Author: Qiaochu Yuan

The Milky Way

~ Qiaochu Yuan ~ Leave a comment

(crossposted from Facebook, lightly edited)

When I was 20 or so, I saw a time-lapse video of a barbecue in Texas on YouTube. About halfway through, the Milky Way starts casually making its way across the sky. I was flabbergasted because I had never seen the Milky Way before in my life, and I thought you needed a telescope or something.

And then I realized: if the Greeks were able to name the Milky Way, it must’ve been visible to the naked eye for most of human history, and it was visible wherever this barbecue was in Texas. And the reason I had never seen it was because I had never been somewhere with low enough levels of light pollution.

When I realized this, I felt… well. Imagine being a character in a dystopian YA novel where they all live underground because of some terrible disaster. Somewhere, you’ve heard some rumors about this thing called “the Sun,” but it never seemed very interesting or important. And then one day someone smuggles a video to you. And you hit play. And you see something. And it’s bright. And it’s beautiful. And this whole time you didn’t know.

I felt a little bit like that. It was like part of my birthright as a human being had been taken from me.

● ● ●

This is the question that haunts me: what else is missing?

If there was something else beautiful, some other part of my human heritage, that was missing… how would I know? And what would I need to do to get it back?

I think about this question a lot. I have some ideas. Maybe you do too?

Meant for your tribe

~ Qiaochu Yuan ~ 2 Comments

(crossposted from Facebook)

Oh. Maybe attachment bonds were never meant for just your parents and your romantic partners. Maybe they were meant for your tribe.

● ● ●

When I was 10 or so, I gave up on my parents ever loving me in the way I wanted, and I poured all of my desire for love (and attachment, although I didn’t have that word at the time) into my desire for romantic relationships. I nurtured a series of hopeless crushes until I fell in love for the first time at 17, with someone who loved me too, and I was deliriously happy. But none of my relationships, including that one, have lasted for longer than 4 1/2 months, and all of them except one have ended the same way: at the slightest indication that my partner was pulling away, I freaked out and got incredibly anxious, which caused my partner to pull away even more, etc.

I was lucky enough to fall into an amazing and supportive group of friends during college, but in my senior year, I was hit by both a miserable trainwreck of a breakup and the prospect of leaving all of my friends for grad school. I thought I would be fine. I was not fine. I didn’t date anyone or make any close friends for 4 years. I was hopelessly lonely and I couldn’t even acknowledge that fact for years, let alone do anything about it.

All of that is on my mind as I say: imagine what it’s like to live in a world where the only people in your tribe are your romantic partners. If you’re monogamous, that means your tribe at any time consists of either one or two people, until you have children. When you’re in a relationship, the prospect of that relationship ending is the prospect of your tribe – your entire world – being cut in half, the prospect of being left completely alone. Serial monogamy is your fragile little tribe constantly dying and being reformed. Anxious attachment is being terrified by the risk of being abandoned by your entire tribe, and avoidant attachment is giving up on needing a tribe because of how shitty this whole process is.

I don’t know how many people live in this world. It’s incredibly isolating – a world where the only people you allow into your heart, the only people who you touch or are touched by lovingly, are your partners, who might be there and might not, who come and then might also go.

Polyamory can help – at least you can get more than two people in your tribe that way. But if you’re still conflating attachment bonds with romantic / sexual connection, you still face the agony of the well-being of your tribe being dependent on the health of romantic / sexual connections that can and do sour.

Here is another world I’ve been seeing the possibility of increasingly clearly lately. The most important feature of this world is that you have a tribe to whom you’re securely attached. You love and support each other. You touch each other. You sing and dance together. And sometimes, some of you explore romantic / sexual connection with each other. And if that gets rocky – when someone gets anxious or avoidant or some other kind of triggered – the attachment that the people involved have with everyone else in the tribe acts as a stabilizing and calming force. If your attachment to your tribe is secure enough, the prospect of a partner leaving you maybe feels less like the end of the world.

(And sometimes, some of you have children, and those children are raised by a tribe of people who are lovingly stabilizing and calming each other, instead of being at the mercy of a fragile little tribe of two…)

It hurts to think about this world, and how far away from it most people are. There are so many forces pushing against it: high school friends going to different colleges, college friends taking jobs in different cities, friends moving into their own apartments, couples living by themselves, the crushing burdens of late-stage capitalism… and, among so many other things, some sense that it’s a little weird to allow your friends to matter to you as much as or more than your partners.

