On giving up
dispatch 15a
Hey all!
When I was a kid, I had a strange mix of rebellion and perfectionism. I wanted to be perfect because I thought it would let me be loved, but I also bristled at commands. Some of that has carried into adulthood, though I am leaning more towards the rebellion (it turns out that perfectionism is a total racket).
Today’s essay is about both. It’s about the habits and practices we get attached to and what we think they say about us, and what happens when we give them up. It started off as a pretty low-stakes journal entry to work through my own feelings, but it turns out that I had a lot of feelings (4w5!) so here it is. No one ever celebrates you for doing less unless “less” looks like a lot of shiny self-care tasks that are actually just doing more things. Consider this is a tiny celebration of doing less.
On giving up
This month after a few months of inconsistency, which I now recognize as trying to force it, I gave up my daily practice of morning pages. Morning pages, if you’re not familiar, are a creative practice introduced by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way in which you handwrite three stream-of-consciousness pages each morning upon waking. I had diligently avoided reading Cameron’s book in the first years of my sobriety, mainly because morning pages sounded like something horrible that I couldn’t possibly commit to. Three pages felt incredibly long, an impossible space to take for myself.
I wasn’t writing at all when I finally gave in and read the book in July 2020 and no one was more surprised than me when from that very first morning, I took to the practice of morning pages with a kind of unexpected joy. I loved emptying my anxious brain onto paper, loved how much my hand cramped from holding a pen after an eternity of typing. It felt freeing and tactile and steady in a way that not much did a few months into a pandemic. It became a practice in devotion to self, a daily touchpoint in a new life.
I wrote morning pages through the last month of living in my first apartment, through the move into this house with Max, through my first upstate winter, a summer of unemployment, and new job anxiety. I wrote them as the cornerstone of my morning routine which slowly built around this practice to become something sustaining and personal. A year and a half of mornings, six journals full of who I was within the peculiar container of a particular day. But I am stopping and I am writing about stopping because the decision does not feel allowed, like something I ought to be ashamed of.
At the close of 2021, navigating a bad round of panic attacks, I declared this year the year that I refuse to be victimized by my own brain. At the same time, I claimed it for my own curiosity. So here I am examining why such a simple choice feels loaded. How habits have tied themselves to what they imply about me, about my sobriety, about my life in ways I didn’t realize.
I didn’t realize until this choicepoint how attached I’ve been to the idea that when I take something on, the goal is to do it forever and perfectly. As if writing my first morning pages in July 2020 committed me to writing them every day for the rest of my life. I’ve seen sobriety looked at this way, whole stretches of sober time disregarded because of that one day, week, month of drinking. As if we can learn nothing from all of the effort it takes even to do something imperfectly or for a short while. Maybe diligently doing my little practices in this self-prescribed order feels like sobriety insurance, or like a way to perform good behavior and compliance so that the cruelest parts of my brain leave me alone for an hour.
Maybe I am writing this because I feel the need to justify this reclaiming of time in the morning. Morning pages helped me to build a daily writing practice when I did not have one. It gave me something steady during a lot of change, a way to regularly check in with myself. But I don’t need them right now. What I need instead is the extra half hour to devote to doing the kind of writing I love to do. Reclaiming this 182.5 hours of my year means more space for my book, for my growing herbalism learnings, for stretching and meditation. It means that sometimes, just for the hell of it, I can watch a half-hour of Netflix in the morning, curled up with my coffee.
Quite simply, my needs changed, as needs are prone to do for all of us. And while I know that my time is my own and that in the grand scheme of things this isn’t very important, I am trying to understand the loss I feel in the giving up. Why I feel like it’s “giving up” at all. Why I feel a lack of confidence in making my own life decisions sometimes, even the small ones. What if this is the one habit that is holding it all together and with its removal, I spin the fuck out? That isn’t rational, but neither am I. My sobriety is not precarious, so why does change sometimes make it feel that way? It’s funny that my brain classifies this as a “giving up” long before it recognizes that it’s actually trusting myself to know what I need.
Maybe it is the story that I tell myself about myself when I do things like morning pages or meditation. If I just collect enough tokens of togetherness, I will have proof. But who do I need to prove something to? So often I weaponize things that shouldn’t be weaponized.
I wonder about things like that within personal development culture. I have seen people cloak cruelty in talk of boundaries and the ways that these concepts and practices turn sharp when shaped into excuses. Sometimes what I call a boundary is truly just me being an asshole. I can’t be the only one hiding the areas where I need to grow in communication behind areas where I feel comfortable and learned, can I? We live in a capitalist hellscape that is entirely based on the inequitable and arbitrary competition for resources. It’s easy to make everything into a binary of right and wrong, of good and bad. It’s harder to complicate things, even simple things like one person’s morning habits. I am not worried about the practice, I’m worried about goodness and this idea of goodness does not exist. But what I do and do not do in the morning actually doesn’t mean anything about me at all.
Sometimes my habits and routines hold me in place. They keep me going when I am not able to tap into what I need. They are prescriptive in a way that is sometimes very necessary for me. But I so easily lean into rigidity. The things that support me become more things that I have to do, more ways to fail, so easily. When they are this way I no longer feel supported, I feel obligated. This evolution beyond morning pages may not be forever. I can come back to them whenever I need their gentle anchor. But I think right now I can trust that I know what I need. That I don’t need placeholders or rigidity right now. That I am not obligated for something forever just because I started it like I am on some cosmic chore chart. That what I need can change.
Assorted, rad things:
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson: I have been waiting for this from the library for MONTHS. Tove’s most famous novel follows a grandmother and granddaughter as they spend a summer on a remote island in the Gulf of Finland, the year after the young girl’s mother has died. Like all of Tove’s books, it’s incredibly clever and with everyday stories manages to touch on loss, love, aging, mischief, art, and belief. I will never stop being blown away by her precise her writing is, there is absolutely nothing wasted.
A Simpler Way by Margaret J. Wheatley + Myron Kellner-Rogers: I think I read about half of this book aloud to Max shouting things like “WOW” and “THIS IS SO GOOD”. This work is theoretically about organizational change, but wow wow wow if this passage below isn’t also about sobriety/getting a divorce/changing jobs/insert major life change here.
Bottom Lines Top Dollars podcast: A financial podcast, but by your cool queer punk aunties who don’t assume you know what a 401k is. Their recent episode about ghosting your own life hit me where it hurts.
Thank you for reading friends. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming next week!
see ya next week,
lisa
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If I just collect enough tokens of togetherness, I will have proof. But who do I need to prove something to? So often I weaponize things that shouldn’t be weaponized.
Razor sharp self reflection per usual 🤯