The quiet wisdom of Tammy Peterson

Last weekend I took my mother, as a birthday gift, to see Jordan Peterson give a talk in Belfast. It was interesting. It’s always an experience watching this man. For the purposes of this Substack essay, I’m not interested in debating his worthiness, though I understand there are many who revile him. But he’s a man who has generated so much hostility mainly by working through the quandaries thrown up by the experience of being human. The hostility comes because he does this in a world in which all spiritual or philosophical elements to life have been stripped away, and we are expected all to live just for our material pleasures. Peterson unspools the threads of existence that weave us all together, his hands up in the air, fingers grasping at the unseen filaments. Sometimes it looks like he’s playing an imaginary harp, but instead of producing music, he speaks words that resonate with millions of people. I’ve seen him live before, and I’ve listened countless podcasts and watched countless YouTube videos, so I knew what to expect. 

What I was not expecting was to hear from Peterson’s wife Tammy. She was his opening act, and on this night — I’m happy to report — she stole the show, in a very unassuming, quiet way. I had only seen her speak once or maybe twice, for example, this interesting interview she did with trans widow Ute Heggen. But last Sunday night in Belfast — the city of her grandfather’s birth, it turns out — she revealed something about herself that was an important lesson to anyone struggling with finding a sense of purpose in their life. 

I will share her story with you, but first, some context from my own life. Like many, many people, I often feel adrift and cut off from worldly success. At times I find myself nursing a complex that I have somehow angered the gods who pick the winners, and I will be relegated for the rest of time having my voice smothered by the noise of our messed up society. And like many, many, people, I have experienced many professional and personal disappointments that looked like conclusive evidence of my mysterious exile. I feel like that far less often, now that I have this Substack (so thank you all, for being here), but those negative feelings have carved out a groove in my brain so deep that any new disappointments or moments of self-doubt easily find it, filling my mind’s perception with lack. 

When I was growing up, I was often told by adults that I was smart, and I always had the sense that should *do something important*, but truth be told, I never had a clear goal, professionally speaking. I was outwardly a very confident young person, but my inner voice was never confident enough to commit to one worldly achievement and work towards it. As a teenager, I loved acting in plays and singing. I was able to perform with aplomb, I think I was pretty good at it, but never had the drive to dominate on stage, or come top of my class, or be class president. As an older teen and then a college student, I adopted a pose of detachment and cynicism — and left-wing politics — that wrapped my inhibition in a protective layer. My abilities were totally in conflict with my insecurities. I was deeply uncomfortable with the idea of pursuing success commensurate with my talent. To this day, I don’t have a clear, must-have goal. I’ve always been ambivalent and operate on a go-with-the-flow, play-it-by-ear model. 

I’m quite sure a lot of you reading this will have felt this way, too. And I’m quite sure some of you have experienced the follow-on emotion, which is: looking from afar at a person — a total stranger —  who has achieved massive success- and allowing that person’s success to make you feel absolutely terrible about yourself. When Jordan Peterson started becoming really famous, I distinctly remember watching him a feeling a sense of longing, wishing that I could just speak to him, or correspond with him, or get him to listen my sad sack story. The longing was to connect with a famous person whose work you admire and bathe in his or her reflected glory. I imagine this is what wannabe Hollywood types feel when they send their scripts or audition tapes, unsolicited, to Martin Scorsese or Gwyneth Paltrow — and then feel bitterness when they do not receives so much as an acknowledgement. When you feel unheard, unappreciated, unfulfilled, it’s so easy to look at the life of some total stranger and think, ‘wow, she/he really has it made!’

Well, Tammy Peterson has a valuable response to that. Speaking in that light, airy voice of hers, she told the audience that as a girl she enjoyed singing with her friend, and playing the piano that stood in the living room of her home. But when her mother got rid of the piano, to make way for some item of furniture, she just shrugged and moved on, giving up on the enjoyment that making music gave her. Then, in college, she took a course in drama. That, too, she really enjoyed, but never took her love of it seriously enough to own it. Then life took its course, she married, she had children, she did things that fit in with the demands of a family life. And when, years later, she found herself witnessing her now-famous husband doing his thing to rapturous audiences while she sat in the front row as the supportive wife, she found herself feeling, as she said, “cynical” and full of “self-doubt.” 

I was very struck by this, because looking from the outside in, you could assume that someone like Tammy Peterson has it made. She benefits from her husband’s status as a hero to many and gets to travel around, meeting people and seeing new places. I think is the ultimate aspiration to so many people in the educated middle and upper middle classes. It certainly always was a core dream of mine. So to hear her admit that success, status, and wealth did not, in fact, equal happiness and peace was of some comfort to me, a person who has spent more time that I care to admit fretting over my lack of success and wealth. To me, her admission that her self-doubt became painful just as her husband became famous resonated with my own weakness — which is a tendency to compare myself to others and judge myself lacking. 

Even more interesting was what Tammy said helped her get over her negative emotions: the 12 step programme and Scripture. She didn’t elaborate further, she just said her piece and left the stage. But I think I understand what she found there. 

I have been familiar with the 12 steps for most of my life, having come from a family with a history of alcoholism. I was lucky, as a very young teen, to have a close relationship with an uncle who was very open about how AA saved his life, and he explained its principles to me in detail. Even as an 11 or 12 year old, they made sense to me. Scripture, on the other hand, is something I have come to look at only in the last few months, but I have begun to find some comfort there when I feel burdened by the malevolent spirit of our time. 

The point of 12 steps and Scripture, of course, is that they both place the locus of control outside the individual. Until quite recently, I balked at this, because personal autonomy is very important to me. However, I am starting to understand why the idea of surrendering control to a ‘higher power’ is actually a profoundly important step for wellbeing. Finding wisdom in words that have been read by billions of people for a very long time, you also find that thread that ties you — a sad, lonely, person living on a spinning rock — to the rest of humanity. You realise you are not alone. You realise that you play a role in the continuation of the human spirit and that you are part of the human patrimony. And even better, you do not have to manage all of humanity, you do not have to try to control the world, because that is already in the hands of a far greater entity than you. You do not have to prove your worth to the two dimensional prestige cartel, you are already blessed. Your existence is miracle enough.

Once you can admit that you are not the most important person in your own story, but rather you are a vessel through which the energy of our entire species flows, then you allow into your life a few key things, like awe, resonance, and mystery, that have been almost destroyed by our demonic contemporary world.

Thanks to Tammy Peterson for telling the crowd a little bit about her path. It’s one that’s available to us all.