That one, I think, is a little easier to do something about than the rest.

So, can I suggest an experiment? Think about the ways in which you open up to your partners. Try opening up in those ways to your friends. Try letting them matter and seeing if they’ll let you matter too. Try playing with them and seeing if they’ll play with you too. Imagine what could be possible, together.

Cover

~ Qiaochu Yuan ~ Leave a comment

(crossposted from Facebook and with apologies to Rent) 

Live in my house,
O seed of the goddess,
And I’ll be your shelter
From wind and from rain. 
Just pay me back,
The moment you flower,
With one thousand kisses
From one hundred mouths. 
Be my lover,
My mother, my daughter, my death,
And I’ll cover you.

Performing desire

~ Qiaochu Yuan ~ Leave a comment

(crossposted from Facebook)

I started seeing a sex therapist last April, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. I have a lot to say about that whole experience, but one thing that’s particularly come up for me lately in conversations is a session we did where we were cuddling and she asked me, playfully, “so what do you want to do?” and I had a clear experience of

  1. knowing the answer, which was “I actually just want to keep cuddling,”
  2. feeling embarrassed and a little ashamed of it, and
  3. noticing this and promoting it fully to conscious attention.

The narrative I absorbed growing up of what it meant to be a sexual man was that I was supposed to constantly want all these sexual things with women, and was supposed to just be waiting for yeses to immediately dive into doing all of them with gusto. But that has basically never been my experience. I also absorbed a narrative that men who expressed sexual desire were monsters, so I never felt safe even feeling sexual desire around women (as opposed to porn), let alone expressing it. My first clear experience of feeling sexual desire for a woman in front of me was a few months ago.

Before sex therapy, what I sometimes (often? I have no idea, honestly) did with partners was perform desire; touching them in ways that I thought would make them feel desired, because if I didn’t then they’d feel bad and I would have failed in my role as a loving partner. And it’s not that I didn’t know that this dynamic existed, but I only knew it as a thing that happened to women; I had never heard a man describe it happening to them. (Actually growing up I never heard a male friend describe any sexual problems whatsoever. It was just not something any of us ever talked about.)

Closely related, for me, is performing dominance. I have a history of being attracted to submissive women but having no idea how to dominate them because I had absorbed all these narratives around male dominance being toxic. The result, as far as I can tell, was that I faked it and I didn’t make it. I experimented with choking and hair pulling and none of it really felt like it was coming from a real place in me; I was doing it to make my partners happy and that’s about it. And based on conversations I’ve been having recently I’m not alone in this.

Anyway, I hereby consign all of this to the flames. I release performance and the narratives that give rise to it. There’s so much more richness and vulnerability and beauty available in the moment-to-moment dance of physical connection with another human being.

My sex therapist and I ended up cuddling for another 10 minutes or so and it felt great.

France

~ Qiaochu Yuan ~ Leave a comment

(crossposted from Facebook)

Awhile ago I asked you all how you felt about people sharing good things that happen to them on Facebook, because I was worried about it making other people feel bad. The general response I got was that people wanted me to feel like I could celebrate the good things in my life (and thank you for that!), especially if I didn’t try to hide the bad things. So here’s a good thing that happened to me:

● ● ●

Yesterday I got back from a 5-day party / festival at a castle in France, where I stayed in the fanciest room in the castle with two lovely friends. I had somewhere around 11 of the most beautiful and emotional experiences of my entire life (I wrote them down and counted) with some really incredible people. I talked a lot, about the things that matter the most to me, and people listened. Some of them cried. Some of them held me while I cried. I might’ve cried more in the last few days than I had in the previous 20 years.

I can’t remember the last time I felt this open in the heart and relaxed in the stomach. I feel very grateful and very energized. It was clear in France that all the work I’ve been doing on myself over the last year and a half has made a huge difference for me, and that’s really renewed my confidence in my sense of the gifts I have to offer.

● ● ●

I feel embarrassed about saying all that. I’m worried it will come across as… competitive? I’m nervous about participating in the social media game around talking about how good your life is and, y’know, posting photos from castles in France and so forth.

A lot of what I’ve been sharing on Facebook lately is my thoughts and feelings around topics like relationships, and that feels a lot better to me to share because I feel like I’m helping people see things in their own lives more clearly. I’m less sure whether this kind of sharing helps people and it has me feeling uncomfortable.

