Finding Beauty in Limitations: The Art of Living Fully with Esme Wang

Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer  01:45

hi Esme, welcome to the show.

Esme Wang  01:47

Thank you so much for having me. We’re

Eric Zimmer  01:49

going to be discussing your sub stack called the unexpected shaped newsletter. We might discuss one of your older books, the collected schizophrenias, and we’ll kind of just see where this conversation goes in general, but before we go into all that, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, and they think about it for a second, and they look up at their grandparent and they say, Well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I think that

Esme Wang  02:38

parable is fascinating because you can look at it from kind of a macro level or a more micro level. In the macro level, it’s like, all right, what kind of life am I going to live? Am I going to live a good one or a bad one? And then by the time we die, and if you believe in the pearly gates, you reach the pearly gates, and then they declare you have lived a good life, or you have lived a bad life, and then in your obituary, the headline is, Esme was bad, or Esme was good. And the other way to look at it, which I think is also as interesting, if not more interesting, is the micro version, which is in every single tiny thing we do in the day, whether it’s deciding to let someone cross the street while you’re driving, or it’s, you know, walking by a houseless person on the sidewalk and deciding what to do in that Moment. And I think that it’s easy in some ways, to look at the macro view, but it’s very challenging to look at every single tiny moment in the micro view. And so I think that there is the great battle in our lives between the two wolves, in my view, but there are also millions, if not trillions, of battles between the two wolves all our lives. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  04:06

and I think you could argue to some extent, the micro is what makes the macro right. It’s all those 1000s of choices we make that add up to the bigger narrative of what our life has been. And I often think about that same thing that you’re describing, which is this sense that every moment and every choice matters, and how do I not get freaked out by that?

Esme Wang  04:33

Yeah, and I also think that things can change in our lives that will make us more likely to make one choice or the other. So there is a quote from the two kinds of decay by Sarah manguso, which I read when I first started getting really sick. And she says something like, when you become very ill, you either become a huge jerk, or you become more open and kind. I thought about that a lot when I was spending those years very ill, because I found that for me, my tendency was to become more open and kind and to think about what everybody else was experiencing when I encountered different people during my days, whether that be online or the few times I went outside. And as I’ve come out of the years where I was more sick and more unable to do things, I’ve found myself wondering, Am I becoming more closed now and more self focused now that I am feeling better? Am I becoming more selfish? Has there been another change in the choices that I choose to make because of what’s happened in my life? And of course, like in the last few years, my husband also developed cancer, so I was not only looking at my own illness, but also at his so a lot of things have changed, but I do think that there are things that happen in our lives that may push us one way or the other, like the tides.

Eric Zimmer  06:07

Yeah, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and asking people on this show a version of the question you just raised, which is, why does adversity seem to for certain people become something that grows their character in some way, shape or form. And when does adversity just break or embitter people? What causes that difference? And I don’t think there’s any clear answers, but I feel like you’ve alluded to this before, which is support is part of that answer.

