Brain Food #860: On being left out

There is power in saying yes to yes, in how it fosters openness through vulnerability, breaking us out of our safe yet stifling shells. But sometimes, hearing no is inevitable. Doors will close, paths will get erased, dreams will be deferred. A world is made out of the yes, but is not filled with it.

A no is, by default, exclusionary—it leaves us out of the story. But that could also be because that story wasn’t ours in the first place.

As Rilke wrote in The Beholder:

“Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.”

In his book Giving Up, despite the misleadingly defeatist title, British psychotherapist Adam Phillips outlines how the act of being left out can be a regenerative one:

“Exclusion may involve the awakening of other opportunities that inclusion would make unthinkable. If I’m not invited to the party, I may have to consider what else I want: the risk is that being invited to the party does my wanting for me, that I might delegate my desire to other people’s invitations. Already knowing, or thinking we know, what we want is the way we manage our fear of freedom. Wanting not to be left out may tell us very little about what we want, while telling us a lot about how we evade our wanting.”

After all, it is only when something is lost that most stories can begin. The fundamentals of storytelling suggest that every story starts with a character who wants something they can’t get.

“Once there has been an exclusion, a catastrophic loss, the story can begin. We only start out after being left out.”

Some decades earlier, the American psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis wrote about the importance of constraint in finding one’s freedom—perhaps the freedom Phillips suggests we tend to run away from by thinking we know what we want—in his book How People Change:

“For if he knows the constraint and nothing else, if he thinks ‘Nothing is possible,’ then he is living his necessity; but if, perceiving the constraint, he turns from it to a choice between two possible courses of action, then—however he choose—he is living his freedom. This commitment to freedom may extend to the last breath.”

In the lonely woods of Walden, Henry David Thoreau reflected on being lost as a way ...