So, in the interest of not hiding the bad things, which feels better to me: a big part of my experience at this event was feeling intimidated by a lot of the attractive women there (a lot less intimidated than I would have been a year or two ago, but still). I could have tried to talk to them and get to know them and mostly didn’t because I was afraid they would dismiss me based on my physical appearance, which I’m still pretty insecure about, especially because there were also a lot of attractive men around. It’s hard for me to feel attractive as a kinda nerdy-looking asian guy with glasses in a sea of attractive white people.

One of the beautiful things that happened was that some lovely people ran an event called “Literally Blind Dating” where we were all blindfolded and ran through connection exercises involving talking and touching in pairs without knowing what anyone looked like. I ended up really connecting with one of the women I was paired with, and one of the other beautiful things that happened was that I cried a lot in her arms while she told me how beautiful l was. I cannot express how badly I needed that. I’m still getting teary-eyed thinking about it.

Okay, having said all that, I feel a lot better about sharing this now. I’d be very curious to hear feedback from all of you about all of that!

Love stories

~ Qiaochu Yuan ~ Leave a comment

(crossposted from Facebook)

I used to maintain a really rigid separation between friendships and romantic relationships, and was confused and made vaguely uncomfortable by people who seemed more able to smoothly interpolate between the two, even just people who were able to cuddle casually with people that I couldn’t tell if they were dating or not.

In retrospect, I think I interpreted any interaction in a romantic direction as something like a promise to play out the full plot of a love story, so going in that direction and then stopping or retreating felt like a huge rejection to me. I wasn’t even able to send people messages on OkCupid because of this. There was something deeply important to me about playing out the full plot of a love story; I think there was a kind of safety I only felt if I thought I was on track to someone falling in love with me and staying in love with me.

But in fact every time I thought someone would stay in love with me I’ve been wrong. The safety I’ve looked for in that narrative has never actually been there. And being so caught up in the narrative made it harder for me to see what was actually happening in my relationships, and made it harder for me to see my partners for who they were rather than for who I needed them to be in my love story.

These days I’ve been looking more carefully at the narratives I have around love, and trying to take them as object. And on the one hand I feel a lot of freedom now to explore romantic and sexual flavors of relating outside the boundaries of my narratives. It feels exciting and growthy. But on the other hand I feel unmoored. Outside of the stability and comfort my narratives promise I am directly confronting not knowing what I can expect from people, and not knowing how our relationships will grow and change as we grow and change, and I feel scared and anxious about that. I’m still learning to sit with all of this.

Nourishment

~ Qiaochu Yuan ~ Leave a comment

(crossposted from Facebook)

So, maybe you went to a workshop or something recently and learned something that could really enrich your life and the lives of the people around you – the importance of emotional honesty, for example. You’re excited, and you want to tell everyone about it. How might that look?

It might look like judgment. “Everyone is so fake. What we need is more honesty and realness!” I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel encouraged to try new things when people start out by telling me how bad I am.

It might look like advice. “The next time you’re in a conflict with someone, just open up about yourself!” I think people dramatically underestimate how hard it is to give good advice that people will actually use; what’s easier is to fall into a familiar pattern of what advice sounds like.

It might look like abstraction. “When people are really honest with each other, incredible things can happen!” But there’s something about this that’s hard to grab onto.

All of this is fine and I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do it. I like hearing people be excited. But there’s something that each of these responses have in common I want to talk about. It’s like they all create a kind of distance between me and you. This is clearest with judgment; when you judge me, you’re placing yourself above me. But advice and abstraction also create distance; you’re placing yourself in the role of a teacher to my student.

That was abstraction just now, so I’ll get a little closer. I’ll tell you what I want: what I want is for you to get a little closer to me too.

When you come across a stunted tree in the forest, you might dream of making it healthier and stronger. But you’re not going to get there by judging the tree for being stunted, or giving it advice about how to grow, or talking to it about how amazing growth is. What you can do instead is nourish the tree. You can keep its soil rich with nutrients. You can help it get enough water. You can show it the sun. And the tree can grow, and how it grows is not up to you, and that’s okay.

That was advice. (I don’t want to go all the way back to judgment.) I’ll try to get a little closer again: I cherish the part of you that wants to share what you learned to make everything better. I hope you cherish it too. I hope you keep looking for what nourishes you, and keep learning how to offer nourishment to the people around you too.