Esme Wang  06:42

Yeah. And it actually reminds me of a quote that is from the book happy baby. It’s actually the epigraph, and I can’t remember where the quote is from, but I bring it up in part because it also has to do with canines. It has to do with dogs, and it’s about how x out of x, like number of dogs, when badly beaten, will become violent and rage against people and will bite, and maybe one or two of those dogs will become very coward and will hide and be afraid of people for the rest of their lives. And so there is a part of me that thinks, Okay, well, maybe there is some kind of nature element to it. In addition to the nurture, there could be something that makes a person more likely to respond to adversity in one way or another, but yeah, I don’t really know what that formula is, and I have talked to other people who have experienced severe illness or trauma, and found that it did make them closed up and bitter and mean. And I see it in my life. I see that happen to people, and I think while there is a small amount of making a decision at one point to be like, Okay, well, this has happened to me, so I’m going to make a decision. There is another aspect that is the voice in your head, kind of tapping on the shoulder, saying, what choice am I going to make today? There was this one time when I was taking lots and lots of medical tests, and my husband and I had just gotten back from the neurologist, and we’d gotten some pretty bad news, and we were very upset, and we went to Whole Foods because it was a place where we could get these supplements that the doctor said we were supposed to get. And so we were at Whole Foods, and we saw these people walking around, and I saw my husband bump into someone in front of us, and he didn’t notice at all, and he just kept walking. And the person he bumped into became very angry. I could see him become very angry. And I thought to myself, My husband is one of the most thoughtful people I know. I’m the person who will, like, burst out of elevators or burst into elevators without really considering what’s happening, or, like, making sure people come out first. He’s the one who pays more attention to things, but he’s so worried about me in this moment that he isn’t as careful as he usually is. And then my next thought was, well, I don’t know what’s going on with this guy who is very upset with my husband in this moment. Maybe I don’t know why this was the story I came up with, but I was like, maybe he can’t afford anything at Whole Foods. Maybe he just comes here once a week and he walks around and looks at the things that he can’t afford and dreams about affording them one day. And because of that today, having my husband bump into him was particularly galling. And so I think that was a really interesting thing to have happen during that time. And when I shared this story online, somebody responded with, I’m reading this while I’m in the parking lot of a Whole Foods, and I’m going to be thinking about this when I go inside. So it kind of had this. Effect to the people reading it. But yeah, I think about that a lot, like, what makes us consider other people when we might not otherwise? Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  10:09

I don’t know the answer to what allows us to consider other people, and I think it’s a really interesting story that you told, because so much of what we do is we attribute things to people, right? You were able to attribute to your husband like he’s just really stressed out, so he did this right? And then you were able to make an attribution towards the other gentleman. Now, again, we don’t know how accurate or not, but it was an attribution of goodwill, though, to some degree, right? It was that there was a reason that he might be so angry. Yeah,

Esme Wang  10:45

I think I could have thought at one point in my life like, Gosh, what a mean spirited person who’s not willing to be open hearted, and to look at my husband, who might be going through a hard time, I think, to realize that we are all going through a hard time. We don’t know what everybody is going through. That’s something that I definitely learned when I was the most ill. So

Eric Zimmer  11:08

let’s talk about your illness, if you’re okay with it. So you wrote the book The collected schizophrenias, which was a collection of essays that documented your struggle with schizoaffective disorder, and later in that book, you are starting to talk a little bit about PTSD. You’re exploring Lyme disease. I know, as you’ve gone on, you’ve been looking at other conditions. Can you just give us maybe an overview of how you see your health now, what your challenges are, yeah, and how that’s changed over time.

