Fever

The hard work of moving from illusion to reality

I got sick last week, and my left tonsil turned into a lake of flaming pain. When I finally limped into the urgent care Sunday afternoon both the nurse and the doctor did that little medical flinch when they looked in my throat, both indicating “that’s quite, uh, inflamed.” Which is the professional way of saying damn, your throat is on fire.

I had a fever, which is unusual for me, since I usually run to a reptilian chill in the body temperature department. The fever made me stupid, too stupid to realize in the moment how impaired I was.

The doctor’s office told me how much Tylenol and Advil I could take for the pain in a 24-hour period. I did the basic math to see how much I could have in the time from sunup to sundown but I calculated a “day” as 36 hours, not 24. Which meant I was woefully undermedicated, febrile and jolted awake by the pain of any reflexive swallowing I did in my sleep.

Had I understood my lack of capacity, I could easily have asked my husband to do the math, or called my daughter, who is a registered nurse, to check the dosage. I did neither, blinded to my stupidity by the very factors causing the stupidity.

I figured it out once I had some antibiotics on board, and the fever had passed. Although I can’t vouch for the full return of my brain functioning – there’s a reason I’m writing a substack rather than the client proposal that is also due.

So, I’ve been thinking about the illusions we believe are real because of a lack of capacity and the ways those can damage us.

I have a whole section in my new book about narratives, and understanding how they can support or limit us, but that’s not what I considering here. What I’m thinking of is the emotional process when we, as individuals or societies, see that what we thought was reality is, in fact, an illusion, a delusion, a fantasy.

It is very painful. And I think many of us will choose to hold onto the illusion rather than confront the grief, shame, and disorganization which attend the acceptance of a new reality.

Think of any idea you once held dear that died. It could be a conception of yourself as a good parent, in sharp contrast to your own terrible mother. Your good parenting was a cornerstone of your perception of yourself as an adult. But when your perceptive but angry teenager pointed out that you’re actually really controlling, just like, you guessed it, that very same mother, that perception was challenged. And when you went crying to your brother about it he said your teen was right, and you realized you weren’t the parent you thought you were. We could skip to the part of the story where you’ve done the work, gotten through, and built a better relationship with your kid. But in between there would be the possibly acute pain of understanding that you are not who you thought you were, a cocktail of grief, shame, disappointment, confusion.

Moving from illusion to reality, and doing the requisite labor to address the actual reality, is a heavy lift for most of us.

In our latest podcast, Eugene and I talk about how to deal with a setback in life. Feel the feelings, acknowledge reality, take the necessary steps to deal with the new reality. Then you can get to gratitude or positive thought or whatever – trying to do that earlier in the process can be a kind of toxic positivity.

Finding reality can be tough, since we have so many personal, psychological, cultural, spiritual and emotional forces lying to us, contorting and rearranging the sharp edges of reality.

When your family, workplace, church or community has bought into the illusion and you begin to challenge it, you risk your interpersonal relationships, any status you have in that group, and possibly your livelihood.

And under it all, for me at least, is grief.

One of the illusions I carried for most of my adult life was that if I worked hard enough I could achieve financial security. My father told me to find a niche career and excel at it, and I would have job security. So, I became really good at pitching new business for ad agencies. It’s niche, difficult, and in demand. It wasn’t my dream job, it was very demanding, but it was lucrative. Or so I thought, until I realized that new business people get fired often, since they are blamed for the agencies inability to win new business. Even though we rarely impact the creative work, client success, or even PR and marketing the agency chooses to do, all of which are critical to winning new business.

I spent years in jobs I disliked, where, as a woman in leadership, I was often treated badly. And I don’t have the financial results to show for it. If I’d known then that I’d end up here, I would have chosen a different career, one with less work, fewer hours, doing something that mattered where I could have worked comfortably past the age of 45.

I understood the illusion that capitalism would make me secure and provide for me in my old age was not reality many years ago. But the grief lingers. I wish I’d spent more time with my kids. The illusion still beckons. I’ve tried going back to agency jobs, hoping it would be different this time, but it never was.

Like many other Americans, I had an idea of my country that was an illusion. I’ve moved to new understandings of reality over the years. We talk, rightly, about the peril of a presidency that is undermining the Constitution and the rule of law. We try to make sense of an onslaught of executive orders that blatantly harm people of color, children, the elderly, the disabled, veterans, the poor. It is horrific, the cruelty seems to be the point.

But is it surprising? Is it unexpected that a country built on the genocide of indigenous peoples and the labor of enslaved people would elect a corrupt white male criminal over a qualified Black woman? He told us who he was and what he was going to do. We just didn’t believe him.

Plenty of us didn’t see this coming, we were still holding onto an illusion of the country we were taught about in school, the sanitized history that erased the Trail of Tears and the Tulsa Race Massacre.

What I don’t think we are owning, talking about, facing up to, is the grief that comes from the death of the illusion that we are better than this. We are not. This is not an aberration. This is the end result of a series of decisions and priorities made over hundreds of years.

It is intensely practical to understand what you are actually up against, where your enemy is vulnerable, how the system can be reformed, rebuilt. Reality is leverage, information, fuel, direction, the bedrock for an effective strategy.

So whether in your personal, professional or civic life, I invite you to do the hard important work of understanding reality. Process, metabolize and move through your own cocktail of grief, shame or whatever comes up for you, and use that as a starting point for the actions needed to recover from whatever ails you.

My book The Saint and the Drunk A Guide to Making the Big Decisions In Your Life comes out in May and is now available for pre-order in the U.S. Or pre-order here for the UK. Pre-orders really help.

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