ON MAKING THINGS HARD WHEN THEY COULD BE EASY AND KNOWING WHEN TO WALK AWAY
Friday November 13 2020
Dear Sarah,
I’ve been coming back to your letter from two weeks ago in which you wrote about shame and anxiety. I found myself wondering about the difference between being shameless, and having no inhibitions about how you relate to others. I have a family member (maybe more than one!) who I would think of as being wildly uninhibited. Your examples of your grandmother belching during your piano recitals or loudly commenting on a waitress in their general presence sounded right up this family member’s alley. I think there is a difference for me in terms of how a person is “being” and how they “are” — shamelessness strikes me as a sort of intentional way of being in the world, whereas having no inhibitions, while not necessarily excusing the actions, seems less intentional and more a manifestation of some inherent qualities in a person. Not a critique of anything you wrote about your grandmother’s shamelessness, just wondering about those differences between an intended way of being versus just being (or is there any such difference in the first place? How much of each one of us is intentional versus innate?).
Even though I just wrote that paragraph, the part I’ve *really* been stewing on the most from that letter were your words about anxiety. I know what you mean about the internal chatter of anxiety starting in the body; I am pondering the dread of feeling powerless to reclaim control over the anxiety. I can’t say whether it’s normal or not! I can say that I feel anxious too, sometimes. I know I can slip right into solutions mode, but I genuinely think that the mind can be distracted from its anxiety loops with physical action: getting up and walking around, going outside even just for a moment if you are inside, cleaning, washing dishes. (Perhaps not as possible if you’re feeling nighttime anxiety, but maybe not impossible if there are some small, quiet physical actions you can take at that time.) I found myself thinking about my mother’s anxieties, and the way that anxiety looks more solvable when it belongs to someone else; you can see the holes more clearly from a distance. This is the case with so many things, but I think it’s possible to turn that logic on oneself, to look at one’s own anxiety as an observer. Why am I anxious? Does my anxiety change anything? Do I need to think about this now, or is there something I should make a note to think about or take more definitive action on at a later time?
I’ve been thinking about how it’s very possible — a regular life practice, even — to worry in situations where worry does not provide a useful channel of recourse. How can we shut off this kind of worry? Where does it come from, this ambient worry and anxiety, what does it mean? Do we have this anxiety because we have so many decisions to make every day, both large and small? Is it because the world is more present to us in magnitudes with the internet and the 24-hour news media cycle, filling our heads with information that is possibly less useful for us and more designed to fulfill business models? Is it because we know more about how our bodies work, what can go wrong, and thus we are more vigilant in paying attention to every detail of ourselves? Is it because we know more about what every other person on the planet is doing or thinking and we are trying to reconcile all this info with the choices we have made for ourselves?
As I was brushing my teeth one day this week (not the only day I brushed, of course) I thought to myself, maybe instead of things being hard, they could be easy. Could it be as simple as that? What if those things that I perceive as hard are not so hard? Am I making things harder than they have to be? I forced myself to think like this for a moment and I genuinely felt a weight lift. What goes on inside my head is only known to me; if I’m puzzling something over again and again it doesn’t necessarily yield some greater outcome that is perceivable to anyone else. So, can I just stop the machine from whirring inside my head and make things easier instead of harder? (I felt that perhaps I had written these words another time, and I found that I have thought a version of these thoughts before.)
Sometimes I find that thinking about things in advance is useful, and sometimes it is useless. There are some activities that do not require any advance thinking, and it can actually be a waste of time to think about them in advance. Some writing projects are like this. At one point I might have thought that every writing project could benefit from some meaningful pondering off the page, but now I find that if I have something I need or want to write, it’s better to just be working on writing it, here on the page, instead of thinking about what I’ll write or how I’ll write it when I get to it. (Drafts, please!) Then, if my mind is going there when I’m not poised to actually work on the writing, I’ll try to get my mind off that thought pattern and on to something else. It works at least some of the time! Maybe the concept of drafts applies to other areas of life — getting something out of one’s head and onto a metaphorical “page” anywhere in front of oneself, where an offending anxiety, for example, can be examined, critiqued, revised.