Esme Wang  11:42

Yeah, it’s so funny. So among writers, there’s this general understanding that in the New York Times Book Review, most reviews are generally positive, and then at the very end, we’ll take a slight turn toward the negative. And so it ends with this kind of, like, more negative thing. It’s like the opposite of a compliment sandwich, you know, just to have it not be a complete rave. And what mine was was a generally very open and interested review, a positive review. And at the very end, the negative thing was that I perhaps did not understand what was going on with my health, and that even though I believed at the time that I was dealing with late stage Lyme disease, that I would probably change my mind about that in the next few years. And I thought that was so interesting when the review came out, it actually made me kind of upset, because I had gone through years of treatment. At that point, I was doing like automated hemotherapy, where I was having my blood removed and ozonated and pumped back into my body, and I was doing all of these different kinds of injections and IVs, and I had gotten treatment in different states and different clinics, and I was thinking to myself, how does this writer know anything about what’s going on with my health and then over the next few years? Well, to back up a little bit in the book, I do acknowledge that I’m not completely sure about the late stage Lyme diagnosis. It was a diagnosis that was controversial and continues to be controversial. It’s not recognized by the CDC. A lot of the doctors who diagnose people with chronic Lyme are seeing these patients after the patients have already gotten all the tests they could and seen all the doctors they could, and are still desperate because they’re very ill. And I do think now, even though I wouldn’t put my foot down on it and say like this is the exact right answer, I would say that a lot of people, because they are very desperate when they’re very sick, will end up trying anything and accepting any diagnosis, because what else are you going to do? And so even if I didn’t 100% believe in the late stage Lyme diagnosis, I was willing to take, you know, 50 kinds of supplements, and I was willing to go to all kinds of oddball clinics, you know, like around the country. And by the time I started to get a little bit better, and then a lot better. So by the time the book actually came out, the collected Schizophrenia has actually came out in 2019 I will say that I was probably past the worst of the years of my physical illness. And I started thinking, what does this mean, and what can I attribute my getting better to? I think that at this point, you know, five years later, I would say that a lot of my problems stemmed from chronic and complex trauma, and this is some. Thing that my original psychiatrist has suggested, which upset me a great deal, because I thought she was implying that it was all in my head, that it was some form of hysteria. But I’m learning more about how complex PTSD, which is not in the DSM or the Bible of mental illnesses, but it is generally accepted as a real thing and and the the difference, just to say really quickly, between that and regular PTSD is regular PTSD is generally one large traumatic event that then causes symptoms. And complex PTSD is an ongoing series of traumas that then kind of form who you are and can cause PTSD symptoms, but generally is more of a thing that will form who you are. And so I learned this even more because I ended up going through a five month autism assessment toward the beginning of this year, and at the end, the doctor said, what I think you have is schizoaffective disorder and complex PTSD, and I think that the combination of those things has created in you almost the equivalent of an autism diagnosis, but from a different angle or from a different source. And so I’ve started to learn more about the autonomic nervous system and how much is affected by trauma. And a lot of my problems to begin with, were all related to dysautonomia, which is why, at this point, when I’m discussing my physical ailments, I generally just call it chronic illness. If I really have to call it something, I’ll call it dysautonomia and fibromyalgia, because those are two diagnoses that I have received, and those are diagnoses that are generally more accepted by the medical profession, but it’s an ongoing conversation with myself and might end up being more of the topic of my next book, which will be a nonfiction book, The one I’m working on right now as a novel. But yeah, these are the things I think about. I

Eric Zimmer  17:11

would be remiss in my job if I did not ask you to share one of the autism tests that you were given. The one

Esme Wang  17:19

that I found really interesting was that he said, This is the gold standard for autism evaluation. And he brought me a baggie, and it had a bunch of items in it, and I looked at the items, which he dumped out on the table, and I was like, you’ve got to be joking. So like inside was a paper clip. Let’s see what else like, a block, a piece of string. Anyway, it just had, like, a bunch of assorted things. And he said, Okay, well, with these items, make a at least one to three minute television commercial. And I was like, Are you kidding? This is the gold standard for autism evaluation and and he was like, yeah, oh, okay, I have to mention one other item that was in there that I found hilarious. It was this miniature pair of spectacles made out of wire. I ended up thinking about it very long. I used to be an aspiring sketch comedy person, and so I just came up with something off the cuff and really hammed it up. But yeah, that was fascinating. Another thing that I had no idea was a part of the autism evaluation was the academic evaluation, which was asking me questions that I would have known back when I was in school, such as, how far is the sun from the earth? And I really didn’t remember a lot of those things, but yeah, it was, it was fascinating. I

Eric Zimmer  18:49

was struck as I was reading that first that the test you just described made me laugh out loud. What I was struck by, Though interestingly, was how thorough that that screening process is and how quickly in other cases, diagnoses are made. Well,

