experience connectedness with my physical surroundings and the real humans that occupy them.

When I descend from the heavens of deep metaphysical inquiry—Expansive Attraction to insight—through the natural compensation of rhythm, and begin to note that I am developing an Averted outlook on myself, I don't have to fear it. I don't need to feel averted to Aversion. 

When I feel "cast out" of samadhi, out of union with Source, I can allow the resultant Self-Aversion to gently pass, and reframe my sense of Othered-ness into a broader, unimpeachable, immutable belonging. 

That’s “belonging” with a small “b.” 

Unlike the grandiose messiah brand of Belonging, this is the simple, squishy, receptive, accepting, secure comfort of simply knowing that you can’t be anywhere but here because here is where you are. It’s an unexciting but secure belonging.

Just a quiet knowing that this space holds you.