Reader Letter: Random Paper Airplanes

Dear Elodie:

I ask this of you because you wrote the Adulthood Is A Scary Horse post, and I thought you might have some insight on Adult Things. I need some help with developing Consistency.

I am good at doing things in three-month runs. Examples:

I can give up drinking diet Coke, which is slowly eating my esophageal lining and the enamel on my teeth, for three months at the most.

I can find internships for three months, but I have never found a job (now on either my sixth or fourth internship, depending on how you look at it.) (I am not sure if my continuing with school is related to not wanting to settle down, or if my inability to find the condition in which to settle down made continuing with school a good idea.)

I do well with my schoolwork (just finishing a master’s, will probably do a PhD, am twenty-five) for one semester, and then the next semester is gray and dull and mediocre.

I rode my bike for 30-40 km every week for three months during the spring/summer, and then somehow I stopped.

This pattern has stretched over the past eight years. I pick up new hobbies relatively frequently (maybe two or three a year) but I don’t maintain them — I circle back to them every so often. Three years ago I started painting, and I’ll do a rush of 6-10 paintings in a couple weeks, and then I won’t paint for three months. I did linoleum prints until I developed hand cramps, then stopped and picked up something else. I just started knitting; presumably I’ll do that for a bit then stop. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Same for writing short stories. It seems like I can work hard in one area for only three months, and then I have to take a break with that thing and focus hard on something else for three months.

My theory is that Adulthood is directly correlated to Consistency. I have done some reasonably cool things, on both personal and professional levels, but I don’t think I will ever get all the things I want to get done DONE unless I develop Consistency — i.e. the ability to put in the same amount of work every day for years at a time.

I have some mental health issues of an ambiguous nature. I have had two major, crippling spates of depression in my life, and my emotions are not well regulated or proportionate — they tend to either be numbed or violently over-the-top. I struggle with something like Seasonal Affective Disorder as well. This has predictable consequences, but it seems to me that many people who struggle with mental health problems still develop Consistency. No, my moods are not predictable, but many people with problems far more severe produce a much greater volume of work.

As a person who seems to have many interests, both artistic and scientific, how do you balance them and give them each enough attention? How do you achieve Consistency and Reliability, even though on a given day you might feel like a piece of asphalt? How can you both manage to be kind to yourself and take good care of yourself while saying, “No, self, you do NOT need ten hours of sleep tonight, just because you feel weird and sad. You should do Other Thing for a couple hours so that you feel a sense of accomplishment!” Many times I feel that Self-Care and Productivity are directly at odds, and while I realize Productivity is not the measure of a human being’s worth, I want to make a living doing things I love, and that will never happen without Productivity, which will never happen without Consistency.

Thoughts? Help? Squawk?

[A. I think I am pretty silly for sending this to you, but everything you write seems so wise, so maybe you have some spare wisdom lying about, however

B. you have a longboat and a job and skeins brightly colored yarn and jam dates and a Dr. Glass, so maybe just regard this as a random paper airplane that landed on the boat, without necessarily thinking of it as a thing that needs be answered.]

-

Dear Friend:

Thank you so much for writing to me! I love getting mail. You sound like such a cool person, and we’re in such similar places in our lives right now, that I just want to grab you by the face and tell you “YOU ARE SO GOOD. YOU ARE DOING SO FINE.” Thank you for writing such a beautiful letter and putting it out there.

I know you wrote to me ages ago, and I’ve been thinking about you for a long time.

Firstly, you mentioned Adulthood is A Scary Horse, a guest post I wrote for Captain Awkward. And so I began to write a response to you, which became ridiculously long, and sort of stopped being about you. It ended up being this Guest Post at Captain Awkward on the Low Mood Cycle.

That was meant for you.

Last month was this blog’s two-year anniversary.

As you can probably tell, I’m not a big Finisher of Things either. The large “drafts” folder of this blog, compared to its infrequent and oddball posts, is a kind of testament to that. Each post tends to take me about a dozen hours of work. Yet, I’m a relatively fast writer – given the usual artistic breaks for blank staring, rocking and crying. I can bang out press releases for work before my eyes have properly opened for the morning, and was known in my university days for frantically vomiting essays onto scrap paper just before handing them in and somehow winning prizes for them. So why does it take me literally months to write a blog post?