Esme Wang  19:07

not only are diagnoses made very quickly for some people, but also there’s been this very large movement towards self diagnosis. And so there are a lot of people now, especially on places like Tumblr and Tiktok and Instagram that are saying you’re okay to diagnose yourself. And while I understand where this impulse is coming from, and I do agree with it in a lot of ways, in that you know, if you feel like this diagnosis is helping you, if it helps you come up with workarounds for your life, or ways to live a life that is easier for you. Also, not everyone can afford an autism diagnosis. I did not have to pay for my evaluation because it was part of my HMO. But a lot of people are paying 1000s of dollars for these evaluations. But yeah, some people when they heard about. My five month long experience, and in part, it was five months long because I have so many other confounding factors. I have different diagnoses. I have the schizoaffective disorder. I have the trauma. They really wanted to be certain, or at least, this particular doctor wanted to be really certain when he was making the evaluation. And when I read the report, I was astounded by how thorough it was. It was a very thorough and very lengthy report, and when I wrote about it, a lot of people reached out to me to say my evaluation was not nearly as long. And there are places that you can pay, like, quite a lot of money, and you go online and you do this evaluation, it’s pretty quick, and then you can get a result. So I think there’s a spectrum of ways to get diagnosed or not diagnosed.

21:02

Foreign,

Eric Zimmer  21:09

you mentioned that the recent non autism diagnosis said that they thought schizoaffective disorder along with complex PTSD, was kind of what’s happening. So I’d like to go back to the book that you wrote, The collected schizophrenia. And there was a couple of things in there that really struck me. And one of the things that really struck me was you talking about, I’m just going to read a little bit of what you said. You said, it’s one thing to be able to say I saw blood dripping down the walls, or the landlord has installed cameras in my apartment. But it’s another to talk about how it feels under the skin to see and believe things that aren’t real. And I was wondering if you could just share some of that with us, because I’ve never read that type of description before. Yeah, I

Esme Wang  21:59

actually wish I kept a copy of the book on my desk, which I don’t because I would read a little bit of what I was talking about. But what I meant basically was the sensation of losing your sense of reality, and not just the actual belief or the thing you’re seeing or hearing, but the actual creepy crawly sensation at one point, I describe it as being in a pitch black room with no sight of where to put your foot on the next step. I think I also talk about crossing a wall that bucks you to and fro and won’t throw you back again, things like that. That was actually one of the reasons I wanted to be a writer, or at least wanted to be a writer that wrote about mental illness in this particular way, because I found that I was not satisfied as someone who has experienced psychosis and continues to periodically experience psychosis, I’d not read about what the actual sensations, the under the skinness was like. And I found it a great challenge, great both meeting big and also terrific challenge to be a writer and to try and make it something that people could parse even if they hadn’t experienced it themselves. We was

Eric Zimmer  23:22

thinking about potentially reading part of what you wrote. Can I just read a little of it? Yeah, yeah, of course. So it would be better in your voice, but listeners will get by with hearing it in my voice. You say, the more I consider the world, the more I realize that it’s supposed to have a cohesion that no longer exists, or that it is swiftly losing either because it’s pulling itself apart, because it has never been cohesive, because my mind is no longer able to hold the pieces together, or, most likely, some jumbled combination of the above. And then you also say, after the prodromal phase, I settle into a way of being that is almost intolerable, and so I just thought both of those sort of spoke to how terrifying and unsettling this experience is, where you realize that this is starting to happen again. Yeah,

Esme Wang  24:20

there is a phase where things are starting to fall apart, and I don’t quite know it, although, if I were to step back, I would realize, Oh, you’re starting to cling really closely to your rituals and routines. Oh, you’re starting to write down more about the details of the day than you normally do, or Oh, you’re reading a lot more self help books than you normally do. But once I cross into areas of stronger psychosis, I kind of lose that insight, and I am less able to believe what should be. Unbelievable, or believe the real

Eric Zimmer  25:01

you said you still do continue to have times of being in psychosis. Yeah,

Esme Wang  25:06

it usually happens when I’m very stressed. The last time I experienced a more prolonged period, and it still wasn’t as long as it used to be, since I started taking Haldol, which I mentioned in the book, I have had far fewer symptoms than I used to but in about 2022 I did have symptoms for some days, and yeah, I probably will go on to have symptoms here and there for the rest of my life, but it certainly is much better now than it used to be, and these days I’m actually grappling much more with complex PTSD. So yeah, life is a rich tapestry, and things are always changing. I’ve

Eric Zimmer  25:52

said before about me and my depression that one of the things that has happened is gotten better at being depressed over the years, like when it comes on, I know how to do it better than I used to. Is the same thing true for psychosis? Can you do it better, or is the break so extreme that there’s no real way that, like your previous experience informs your later experience?

