The Year of More and Less

Life continues apace.

I like being in my late thirties. I have my shit roughly together. I'm more secure and confident in who I am. The existential anxieties that haunted my twenties have quietly settled down. Instead of "Who am I?" and "What is my purpose?" I'm occupied with different questions: How do I increase my impact and expand my influence? What are my focus points for growth for this year? How am I going to make my life even better?

I never saw myself reaching this point. I don't mean this as a bitter indictment of my abusive upbringing in narcissism and fundamentalist religion (although it certainly doubles as that -- I will never stop indicting that shit); I mean it very literally. I never saw myself reaching this point because "this point" was beyond my ability to conceptualize. Up until two years ago, nothing about my life had ever trained me to envision a life in fullness. Fullness was so far be yond my capacity to comprehend that I had to live it before I could imagine it. I built up to it blindly, knowing that each step was toward something better, even though I had no idea what "something better" looked or felt like.

I have a better idea now. And like Conor Oberst writes (yes, I still love Conor -- even more now than when I was a wreck; I'm fairly certain that that man's voice could bring me back from the dead), "I'm not there yet, but I'm feeling confident to build something that's sacred till the end." Still en route; always will be. But I have an inkling of my destination.

Which brings me to this, the beginning of my 38th year on this planet. The questions that occupy my mental spaces get an annual refreshment around my personal New Year. As always, I find myself asking, What do I want from this next year? What do I want to accomplish?

Thinking about these things led me to The Year of More and Less.

See, I'm great at self-improvement, but, like most humans, I'm terrible at self-regulation. Especially with ADHD.  Like -- so, so bad at self-regulation. At least when it comes to meeting concrete, overly specific, disciplined goals. I mean, people aren't good at this in general. This is why diets fail, why New Year's resolutions are a cultural joke, why people are constantly doing shit we regret later, knowing full well we'll regret it. (There are a lot of neuroscientific reaons for this, including our brains' inability to identify our future selves as our actual selves; our brain classifies our future selves as a wholly distinct and other person.) As a species, we're just shit at responsibility -- it's a capacity that got cobbled onto other existing neural systems as we evolved, and we're no better at it than we are at logic.

So in the past, when I said, "I'm going to lose 40 pounds in 6 months," or, "I'm going to exercise 150 minutes per week," or, "I'm going to get 8 hours of sleep every night," I would get a strong start, lapse into my normal modes of existence, and give up on the goal altogether. I felt guilty. I felt like a failure. I felt powerless against my own desires.

Well, fuck guilt and powerlessness. That's all bullshit. The goals are arbitrary anyway; what's to feel guilty about? (It's actually kind of hilarious, and profoundly tragic, when you think about it -- we impose these meaningless, arbitrary, completely impossible rules on ourselves and then wallow around in self-flagellating worthlessness for not following them. I meannnnnnnnn who cares.) 

So there are things this year that I want to do. But I don't want rules. I want a solid life rhythm. So I came up with More and Less. I wrote down all the things that I want for my best life (there were a lot), and narrowed the list down to the four things that will add the most to my immediate wellbeing (success in which will build the foundation to tackle a few of the other things next year). For two of those things (exercise and sleep), I will do More. For the other two (alcohol consumption and skin picking), I will do Less.

So far it's pleasingly effective. For one thing, it's almost impossible to fail. I could exercise 10 times this whole year and that's still More than what I've been doing. So there's no fear of failure, no self-loathing lurking around the corner. The question instead focuses on what it means incorporate these things into my best life. Like okay, since I can't fail, what kind of More and Less am I aiming for? And really, what I want is to build better habits. And a habit is a frame of mind. An assumption that you'll do a thing more often than you won't (or that you won't do a thing more often than you will).

So I've been taking my mindset about these four habits, accepting what my mindsets are and historically have been, and simultaneously assuming that those mindsets are already different. Exercise, for example. I haven't exercised with any regularity in, oh, at least five years. So now I'm placing an overlay on my existing no-exercise mindset, and thinking like someone who exercises regularly. Which means that I'll miss some days here and there due to reasonable circumstances -- illness, or being out of town, or just being too fucking tired. But instead of going "oh no I fell off the wagon, now I'm fucked," I think, "well today wasn't good, so let's try again tomorrow or the day after or even next week, when I'm up for it again." This way a small break in continuity doesn't lead to the train totally jumping the tracks.

