#65 - The Importance Of Being...Chill

I like to think I put a reasonable amount of stock in astrology. I don’t think it’s 100% accurate, end-all-be-all, this week is going to be total shit because of the alignment of Jupiter kind of thing, but there are the more woo-woo parts of me that certainly can jive with the fact that the alignment of the planets/spacial makeup of the cosmos was in a particular place the day I entered the planet and that probably has some lasting effects on my energy.

I’m a big believer in energy and there’s nothing more energetic than the universe. Space. It all got here somehow. And I love science for being able to explain how the Big Bang happened, but it doesn’t stop me from wondering why it did.

Anyway, I’m a Virgo sun, Aries moon, and Pisces rising. Apparently, this means that I’m serious and logical, with huge emotional sweeps, and I appear unconventional and assured to others. Which uuh, yeah that feels accurate. Idk that I would have believed the rising interpretation a few years ago but after being repeatedly told that I’m “intimidating” upon first meeting people I‘m going to have to just accept that despite the constant chaos of my inner turmoily bits, it appears to the world at large like I know what the fuck I’m doing. It’s kinda like fake it ‘till you make it, but in reverse!

Anyway, a thread by my favorite astrology twitter account got stuck in my craw a few months ago and it keeps popping up and reappearing in my life.

“Because Virgos learned that their safety and survival is tied very closely to being the perfect child or making everything go right themselves, they plunge into ‘bettering themselves’ when things go wrong. And while it is fantastic to be constantly working on yourself, as a Virgo, it can be incredibly stressful to go back to the idea that if you are perfect, everyone else will be and everything will fall into place.”

“Virgos constantly experience this state of never feeling enough or that they accomplished enough because of this exact tendency to “perfect oneself” when things go wrong.”

(Honestly, just going back to read the thread made me want to cry. Have you ever felt more seen by a rando on twitter than anyone else in your entire life? It’s a TRIP I tell y’a!)

I remember learning about alcoholic family roles in health class in high school and realizing I was the Scapegoat. Growing up means learning that actually all of us were harmed in different measures by these roles, but part of my healing from the messiness of being A Bolger Kid was understanding that my level of perfection actually had no impact on the volume of the voices that yelled at me. I was a kid. It wasn’t my fault. (And being an adult also means understanding that it wasn’t really the fault of my parents either, they were doing the best they could with the cyclical violence that had been passed down to both of them.) (Do I wish they had done a better job? Of course, but I know they wish that for themselves as well. Being a victim does not prevent you from causing harm.)

Chasing the dragon of perfection has defined much of my adult life. It’s hard to give up the safety mechanism that if I say the right thing, no one will ever be mad at me because they’ll have nothing to be mad about! If I do everything right no one will know I make mistakes!! If I can just control everything, then everything will be okay!!!

It’s just not realistic. It’s not a healthy way to interact with the world (this perfectly flawed world that never actually seeks perfection).

I have been so afraid of failure, which I was always so willing to admit because that’s an easy one to agree on right—everyone is kind of afraid of failure, especially on a public stage. I don’t think I ever explained how low my bar of failure was to anyone. My rubrics were so unbelievably harsh. I couldn’t be perfect, because I’m me (and I’m human), but also because my life is “always just a little bit weirder” than those around me and it’s hard to prepare for those kinds of situations.

(After having to describe to my boss why I had known that there was something sketchy about an old coworker because they reminded me of a con man that I had lived with who destroyed me and my friend’s entire lives, I summed it up with a pithy, “Yeah that was a weird year.” To which my boss (rightfully) responded “It sounds like…all of your years are a little bit weirder than other people‘s.”)

Anyway, after being sniped in the ass by a random astrology account on the interwebs, I‘ve been actively pursuing being less perfect. “Done is better than perfect” was a great quote to start from, and slowly I’ve continued to progress so now I don’t think of dishes in the sink as some form of moral failure but rather the result of a life having been lived. Food was eaten on these plates, and I haven’t gotten around to cleaning them yet. It says actually nothing about me as a person that I leave my coffee mug in the sink until the evening! It just…is what it is.