Esme Wang  26:17

I tend to experience with any kind of mental health issue, whether that be depression or mania or psychosis, something that I call phase blindness, which I would say is the biggest challenge for me when I’m dealing with these things. And I do wonder if it’s something that you deal with and is something that you are better at grappling with when you say that you are getting better at being depressed, and what phase blindness is this is just a term I made up myself. This is not, not an official psychiatric term, but what it means to me is being unable to think of a world outside of whatever phase you’re in. So when you’re depressed, never being able to imagine the sensation of not being depressed, being like I’ve been depressed my whole life. What are you talking about? Just like, I’ve never been happy, or when I’m in psychosis, like, Oh, this is just the world, like, I’ve just been psychotic all this time, and it will never not be psychosis. And so I think in some ways it’s the face blindness that’s the real trick of it, because being in it means that that’s here forever, and that’s your always. You’ve always been like

Eric Zimmer  27:24

that. That’s a great term for it, phase blindness. Because I feel like, if I were to give depression qualities, you know, like that would be one of its qualities, is this sense you’ve always been this way, you always will be this way. And I do think that is what I’ve gotten better at doing. I’ve gotten better at going, that’s not true. That’s not true. Yeah, I’ve described before, sometimes with depression, that I sometimes treat it a little bit like, I call it the emotional flu. And what I mean by that is, like, I’ve got a cold right now, you can hear in my voice, and so for a couple days, I’m going to rest a little bit more, and I’m going to take some vitamin C, and I’m going to try and take care of myself, but I’m not going to make much out of it. I will recognize like, yeah, I feel crappy, but that’s part of this thing, and it’s going to pass.

Esme Wang  28:13

This is not a holistic statement of who I am as a human being. And

Eric Zimmer  28:17

so it’s easy to do with a cold. It’s far harder to do, I think, with a mental health condition, but that’s part of what I think I’ve learned to do a little bit more, is go, okay. We don’t need to suddenly think that the world has gone wrong and that your life has been wasted, and everything you’ve done up till now doesn’t mean anything. And you’ve always felt this way, and you always will feel that way. I’ve gotten better at just going, okay, just relax, take care of yourself. For a little bit, this is going to pass. I know it doesn’t seem like it’s going to pass, but it will. And maybe it’s going through enough cycles of it, I don’t know. Yeah,

Esme Wang  28:50

I think something that’s helped me with that issue is that I keep very detailed records. So like, I keep basically, like, half hour by half hour records of every day, and I do it in a planner. And so it’s easier for me to physically turn the pages of the planner and say, Hey, you feel right now, very bad and sad and anxious, and you feel like this is how you’ve always felt and how you always well feel, but look, not that long ago, five days ago, you actually went to an event and you had a good time. It says right here, I was happy and I had a good time. And so you are proving yourself wrong here because you wrote that that happened. And so I think that’s very helpful for me. And then for longer periods of not feeling well or struggling with mental health issues. Then again, I can turn back. I can go okay. So it is true, the last three months have been really hard. But if you turn back to like the very beginning of the year, or like the very ending of last year, or even, like 2020 One there was this time when you were having quite a few good months that you have forgotten about. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  30:06

it’s great to be able to go back and look at that. Let’s change directions now a little bit. And one of the things that you do on your sub stack, the unexpected shape newsletter is you say that you provide inspiration for ambitious people living with limitations, such as chronic illness, caretaking, responsibilities and or disability. And one of the things that comes through your sub stack and came through your book also is that you are, by nature, a fairly ambitious person. You are a person who likes to do and create and make, and yet you have faced significant limitation in doing that, and so I thought we could explore that topic for a while. Both, what does it mean to be ambitious? Is this a good or a bad thing? And how when you are limited more than you would like, do you make peace with not being able to do all that you wish you could? Yeah, so