You

know

why.

You and I, my love, have to learn that “done is better than perfect” – that “good enough, and out there in the world” is better than our perfect, anxious fantasies.

I’m sure we’ll learn that together, you and me – we are the same age and in the same place, and somewhere ahead of us are our forty-year-old selves, holding out their loving lived-in hands to us, their beautiful eyes sweetened by laugh lines, their beautiful heads crowned with silver and gold. And all this frantic mess of the twenty-something life and the thirty-something life will be so beautiful and precious to them, and they love us so much.

But here are some things that I’ve learned to get us there:

The first short answer is that I don’t do these things.

I enjoy writing for my blog, but a look at the date stamps on the posts will indicate that my blog does not reflect this in the usual way. Most of my life is spent in flailing, with occasional interludes where I impose a nice narrative onto the episodes and set them up as Teachable Moments.

Really.

The first step is to know yourself. The second step is to set yourself up for success.

If you know (like me) that you’re bad at Balancing Things, but you also know (like me) that you like having diverse experiences and interests, then you can set yourself up to get them. If people offer you gifts (“what would you like for your birthday?”) you can ask for experiences, or raw materials with which to make other things, such as “a box of beads” or “animal skulls” or “paint.” Go inside art stores when you see them. Tell everyone that you’re doing a Handmade Christmas – then you’ll have to do it! When you have an intersection of spare time and cash, pay for a course to learn something. Say “yes” when people say things like “could you watch my bookshop for me?” and “could you chair this radical underground boater’s meeting?” and “would you like to do standup at the Royal Society?”

I do notice that when I sit on my butt and demand that an interesting life be delivered to me, it’s less effective than when I put myself in the way of Stuff Happening.

If you know that you are always the person who forgets your keys, tie them permanently to your handbag/messenger bag/traveling pack/interior of this week’s jeans or jacket.

If you know that you are always the person who forgets to eat and then becomes too hungry to figure out a healthy meal, then purchase a huge case of non-perishable snacks, and secrete them in stashes around the house.

There are many small problems that you can set yourself up to avoid. The reason why it’s difficult is often because you don’t want to admit that you’re the Bad Person Who Does The Silly Thing. (“I’m not a LATE PERSON. Late people are awful and have no friends. I’ve just been late four or five times.”)

I am currently working in an office. Before I sit down in the morning, I put several glasses of water in front of myself, because I don’t remember to drink much water in the day. The concept of thirst – a recognizable state of being – and the process of fixing it by standing up getting more water – seem to be completely disabled in me. But if somebody has put some water in front of me, I drink it, and realize to my surprise how thirsty I am. Yes, I look very strange, like I’m about to start playing a tune with my scale of musical glasses – but I’m hydrated, which is a good state for a biological creature to be in.

To break a habit, replace it with something else that fulfills that need.

I have occasionally decided to stop biting my nails. The thing is, I’ve been told all of my life by loved ones and strangers: “Don’t bite your nails.” Of course that never worked:

“Don’t bite your nails – because I hate the sound / it grosses me out /  it makes your hands ugly to me / it makes you look nervous.”

I mean, what? What the fuck does that have to do with me? It’s you, you, you all the time – what you want, what you want to fuck, what you want to look at. If I’m biting my nails, it’s because my nails are enticing, and biting them makes me happy. That is literally it. If you are anxious, or worried, or bored, and you are a nailbiter, then you do not give any fucks about how sexually attractive your nails are – they get sacrificed on the altar of Feeling Better. They’re yours. That’s why you bite them.

Don’t bite your nails because something comforting for you is annoying to me – oh, fuck off. There is no planet on which a smoker will quit because you ask them nicely, or shout at them, or ask them to consider your tender precious feelings. There is a multiverse of planets where smokers quit because they can’t breathe anymore, or they want to get pregnant, or they have PANTSFEELINGS for someone who hates the smell of cigarettes. People are selfish about their bad habits – honestly, for good reasons.

