#123 - My life went through a fundamental change

I have had the same dish rack for more than ten years of my life.

It’s big and clunky and the spacing is all weird so it holds none of my bowls, plates, or bowl plates well.

It also has no drainage. The run-off water just kind of limply spills over the side and goes underneath, soaking the countertop each and every time and creating this awful greyish (how? why!) water that I wipe up while trying to look elsewhere lest I heave into the sink.

In short, it sucked. It never really worked and after a lot of thought—I don’t know why it took me until this week to replace it.

But the new one? Oh my god the new one is amazing.

First of all. Expandable. And I have such little counter space that it’s already come in handy and I love that it’s more compact AND bigger than the old one all at once.

Second—drainage. There are two layers to this thing and a spigot.

Oh my god I love the spigot so much it drips directly into my sink so there’s no possibility of water underneath and washing my dishes no longer creates this phantom second task that I absolutely detest.

And when I wake up to a clean sink, the whole day is easier.

I’ve been trying to set myself up (for ~success) lately because the only one who can do anything around here is me. The cats are great but they mostly contribute cuteness and cat hair and you know what, they’re perfect at it and don’t need to do anything else. But that does mean that I am solely responsible for running my life, and it’s like partially daunting but also really freeing.

I may have finally allowed myself to chill enough that I no longer feel withheld from the activity. I’ve indulged this summer. I haven’t gone outside when I didn’t really want to, I’ve been laying in the park for hours on the weekends, my journaling has become random jots throughout the day with no dated attributions,  more books have been read in the past three months than the past three years (because I’m letting myself read whatever sounds appealing and rereading old favorites and having a ball I love reading I can’t believe I forgot how great this shit is!), and I have allowed myself to pile laundry on chairs without guilt or self-judgment.

I bought a fan for every single room. I didn’t want to make myself move the large fan from room to room, knocking my ankles into it at every doorway, remembering to tilt it backward so the blade didn’t fall off.

And it improved my summer tremendously. A fan was available anytime it was necessary. My handheld stood strong through another summer and the neck fan I purchased was by the door so I could come in and immediately cool down while putting my stuff away.

I read that if things were always in the wrong place, it meant the object didn’t have a proper home. So I spent time figuring out what my floating objects were, and figuring out containers. They can even still live in the same general area, but there’s now a tray or little basket beneath them to complete the illusion of neatness.

I like when things have a proper place. I like when my desk is clean and cute and I take the time to wipe it down and vacuum all the cat hair out of the keyboard while I replace the keycaps on Sundays. I like that I have a cute little ceramic key dish and a coat rack so packed with bags it’s threatening to tip over at all times.

I don’t know why it took me so long to buy a new dish rack.

Part of me thinks that I often keep small obstacles in my own way so I can point at them as my excuse.

I don’t want to do the dishes because the counter will get gross and I’ll have to deal with it and instead, I can just scrape everything into the compost and rinse them and stack them and feel slightly bonkers for days on end because I hate walking past a cluttered sink and it’s legitimately distracting to me throughout the workday because my office is in the kitchen and I feel like I can just tell they’re sitting in there the whole morning and—

Some things are easy fixes. Affordable $25 investments that will pay themselves off in mental clarity immediately. Triple value on the return!

Others take time and constant reminders.

I’ve been determinedly changing myself and my patterns of behavior for two years at this point, and I’m here to breathlessly report a brand new observation that no one has ever observed before: change is like, really hard.

It takes a level of persistent vigilance that is exhausting. You get mad at yourself for new things which requires figuring out new methods of self-forgiveness to ward off the spiral of thoughts that come with any hint of the idea that I’m not doing everything perfectly, all the time, with the purest of motivations.

So, if it’s this hard for me and I’m like fully on board with the whole trying to change for the better plan, how the fuck would it ever be possible for me to expect change—especially instant change—from those around me?

Illumination is step one. It’s the seed being planted. Can’t expect apples to appear fully formed overnight!

In the process of learning to give myself grace, I may have accidentally finally figured out the reason it’s so important to extend it as often and fully as possible to others—everyone might be trying their hardest, too.

Overt generosity is not a satisfying read of someone. It doesn’t allow me to diagnose their actions with alarming accuracy, it rarely leaves room for disdain, and it creates questions that I do not have answers to.

There are times when I struggle to hold all the truths and contradictions of humanity in me to forgive the person who cut me off in line. (But then sometimes that person goes on to spill the hand sanitizer they demanded all over themselves and their ugly Louis Vuitton monogram wallet and it gets a lot easier.)

My sister teaches professional facilitators how to facilitate. In one of her workshops, she asks them to list how many strategies they have for how to keep themselves in a generous headspace when a participant says something problematic. And then she reminds everyone that “Hope is not a strategy.” which always gets a laugh.

Because she says it so plainly.

Hope is not a strategy.

I can’t just hope things don’t happen so that I don’t have to deal with them. That’s only setting myself up for a reality I’ll be woefully unprepared for.

I have never gotten away with sticking my head in the sand and hoping others will fix it for me. And letting go of my resentment around that fact allows me to exist in the reality of my life.

Change is exhausting, choosing to be slightly heartbroken by people’s actions rather than infuriated requires a lot of energy, and by focusing inward I am able to set myself up to be more present with those around me.

