The Human Propensity to F*** Things Up

Why having language for our tendency to break things helps me, plus a book preorder bonus, a US discount code, and some in person events!

Hello dear subscribers. As it is just a month until publication date in both the US and UK, I’m delighted to be able to share with you a short excerpt from Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times.

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I am unstacking the dishwasher, loudly. Every few plates I stop to check my phone and call my husband, who is not picking up. It is a glorious autumn day, the sun streaming like lemon curd through the windows, but I am full of rage. Yesterday we took our daughter for a PCR test, bribing her with marshmallows to endure the sneezes, the gag-reflex, the coldly clinical procedure in a shipping container in a local parking lot. Today is a school day and she isn’t allowed in until we can prove that her ominously persistent cough isn’t Covid. My husband booked the appointment, and so the results will go to his phone, and he is working elsewhere.

Five missed calls, six. I slam the mugs into the cupboard as if he, a mile away, can hear me jungle-drumming my feelings. I am absolutely sure she is negative, and that the results will have arrived already. I am equally sure that he, more able to focus than me, less vigilant, will have missed them. I’m supposed to be working and I can’t get my head in the game until she is at school. All the weeks and months of this feeling—the thinly spread pandemic juggle, the scarcity of time and energy and space are pressing down on my mood, causing me to huff and sigh and mutter under my breath. The cutlery is away, and the dishwasher filter is covered in gunk, and of course I will be the one to clean it, as always.

Eventually he messages. She is negative. The results arrived hours ago. Of course.

“Shoes on, time to go!” I bellow through to the lounge. My daughter, untimely ripped from an episode of Junior Bake Off, appears around the door, pale and hacking into her elbow. “Can I stay home, Mum? I’m really tired.”

“No. You have to go in. I need to work.”

“But it’s weird to go in for half a day. I don’t want to go in at lunchtime.”

My voice rises from brisk and harassed to forceful. “Shoes on. No arguing. Let’s go.”

I can see the stubbornness rising up in her red-rimmed eyes, the desire to watch TV and sleep and read Harry Potter for the day, because she has a cold and who doesn’t want to do that when they feel rough? She is about to engage her considerable will and refuse to go to school. I could head it off with calm words and empathy and connection. I could problem-solve and encourage and make her laugh and get us both through this, like I usually do. But today I don’t have it in me. I am aggrieved, for all kinds of half-processed reasons, and she is the three-foot embodiment of all the things thwarting my will. The frustration and rage rise up in my throat, bitter as bile, and I shout so loud she bursts into tears in surprise: “It’s the LAW! Do you want me to be arrested by the police and sent to prison? Do you?” And then I slam the kitchen door on her terrified face and proceed to restack the dishwasher, stopping myself at the last moment from throwing a travel cup through a window. Plates, mugs, an encrusted casserole dish—I am waiting for her to come and apologize, because of course the sick seven-year-old, not the adult woman who has just invoked the force of a fictional authoritarian state to get her way, should be the bigger person.

I messed that up. I do that a lot. Please tell me you do too. Not (usually) in dramatic ways, the Obviously Bad things, like murder, and fraud, and adultery. Although even with those last two most of us have our grey areas. Our dubious choices show up most regularly in these private, banal moments. I don’t think it’s just me who lives among the attrition of tiny disappointments with myself: half lies, broken promises, judgmental comments. Avoiding the eye of the homeless person, as if we might both believe they are not there.

Francis Spufford, who is Professor of Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, calls this tendency The Human Propensity to Fuck Things Up, or HPtFTU. It is his attempt to rebrand the concept of sin, a word that has fallen far, far out of fashion. It’s used now, if at all, jokingly. A slimming club’s shorthand for calories, the name of a lingerie shop. It sounds like self-indulgent naughtiness, harming no one, the liberated opposite of Puritanism.

There are good reasons we shrugged off the concept. Alongside the sillier usages (Magnum ice cream had a 7 Deadly Sins range, the Vanity flavor including crunchy silver cake-decorating balls embedded in champagne-flavored coating), we can trace a darker side. Church teaching on sexual sin has created shame around entirely normal human urges, and in some periods and denominations riddled people with terror of hellfire for the smallest misdemeanor.

