Something Has Hold of YouChapter 1 of 127 min
The evening you did not choose
It is a quarter to ten. This morning you decided that tonight you would not say the thing you always say, and about twenty-five minutes ago you said it.
You remember deciding. It was not a vague intention; you were quite clear, standing at the kettle, and you meant it. You could probably still recite the reasoning. And then the moment came, and the sentence came out of you more or less fully formed, in the tone you had specifically decided against, and now you are sitting here with the particular flatness of somebody who has watched himself do a thing he had ruled out.
Nothing has happened. That is almost the worst of it. Nobody is injured, the evening will be smoothed over by tomorrow, and there is no incident here worth anybody's attention.
You are just not free in the way you assumed you were.
Here are the two usual explanations, and they are both wrong.
The first says you lack willpower. You need to want it more, try harder, be more disciplined. You have tested this one. You have had periods of wanting it very much indeed, and the sentence still came out.
The second, more fashionable, says there is nothing to explain. You are human, you were tired, be gentle with yourself. And there is something in that — you were tired. But notice what it asks you to accept: that the gap between what you decided and what you did is simply the weather, and there is nothing underneath it. If you believed that, you would not still be sitting here at a quarter to ten.
You do not believe it. You have the distinct sense of having been overruled.
Try a different account of it.
Not that you are weak, and not that nothing happened. That something has hold of you.
Take the word plainly, because it is meant plainly. Not a force, not a metaphor for your upbringing — a grip. Something that was waiting, that took its moment, and that let go afterwards, which is why you can see so clearly now what you could not see at twenty past nine.
You know the feel of it being on. There is a particular tightness about an inch behind the breastbone when you are about to say the thing. There is the way the room narrows. There is the speed — and the speed is the tell, because reasoning is slow and that was not slow. By the time you were deciding whether to say it, you had said it.
Three things follow, and the third is the one worth the book.
You were not consulted. Whatever ran that sentence did not put it to you. This should be more alarming than it is, and the reason it isn't is that it happens so often you have stopped classifying it as an event.
It is not continuous. It let go. You are reading this now without it. So whatever it is, it is not simply you — a thing you are cannot arrive and leave.
And it is not large. This is the part nobody says, and it is the beginning of the way out.
You could be forgiven for assuming that what holds a person is vast and complicated: your childhood, your parents, forty years of accumulated sediment, something that would take a specialist a decade to unpick.
It is not like that. What took you at twenty past nine was small, specific, and about the fourth time this month. If you sat down now and listed every distinct thing that has ever had hold of you in that way, you would not need a second sheet of paper. The list is short enough to count on your fingers, and you would recognise every item, and so would anybody who has lived with you.
You already know their names. You use them constantly — just not about yourself.
You say that your brother-in-law is arrogant. You say your neighbour is a bitter woman. You say somebody at work is greedy, that your uncle is a controlling man, that your cousin cannot let anything go. You produce these judgements fluently and quickly, often in the car on the way home, and you would stand by most of them.
Every one of those is on your own list. You have never once used the word about yourself in that tone of voice.
That asymmetry is not hypocrisy, and the book is not going to call it that. It is a technical problem, and it has a technical cause.
You see the thing in your brother-in-law because you are outside it. You are standing in the room watching it operate, and from there it is obvious — it has a shape, it has a name, you could draw it. When the same thing operates in you, you are not in the room. You are inside the thing, looking out through it, and from in there it does not look like arrogance. It looks like being right.
That is the whole of the difficulty, and it is why trying harder has never worked. You cannot decide your way out of something you are currently using as your eyes.
So this book does not begin by asking you to improve. It begins somewhere much duller and much more useful: with finding out what, specifically, has hold of you — by name, by number, and by the circumstances in which each one takes its moment.
Not so that you can be ashamed of the list. Shame is simply the grip changing hands.
Because a thing with a name and a shape can be dealt with, and a vague sense of personal inadequacy cannot. You have been trying to fix a fog. There is no fog. There are about ten things, they have been described before, and they have been counted.
Tonight
Ten minutes, with a pen. Not a system, and nothing to keep up.
Write down three decisions you have made about yourself more than twice and not kept. Not tasks — decisions about how you would be. I will not raise my voice at her. I will not check it before breakfast. I will not say anything about his money. Three is enough; you will think of more and you do not need more.
Then, next to each, write what was happening in the moment you broke it. Not why — what. What time it was. Who was in the room. What had just been said, and by whom. Whether you had eaten. Whether you were on your way somewhere.
That is all. Do not diagnose anything, do not resolve anything, and do not read it back tonight.
You are not looking for a reason. You are looking for conditions — and the reason to write them down rather than think about them is that each of these has a setting it prefers, and you cannot see the pattern from inside one instance of it. Nobody can. That is not a flaw in you; it is the geometry of the situation.
Let me be exact about what this is worth, because the rest of the book will be exact about it too.
Tomorrow will not be different. You will probably say the thing again this week, and when you do, this chapter will not have failed.
What changes is smaller and stranger than improvement: a short delay. At some point — maybe not this week — the tightness will arrive behind the breastbone and you will notice it as the tightness rather than as the obvious truth about your brother-in-law. Half a second, no more. You will very likely say the thing anyway.
That half second is the entire foundation of everything that follows, and you cannot manufacture it by effort. It is a by-product of having looked.
The next chapter does the counting. It is the most practical in the book, and it is mostly concerned with a question you have never thought to ask: why, when you solve one of these, does another one put its head up within the minute?