It’s Friday, another eternal week has drawn to a close, and I am ready for a relaxing beverage and some casual reading. I’ve been very much enjoying jumping around in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) which I requested from the library after seeing it highlighted in a Letter of Recommendation in the New York Times this summer. It’s in my hot little hands after a few months’ wait, and I have lots I want to discuss with you about it but I’m going to digest it a bit more first! (I’ve been further illuminated about Warhol’s archive boxes among other things… more soon!) Happy weekend, my friend, and I’m looking forward to reading your words before long!
Yours,
Eva
P.S. One more note on your letter from two weeks ago: I wonder if you could institute something like a TL;DR rule with your relatives who like to send many articles? I would imagine at the core of things they’re hoping to talk with you about something a given article was *about* rather than to assign you lots of homework (I hope!). Maybe if you can kindly ask them when they send readings to grab a few quotes that stood out to them, or the questions an article provoked for them — then you can find your way out from under the virtual article stack? No article sharing without the briefest of summaries or key points! I say family isn’t allowed to assign homework! As you and I have talked about many times in our letters, we each only have so much time on this earth and there are a lot of things that want reading! We have to decide for ourselves what’s worth our reading time!
November 13, 2020
Dear Eva,
It is Friday the 13th, and I am thinking back on our letters about all the things that take work. It takes work to take care of a home, to take care of other human beings, to cook meals. It takes work to think, and to write. It takes work to notice things around you, to observe the trees as you walk the neighborhood or to check your moles for funny coloring or changed shapes. It takes work to consider why you do what you do, the choices you make and the patterns you develop. It takes work to even know what you do, as anyone who has ever kept a food diary or a detailed budget can attest. I think these things are on my mind because I’m feeling particularly overworked lately. You talked last week about feeling fatigue, and I am with you. I need a break.
Recently I was talking to someone who told me they are “not a very reflective person”; they just like to do. This intrigues me. I suppose it might be viewed as a way to swap out one form of work—the work being thoughtful, and of thinking back on what you have done—and converting it into the doing kind of work so you can get more done. This is not my way of being. Although I type that and as I do, I am thinking about all the things I do without doing the work of thinking about them, as if I am on auto-pilot. Looking around in our kitchen today, I was thinking about how little I really understand about the appliances that chill and warm our food each day, or how the pipes that carry clean water to our home really function. There is so much to know, and we can get more done when we don’t really know it. How is that for a sentence? It’s true! Or at least it is true for someone like me who has a limited capacity on what I can cram into the ole noggin any given day. I need at least some portion of my everyday life to happen without having to deeply think about it. Even so, I call myself a reflective person. I strive to at least consider and be thoughtful about some of the basics, like how I am to the ones I love, how I work with people, how I spend my days. Maybe that is what most bothers me about my recent overwork—it feels like it makes it challenging to be reflective about the things that matter most to me.
Today for a different writing project we have together (for which I was only a consumer, not a writer this time), you wrote about walking away from things/people that are toxic or otherwise not worth the effort to endure. You were talking about democracy, but I am now thinking about that notion as it applies to other contexts, too. I think the answer to when we walk away usually has some correlation to our agency in the situation, how much ability we have to effect change within it. This then ties back to how everything we do requires some sort of labor—physical, emotional, cognitive. I suppose in every situation in our lives we must do an assessment (whether reflected upon or just done) of whether staying in it is worth the work. Sometimes we have no choice, but I actually think those are the exceptional situations. We can leave a relationship (with the exception of our children, at least until they are 18). We can leave a job. We can leave a country. When we choose to stay, I think we have to acknowledge our agency in the situation. I think we have to then commit to participate, to put in some work.
With that, I will close out this tired little letter on this Friday evening. I am anxious to read your words, which are waiting patiently in my inbox right now. I hope you have a lovely and leisurely weekend, and I look forward to talking to you next week!
Your friend,
Sarah