Despite all this I’m going to use it, because without the word, or at least the HPtFTU alternative, I don’t know how to speak honestly about the moment of fracture between me and my daughter. I am seeking a deep life of connection, and moments like these keep getting in the way. This language gives me a way of talking about all these fractures, large and small, the twig-snapping crackle-glaze of human interactions. Sin, theologically understood, has nothing to do with enjoying sensual pleasure. It is a relational concept, about the threads between us and others, us and the natural world, and yes, us and God.

I’ve been sparing with my use of the G Bomb, so far, because it does need handling with bomb-disposal-team levels of care. It is present in the background of everything I am going to say, of course, but my hope is that those of you who are cautious or outright allergic to God talk will find much that is thought-provoking or useful anyway. If you are interested to read my attempt to address the subject more directly, you can flip ahead to the final chapter. Until then, I’ll mainly use [God] to remind us that these are perhaps the most semiotically dense three letters in our language, and that we will all be dragging our own associations into the space between those two brackets.

Meanwhile, sin, barely recognizable now in the cultural cipher it’s become, is tragedy. What Immanuel Kant called the crooked timber of humanity, the tendency to break things, accidentally and deliberately, that just seems baked in. I like Spufford’s use of Fuck because its fricative-plosive helps us hear the brutality. HPtFTU is all the times we choose withdrawal, self-protection or attack. When we center ourselves, not as part of a healthy rhythm of receiving and giving in a web of relationships, but because we’re terrified no one is going to meet our needs but ourselves. I see my sin (which, I should say now, needs meeting with grace, not judgment), as a bundle of my self-destructive tendencies. HPtFTU shows up in lashing out, hiding, numbing behaviors that close down the possibilities of intimacy, with myself, others and the beyond.

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I didn’t expect to end up writing a book about sin. Well, it’s not just about sin. It is probably about too many things - my craving for steadiness of soul, what kind of people do we need to become if it’s the end of the world, why I buy too many serums, what does a stable sense of self look like. It is really about why it’s so hard to be human (and hold onto our humanity), to live the kind of lives we long for, deep down. It is about the strange and unexpected wisdom I have found in Christian theology, much of which I wish more people knew about, even if you don’t know what to make of the metaphysics.

But it’s also about sin. I have discovered I need that language, and wonder if we all do. I have structured the chapters around the seven deadly sins and how these temptations to disconnection show up in my own life. Rather than being a dusty medieval joke concept, they now seem shockingly relevant to our age. So much of my search for spiritual core strength is driven by climate anxiety, and the sin of avarice spoke so clearly of the insatiable lust for comfort and convenience and consumer crap that has got us into this mess. Wrath, read as the temptation to contempt and tribalism, is driving us apart at exactly the moment we are most going to need each other. Envy, which is essentially status anxiety, is endemic and amplified by social media (even the bookish, civilised end, like Substack). It goes on. It seems, perhaps, those desert monks were onto something. And I want to share those somethings with you, as I try to apply them to my own life.

Preorders and US discount code

Preorders are tremendously helpful for authors, because they signal to bookshops that there is enough demand for them to bother stocking the book. If you think you might buy the book at some point, would you consider preordering it? You can do it on e-book and audio book also, which are generally a bit cheaper (hardbacks are expensive!). Requesting your local library to stock it is also a huge help if a new book is out of your budget.

As a thank you, if you are able to preorder the book and email me proof of purchase at elizabeth (at) elizabetholdfield.com, I will send you a PDF of the first two chapters.

And, if you are in the US, my publisher there is offering a 50% discount if you order two copies, essentially meaning you can get one free to give away. Follow this link and input the code OLDFIELD.

Events

I am so looking forward to meeting some of you in person at events over the coming months. If you are based in or in reach of the North East I would love to see you at an event at the Faith Museum, Bishop Auckland on 7th May. I’ll be in conversation with contemporary artist Mat Collishaw about his piece Eiodlolan.

• On the 14th May I’ll be at the UnHerd club in central London discussing the possibility of a religious revival in these turbulent times with Justin Brierley and Alex O’Connor (you’ll have to come along to find out what I think).

  

• On 9th May I’ll be at the Swindon Festival of Literature

• And on 13th May I‘ll be speaking at St Mellitus College about power, transparency and leadership

  

More events coming up in late May and early June but please sign up for one of those if you can.