Enough.
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
This weekend, after listening patiently to my angst, a close friend told me to write down what "enough" looks like. (I had been complaining that I didn't know how I was ever going to do enough of all the things that I needed to do. This is subtly different from the problem of taking on too many tasks, although I have that too - I've been working on that problem and balancing things out with some success! But now I am worrying I'll never be balanced enough...)
She suggested writing because I process best by writing. Some people process best in a conversation, or through other methods.
The key to this is that you write it, and then you look at what you wrote with a grain of salt. Is it realistic, or are you beating yourself up for not achieving some fantastical, pie-in-the-sky, I-want-to-be-the-very-best ideal?
The other key is that, like I was talking about a couple weeks ago, naming things helps take away their power. When you write it down, it's no longer a nebulous cosmic horror that's haunting you; it's a concrete thing that you can evaluate and assess.
A few of my ideas of "enough" seemed achievable in the near-to-medium term. Most didn't. Some weren’t unrealistic but were obviously going to take years, even if I worked hard and managed them quite well. Others were totally out of proportion; stuff that very few people will ever achieve in their life. (If you've ever seen a writer going "boo hoo, I'm nothing, because I haven't won a Hugo award," then you know the kind of thing I mean.) So now I know. This doesn't stop me from wibbling but it puts the wibbling into perspective.
This week I suddenly couldn't stand my own living room walls. I already had a plan to repaint them eventually, but for a few days this week it was suddenly urgent and intense: the walls, which are perfectly functional living room walls and have been this color for years, were suddenly AWFUL. The beige color felt oppressive. I couldn't stand it.
(I've been doing a lot with the house lately, but it's all pretty unglamorous - managing appointments with different contractors, replacing a breaker box, redoing some masonry, replacing the garage door - because that's the stuff that was safety-critical. The sexy interior-design stuff is mostly having to wait.)
After a few days of this, in the middle of yoga, I abruptly realized why I was angry at my walls. I've been working through something pretty heavy in therapy lately - a way that a past relationship permanently changed an aspect of my brain. I hate it! And the house, as always, is a metaphor for the self. This house has a fraught history - it used to belong to an ex, although not the specific ex that I’m processing trauma about right now - and I was mad at everything in the house that was still determined by the past. Why couldn’t it just magically shed every trace of how things were before? Why did that have to take time? Surely, if it took time, then that meant I wasn’t doing enough.
It hurt a lot to figure this out, but now I'm back to having more compassion for my house and its silly beige walls.
For similar reasons, I'm grumpy with pretty much everything this week. I'm near the end of my secondary world fantasy WIP, which should be exciting, but my brain weasels say it sucks and it's silly. I have a promising start on what might be another book - yes, I'm the weirdo who does more than one project at once - but maybe it sucks and is silly, too. Things are moving in exciting ways with RESURRECTIONS, but maybe no one will like it. I may (?) be getting a cool new opportunity at my day job soon, but maybe that sucks and is silly, too, or maybe I'm not getting it and the whole thing is fake. I have some very supportive friends, but maybe they don't like me. Or maybe none of it matters because climate change. I'm doing stuff just for fun as well, but it has the same problems.
I know exactly where this is coming from and why it's coming at me harder than usual this week. It's a temporary state (and I'm lucky that it's a temporary state for me, that I really am doing better than I was a few years ago.) Knowing where it comes from doesn't make it go away, but it does help me handle the downturns with a little more grace.
There's an art to handling times like this and it has to do, again, with balance. With slowing down enough to be soft and caring with the parts of me that need it, but keeping going enough to make progress. And it's impossible to ever get that balance perfect, or even to decide in advance what perfect looks like; there's a part of it that's always going to feel like back and forth, trial and error. (If you're trying to be perfect at overcoming your perfectionism, then, well, I have news...)
I have another therapy appointment tomorrow. Meanwhile I'm putting my feet in front of each other as patiently as I can. That's enough.
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(Note: I am leaving the comment section open, but please understand that when I make mental health posts like this, I'm not trawling for sympathy or for a listening ear! I post them so that I can be honest and stay connected to my readers at times when mental health is kind of taking up my whole attention, and so that readers with similar struggles will feel less alone, or maybe find something that resonates with them in what's worked for me. There really is no need to do the "sorry you're going through this" dance; I have a solid support network elsewhere.)