There’s a ton of advice out there on how we should maximize our productivity and how to create systems and fill every inch of our schedules so that we’re always in motion but just enough motion to get the right amount of sleep—and then people wonder why they feel hollow and hopeless. Burnout sounded fake 10 years ago and now it’s something that everyone I know has gone through. Capitalism is crushing us, and the hope for a better future feels increasingly futile. We can try and side-hustle our way through the world or we can pause and actually consider the ends of our means. Is it money? Or is it just relief from economic stress? Those are two different goals!! One involves other people and a radical shift of our community values when it comes to how we measure success!!! I think it’s totally possible though, it’s why socialism is so scary to conservatives—it turns out people really really like it when you give them money with no expectation of return.

(And they should be giving us money, especially since they’re doing fuck ALL to fight “inflation” which this time around isn’t even based on some math sequence that I don’t understand but is instead just a direct result of corporate greed! They’re raising prices not because of supply chain, but because they can! The UN this week called out The Fed for being feckless, and when the world’s least effective body is called you bad at your job «whistles» sheesh, idk bro, sounds like you’re really fucking bad at your job!)

I also think that teaching myself to not overexplain every single one of my actions was really helpful. Resisting the urge to tack on a “it’s okay if not!!” to every text I sent was weird at first, but then over time, I realized that in shifting my language, others had shifted theirs. It turned out I had been Rasputining them with my anxiety, and so our mutual language had sought to include it—and we can’t say things ironically (I’m reeeeally starting to doubt that humans can interact with anything ironically—we certainly can’t do it when it comes to language! Say a word ironically once and a week later it’ll wedge itself into your lexicon) so it was a sincere plea. Please don’t worry if you can’t do this thing for me, I’ll still love & care about you!! Yeah, that part was already implied through actions. You know, like how it was totally fine when one of us was too busy to ‘hang later’; and our relationship continued unaffected the next day.

Sometimes anxiety needs proof that there isn’t a sabretooth around the corner ready to pounce. It’s tough for our bodies to unlearn instincts that are meant to keep us safe. But when it comes to social harm—so many of those instincts work against us. Overthinking causes paralyzation. It’s unappealing to hang out with someone who is coming into every situation with big Director energy when everyone else is showing up to do some casual zip-zap-zops with each other!!

(And the tragedy of social anxiety is that the Director just really wants to be included and they don’t know if it’ll happen if they don’t orchestrate something incredible because they don’t believe their presence IS enough. And that makes sense!! It’s hard to feel worthy after a lifetime of experiences in which you are told you are not. A lot of people who move through the world without those barriers cannot fathom that they exist. If the circle always opens to let you into a conversation, it’s hard to imagine that for some of us have to ask people to budge up or make pleading eye contact with a friend who will casually force everyone to let us in. It’s scary to try again. The fear of others totally makes sense, but it’s the attempts to control that fear rather than steering into the skid that lands our car in a ditch. And then you have a totaled car and another shitty weird off-putting experience to add to the docket. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy but what’s so shitty is that the only way to avoid it is to actually try and go through life without thinking about it. You can’t plan everything, you can’t imagine every scenario, you just have to trust yourself and your instincts and if you hit an icy patch you’ll remain calm and in control and on the road—even if you’re a little shaken up afterwards.)

A lot of this has been solved by hanging out with people who actually like me. Not just people who think they should like me, or someone who feels obligated. A lot of my anxiety came from the imagined pressure that I had to be perfect and hold up well over 50% of the conversation, when, in fact, I just needed to be around better conversationalists.

In 2022, I haven’t been drunk. I think the most I’ve had was maybe 3 drinks in an evening? I had two margs and a shot on my birthday, and that might be the ~tipsiest~ I’ve been. I’ve never been a big drinker for several reasons, but being the descendant of a looooong line of alcoholics on both sides of the fam was a big one. But in the summer of 2021, I was regularly chugging entire bottles of wine to hang out with my ex’s friends. It helps that everyone else there was also drinking quite a bit—and sometimes I drank canned wine, and two cans = a whole bottle, but people are not going to have any sort of red flag go up when someone is chillin’ on two cans. It hit me a few months post-breakup that I had barely drank, let alone been drunk since I got to stop forcing myself to be around that group. It would appear that when I’m around people who I liked and who liked me, I don’t feel the urge to become someone else or require any sort of “liquid courage” or some external thing to blame any of my behaviors on. I am totally comfortable when around the right people to just be silly (and stoned) and tell my little stories and play my little games.

