Distress Tolerance and Bankruptcy

I love the idea of an ugh field (incidentally, a very hard thing to say when speaking since ugh is frequently an exclamation that stands on its own and not so much a frequent occurrence within sentences and so I avoid saying it as much as I can, therefore making ugh field an ugh field). I think of it as debt - if you’re already in huge debt, you already have a huge ugh in your life. Additional debt accrual doesn’t seem to matter as much as getting through the next few days. You would need a huge windfall of money to pay back enough of the principal of the debt for it to start affecting your life. So we keep ignoring and building up interest with this thing in our lives we should really fix. In a way, this is tolerating distress - saying ‘ugh’ and keeping on anyway.

Distress tolerance and deferred reward seems to have a lot to do with success later on in life, supposedly, maybe. What if we thought of dealing with any mild distress as someone coming and asking you for a loan payment right now? On a tight emotional budget, you might not be able to afford that - and so one of two things happens. You find a way to squeeze in this additional incursion by tightening the belt - less emotional expression. Or you declare bankruptcy and begin detailing all of your assets and restructuring your life so that you can be free of this debt - going through a wild, crazy period of emotional release untethered to the stimulus around you.

There’s actually a third option - just saying “Hey, can you come back a bit later when I am more ready to deal with this maybe?”. This is something you can do with debtors very rarely, but it’s possible. It can be hard to do this with the natural environment - can’t just ask nature to give you a cyclone a bit later. In situations where you can’t do this…you have to deal with the two above.

Financially, bankruptcy might mean you lose a lot of your stuff, it might mean you have to give up certain habits that you’ve had for a long time. Heck, after paying all of it back you might realize that your entire relationship with money is different now, you don’t want to accrue even a single cent of debt. The emotional version of this is you lose or redefine a lot of relationships in your life - to your job, to your family and friends, to your hobbies. Things that used to give you joy, don’t any more and you have to go find new ways to live. You might not want to take on even a single bit of emotional burden - whether it pays off in the long run or not.

Regular society is not setup to actually reward people getting out of emotional debt - you need a safe, high-trust space to do such a thing. If you’ve got a bad credit score, no ordinary lender will lend to you, only sharks and very very trusting friends and family. Sudden enormous emotional expenses can hit anybody, at any time. Becoming emotionally solvent again can look very different from looking emotionally solvent again. For me, ceasing my attempts to look emotionally solvent are helping a lot. Lockdown has helped me reach new levels of personal emotional expression. I feel safe in this lockdown in a way I didn’t expect to - the world isn’t churning on and leaving me behind. I have the time now to truly get my accounts in order so I don’t have to keep living a meager emotional existence. Seems the only way I could get here though was through crashing everything.