Pain in school

~ Qiaochu Yuan ~ Leave a comment

(crossposted from Facebook)

I proctored a linear algebra midterm yesterday. The professor and I talked for a bit about the surprisingly high number of students who couldn’t make it because they were sick. Other than possible fakes (they definitely weren’t all fakes, one of my students had a doctor’s note saying he had developed a nerve problem), my sense was that the students just felt susceptible to being sick to me, because of how stressed out / burnt out / depressed they were.

I had a conversation with a student in office hours a few weeks ago which started out with her asking me how to do a homework problem and ended with her telling me that she came to UC Berkeley because it was the most prestigious school she got into and she thought she could handle the math program, but she kept running into things she couldn’t understand in the course, didn’t have much extra time to study, couldn’t afford a tutor, and overall felt like she was maybe too stupid to do math after all, and also maybe she was stupid for not listening to one of her teachers who told her not to go to UC Berkeley. My heart broke. I didn’t know what to tell her or how to help her.

When I feel into what my students are feeling, none of it feels good. Stress. Anxiety. Nervousness. Fear. A sense of not knowing what to do or what their place in the world is. A disconnection from their power. Shrinking away. It hurts to stay with them because I don’t know how to help them; I can’t do it for too long.

I want to tell them that it doesn’t have to be this way. That if they actually understood the insane structure of the game they’re killing themselves to try to win, they’d burn the whole thing to the ground in a night. That they were meant for greater things than sitting hunched over, still as the dead, at 6pm on a Wednesday in a crowded classroom.

My favorite moment of the midterm by far was the moment that it ended. The students came alive again. Suddenly it felt like I was in a room that had people in it.

I hope they had fun last night. I hope they laughed and cried and loved each other. I hope they don’t lose sight of how important that is.

Pain on Facebook

~ Qiaochu Yuan ~ 1 Comment

(crossposted from Facebook)

I’ve been posting a lot of darker stuff about pain and trauma lately, and I’m grateful to all of you for your responses to it. I hope people aren’t worried that I’ve been in a lot of pain lately (although that would be okay); actually this past month has been one of the most joyful in my entire life (and once I understand how that happened I’ll try to write about it too).

I’ve been focusing on pain for a few reasons. One, because it helps me understand and heal myself. Two, because I think there’s a hell of a lot of unacknowledged pain out there, especially male pain, and I hope me publicly naming and holding it can help some of you understand and heal yourselves, too. Three, because I’m done with not saying what I want to say.

But four is specific to the dynamics of Facebook: in the same way that I think talking about pain here can be healing, I worry that talking about joy can be harmful. I worry that it reminds people of what they don’t have in a way that’s not healing, especially the further they are from me socially. And I worry that there’s already an imbalance of people talking about their joy but hiding their pain, which I want to rebalance.

I’m left genuinely unsure about how, if at all, to celebrate the joys in my life publicly on Facebook. I’d be curious to hear opinions, especially from people who do feel hurt by reading about all the good things happening to their friends (message me if you don’t want to write about this in public). Thanks in advance for any contributions.

 

A portrait of a man in pain

~ Qiaochu Yuan ~ 1 Comment

(crossposted from Facebook)

(Written after Day 1 of volunteering at the Authentic Man Program.)

A man craves love, desperately, the way a bird craves the sky. But a man’s life is barren of love. The men around him are afraid of loving him and each other; they have never been shown how. The women worry about him, but it’s not the same, or there aren’t any. He dates, or not, but it doesn’t last. If love stumbles its way into a man’s life, unexpected and sublime, he gropes at it clumsily and it slips through his fingers.

A man, thinking of love, feels fear. A man feels grief. A man feels despair. A man feels rage. All of these are unacceptable, and so he disowns them. Who could love a man’s face made ugly by fear, or grief, or despair, or rage? Who could love so much pain in a man? A man locks away his fear, his grief, his despair, and his rage, and sinks them as deep in the ice as he can.

A man wanders through his life, frozen and alone. A man finds it easy to keep doing this. In time his pain can become a distant memory. He can take comfort in the ice. But he is unsatisfied (being unsatisfied is acceptable) about something.

One day a man might follow his dissatisfaction back to the ice. A man might stare at the ice. A man might take a deep breath, and blow out slowly onto the ice. A man might see the ice begin to melt. A man might be scared shitless of the flood to come.

And so the work begins.