Clown Class: Advice for a Worried Bubble Dweller

Dear Tina,

I live in a bubble. It feels like I spend all my days floating around in a goopy liquid made of memories, feelings and thoughts. The ‘real world’ is far away and mostly irrelevant. Which means nothing outside the bubble (work, people, Art-making) feels important enough to bother with. 

I’m pretty sure I want to exist in the outside world. So I start projects, set goals, make resolutions and plans. I get revved up and excited and I feel strong and certain about every single project. 

And then I forget. I literally forget the [whatever] that I envisioned, in minute detail, just a few days or weeks earlier. It feels like some other person made that plan and it’s got nothing to do with me. Then I feel upset and inadequate, like I’m wasting my time and also I’m lonely because there’s no one else in here. 

I don’t even know what to ask. Does everyone live in a bubble? Do you? Do I need to get out of the bubble (how?) or do I need to manage the bubble differently? Am I supposed to be grounded somewhere or is floating ok? How can this be ok? It doesn’t feel ok. 

This is my best effort to explain but I change my mind so often, I only half trust my theories. 

Xo,

Bubblehead

Hi Bubblehead,

Thank you for sending this message from your bubble. I feel honored to be addressed from inside a place as important and private as this. If you have a bubble so strong and present that it begs the question of how it needs to be related to, then you have the bubble there for a reason.

I’d like to stop and admire the bubble, if I may. Your bubble, I’m guessing, is an honorable old companion and protector.

Hello, sir. <bow>

You mentioned ‘the real world’, Bubblehead. Let’s not fly over that term. I know I have some fast connotations when I hear ‘the real world’. Those connotations include commerce, politics, money, community. The non-private, the…urgently relational, somehow. People, inescapably, but not people relaxing without needs, demands or agendas. Somehow people relaxing without any of those things in play are not a Real World concern.

The ‘real world’ doesn’t seem to include things like mountains or fields, trees, all the natural world things. Rivers, lakes. Animals, particularly animals who aren’t endangered and thus Part of the Conversation—I mean nondescript, low-key guys like squirrels or cats. Small buildings like huts or houses, private dwellings, these aren’t part of the Real World conglomerate. People on the front or back porch of their private dwellings, people sitting in the sun watching a cloud of gnats move across the yard, people in beds or bathtubs who don’t want anything from anyone at this minute, they’re of no concern.

So. There are a couple of real worlds. There’s the real real world, all-inclusive, and there’s the conceptual Real World, the one the Bubble wants you to skip, operating as it probably is on some ancient and reasonable orders you set out as a young Bubblehead.

I think it’s rare for an adult to have a major new bubble. I can imagine fresh traumas entering the scene powerfully enough to make an adult construct a new, safer way of being in the world, but you didn’t mention anything like that.

To the degree that your bubble is a rejection of the world, we have to understand that it’s not the world with topography and wildlife and people minding their own business in their own contemplative spaces that’s a threat in this scenario. It’s the world where people are conducting urgent business with each other—making demands, bumping up against each other, sometimes roughly—that can do damage.

People are the real world. The bubble is not meant to protect you from anything besides people.

People paying attention to you are the real world. People who want things from you are the real world. People who are paying a scary kind of attention to you are the real world. People who make sudden moves and aren’t paying attention to your cues, who aren’t interested in your likes and dislikes, people who are perfectly glad to disturb your airspace, your body, whatever you got, as long as they can complete the transaction they have in mind, they’re the real world. People operating unacceptably, overwhelmingly, negating you, forgetting about your real, tender existence. They’re the real world.

At some point—and it’s very important when but it’s not important to know when—you as a small person came up with a great idea that came to life to save you. You conjured your bubble. You made the excellent decision to claim your existence as a very real existence. Not the least real one in the room, the most real one in the room.

Hell yes, little Bubblehead. I’m talking to you, back at the big moment, and during the bubble construction era that followed. Your tastes, your likes and dislikes, the interactions that please you and relax you and the interactions that alarm you and make you mad, these are incredibly important. Hell yes, you should make a portable place where your experience of life reigns supreme. Get it done!

Just because we’re alive in the world doesn’t mean we want to be. We were dragged here, things got messed up immediately, and now we have to make the best of it.

Is it any wonder we don’t want to race triumphant into the Real World and plant flags all over it? Do we really have to be all RAH-RAH, WORLD! I love this joint! And hey, everybody totally unpredictable: here’s my location! Come mess with me some more! It’ll be amazing!

It is not a wonder.

“I’m pretty sure I want to exist in the real world.”

You know what? As long as you stay alive from birth to death, you’re fulfilling the basic requirements and you don’t have to find the ‘realest’ part of the ‘world’ and go exist right in the middle of it. Your sentence here is awfully important. Do you? Why? Which part? Maybe you do. But which part and with whom?