It turns out, it’s okay that I’m me! There are plenty of people who didn’t need me to change at’tall to find me worthy. I was just with the wrong crowd, being graded on a too-harsh rubric.

Plus, I learned about anxious attachment and realized that oh yeah yikes, that’s exactly how I was relating to people.

Encouraging myself to be open about my fears when it came to friendships is sometimes actually the opposite of what I need to be doing. And like, it’s so lovely to have people that encourage openness in general, but when it comes to anxious attachment it’s just that, anxious. It’s actually not recommended to seek reinforcement from friends because it just helps continue the loop in my head that everyone secretly hates me unless they’re explicitly telling me they don’t! And something that really helped me with this was reading a tumblr post (it’s always a feckin’ tumblr post I swear) about someone who told their best friend that they always felt like annoying when they sent a text—that they expected their friend to sigh/grimace anytime a notification went off from and realized who it was from. Their friend told them that they were absolutely heartbroken to be thought of that way.

Counterfactuals, man. So fucking helpful when it comes to anxiety.

I totally understand that person’s fear, I had the exact same one—but reading their friend’s reaction helped me understand that actually, it is damaging to think of others in the most negative light possible. It’s not creating some sort of cushion from an ~inevtiable blow~. It’s not going to accelerate the healing process if you “were right all along” about someone. (It actually just makes it easier for self-flagellation that you’ve done it again, wasted even more time, and need to develop a better picker when it comes to people!)

Perfection isn’t the cure for anxiety. It’s more like an internal combustion engine for it. There is no such thing as perfect, there’s better or worse than before, but perfection isn’t possible. It’s actually good to half-ass things, or even to do things poorly if that’s the only way they’ll get done. It’s okay to have anxiety-riddled experiences occasionally because they can help teach the body that it’s okay to go through those things, we survived, and we don’t have to hang onto everything anymore. It took my body years to relax during sleep, because I would so often be woken by being yelled at. I didn’t feel safe, so I couldn’t relax in my sleep. I regularly was so tense I would be woken up with shooting pain from Charlie Horse cramps.

(During the first few weeks of college I kept oversleeping—like 11am wake-ups, and this dude at the lunch table said something super shitty to me about it—just fully  judged me (too harshly, other people at the table got uncomfortable because while I was an acceptable person to bully you couldn’t be downright mean about it) and all I remember how afraid I was because I didn’t know why this kept happening at the time. In hindsight, I was catching up on years and years of slumber. And him knowing that would have probably changed how he thought about it or at least what he said to me out loud, but it’s actually okay that he was an asshole. I didn’t suffer any long-term effects from him being a dick at the lunch table—I just never wanted to be that dude’s friend after that. Besides, when it hit me years later that my chronic tiredness faded after a few months of finally getting to rest I got to feel quite holier than thou about the “you never know what someone else is going through” of the whole situation.)

This isn’t the first time I’ve written about my anxiety, and for a moment I panicked that this has all actually just been one big loop and I’ve actually made no progress. But things take time. You can’t 1.5x speedrun recovery. It’s okay to have realizations over and over again because that’s part of helping them sink in and take hold. It’s frustrating, but learning to receive myself with kindness is what allows me to genuinely extend it to others. A big part of this year has been teaching myself how to be kind to myself. I am by far my harshest critic, but to what end? Who was it serving? Because it certainly wasn’t me!

Done is better than perfect. Experiences don’t all have to be positive. It’s okay to be a little awkward or weird. The right people are going to love you anyway, not in spite of or because of, but just because you’re you and they love you. I can keep chasing the dragon of perfection, or I can get real cozy with myself and learn to radiate the energy that I want to invite back into my life. I don’t want to schedule every second of every day, I don’t want to maximize my output, I want to live.

And sometimes it’s hard to be alive, and that’s okay too. We can’t protect ourselves from everything, and life inside the bubble pales in comparison to the life that can be lived outside of it. Control is an illusion!! It’s all chaos out there babes!!! And the more I learn to embrace that, the happier I find myself.