I don’t bite my nails when I’ve decided not to paint my nails, by following these habit-breaking behaviors:

1. I decide not to bite my nails because I prefer them unbitten. (You can’t break a habit for other people.)
2. I paint them, so that I notice them as pretty colorful entities, and not invisible snacks. (You can’t break a habit if you don’t realize when you’re doing it!)
3. I note the situations where I bite my nails the most. (You can’t break a habit if you don’t know why you do it.)
4. I get other displacement activities. (To break a habit, you need to replace it with something better and less destructive that feeds the same need.)
5. If I bite a nail, I go “Eh” and fix the paintjob. They’re my fingernails; it’s not a problem if one of them doesn’t match. (To break a habit, you can’t punish yourself for dipping back into the habit. Especially if it’s an anxiety/comfort habit – you’ll go “I’m a piece of shit!” and feel awful and then bite all of your nails and then you’ll feel like the pits and you’ll have no fingernails. Why feel awful and have no fingernails?)

I became a nailbiter when I was five. For twenty years, people shouted and cajoled and screamed, slapped my hands from my mouth, held them down, painted me with bitter things, made disappointed faces, and compared my hands to sexier ones. For twenty years, this utterly failed to work. It made me more nervous (I hid my nailbiting behavior, and perversely wanted to do it more) more deceitful (I tried more subtle and damaging nail picking/biting behaviors) and less respectful and trusting of the authorities who tried to force me to give up a nervous habit.

Lovingly and intelligently training myself to grow my nails, for my own pleasure, works time and again and again.

We really ought to treat ourselves as gently as we would treat those anxious younger selves, don’t you think?

Be Nice to the Self Who Grew Into You

Building on that, a lot of the habits you hate about yourself were developed by your younger self.

Your younger self was only doing the best they could with limited resources.

Maybe when your younger self wanted the instant bubbly comfort of Diet Coke, they were often denied it, because young’uns have practically no control over their environment. Now, the You Today can have ALL THE DIET COKE. Immediately. This is still something your younger self gets excited about. Why not?

You buy Diet Coke because it makes you happy. You don’t go running or biking because sometimes they don’t please you. You stop doing lino prints when they begin to bore you. If you were complaining about these behaviors in a young child, you’d probably understand where they were coming from!

To make a habit, train yourself kindly, or: HOW DO YOU EVEN.

While I was working part-time and Dr Glass was technically working two full-time jobs, in a funny piece of Time Lord trickery often performed by academics, the agreement was that I would do more housework. Or rather, all of the housework. Or boatwork, really. The problem was that I don’t care much to do housework, and Dr Glass feels that it is important to be Clean.

And as we know, you can’t logic yourself into doing something that you find inherently unreasonable, just as you can’t logic yourself out of doing something that seems completely reasonable.

But it’s a Good Habit to be Clean. It is known! People are very serious about it. Apparently there are folk who find an organized cutlery drawer to be incredibly satisfying, and who can feel more than one feeling about putting stuff away. I decided that Cleanliness would probably be a good habit to try out.

So how to be Clean?

Well, I know how to clean – I was raised by the most hygienic of wolves. But knowing how to do the Thing does not a good habit make. You need reward; you need motivation. Motivation comes after action, but…

…You have to give just the tiniest fuck. And to make yourself give a fuck when previously you gave none, you have to be kind to yourself and train yourself well.

For me, housework got easier when I decided to put on podcasts while doing it. That absorbs the “oh god oh god I HATE HOUSEWORK WHY AM I DOING THIS, CAN I JUST NOT?” part of my brain, while my hands can move and work. Plus, if you put on a half-hour podcast and finish the basic work in fifteen minutes (because the basic stuff always takes exactly fifteen minutes for some reason) – well, you’re halfway into your podcast and don’t want to stop now, so why not do the fancy tiddly extra stuff?

For me, a lot of routine/necessary work is awful because I’m way too used to being Intellectually Stimulated and Mindful and Engaged – too used to labwork and sciencey stuff where you really have to pay attention or you’ll end up with an exploded mouse and far too much blood on your clothes for socially acceptable purposes. I always see the Point in Science, but I rarely see the point in moving dishes around, or using the vacuum cleaner attachment that Dr Glass believes is more efficient for dusting the gunwales.