Esme Wang  31:01

this is a really big topic for me, as you can probably tell. So the kind of name that my company goes under, or my business goes under is the unexpected shape, and that comes from a story that I heard from a friend about her father’s analogy of a baseball diamond. And I’m not a big sports person, so I can’t tell you that much about baseball, but I feel like this works pretty well. So with the baseball diamond, there’s the certain shape of the baseball diamond, but there are also the rules of baseball. So you hit the ball and then you run from first to third to second to home, if you’re lucky. Now possibly it would be easier for you to win if you could just run from first to third to home, or from first directly back to home, and then score that way. But that’s not how the game of baseball is played, right? And so I look at limitations as kind of like the borders of the diamond or the rules of baseball. So we all have these unexpected shapes in our lives. We don’t know what the shapes will be when we’re born. We don’t know how they’ll change as we grow, but as we are living through life, it’s one thing to call them limitations, but I could also call them just boundaries, like they’re just the boundaries of the lives that we’re living, and part of the quote, unquote game, even though that can sound like a flippant way of putting it, is to live your life with those boundaries and within those boundaries. So one thing that I like to teach in terms of living with limitations, because limitations are frustrating, and I live with a lot of them, such as chronic fatigue is workarounds. So I started writing the collective schizophrenia, pretty much entirely on my iPhone, and I wrote basically the whole thing on an iPhone or an iPad, because I used to sit at my desktop and write for hours at a time, you know, like all day, really. And I did that with my first book, but with my second book, I couldn’t do that because I was too tired. I lay in bed all day. So I found that what I would do is I would tap out the draft of the book using one finger on the drafts app, and that’s a workaround. I mean, it might not be as fast as typing on your laptop, but it certainly is better than nothing. And so I think that one thing we can do is look at our limitations and see what our workarounds could possibly be. And our workarounds may also be based on resources. So we can look at our resources, maybe your resource is money, maybe your resource is community. If your resource is money, maybe you can pay someone to clean your home once a month. If your resource is community, you can barter something that you do for your friends for something they can do for you that’s harder for you to do based on your limitations or your boundaries. And so, yeah, I spend a lot of time thinking about what limitations mean, especially if you are ambitious. And to speak of ambition, I think also my thoughts on ambition have changed over the last few years. I actually pitched my next two books. So the next book that comes out is a novel called soft creatures, and the book after that will be a non fiction book, but I am not entirely sure at this point what it’ll be, but it was going to be about being ambitious and living with limitations, but I have seen in the five years since I signed that two book deal, that society’s relationship with the word ambition has changed a lot. It is actually, I think, more of a dirty word, especially among the more liberal leaning community or the leftist leaning community, than it used to be, because it implies. Is work and drudgery and capitalism and not protecting yourself and your health in so many things that have become more valued in recent years. And so I’ve been wondering to myself, like is a book about being ambitious and living with limitations? Is that something that I even want to write anymore? But I think that these are all challenging ideas that I’ve certainly been thinking about, and I bet other people have too you.

Eric Zimmer  35:54

I have seen a change in culture around the word ambition, I think, and for many of the reasons that you’ve said, I think there’s a sense that if we are working hard for something, that it’s because either we are shallow or capitalist or all the things that you said, and I don’t necessarily buy that the same way that people used to say, like nobody says on their deathbed, like, I wish I’d spent more time in the office. And on one hand, I believe there’s obviously a lot of truth in a statement like that, and yet, for people whose work feels really important and meaningful to them, you very well might have wished that you had put more time and energy into whatever this thing was that you were bringing to the world. I was also thinking about a term that you used. You posted a picture of a bird. You’ve been sketching birds every day, and you said I wasn’t able to do anything useful today, but I created this bird and that we’ll have to do. And that term useful. I actually thought about and think about often, because that’s a term that I relate with very well. Actually, I think it’s good to be useful, because it doesn’t mean that I’m necessarily creating something, but it’s an orientation to being in the world for me, which is that what I do here is useful to other people in some way, shape or form,

