In 2002, on a porch in New Hampshire at three o’clock in the morning, I was arguing about the nature of faith with a man who declined to argue back. This was at a men’s retreat, and I had reached the hour when I couldn’t pretend the very idea of faith didn’t seem absurd to me, and I was saying so, with the special fluency you have at 3 a.m. for the things you need and cannot have. He listened. He did not give me the opponent I was asking for, which I have come to understand was the whole intervention. At some point, he offered a question instead: what if faith didn’t have to be a matter of ‘belief without proof’ — which was exactly, precisely, how I was thinking about it; how I’d always thought about it — but rather: trust without reservation?
What the question did, over time, was move ‘faith’ out of a register in which I was helpless. I could not choose to believe something. I had tried, the way you try to fall asleep. Trust, however, turned out to be a different kind of object: a thing you do (or, more often, a thing you don’t do) and therefore a thing that can be chosen, a little at a time, on a given night, with a given person, as an object of will. He handed the problem back to me, in a form I could sink my teeth into.
The podcast was supposed to be about other people.
That’s a little glib, but it isn’t wrong. The design was honest enough: conversations with people inhabiting uncertainty in interesting ways — a playwright, an ecologist, a shrine-maker, a photographer — with me as the person who held the room. And I know well enough how to hold a room. I have done versions of that work my whole adult life, in wilderness programs and classrooms and coaching sessions, and the discipline is real: show up all the way, follow anything, keep your own material present-but-peripheral. It is the right discipline for (most of) those rooms. The trouble starts when it stops being a discipline, and becomes the only way you know how to be with another person: when your attention, which is real, and your warmth, which is also real, get quietly repurposed as a place to hide. You can be entirely focused on someone, and use the focus to make sure nothing in the room requires anything real of you. Hardly anybody will ever catch you at it. It looks exactly like generosity.
The guests caught me at it anyway. Not by accusing me — by being further along than I was. Caught, here, is a term of art: an anthropologist named Jeanne Favret-Saada, who spent years inside the witchcraft talk of rural France, came home with the finding that there is no ‘observer’s seat’ in that discourse: “Anyone talking about it is a belligerent… There is no room for uninvolved observers.” You learn nothing until you are caught — addressed, implicated, assigned a position you didn’t ask for — and even then the understanding arrives late, on a time-lag, when you go back over what people had been trying to get across to you all along. The methods chapter of my dissertation is literally titled “On Getting Caught at Home.” In it I warned, with a straight face, against the “epistemological minimum safe distance” that hollows out so much fieldwork. Ten years later, I built a show and spent a season holding exactly that distance, warmly, one guest at a time. She also named the only fix: become your own informant.
Hence, I suppose, this essay.
Five minutes into my conversation with the photographer Adam Ekberg, he mentioned what he tells his daughter when she’s scared: that the nervous feeling right before something happens is a great feeling, “because that means you’re really doing something.” I grabbed the line like a railing. An hour and a half later, Adam asked the plainest question anyone asked all season — “What does it mean to spend your life making silly shit that doesn’t matter?” — asked it about his own work, no anguish in it, no irony either — and I heard myself reach for the machinery.
“It sounds like you’re describing something like a completely inverse—” I interjected; the analytical frame, arriving exactly on schedule, to carry us both somewhere safer than the question. Adam moved on, cheerfully. I didn’t.
Alison Dilworth — Philadelphia muralist and shrine-maker, a person I hadn’t spoken with in fifteen years — told me she isn’t a great painter. “I am a person who is really good at holding certain things. And art is one of the containers I can do that with.” I asked her what she was holding. “Grief. Love. Just like — how to love.” Alison is one of the people who taught me, without trying to, that holding is an active verb — that bearing witness costs the witness something, and is supposed to. She also said, in passing, as though it were nothing: “You can’t stay safe and be alive.” I wrote it down. I did not, at the time, think to apply it to the man asking the questions.
Jessie Rack — ecologist, old colleague from a shared previous life teaching writing at Princeton — read me a sentence from a scientific paper about scorpion eyes, which are sensitive enough that they may register starlight, and then told me about the poem she wrote in response: a scorpion noticing, for the first time, that there is something up there. Something beyond me. I said, “I’ve got chills right now” out loud, on tape. (I am not a subtle audience.)
And later, she said the thing I have been carrying around since spring: that it’s okay to be uncertain, to not know, to “just leap into space sometimes. Trust that there’s a bottom. There’s something. Probably.”
I offered, by way of agreement: “There’s a net. Something.”
“We’ll find out in a few minutes,” she said.