Yes. This has been the focus of many, many fights.

Housework and officework baffled me a lot until I figured that music and podcasts can occupy that “WHY ARE WE DOING THIS/WHY ARE WE SITTING DOWN FOR SO LONG/WHAT DIFFERENCE IS THIS MAKING TO THE FUNCTION OF THE UNIVERSE” portion of my distractable brain. Most people can use clever little hacks like this – they’ll depend on you and how you work. Soaking up that excess energy can take the seduction out of procrastination. Other tricks involve setting timers – doing as much as possible in fifteen minutes. Also, having guests over always motivates me to present my home well. If we have guests over for dinner once a week, our home remains clean and organized. It’s a good trick!

Next, to make a good habit, train yourself – wisely, kindly, with resources.

If you want to eat more vegetables, step one is not “eat some vegetables.” Step one is thinking of your favorite tastiest vegetables and the nicest recipes involving them, and step two is acquiring them and keeping them in the house, and step three is cooking them up deliciously. But that’s not how we do it, is it? We grandly resolve to eat vegetables, and then immediately punish ourselves for not being more herbivorous when we didn’t even get the vegetables! or we got ones we don’t even like! I know; I’m the worst at this too. I have whole conversations in my head like:

Me: ALL YOU’VE EATEN TODAY IS DRIED FRUIT, YOU SAD SACK, GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER.

Me: But… there was a bag of dried fruit! CONSIDER THE FRUIT. It was inherently logical!

Me: But you should have eaten THE VEGETABLES OF MORAL PURITY.

Me: What vegetables? Where are they?

Me: EXACTLY. YOU SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN THEM ALREADY.

Me: Have you considered dried fruit, though? It’s real nice.

But this is the kind of argument you have with puppies and toddlers – and you don’t kick them in the head and scream at them for eating Logical Fruit instead of Moral Vegetables.

Like Anne Lamott puts it so beautifully:

“Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.”

We’ve gotta stop doing that to ourselves, my dear friend. We just have to keep bringing our puppies back to the newspaper.

Seek Your Creative Replenishment

For me, it’s things like the book the above quote comes from: Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird. I read this book when I was young and hungry – still developing – and in turn I grew to resonate with it. If you want to accuse me of harboring any wisdom, it’s all been stolen from Anne. Sometimes I’m in a Low Mood or my Grey Dog is lying on my chest and I just open it up and it’s like Anne is slapping me around the face and shouting

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

And I’m like, God, Anne, thank you! You’re absolutely right! And then I go away and write.

Bird by Bird makes me want to run circles around the room and then sit down and write for two hours regardless of mortal things like bedtimes. That’s the state that we go into when we do Productivity, the feeling of being the pivot point around which your environment turns, the knowledge that you are slightly on fire but too engaged to care. Technically, the state is called “flow,” and it’s the result of directed focus and attention. Flow usually occurs when you care about something, and dries up when you’re being overly critical of the thing you care about.

Sometimes you can jump-start this with 50ccs of Bird straight to the heart. Or you’ve given up on painting, and then something comes up on Tumblr that’s so gorgeous it makes you want to run around the room screaming, and it strikes sparks off your competitive instinct and your love of painting and you’re off again. Sometimes you’re jaded by cooking – a good prescription is to go out to dinner and order something that you can’t cook, that will make you jump up and down in your chair, because now you want to cook it. Sometimes you’re jaded by science – then after winning an argument with a colleague, you’ll be doing victory laps, lit up from within by the love of what you know.

I don’t know what the Serious Exercise equivalent of this is, because I regard most sweat-making activities with disturbed suspicion, but I think it’s probably like when you’re running and the good part of the music is playing and you are pretending that you are a magnificent racehorse. That.

Our great deep loves come from somewhere, and when the lustre of love has faded, there’s no shame in tapping straight back to the source. Where did you get the love? Go get it again. You’ll find it in things that you read once, and you put the book down, and went “ARGHH!” and then picked the book up and went on. Read that book again. Get back into that Flow.

