You Do Not Need Every Artifact

The ground is already yours. You can stop digging for permission.

The 35 Chains, The Past, essay 3 of 5. The whole series.

You have been digging for years. Maybe with a therapist, maybe with books, maybe alone at night with a notebook, going back over the same stretch of years with a brush and a trowel, uncovering one more fragment, holding it up to the light, adding it to the pile, and telling yourself that when the pile is complete you will finally understand, and when you finally understand you will be allowed to move. The pile is enormous now. You could give a lecture on your own childhood. You can trace the exact route by which a thing your mother said in 1987 became the way you go quiet in meetings, and none of that knowledge has moved you one foot forward, and some part of you is starting to suspect that it never will, and that suspicion frightens you more than the digging ever did, because if understanding is not the way out then you do not know what is.

The dig site is a familiar place to a great many people. And what I want to say, gently, to anyone standing in one, is that the work has been honest and much of it was necessary, and also that you have been waiting at the bottom of a hole for a permission slip that no amount of digging will ever produce, because the thing you are looking for is right where you are standing.

The archaeologist’s mistake

An archaeologist digs because the past is the point. Every shard matters to her because the shard is what she came for, and she will keep going until the site is exhausted, and that is right for her work. But you did not come to your life to catalog it. You came to live it. And somewhere the two projects got confused, and you started treating your own history as a site that had to be fully excavated before you could be certified to leave, as though a person were a dig and the dig had to close before the person could open.

Here is the thing that finally breaks the spell, usually on some ordinary afternoon, sitting at the edge of the hole with a notebook full of connections you could recite in your sleep: you do not need every artifact to know what the ground is made of. Pick up a handful of it. Feel the weight. You already know it is clay, you have known for years, and the thousandth shard will tell you it is clay again. The ground beneath your feet is you, and it was you before the first shard was buried in it, and it will be you after the last one is lifted out, and you can stand on it right now, without the report, without the final chapter, without the one memory you are sure is the key and have never been able to find.

You do not need every artifact to know what the ground is made of.

What the digging was for

The digging was for something, and it should not be dismissed. It was for safety. If you can explain the thing, you can predict it, and if you can predict it, maybe it will not happen again, and so understanding became a kind of armor, the more complete the safer. It was also for permission. Somewhere the idea took hold that you had to earn your way forward by fully accounting for the past, that moving on without the whole story would be dishonest, or naive, or a betrayal of the child who lived it. And often it was for company. The dig is familiar. Every wall of it is known. Climbing out means standing in open air where you do not yet know who you are, and the hole, for all its darkness, at least has the comfort of being thoroughly mapped.

None of those reasons are foolish. But look at what they cost. Years, first. Then the present, which kept happening above the hole the whole time, children growing, a body aging, the light changing across a room nobody was looking at. And finally the strangest cost, the one nobody warns you about: the more completely you understood the past, the more real it became, until the explanation grew more solid than the actual life, and you were living inside a very well researched account of a person instead of being one.

Climbing out

I want to tell you what it is like above the hole, because the fear of what is up there is what keeps most people digging.

The first thing you notice is that you do not fall apart. That was the secret terror, that without the full understanding to hold you together you would come undone, and it does not happen, because you were the one holding you together the whole time, whatever the understanding seemed to be doing. The second thing you notice is how much of the present had been going on without you. There is a whole life up here, and it was here the entire time, and it does not require a completed account of anything to let you in. A friend calls and you are simply glad, without first checking whether your gladness is a healthy pattern. Your kid says something funny at dinner and you laugh before you have finished analyzing why it landed. You wake up one morning and the first thought is about the day ahead instead of the years behind, and you almost do not recognize the feeling, and then you do. It is what other people call being alive.

And the past is still there. You can visit the dig any time you want. Some days you will, and you will find a shard you missed, and it will be interesting, the way an old photograph is interesting, and then you will climb back out and make dinner. The difference is that it is a place you go now, and not a place you live, and the ground you stand on up here, the ground that was always you, does not ask you to finish anything before it holds your weight.

You have understood enough. Put the trowel down. Look up. That light on the far wall of the room is the present, and it has been waiting for you with unreasonable patience, and it does not need to hear the whole story first.

Questions people ask

Do I need to fully understand my past before I can heal?

No. Understanding helps, and some of it is necessary, but a complete account of your history is not a requirement for standing in the present as yourself. Many people spend years assembling an explanation of who they are and find that it moves them nowhere, because the self they are looking for is the one doing the explaining.

Why does it feel dishonest or unsafe to move on without the whole story?

Because understanding was doing two jobs for you. It felt like armor, since what you can explain seems less likely to catch you off guard. And it felt like permission, as though you had to earn your way forward by accounting for everything behind you. Neither job actually requires completeness. You can be safe and honest with a partial account, and you can be present with no account at all.

What if there is one memory I have never been able to find?

The one you cannot find is the one that feels like the key, and it almost never is. The ground you are standing on is already known to you. A missing shard does not change what the ground is made of. Let the missing piece stay missing, and notice that your feet are still supported.

How do I know if I am stuck in the digging?

If you can explain your patterns fluently and nothing has changed. If you feel more real inside the explanation than inside your actual day. If the thought of stopping the analysis frightens you more than the material you are analyzing. Those are the signs that the dig has become a place you live rather than a place you go.

What does it feel like to stop?

Quieter and more ordinary than expected. You do not fall apart, which was the fear. The present turns out to have been going on the whole time, and it lets you in without a completed report. The past becomes a place you can visit, interesting the way old photographs are interesting, and then you come back up and make dinner.

The 35 Chains, The Past, essay 3 of 5. The whole series lives at jamestippins.com/35chains. The thirty-five statements it grew from, and the thirty-five that answer them, are at autonomycommission.com/chains. Many who read them find one that is theirs.

Part of The 35 Chains, essay 3 of 35. Next: The Contracts You Never Signed.