What's your spirit animal?
It seemed like a reasonable question to ask the cat-eared girl clutching a stuffed chicken bobbing next to me at the concert. I was feeling isolated in the crowd and hoped a briefly silly connection with a stranger would break the monotony.
She turns to me, fangs popping from her mouth, and hissed That's a stupid fucking question. Why would you ask that? She tightened the grip on her stuffed chicken and resumed bobbing to the music.
....rattlesnake...I thought.
Her word-venom shocked me into recognizing the obvious. I wasn't into the music. The lights were more overstimulating than entertaining. I couldn’t connect to the crowd (which rattlesnake girl highlighted). I couldn't even connect with the friends I came with. Despite doing something that should have been fun, I felt completely disconnected.
That's when the metaphorical apple materialized and doinked me on the head.
What the fuck was I doing here?
Once the sub-obvious became obvious I left the concert, went home and prayed a stuffed coyote would shred rattlesnake girl's stuffed chicken to pieces.
This brief and petty interaction triggered a now-obvious revelation that I suspect will change the rest of my life.
Most of my senses are obvious. It’s obvious when I smell something I yummy, taste something icky, see something dangerous, touch something painful, and hear something I want to bougie to. Because I’m connected to these senses I eat food I like, listen to music I like, and avoid burning myself on the stove.
Wonderful.
But I’ve now realized I have other senses that are less obvious, but perhaps more profound.
The one I’ll talk about here is what I’ll call my Alexander Sense. Maybe you can think about it as instinct, gut feeling or intuition. Where my nose calibrates to smell and my eyes to vision, my Alexander Senses calibrates me to…a deeper me.
For the same reason it’s impossible to explain what a cheeseburger tastes like with words, it’s impossible to explain what this deeper sense feels like. The best I can do is say that it feels like a deep sense of knowing.
To simplify it, the Alexander Sense senses connection or disconnection.
Disconnection feels like something is off.
This “off” feeling has manifested in many ways throughout my life. It was the isolation I felt at the concert. It was the dullness of growing up in wealthy-yet-empty suburbia and feeling mismatched to the culture I grew up around.
In college it was trying to fit in with people who didn’t want me in their groups. It’s come from fake what-can-I-get-from-you conversations at networking events and cringy overly-contrived “spiritual” events.
It’s what I felt suiting up to interview for jobs I never wanted and the this-feels-like-high-school feeling of waiting for the clock to hit 5 at my old job.
Senses have their ways of of being heard. It’s the pain of touching a hot stove, gagging after eating gross food, and the disgust of an overly pungent fart. My Alexander Sense has it’s ways of being heard. Some are more obvious than others.
One thing has always been consistent. The longer I ignore my Alexander Sense, the more painful the signal becomes. Ignored long enough the signal, like a ghost banging on the door of my soul, becomes louder and louder. It throws everything at me from anxiety, dread, anger, self sabotage and depression until I get the hint and listen to what it’s saying.
While never fun in the moment, I’m always grateful in retrospect for these dark periods. Allowing myself to feel what this deeper sense has been telling me has helped avoid the wrong paths in life so I could find the right ones.
None of this is to say that I’m abandoning logic or reason for the intuitive. Logic and reason are necessary to synchronize to the world of mortgages and taxes.
But I can only guess what my life would be like if I only governed myself purely through reason. Externally I would have the “right” career, income and badges of prestige. Internally I would be a hollow shell of myself desperately searching for connection. I would have everything and nothing.
Connection is the inverse. Whereas disconnection feels off, connection feels on. Whereas disconnection has accounted for virtually all the pain in my life, connection accounts for everything great in my life.
Connection is what I feel planting roots in a city I love. It’s what I’ve felt wandering the world. It’s what I feel when I cook, host dinner parties, stroll fine art museums, play disc golf with the homies, read history books and hug people who love me for who I am. Soon, connection will manifest as the most important work of my life - my first published book.
The difference between then and now, thanks in small part to the chicken-clutching rattlesnake-girl, is that I’m way more aware of what connection and disconnection feels like.
The Process & The Bet
I’m sure these feelings have all sorts of rational explanations, but I’m realizing there’s a lot I don’t need to rationalize. The same way I don’t need to rationalize why I hate cilantro I don’t need to justify why I’m attracted to somebody, why I love playing disc golf, why certain things feel better than other things.
Here’s what my senses tell me. Self respect is respecting what my senses tell me. Self love is trusting these senses, for reasons I don’t understand, somehow have my best interest in mind.
A caveat. I’m not prescribing you do the same with your You Senses. I don’t know what your senses tell you. Yours may suck and guide you to disaster. What I know is that my senses have guided me well, so I’m going to continue to listen to them.
Of course, the Alexander Sense won’t be the only way I make decisions. It’s imperfect in the way my other senses are. However it will be louder voice in my mental conference room.
Moving forward I’m going to consult my Alexander Sense to help me decide what to work on, what to avoid, what hobbies to deepen, pick places to explore, who to work with and which relationships to invest in (or let go of).
Maybe it’s blind faith, but I’m trusting the Alexander Sense will guide me to where I want to go and who I want to become.