Everyone takes a different path.

“Ooh, you were such a Gifted Child, but we can’t help but notice that you’ve reached an Age, and you haven’t unlocked the required babies and car achievements for that level. Whatever happened?”

Ritualized panic about Achieving Life Milestones at Certain Life Ages is pretty common. I understand that it is hard to shake yourself out of these constant comparisons to what people in your cohort “should be doing.”

But working yourself up about how you compare to this fictionalized cohort makes about as much sense as “caring too hard about whether your taste in clothing makes you more attractive to Percy, the King of the Pangolins, whom you will never meet.”

“Come back, your Majesty! I can change!”

King Percy ain’t never gonna care about the color of your bra strap, and it won’t ever come up in any life situation whatsoever. Worrying about whether you match up to an imaginary calendar is just as helpful as worrying about a fictional pangolin’s opinions.

That’s all I have to say.

End Result Fallacies

“I feel like stuff is wrong because I should be happier, I should be doing more, I should be wanting more things – and getting them. My life, as a narrative, looks unsatisfying.”

Have you noticed how people rarely talk about their failures and insecurities? You and I talk frequently of them, Letter Writer, because we have that kind of close and intimate and safe relationship here. But outside, in the big mean world, people talk only about their successes, slapping them down like winning cards and daring you to raise to them. We see the people we respect and admire – our heroes and role models – and the accounts they have told us of their lives, and we see them as a planned and directed stream of Goals, Successes and Adventures. It’s confirmation bias: we see successful people as people who have achieved Success, and only Success, probably because (as they are happy to tell you) they wanted it so hard, and worked so hard to get it.

(Now, with the Internet and Twitter, we can bring our heroes that bit closer, and can experience disproportionate outrage when they fuck up publicly. “How dare you be a person when I demand you be a metaphor!” we can shout. But generally, when you think about your heroes, you’re not thinking about the worst books they wrote, the racism they endorsed, and the ridiculously wrong scientific ideas they supported wholeheartedly: you’re fixating on their success.)

So you’re left going “Well, I’m twenty-six, and my life is okay – but I suppose they’re right; I don’t have X, Y, and Z. I guess I just don’t want them enough – maybe I don’t know anything that I want enough. In fact, I’m not entirely convinced that I’ve found my Passion yet. I don’t even think I HAVE a Calling. I must be a failure. Maybe I shouldn’t be here. They’ll throw me out when they find out – I’ll just desperately work harder, I guess. I’ll just hope really aggressively for Success – granted, I’m not really clear on what that is.”

It’s a mindset that is nicely encouraged in graduate school, where you’re expected to show up each day with the stated intention of working yourself to death to Get Success. It’s encouraged in the workplace, because belief in Goals is supposed to be linked to Productivity. It’s also crystallized in the self-help zeitgeist, where positive thinking is viewed as necessary to health, and lack of motivation/success/health is probably due to negativity and general lack of Belief in Oneself. It’s supported entirely our by unchecked capitalist economies, which state that poor people probably want/expect to be poor, and simply lack the mindset to get rich. It’s very much a feature of the previous generation’s thinking, because they were the first – and possibly the only – modern generation to be raised in a cocoon of stability, entitlement, and certainty, with every expectation of achieving Success.

It isn’t particularly reflected in either science or magic or faith, though – three great paradigms where you’d expect Humanity’s Influence Over the Universe to be a stated truth.

But not even magic demands and expects as much control over the environment that we young Western adults believe we should have. Not even witchcraft – which is often about “focusing your intent” and “imbuing spells with your will” in order to bring about changes in the Universe – demands an instant return in exchange for this display of willpower, for this stated intention of Wanting Something Hard Enough. Witchcraft has a structure and a tradition, and includes an inbuilt expectation that the Universe will occasionally interpret your demands differently, handing you something other than what you asked for. Christianity accepts this too, assuming that the uncertainty of the end result is because God has a bigger plan; you can pray for Him to look kindly on your efforts, but it isn’t within your power to rearrange God’s game. And science? Half of all experiments fail, most papers get scooped before you publish, the rest get rejected in peer review, and most funding bodies hate you – your only hope is to try to turn this mass of failure to your advantage more quickly than your colleagues. Most mining operations turn up lots of rocks and dirt, with occasional bits of gold. But we do it anyway! We do it, and find great joy and fulfillment in doing it. Scientists write papers despite knowing that they will not necessarily result in Jobs. Christians pray whole-heartedly despite evidence that it has limited effect.