I mean, I think about the habits I already have, like eating dinner while watching TV. Most days I do this, and I enjoy the hell out of it. Some days, though, I don't, because I'm eating out, or I'm talking to a friend and wind up eating while I'm on the phone because I don't want to end the conversation. I don't get upset that I didn't watch more of a favorite show; that doesn't even occur to me. My brain is already thinking, We'll do it tomorrow. (Or the next day. Or the next.) No matter what, it's going to happen again, because it's just something that I do. If I approach exercise and sleep the same way, occasional or even regular interruptions aren't that big a deal, because I'll pick it back up as soon as I can, because it's just something I do more often than not. And conversely, with drinking alcohol and picking my skin, if I gradually reduce the regularity of both, I'll be at a point where I don't do those things more often than I do them.

Any increase in exercise and sleep is good; any decrease in alcohol consumption and skin picking is good. And that's ultimately what I'm seeking: Goodness. Not perfection. Where perfection is rigid, uncompromising, disapproving, harsh and judgmental, goodness is flexible, realistic, accepting and nurturing. Balanced.

So we'll see how this plays out -- a self-help approach that eschews discipline. I'm anticipating good things. 

gearing up

Another hot August day, sunny and humid, rasped by waves of cicada wings and the occasional gusty breeze. These are the sounds I notice, even in the heart of the city with the endless ocean roar of traffic, the punctuating barks of distant dogs, the pulse of bass and wail of car alarms. I'm a small-town girl. I hear the wind and the insects. Country sounds.

I'm sitting out on the balcony where a truly enterprising spider has constructed a web the size of a schooner sail. I used to be terrified of spiders. Through no particular design, I'm not anymore. Mostly I attribute this to science enthusiasm and being tired of fearing things I can't avoid. The web I'm looking at now is liberally sprinkled with insect corpses, and I'm raising my coffee mug in tribute to a master predator whose feeding habits benefit me.

Hopefully this is my last summer renting. Apartment life has been good to me but it's time to call the shots in my own living space. I'm sick of sharing walls with inconsiderate neighbors and putting up with laissez-faire landlords. So here I am, less than a year after declaring that I would rent until retirement, obsessively scanning listings and constructing castles in my head. My therapist says it means I'm in a healthy place: For the first time in my life, I'm putting down roots. I know he's right but mostly I'm just excited for an absence of pot smoke and dance music bleeding through my walls like the superbly shitty ectoplasm of the world's worst ghost.

When you don't have kids, I guess this is what drives the homeownership decision. Fuck everyone with their noise and their laziness. I'm buying a fort.

I'm planning on buying in Detroit. I love it here. I love watching, all around me, the neighborhoods begin to come back. It's only been two years since I moved into the city limits and the progress is astonishing. Four years ago, my realtor told me, you couldn't hire contractors in the city because no one would work here. Now you can't hire contractors because there are too many jobs. Just this summer, rehab work has begun on three derelict houses within eyeshot of my balcony.

Trauma and disaster don't last forever. Not on a wide scale. I'm lucky enough that they don't last forever on a personal scale either.

I shouldn't have survived what was done to me from birth. Certainly not with my personality intact. My therapist says there's no explanation for why I'm okay. Some deep, impossible wellspring of resilience brought me through.

I had to make hard choices to get to the other side of survival. I cut ties, cast off bonds, tore up roots, burned bridges. I obliterated my place in the world. You don't know what it is to be alone until you've cut yourself off from your family of origin. Even a shitty family is family. Even a shitty family gives you a place. I incinerated all that. With nothing to replace it. It took strength beyond strength.

And here I am, more than okay. I'm thriving. I'm free. I'm crafting my own place in the world. And one of the best things I discovered is that irrespective of trauma and depression, it is not in my nature to be miserable. My default state is happiness.

So I can sit here on the balcony of an apartment I'm tired of, enjoying a day moving toward thunderstorms, relishing the drop in temperature as I scrutinze the latest house listing to catch my eye, gearing up for the next phase in my evolution. I can savor the present even as I anticipate the future -- a balance that has heretofore eluded me. It's still a little wobbly some days, but I'm getting the hang of it. Because that's what I do.

It's starting to rain.

Life couldn't be better.

My kingdom for some ointment

Month 3 of new cat motherhood:

Thackeray jumped on my chest and promptly started licking his ass 2 inches from my face, then spent 5 minutes kneading my tits with his claws right over the nip.

I need a shower and bandages.

Also he is frighteningly cute.

l'hote

On an antiquing venture with my sister in PA this weekend I picked up what can best be described as a "framed owl thingie." Constructed of leaves, pine cones and papier mache, it is equal parts creepy and adorable, the kind of thing you hang in a guest room just to fuck with your guests. 

Which is precisely what I'll do when I buy a house. 

Sleep well, motherfuckers.