Wisdom on the elementary particles of our shared humanity from Alain de Botton, Brené Brown, Elizabeth Alexander, and other visionaries across the spectrum of the creative life.
We must be at least slightly embarrassed by our past selves. Otherwise, life’s voyage will end in the void of complacency. This renders the interview a curious cultural artifact by design — a consensual homily of future abashment, etching into the common record who we were at a particular point in life, in a particular state of being, with all the temporary totality of thoughts and feelings that we so often mistake for final destinations of personhood. An interview petrifies us in time, then lives on forever, the thoughts of bygone selves quoted back to us across the eons of our personal evolution — a strange and discomposing taxidermy diorama of life that is no longer living.
A great interview can also do something. It is a great way to touch the essence of your potential and self-worth, which remains unaffected over time.
One January afternoon several selves ago, I entered the corrugated black walls of a snug recording studio at the School of Visual Arts to sit at a microphone across from a woman dressed entirely and impeccably in black — a woman all stranger, all sunshine. I didn’t expect that, over the next hour, the warmth of her generous curiosity and her sensitive attention would melt away my ordinary reticence about discussing the life beneath the work. I didn’t expect that, over the next decade, we would become creative kindred spirits, then friends, then longtime romantic partners, and finally dear lifelong friends and frequent collaborators.
Over the years, I have witnessed Debbie interview a kaleidoscope of visionaries — artists, writers, designers, scientists, musicians, philosophers, poets. Every guest who leaves the studio feels deeply understood, appreciated and reminded who and what they are, and that we all make our own decisions and make our own choices. In the nearly two decades since the birth of Design Matters — born in that primordial epoch before podcasts, when Debbie actually had to pay for the radio waves transmitting these conversations — she has interviewed more than 450 creative people about the arc of their lives. Roxane Gay — once her interview subject, now her wife — describes the resulting totality as “a gloriously interesting and ongoing conversation about what it means to live well, overcome trauma, face rejection, learn to love and be loved, and thrive both personally and professionally.”
The best parts of the best interviews from this immense body of work are now gathered in Why Design Matters: Conversations with the World’s Most Creative People (public library). Pulsating through them are a handful of common themes — the elementary particles of which any creative life, any life of passion and purpose, any fully human life is built — none looming larger than the relationship between vulnerability and belonging, which constellates our entire cosmos of being: what we make, how we love, why we long for the things we long for, in love and in work.
It is the easiest type of vulnerability to see, and it’s the one that everyone who creates with their whole being will experience: self-doubt. Mairakalman is a talented artist who captures all the details with an endearingly non-selfconscious candor.
I’m constantly tormented. I think that’s the nature of creating anything — that there’s something wrong with you if you don’t have doubts. You have a combination of extreme insecurity and tremendous drive.
Insecurity, however, is in some ways the exact opposite of vulnerability. V-Day founder Vagina Monologues creator V looks back on her brush with death — which jolted her from a lifetime of trying to render herself invulnerable behind the armor of achievement and awakened her to a creaturely belonging with all of life — and reflects:
When I woke up from that surgery… I had tubes coming out of every part of my body. There were bags. My body was connected to various machines. Although I suffered a severe scarring along my entire body, it was my first experience as a fully functioning body. When you sit in a room and the doctor looks over at you and tells you the odds aren’t good, you die in that moment. Your body dies. You realize that you are truly alive and want to live a full life.
[…]
That tough veneer doesn’t let us feel our fear. It’s an invulnerability, even though underneath it we’re horribly vulnerable. Now, what I feel is that I’m vulnerable. We’re all vulnerable. We’re human beings on this planet Earth. We have no idea what we’re doing here. It is something that brings you the most joy, to be vulnerable. It is different to insecurity.
Our most fundamental vulnerability lies beneath all the insecurity and fear that we feel. Brené Brown has made it her life’s work to dive into and study those depths. She tells Debbie:
Vulnerability at its heart is the willingness to show up and be seen when you can’t control perception.
[…]
The one thing that we all have in common is… the paradox of vulnerability: that when I meet you, the very first thing I look for in you is vulnerability, and the very last thing I want to show you is my vulnerability.
Through the use of masks and armors we simulate invulnerability to try and control our perception. Among most prevalent and pernicious in our culture is the broadcasting of busyness — this compulsion to signal that our valuable time is highly valued by others, that our presence and attention are in high demand, that how much we matter to the world exceeds the atoms of time at our disposal. (Autoresponders, particularly among creative people with no boss or client, are an especially unfortunate manifestation of this — rather than making the implicit and humane assumption that our response times are a natural function of their load and priorities, and therefore the best we can do no matter how long or short, an autoresponder makes a performative martyrdom of our own choices about how we are prioritizing our time and creative energies.)