Most real-world effort is rewarded in unpredictable ways. In fact, it’s often given in unrecognizable currency: we expect to receive payout in the form of Secure Fulfilling Jobs and Stable Safe Homes and a Constant Glow of Achievement and Serene Happiness, and then get upset and frustrated when they aren’t in the envelope.

This uncertainty is accepted as inevitable in even the most goal-oriented science, magic, faith and resource-collection – but somehow, in your own life, you are expected to develop a habit of Consistency that allows you complete control over the Universe?

In Studio Ghibli’s “The Cat Returns,” the Heroine falls from a great height, but is saved by a flock of crows. The birds form a living staircase that allows her to walk downwards safely.

A lot of our internal stress and unhappiness comes from this belief that if you do everything correctly – if in your twenties you ride your bike three times a week, receive positive feedback from your boss and keep a clean home, then in your thirties, you’ll get the envelope with the Stable Job and Shiny home in it. Instead, think about this quote by Anne Lamott:

I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.

Now note that in your life, there have rarely been stepping stones. Instead, your life has been more like the girl in the gif above; teetering above disaster, you are held aloft by a thousand unexpected crows, who each break your fall just a little bit at a time. Embracing this uncertainty, rather than fearing it, is how you get your Balance.

Knowing that we have no job security and that all of our efforts might see us unemployed next year, with our life path run out from under us, and Science not wanting us anymore, and our employment opportunities in our city drying up, Dr Glass and I bought a boat. It is our stated acceptance of this uncertainty. If the Universe offers us jobs in another city, we will take our boat to it. If there are no jobs, we will take our boat around the country and write a book about it. If we don’t like it anymore, we will sell the boat and move back to the States. If the States are consumed by fire, we will buy a larger boat and live on the sea. There is no real point in planning for any certainty but uncertainty; you have to embrace the uncertainty. At any point you might be thrown into the sky with no parachute; but hopefully you have read your fairy tales well, and befriended the King of Cats and a murder of crows.

I guess what I’m saying is that if you don’t ride your bike for three weeks, you’ll probably be okay.

Experiere

It takes me a while to write a blog post, partly because these discrete and scattered thoughts don’t tend to make sense until I have a Moment of Epiphany that ties them together. You can’t force these Moments of Epiphany; you just have to sign up for them, and then wait for half a year in constant uncertainty, knowing that they may be delivered at inconvenient times (I was brushing my teeth) and that they might be pretty crap.

Here is this one:

Experience and experiment and expertise are all the things you’re writing about, all the things you want to obtain, and they all share the same root word: experiere.

 Experiere doesn’t mean “success.” It doesn’t mean “something you’ve done a thousand times” or “something you’re a genius at.”

“Expert” doesn’t mean “someone who has it all figured out and makes lots of money while making you feel bad about yourself.”

Experiere means “try.”

It has an extra flavor added; it means “try” in the sense of “test.” But note that there is no flavor of “excellence,” no presumption that trying will lead to success. These word sisters don’t mean “instant competence” or “constant mastery.”

An experience is something that you’ve tried, and when you’re experienced, you’ve tried a lot. An experiment is only something that you try.

And experts? They’ve just accumulated a lot of trying. Probably a lot of failure. Probably a lot of unfinished experiments, stuffed in the backs of their closets.

Try it for a bit, see if you like it; call yourself an experimenter, an expert, a collector of experiences. To acquire these acclaims, all you need to do is try.

Caveat Emptor: Elodie Knows Nothing

But the thing is that I don’t know – I don’t know anything. It took me, like, five months to write back to you.

I wish you the best, in the knowledge that one day we will both meet our older selves together, and that they will be proud to see us there.

Until then? We will try.

I wish you every joy, person of my tribe, member of my species, new friend of my heart.