Obsession
Invite it in.
I recently saw and enjoyed the new indie horror It Flick of the moment, Obsession. That is very much not what this piece is about, but it did elicit an abstract association rumbling that got us here today. What if you’re actually not obsessed enough? What if watering the dark wood of your obsessions is the path to enchantment of your own becoming?
If you want to make a potent, abrupt shift in your life: become totally obsessed with one thing that fascinates you; that you think is just cool, and ride it until it collapses under you (or you transcend the space-time barrier).
Obsession has built my life. It has been the whisper at my shoulder behind most of the larger scale endeavors and long-term practices and orientations that have helped me navigate and build a life I could survive, and eventually, thrive in. Extreme, fixated, enduring focus on select domains is what builds a skill, and refines one’s self-selected orientation. But the message from the over-culture that I often found bubbling up in my fears and self-denials, was that obsession is weird and undesirable and that I risked making myself unlovable, unemployable by burrowing too deep into the objects of my fascination. Too much enthusiasm, too much desire, and too much focus are disturbing and off-puttingly weird. But my obsessions are what put food on the table, fire in my blood and eventually built me the body of a life I am proud to live. Obsession is a doorway to greater freedom, more fun, and dare I say, power. No wonder it is discouraged.
Obsession is seen as creepy, and codified socially and culturally as such. The obsessed person forgets to care for themselves, sacrificing cleanliness and order and all Good, Respectable modes of social human behavior on the altar of their obsession. They don’t eat, they don’t sleep, they don’t shower. They are moved to great exertions, and great sacrifices of normality, in order to be in closer communion with the object of their stimulation. Now, I am not ignorant to the downsides of obsession, nor do I refute their basis in reality. I have sacrificed much to honor my obsessions. I pushed my body to risky extremes to feed my strongman obsession. I have sacrificed financial security many times over to protect my obsession with making my own art and building it on my terms. I have dedicated massive temples of time and energy to the obsession I have with building my own artistic world and body of work, often withdrawing from the social world to do so. Obsession requires sacrifice, and it requires rejection of anything that will get in the way of the obsession’s creation or sustenance. This is a feature, not a bug, as they say.
If obsession is so destructive and norm-breaking, how could one reasonably advocate for allowing it in, and for giving oneself permission to surrender to its compulsions? Because it is as vitalizing as it is destructive. It’s a gamble, of course. There’s no guarantees, especially when it comes to making deals with the violently unknown. But great enthusiasm has a tendency to reshape its own river banks; when you follow the current of enthusiasm, you are following a current suited to stimulating your own vital forces. My partner and I have something called the “rule of enthusiasm.” We are business partners, and artistic collaborators on every level imaginable. Our film projects are woven together from the enmeshment of our own psychic fields, creative instincts, personal histories and shared daily existence. We often arrive at an impasse of any number of infinite choices, be they about our home life or the project we are working on. And we have a principle that we cleave to, that has worked so reliably, it’s a marvel. It’s simple: when we are uncertain about what route to take, we defer to whoever is more genuinely excited and enthused about their option. This works because we have cultivated a deep partnership off and on for about 14 years, and both respect each other deeply and have keen attunement to each other’s emotional authenticity. In short, we can’t fake real enthusiasm to each other; because the real thing is too pure and too powerful. So, when we use it as a decision-guider (often about creative story choices), it’s usually pretty damn clear (And if neither of us is enthusiastic? We wait or amass more options).
If enthusiasm is our measuring stick, obsession is the raw material from which we create. Our obsession with cinema is in part what drove us to head into the frayed frontier of filmmaking and set out to build a life in its wild. It has wrought us a life rich in meaning, dazzling in experiences, and ever-stimulating to that part of our hearts that requires great endeavors to feel fulfilled. Obsession is a creative God of the spirit, or more literally in my experience; the language through which our creative daimons/spirits/inspirations speak to us.
Likewise, obsession with the kinda dangerous and niche sport of strongman turned my career in fitness into something long-lasting that eventually landed me a job offer from of the most successful gyms in the world. It was my absolute fixation with the uniquely excruciating and satisfying sport of ”odd object” lifting that turned me from just another personal trainer/artsy type trying to pay bills to a muscle monk utterly devoted to mastering the art of becoming strong. It became the speciality for which I am sought out. When I got into strongman over a decade ago, people in the sport would say “there’s no money in strongman.” That is of course, a losing attitude (or maybe the attitude of one who is used to their joys being poo-pooed by everybody else). “How could this weird thing that I like be valuable to others? I guess it isn’t.”
My genuine zeal for strongman was so infectious, it quickly landed me a writing side gig at BarBend.com, and then when I started publicly talking about how I had combined strongman and the occult, people started really paying attention, and I started getting podcast invitations, speaking invitations, and so on (wait until you all see how all of this has been metabolized into my forthcoming book and future film projects…). While making money was not the reason I got into strongman, it is not surprising to me that it’s now a large chunk of my income, through my signature class at CFSBK, Mythic Strength, because money can often be an outcome of a well-positioned, shared passion. I don’t believe it’s necessary to professionalize every single thing you’re into (and it’s actually incredibly important to have things in your life that are utterly free from that expectation or relationship), but my obsession brought me a freedom from having to adhere to other people’s systems and dogmas that allowed me the mental and physical freedom that I require to exist happily. Live free or die, baby.
Obsession is a door to self-mythologizing, and eroticizing the uniqueness of our own experiences. This essay is an expression of that. I am championing my own experiences and obsessions as magickal acts of self authorship. I bought what the over-culture told me for a long time. Don’t be too weird, don’t be too front-facing about what really gets you off. And we should all know by now that an overwhelming amount of what is being sold and propagandized to us as desirable and normal by the overculture, is actually anesthetizing and stupefying. Being singularly obsessed with a handful of subjects/interests/modes of being makes you a bad consumer, and being a bad consumer is the ultimate sin in America.
(“Why don’t you like/want this?? Are you saying it’s bad? Are you saying that I, or they, are bad for liking/doing it?” This is not always stated explicitly, but is often revealed as a reflexive response.)
For artists, spiritual seekers, and magickal operators alike, obsession must demand great scrutiny, and then greater proving. Odds are, the spirits of your obsessions are very real forces in your life, that you may have called to yourself at some point. You have the prerogative to interrogate these spirits, but you also have the ability to empower them to do even more for/with you. For the artist, “inspiration” is often a form of possession, or put another way, spirit communion. The more I have grown into an animist/spiritually-relational worldview, the more this orientation has made sense, and made my actions make sense. When I treat my ideas like living autonomous forces they proven themselves over and over to be, I am much better able to dialogue with them and guide their cultivation in my life. It’s teamwork and dream work, not self-coercion.
Ideas are validated by the change or outcome they produce, what they create, and what they enable. So I challenge you to pick something you already like, and give yourself a mission: become obsessed. Become the authority. Learn everything there is to know about it. Leave no stone and no perspective on that thing unturned. Make it your personality. Stitch it so closely into your life that people can’t even talk about you without mentioning that thing.
This is also a tremendously helpful inroad to progress at something you may have a great deal of uncertainty about. Want to get in better health and physical fitness? Pick one thing you think is cool and let obsession take over. It could be as simple as mastering the biceps curl, or as complex as a martial art. You can always go deeper, it doesn’t matter how seemingly simple the movement or modality is. Let obsession be your teacher.
Feed your obsessions the fresh blood of my attention, and the manna of your love. Build them into sentinels guarding your every step, and clearing the path ahead of you. Who knows, you might just change your whole life.
Do you dare?