Brown, with her normal sympathetic intelligence captures the human tenderness beneath this maladaptive self-importance.
We are desperate to be recognized and belong. Exhaustion can also serve as a status symbol. We want to believe we’re lovable. We want to believe we are loved.
It is in love that vulnerability and its deep-rooted longing for connection are most alive. Alain de Botton has written with uncommon empathy and sensibility about this subject throughout his creative career. He speaks with Debbie to unravel the paradox.
There’s a real tension in love — at the beginning of love, particularly — between the desire to be honest about who one is and the desire to win the affection of another person. Ideal is for us to be both honest and love each other. That’s the dream.
The reality is that our dreams are often thwarted by the fact we feel too flawed to receive the love we desire. Instead, we turn to more secure counterfeits of love to help us dream the perfect dream. We channel the paradoxes of vulnerability into the paradoxes of crush. De Botton observes
It is common to want to be free from oneself and fall in love. It’s not so much that one wants to be welcomed by another person. It’s that one wants to forget oneself and immerse in the perfection of another… We have this enormous capacity to locate perfection elsewhere, and this is what the crush is all about… The crush is the instantaneous certainty of the location of the ideal, and there’s an awful lot of projection and deception — self-deception — in it… The more information you know, the more you’re forced to realize that actually they are an independent person outside of your fantasy… The less information there is, the more our unconscious can hold onto this rather peculiar piece of emotional trapeze work.
We reach for such counterfeits of love because the terror of real love often feels too great to bear — the terror of being known and cast out of love, which is a miniature of the ultimate terror, the ultimate vulnerability we are born into: being cast out of life. This is why, wherever real love exists, the terror of its loss is the most fearsome of terror — and why the fact of its loss, when it comes, can feel unsurvivable. A generation after Mary Gaitskill offered her splendid advice on how to live through the death of a parent, Saeed Jones reflects on this in the context of his mother’s death:
The finality of death with one of the people who made you is such an overwhelming and fluid and evolving revelation… It’s a proof of love… Love is almost like gasoline reserves in your body, and you don’t know how much is there until it’s all burned out.
No one has captured this notion of death as a lens on love — and a reamer for widening our definition of love — than poet Elizabeth Alexander. Reflecting on the sudden death of the love of her life — the subject of her stunning memoir The Light of the World — and how the experience fomented the vision of love in her now-iconic inauguration poem — “love beyond marital, filial, national, / love that casts a widening pool of light, / love with no need to pre-empt grievance” — she tells Debbie:
While I am a great believer in intimacy between two people, between lovers and spouses, with your children, I also believe… that we cannot only belong to our romantic units… If people in heterosexual nuclear families think that it’s all about them and their shimmering perfection in their homes and that their love can stay there, they are mistaken. You have to belong to more, and then hopefully — this is not why you do it — the village will have your back when you need the village, which we all will at some point.
Indeed, if the paradox of vulnerability has a solution, this might be the most reliable clue to it — this inquisitive insistence that our deepest sense of connection and belonging is found beyond the simple units of romantic love, beyond the likes and the other superficialities of affirmation, beyond the sham of busyness and performative achievement.
Brené Brown considers this with an eye to another visionary’s koan of a statement to another great interviewer in another era — Maya Angelou’s 1973 conversation with Bill Moyers, whom she told that “you only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all.” Brown tells Debbie:
True belonging can be described as the spiritual practice that believes in yourself and feels connected to it. It is the ability to feel at home in your own world, while also feeling sacred in being apart from the chaos. True belonging doesn’t require that you change who you are. You must be yourself.
[…]
We’re in… a spiritual crisis of disconnection. I define spirituality as the belief that we’re inextricably connected to each other by something bigger than us. Others call it God. It is also called fishing. Others call it art. Spirituality is no more, no less, than the belief that we’re connected to each other in a way that’s unbreakable. It is impossible to break the human-human connection, but it is possible to forget about it. This inextricable link between humans has been forgotten.
And yet our capacity for true connection and intimacy with others springs from our capacity for solitude, for intimacy with ourselves — for, as the poet May Sarton wrote in her exquisite ode to solitude, “there is no place more intimate than the spirit alone.” A century after Rilke contemplated the relationship between solitude and creativity, observing that “there is only one solitude, and it is large and not easy to bear,” and that “people are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy [but] we must hold ourselves to the difficult,” Brown adds:
People are afraid to be alone because they don’t belong to themselves. True belonging is not just about being a part of something but also having the courage to stand alone when you’re called to stand alone: when the joke’s not funny; when you don’t believe in something; when you have a different opinion; when you’re at family dinner and people are saying things that you actually find hurtful. When you’re called to stand alone and you can’t, then true belonging is very elusive. You will not be able to feel a sense of belonging if you don’t have the courage to do so.
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