Figuring out my points of friction in life and making the necessary changes means that it’s one less thing to worry and stress about so that I can continue my determination to become an extremely gracious person.

Which, by the way, I don’t think is necessarily like The Right Way To Live for everyone, but it’s certainly helped me.

I keep feeling like culture has moved towards purity-testing everything. What is your intention with this action and does it align with the absolute best version of possible reactions?

And yeah, sometimes being wildly generous is lovely and makes everyone aware of each other’s humanity and that’s great. But other times, it’s just what I’ve found helps me move through the world without a ripping sadness that I have to stitch back together before bed in order to get out of bed the next morning. Sometimes I am being selfish in trying to ascribe blame to institutions rather than individuals because I just want to believe that if given the right tools and education everyone would make better and more magnanimous choices in their lives and for others.

Because I think the heartbreak comes from the fact that most people want to be good. To see themselves as good. To see their actions as having a positive impact.

And right now, society has set us all up to fail. There’s no healthcare, no social support, no care or decorum or leadership. So every day, we’re reaching into our reserves to find the lovely things that make it all worth continuing on through.

I think it’s bizarre how easy it was to imagine even just a year ago that my internal well of love would run dry eventually.

(But love is exponential, not subtractive. It only needs to be in proximity to hope to magnify its properties. Love begets love begets love there is no limit to the supply. Endless resource! Just tap here.)

I tried for a little while to make my life really small, to minimize the damage and the pain and the mess that comes from being alive and caring about people (especially people who no longer care about me) because I wanted to protect myself from disappointment. I wasn’t sure I could handle feeling like the catalyst for another person’s Life Lesson in How to Treat People.

Ultimately though, that set me up for a different kind of disappointment. It turns out, insulating my life to such a degree took the magic and the spontaneity and the new experiences off the table and at the end of it—that really wasn’t any kind of life at all.

Making things that can be made easy, easier, is worth it. Because so much of life cannot be made frictionless, and perhaps shouldn’t be.

The friction might just be the point.

The constant deluge of Things We Must Deal With might actually be the universal experience that does bond us all together in this undismantable way.

The men running the social media that we primarily use to communicate with each other would like to create rifts and make us all see each other as the ultimate enemy who we could never have anything in common with, because it keeps us online and looking at their platforms so they can shove more ads in front of our eyeballs. Communication isn’t happening between us, it’s happening in the space between undisclosed advertisements for products that we don’t need that will slightly ruin the planet via shipment to our front door.

And I think the unraveling of the human spirit is being caused by the constant purity filter we overlay on our actions. (And are often forced to due to the aforementioned deliverability optimization.)

Am I dealing with this in the absolute best way possible? Am I holding space for every experience or centering my own? Is there some secret answer I’m missing that does work for everyone and speaks to everyone’s motivation and why does it feel like those with alternative solutions feel the need to attack my solution rather than focus on launching their own because I, for one, believe in multi-prong approaches and having experts in different fields approach a problem from all sides rather than hoping we’ve collectively found the weak spot and arguing about who’s plan should be tried first since in this world, we only get one shot so we better make it good, right? I’ve run through all the possible critiques in my head and while I think I have responses to all of them I have to remember that I am not the best/smartest person—oh god should I even be trying at all?? Is trying and getting it wrong worse than not trying for and having 0 feedback?!

It sucks to feel out of control and like things are actively getting worse quickly because politics is more gamified than ever and they seem to believe the stock market will survive the environmental collapse they’re pushing us toward by refusing to engage with large-scale shifts in production and consumption.

Life is going to change. And we’re always going to have to deal with people who fundamentally lack perspective and humanity and awareness and we can’t just write them off because some of them like, write the literal energy policies.

Figuring out where I can make my life easier, where I can source and re-up my supply of joy and love, those are the investments I’m making because like…I think we’re headed for a rough ride, but also maybe one that’s less rough than we expect because I think we have to have a collective brain break/shift in understanding what money can buy and it can’t buy Mother Nature! She doesn’t care about profitability or the slogan chosen on the Annual Report and she doesn’t care who paid what for carbon credits and I’m like weirdly so glad that we have this noncorrupt ultimate judge/decider because I think a lot of humans feel a little too powerful these days and we’re just…not.

Like we are and we aren’t, but some people really panic at the latter implication.

Peter Thiel (& Co.) wants to lock us all in headsets and make the world through VR so we can experience it while we’re floating around in space pods because he hates being a human.

I uh, don’t! I think it’s messy and weird and not always wonderful, but I don’t want to forsake the mess for sterility.

The mess is where you find out the real shit about yourself. The mess is what it means to be alive. The mess is why our impulse to make art is only increasing these days because art can be abstract, it can represent things beyond precise description.

I love that humans try to make sense of things. I love that they try at all, tbh. I love that collective efforts create fundamentally different results than singular ones and that both are necessary to continue on.

Some tasks are always going to create sludge water and there’s nothing we can do but manage our expectations and keep super absorbent sponges and rubber gloves on hand. Others can be solved with a small investment into a new system.

My duty is to figure out how to manage my efforts and reactions, not to try and fix everything all the time so that we can pretend it was never broken in the first place.

And in the meantime, my sink will finally be clean and tidy while I do!

From The Vault

Last year: #61 - I’m so mad about the MTA dropping their mask mandate

Pod thoughts this time last year: Ep 9. Why I Stopped Reading Snark & Deleted My Instagram