No wrong answers. Changing answers are also excellent. Eternally changing answers are just as good, and I know that feels maddening but it’s true.

There is no deadline to put in your Real World application and there is no big special benefit to joining a fake idea like the Real World, either.

If you start projects and set goals and feel vivid and excited and then totally forget about them, the bubble is kicking in hard at the “totally forgetting” part. I get it. I have my own bubble. (To answer your question.) Forgetting can sound so casual and sometimes it is. But there’s also a deep, defensive forgetting, isn’t there, which is not casual. This kind of forgetting asks for respect and space.

What we have to do, world-wise—the only real requirement—is to be able to eat, sleep and move through the days decently well, physically. Whatever resources we need to do that, we have to make a plan to get those. And that’s it.

I think that inside your question another question might be hiding.

The loneliness of being in a bubble. The ungroundedness. The not-ok feeling, the too-floaty feeling. People being the source of trouble in the world. People making the ‘real world’ what it is.

What do you think you might want to do about the question of people?

Is it worth being with people? Do you think you might like to find out?

If you emerge from your bubble, you’re emerging to come face-to-face with people. You’re not emerging from the bubble to start a cool project or to have a big career, although you are warmly welcome to go for it on both of those fronts if you want, all you want, however often you want, in as many ways as you want. These things matter, truly, but without mattering at all.

And I think these pursuits are skipping some steps, bubble-emergence-wise.

You don’t have to pretend to like the real world, Bubblehead, whichever one that is. You don’t have to hype yourself up to add something to a world you don’t feel warmly about.

Maybe you can get to know the world bit by bit without getting into the commerce and demand and exposure of it. It’s not too late to come to like the world where the people are, or even love that world, love the world because of the people here.

It may be worth challenging yourself to come into deep relationship with a greater number of the people. There aren’t many other cures for loneliness, I don’t think. I know there are natural hermits out there who enjoy deep solitude and don’t feel lonely at all, but they didn’t write me.

You don’t need an idea or a project to be with people. An idea or project will probably get in the way. Sometimes an idea or a project is the bubble, and the people stay over on the other side of the bubble wall, and you’re safe in the idea, but the people stay over there, even if the bubble is clear and you can see their faces.

I’m thinking about much simpler, more boring and unnerving forms of connection. Like meals with people. Like spending unstructured time with people, lots of it. Like any form of service or volunteer work with people, too. Like being in the company of people you’ve never hung out with before, or with the same people you already know but more so, more deeply, or for longer.

We’ve been getting a lot of bunnies in our yard lately. Our yard has all kinds of wild bushes in it, great hiding places. This new bunny hub vibe is a joy. You know how, when you come upon a bunny and you want to be closer to it, you go all still and radiate safety and benevolence? And when a bunny does move closer to you, that’s the biggest news of the moment, and nothing is more important or successful?

I’m thinking about the quality of that interaction. So charged with life, so immediate and bubble-less. Nobody’s up in their memories when a bunny is two feet away.

The more the hours in your days are up close with whatever and whomever feels like a bunny—that great and safe emissary of life force that needs protecting exactly like you do—the less your bubble can operate. Right? No? And you’re the bunny, too, walking into inviting yards with people in them that you can suss out and move close to and thrill, if you choose.

What if you don’t do something so big as chart a life in the real world? What if you forget that for a while? Get yourself enough money to live on—however, not important—and if you have that already, perfect. What if your job is to walk around in the world and put yourself in as many real-life human interactions with a bunny charge as you can? What if your job is just being here? What if you hang out in the sun by a mountain eating tomatoes with some other unpredictable human creatures? There are pleasures outside of the bubble involving other humans that are plain pleasures. They don’t need to be parlayed into anything. Lure yourself out with these pleasures for a few hours at a time. Go on a thousand little bunny person-to-person field trips.

To your question, does everyone live in a bubble? I don’t know. I think we have an extraordinary range going, between us all. Some exceptional karma yogis out there maybe live in a minimal bubble. I think a lot of us are major bubble dwellers. I bet you can conjure some charming ones whom you’d never judge. You’d think, “Oh, look at that sweet being. That one wants to take a pass on this ride. I hear you, buddy.” Be as kind to yourself about it as you would to the most charming bubble-dweller you can conjure. You deserve it as much as they do.

If you find, on your field trips, that a critical mass of people are worth emerging for, your honorable bubble-servant will find this out, too. I don’t know what will happen then but it’ll be different and new.

Do you have an existential question you’d like me to bounce around for you? Do you struggle with the same kind of dilemma over and over in your life? If you’d like to trust me with a question for this advice column, I’d be delighted. All you need to do is reply to any Clown Class email in your inbox with your question.

Love, Tina

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