How much of my mental life can I be responsible for?

I see myself as broadly responsible for my beliefs and behaviors and not responsible for my feelings at all. My day-to-day thoughts and activities can and often do proceed on autopilot, but I can intervene and change what I’m doing with focused attention. I can’t do that with my feelings - I can notice my feelings as they arise, and maybe take some actions that will help evoke new feelings in me, but I can’t immediately switch my feelings the way I can immediately switch what I’m thinking or doing. Maybe someday I’ll have such power, but as of now it’s more helpful for me to think of my feelings as neutral and organically-unfolding information rather than as something that’s a direct expression of my conscious intent.

I used to think that my beliefs weren’t things I was responsible for either - I saw my beliefs as true-or-false representations of reality, an expression of the noble truth-knowing capacity that separates humans from non-human animals. I saw my beliefs as being provided by reality in some sense - I saw the world as being defined and structured by human-legible concepts, and I thought you could discern those concepts directly by applying the proper methods or by doing the work of purging your own biases and irrationalities. I saw my beliefs as being forced to be what they were by the true state of the world, and I saw myself as having distinct rights and powers conferred upon me by my alignment with this all-powerful capital-T Truth. I saw the world clearly and it provided the concepts and arguments I needed to convert everyone to the Truth, to know myself as an anointed Truth-Warrior and as such to know myself as both good and strong.

This perception of myself as aligned with a greater power took a dark turn when I drank myself into a hole and thought that the greater power of Truth told me that I deserved to be there and that there was nothing I could do about it but keep on drinking. I thought that I was irredeemable scum and that that was that - I had beheld my Ultimate True Nature, my self as I am regardless of contexts and connections, and I was compelled by the facts to continue to see myself that way.

There was nothing in my immediate sphere of understanding to suggest that sobriety was possible for me, personally - my past and my present certainly did not suggest that a better life was possible. Getting there took something that was rather radical - I had to make the assertion first and then let the evidence for it show up afterwards. I wasn’t compelled to believe that sobriety was possible for me - in fact, it only became possible for me through the act of me saying so.

Taking responsibility for my beliefs opened up a whole new domain of empowerment and possibility for me. In doing so, it also did not somehow detach me from reality. I think that “reality” is something we’re always already helplessly in contact with, and that our beliefs are there to help us synthesize and strategize and better cope with our encounter with reality. My beliefs are there to help me meet my needs, which I am always already doing whether I want to do so or not. My beliefs that I was a piece of shit who deserved to suffer and couldn’t stop suffering even if I wanted to were there because they met some of my needs - my needs for clarity, for predictability, even for value and power. Condemning myself gives me psychological juice in the same way that condemning others gives me psychological juice, it makes me feel valuable because I’m at least better than someone, even if that someone is (paradoxically) me.

What’s helped me take responsibility for my beliefs has been explicitly prefacing statements with “I think” - it changes statements about “the world” to statements about myself. I don’t think it’s a selfish and self-centered thing to do - I see it as an expression of humility, an acknowledgement of my epistemic limitations. I also see it as creating the possibility of turning a tug-of-war over facts into an opportunity to connect with each other as human beings. Looking back at what I wrote here, it’s obvious that I don’t do it all the time - maybe enough to make a point of it, at least to myself.

My sober time has been a relentless quest to take as much responsibility for my beliefs as I can; not only by looking inward to see what needs I might be meeting by thinking the way that I do, but also by looking backward through history to see where the words and concepts that animate my inner life had their beginnings, to imagine what purposes they might have served then, to keep myself from letting my mental life fossilize into something that I confuse for something that is necessary, “natural”, and inevitable.

History may have led to the present, but it never pointed towards it - our collective human trajectory could always have gone differently, and it still can. The same, I think, can be said of my own story - no matter what happened to me and no matter how I got here, the future is something that I can create anew at any time. As tempting as it is to ruminate on what happened and think that it’s bound to happen again, I’ve gotten a lot more power and optimism out of seeing tomorrow as being wide open.