Esme Wang  37:24

right? Like I was not selling that bird to anyone. It wasn’t part of the capitalist machine, you know, like it was a bird that I painted and then I shared online. And what shocked me, genuinely shocked me, you know, when people sometimes say, like, oh, I posted this tweet and it went viral. And I was so surprised. I often think to myself, yeah, right. Like, you thought that might go viral, but this genuinely, like, I don’t use Twitter anymore, but I do use notes on the substack app, and it went kind of viral. And I was genuinely very surprised, because I had not given it much thought. I genuinely was feeling like, I haven’t done much today, but like, here’s a bird, and like, I hope people like it. But people really, really did. And like, hundreds of people responded to this, saying something about like, how no This bird has brightened my day. Or like, This bird is enough for today, and this, you know, and beauty is enoughness and beauty is of use. And that really struck me, and so I did end up writing a sub stack piece called, like, what is it to be useful? Which was about that experience. But, yeah, I think usefulness is an underused word. Honestly. I think people like to use the word productive, or like productivity, or things like that, but I think useful is a very good word. Yeah, yeah. I

Eric Zimmer  38:40

think we have to watch for matter of degree where we don’t want to think that every moment has to be useful or productive, or whatever your word is. And at the same time, I think there is value in saying, Am I using my time in a way that feels valuable to me? And I see you wrestling with this question out loud through your sub stack, which is, given that I have these health challenges, could I be pushing myself a little bit more? And I think that all of us have some some measure of this. I think, like you said, we all have our own boundaries or our own shape. And so I think that it’s a very common thing for people who want to do things in the world to question, you know, when I sort of just said, like, I’m out of gas for today, I’m done, I’m just, I’m I just need to relax and do nothing. Like, did I really need to or could I have pushed? You know, could I have done more? And I wrestle with those questions. I wrestle with questions of my energy level at 54 is different than it used to be. It just is. I don’t know what’s appropriate energy level at my age. So you get into these like, well, am I could I do more? Should I do more? Should I do less? I think everybody wrestles with these questions. And

Esme Wang  39:57

I think that again, to go. Back to something we had said earlier, things that happen in your life will change how you feel about these things, whether that’s growing older or having less energy. For example, my husband was diagnosed with cancer last year, and he may have come close to dying several times, and I was very, very burned out. Recently, I might still be pretty burned out I had, I just relaunched the unexpected shape writing Academy, and I had also just turned in 130,000 word manuscript to my editor. And for a while I was like, Why am I feeling so unable to do anything? And then I remembered, oh, yeah, you just did all these really big things. And so, because I recognized that, I thought to myself, Okay, so instead of working this weekend, you are going to force yourself to rest on Sunday. And that was actually very challenging, because I kept finding myself starting to do work, and then being like, Oh no, no. I was gonna read like Prophet first. And then I was like, No, you can’t read Profit First as like reading on your resting day. So I decided to read a mystery novel instead. But then later that day, and I think that I might not have seen this as useful or productive, or whatever word you want to use before, but my husband and I made a steak dinner, just like a very modest little steak dinner, and we listened to records, and we sat and cuddled on the couch with our dog. And that was the best thing I had done all week. It was the best thing I had done all week, and I was so glad that I had taken the time to do that and to kind of refill my well a bit after being so tired, and also to think, no, this is the most important thing that I have done. Yeah,

Eric Zimmer  41:56

you have a line where you said I found, in the end that aggressive pursuit of one’s ambitions is a skill that is not as important as living a good life, resting with my husband, C who’s in cancer recovery, cuddling with my dog, doing work that I care about in bits and pieces, instead of hours on end. And yeah, I think it is that balance of those things, because I do think that is the one thing that ambition can do, which is really pernicious, is rob us of the ability to appreciate actually where we are. Yeah, absolutely, we’ve got to be getting somewhere all the time. For me, that’s certainly a shadow side. And again, my ambitions are when I use that word, I don’t mean necessarily make more money, I just mean, do the things in life that feel important and meaningful to me? But it is true for sure, that too much focus on that is problematic, and so I’ve often spent a lot of time thinking about like, how do you do both those things? How do you want to change and grow and create and be these things? And how do you also simultaneously appreciate right where you are. Yeah, and

