This is the title of a chapter in The War of Art. But let me expand on it here, from recent experience …
Resistance, remember, is that negative, sneaky, brutal, merciless force that you and I wake up with every morning. Its aim is to stop us from doing our work, from becoming the realized individual and artist we were born to be.
All by itself, Resistance is a massive challenge. But Resistance is so diabolical that it can search through our circumstances like some evil form of AI … and add a dimension to its perniciousness.
Resistance recruits allies.
If we are facing any kind of adversity in our lives—a child struggling at school, a health issue in the family, a lost job, a divorce—Resistance will piggyback onto this and use it against us. It will tell us—the voice in our heads—that this exterior headwind is so urgent, so time-consuming, so critical that either we must devote all our time to dealing with it (and thus not do our work), or we must become so demoralized and depressed that we can’t deal with anything at all.
This phenomenon is front-burner stuff for me right now, dealing with the (very real) rebuilding process after losing our home in the California wildfires.
What’s the proper response? First (I’m coming to this realization myself even as we speak), we have to recognize the component of adversity that is Resistance. It’s there. It’s hiding. But it’s real. Fifty percent, maybe more of the intensity of adversity that we feel is almost certainly Resistance.
We have to dismiss it. We have to tell ourselves, “This is bullshit. This is our own self-sabotage. Gear up and fight it.”
At the same time, we have to cut ourselves some slack. If our emotions are on overload over the very real problems we’re facing, we have to take a deep breath and sit ourselves down for a little talk. “Yeah, this feels like hell … but remember, fifty percent of this intensity is just our own Resistance. We can get around this. We can overcome it.”
Again, we must dismiss the element of our issues that are Resistance only. They’re not real. They’re the bully that vanishes as soon as we stand up to it, as soon as we ramp up our commitment to ourselves—no matter how much we don’t want to—and sit down and do our work.
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