“Probably” was doing a lot of work in that sentence. So was “something.” I understood them both completely.
Then: Ryan. Early in our conversation — the one that just aired — Ryan Eggensperger told me about a directive he’d written to himself in a journal at twenty-eight or twenty-nine: No more mongrel genius. All that untapped potential, the diamond in the rough, the genius work forever out ahead of you — “that was such a comfortable place for me to hang out,” he said.
The laugh you can hear on the tape is mine: the laugh of “a perpetually recovering gifted kid whose identity,” as I put it to him in the moment, “is stapled to potential in its purest form.” I have made so many life choices around preserving as many possibilities as possible — life as a choose-your-own-adventure book with fingers holding six pages open. None of them chosen. All of them safe.
Near the end — we’d been at it nearly two hours — Ryan turned the whole apparatus around. “So how important is it to you to get, like, a book out of this? What if there’s no — what if that doesn’t happen? How does that change your relationship to these experiences?”
I did not have an answer prepared, which, given how much of my life I have spent being prepared, was precisely the point. What came out in the scramble was true. That “no book is much better than the wrong book.” That what I care about at the end of the day is “being able to tolerate the experience of being in my own skin.” That “on a good day I make a tiny piece of the world a little better by being in it, and on a bad day I make it worse.” That these are, at bottom, relational questions. I’m still sitting with my answer. But I know what the two of us built that afternoon, because the tape doesn’t lie about it: the first conversation of the season in which the host was as bare as the guest.
Stop performing the potential. Start doing the thing. I had built a show that asked other people to do the thing, while I performed — warmly, attentively, with genuine interest — the potential of one day doing it myself.
I told Ryan on tape where I’d learned the alternative. For many years, several times a week, I was in rooms that come with a tradition of anonymity — one I'm going to honor past this sentence — where the working practice (mine anyway) was to start by saying one true thing out loud. Usually small, usually banal; my back hurts was always available. You said it to people who could not be impressed, because they had heard everything and, more to the point, said everything. "Otherwise I'm fucked," is how I put it to Ryan. "Otherwise my priority becomes managing how people see me." Those rooms were the keel of my life for years — the weight below the waterline that lets you carry sail without going over. I stopped going, eventually. The structure that had made sense of my life had slowly stopped serving it — or I'd stopped letting it; I stayed too long either way… and what I needed next was a community I'd have a hand in making. I have also been writing around those rooms all year. In “This Is Labor,” I wrote that the way through “probably runs not through more individual practice but through the kind of community that can hold the practice collectively,” and promised that was a different essay — one I had “only recently begun to write.” I assumed I would write it at a desk. It turns out I had been recording it all year, one conversation at a time, without letting myself all the way into the room.
The last conversation of the season was with someone I met before I had any of this to perform. I’ve known Kathryn Cornelius for more than twenty years — graduate school round one at Georgetown; the era in which high theory got malleable at three in the morning — though for most of those twenty years we hadn’t actually spoken. We recorded twice. The second time, forty-two seconds in — the timestamp on the transcript reads 0:42; she was still settling in, saying she hoped she’d turn out to be as smart as she remembered feeling back then — I heard myself say: “I got so tired of performing.”
Not as a bit. Not as a host warming up the room. As the first true thing I could find, offered to someone who knew the version of me that existed before any of my current performances were built. “I’m far less interested in us impressing each other with how smart we already know we are,” I told her. “And much more interested in reconnecting with you.” I did not plan any of that. A season of tape planned it. The show walked me, guest by guest, to the top of Jessie’s leap — and with Kathryn, forty-two seconds in, I jumped without checking for the net.
What followed was two more hours of the thing the show had been asking me for all year: two people trading true things back and forth, at cost, in both directions. I wasn’t hosting. I don’t have a plainer way to say it — I was in the conversation. And somewhere past the hour mark, I told her about the porch in New Hampshire. Out loud, on tape, for the first time… in a long time. You’ll hear it. She listened the way she listens, and then she said — this one, she’s let me quote — “trust can maybe be like a gateway drug to faith in some ways.”
The finale is called “Trust Without Reservation.” I would love to tell you the title is aspirational — safely out ahead of the man who chose it. But it’s just what the season found, waiting at the bottom of the leap: that trust doesn’t arrive on a sufficiency of proof; that it can be chosen, as a matter of will, some days, with some people, a few minutes at a time; and that everyone hedges it — there’s something, probably — right up until the moment they don’t. It is terrifying. It is not impossible. It’s just really, really hard.
Come into the finale with some time. Something happened in there.