Esme Wang  43:03

this reminds me of something that I used to focus on just as much as ambition, which is legacy. And I think about legacy less these days, but I found that my happiest definition of legacy was not just like, oh, I want to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, or would want to win this or that, or make, like X amount of money. It was also really important to me to leave a legacy where people would say Esme was a really kind person, or Esme was a really generous person, or the legacy that you leave when you smile at the barista and give them a big tip, and they feel good for a few minutes. Again, we were talking about the macro of the wolf parable and the micro of it. I think there’s also a macro and micro of of legacy and productivity and ambition, something

Eric Zimmer  43:57

else that you wrote recently on sub stack that jumped out at me because I felt this way so often in my life, you said I found that one of life’s greatest fundamental frustrations, as well as one of its great terrors, is that I only have one life, and that every choice I make is finite. I have made certain decisions that have led me down certain paths, and whether I am happy or not with the path I am on is not so much the point. The point is that I did not choose any of the centilian other paths that I could have gone down. Yeah, and

Esme Wang  44:27

surely enough, science fiction movies have been made about this topic. I don’t know if sliding doors counts, but that is one. So yes, I agree with what I wrote. That is true of how I think about life. I think that’s one of the really beautiful things about books, about writing. I contributed to an anthology that Penguin UK did, and it was called Why We read. And mine was generally about how there are so many things that I am not doing and cannot do at this point in my life. I was once told. Field, that the social psychology field, would be much poorer if I did not become a social psychologist. Well, I am not a social psychologist, and, you know, I’m sure they’re doing just fine without me, but what I can do, because of books, is read about social psychology, is read about what it’s like to be a social psychologist. I didn’t become like an expat and live in London, but I can read about other people’s experiences of being expats and living in London. I think that’s one of the really beautiful things about literature, is that we get to experience so many other lives, even if we can only live one life ourselves.

Eric Zimmer  45:39

Yeah, I agree, it’s one of the things I love about reading. I think the other thing that is embedded in what you said is that recognition that whether I’m happy or not with the path I’m on is not so much the point. It also means that there is no other life except the one that I did choose, and that can be comforting also, because I realize that questions of, would I have been happier if I did this, or would I have been better doing that, they’re meaningless questions because they presume some reality that doesn’t exist, although

Esme Wang  46:16

I do find that some people look at Quantum mechanics as one way to comfort themselves in this manner, like they think, like, well, there are all these like, other dimensions out there where I’m doing all these different things, and I’m in this one, but there’s an Esme out there somewhere who did become a social psychologist, and so I don’t have to worry about like, I don’t know if I necessarily subscribe to that belief or that way of thinking, but I do know people for whom it is a great comfort. It’s back

Eric Zimmer  46:46

to what we said before about the micro and macro. It’s easy to think that there could be these other worlds at every decision point, there’s a choice made, and they go this way, or you went that way, and it spins off alternate universes. But when you realize how every moment is a moment of choice. Then you’re like, Well, wait a second. Hang on. A second. This becomes mind boggling. It’s not just whether I chose to be an author or a social psychologist. It’s also the 100 small decisions that I made all morning. Yeah,

Esme Wang  47:16

it’s like, oh, I lifted this water thermos and I took a sip. What if I hadn’t done that precisely?

Eric Zimmer  47:23

Well? Esme, thank you so much for coming on. I think we’re about out of time, but I really enjoyed talking with you. I’ve enjoyed reading your sub stack and reading your books, and I’ll be excited to read your 130,000 word manuscript. That’s a lot of words.

Esme Wang  47:42

Thank you so much. The words will get cut down for sure, but I really appreciated this. Thank you for having me. You