Since becoming a parent, I’ve developed the power to forget nearly anything, and I’m reminded all the time. “Oh yes, you already told me!” my friends are constantly (humiliatingly) replying. The other day, I invited someone to meet me at a new cafe I’ve been loving, in case they’d never been—“Yeah we went there together! Remember?” she replied. I didn’t, and only barely recalled it once I really tried. Humbling as these situations are, they’re fairly low stakes. It felt far more alarming when Michelle, in honor of my 36th birthday, asked me to recount the highlights and challenges of 35, and I realized I’d forgotten the whole year.
What had gone well? What hadn’t? I really couldn’t say. As a terminally reflective person who’s spent my life filling documents with answers to these questions, this sudden lack of insight made me feel sick. Completely disoriented, like I’d been asleep without realizing it. But that wasn’t right—I’d been recording my thoughts and activities for the newsletter all year. Clearly things had happened and I’d made note of them, at least briefly. The truth, I suspected, was that I’d just been too preoccupied to take stock and weave any of it into a coherent story. I’d lost track of the narrative thread of my life, and fittingly, I hadn’t even noticed.
I do notice the ways that being exceptionally preoccupied, in other words chronically drained, has seeped into every aspect of my life, down to the way I hold my face or fold a pair of underwear. Down to how frequently I bathe (getting less frequent by the week). Down to the way I think and see the world. I keep returning to the issue of this over-extension, wondering how to fix it. But I feel like I’m already doing the bare minimum: taking care of my kid, home, relationship, job, friendships. I know that’s a lot, but what’s there to cut? I’m not taking care of my body, so at least there’s that.❤️
Failing to answer Michelle’s question, I changed tack and asked her to tell me what she envisioned for my next year instead. This was an exercise my sister’s friends had done for her 39th birthday a few months ago—one my sister found so touching it made her cry. I hoped we could manifest that vibe instead, but while Michelle thought for a moment, my stomach sank at the realization that there was nothing she could say that would make me feel better. I simply couldn’t bear another goal, aim, priority, or focus. Then she opened her mouth and proved me wrong: “I’d like to see you embrace messiness.” And then I levitated.
It’s been a week since she said that and I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Anyone who’s read my writing for a while will know I’m naturally inclined toward creating order (internal, external) and am thus obsessed with disorder, the way a dieter might be obsessed with junk food. I’ve tried to write my way to embracing messiness many times—here on the merits of illegibility, on resisting diagnosis, on analyzing less, on coping imperfectly, everything I’ve written about giving up documentation. But all that felt pretty gentle; an opportunity to forgive myself in the moment and push myself toward a softer way of life long-term. But today I find myself in a more dire situation, wherein my sanity might actually depend on it.
There is a plate-spinning quality to my life right now that lends me the impression that everything must be done in a certain order and at the correct time to prevent disaster. The house must be picked up, the bed made, the kitchen clean, the fridge stocked, the kid on a schedule, the social outings planned, the writing done, the pillows and blankets returned to their proper positions—and then I can finally deal with whatever’s going on with me. Particularly after having a kid, his hierarchy leaves me with so little room for taking care of myself that I’m often teetering on the edge of depression. And for the purpose of this conversation, I think it’s important that “taking care of myself” means more than just showering and seeing my friends (both of which I’d love to do more), but something more expansive than either of those: opportunities for looseness, curiosity, exploration, reflection, spontaneity, even boredom. Parents, imagine being bored? Not with your kid, but by yourself.
Cultural theorist Lauren Berlant has a term for my plate-spinning logic: cruel optimism. In her 2011 book of the same name, she writes that “cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” While not inherently wrong, these desires “become cruel only when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially.” This idea is convincing on its own, but my favorite part is her suggestion that we become chronically attached to these desires not because they fulfill our expectations, but because they make us feel perpetually optimistic.
My cruel optimism takes on a fairly basic but highly adaptable form: When _____ happens, I can finally relax. When the house is clean, when the work is done, when I’ve proved motherhood hasn’t changed me fundamentally and that I have my life together. Practically speaking, these beliefs are asking too much of me, but they are also a kind of north star, providing me both a map and the promise of deliverance once I arrive. However unsubstantiated they may be, I’m attached to the impressions these beliefs give me: that everything can be under control, that I haven’t lost my way. Despite all my romantic writing on the topic of letting go and embracing disorder, it seems my fantasies still revolve around the opposite. To let these notions go is to lose something precious.
“Fantasy is an opening and a defense,” Berlant writes, meaning we use our objects of optimism not only to make things feel more possible but to protect ourselves from unappealing realities. I tell myself, for instance, that remaining domestically and emotionally organized will help me thrive because I’ve constructed a reality whereby anything else gives me anxiety. It then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: If I live up to these ideals, I feel good; if I fail them, I feel bad. The beliefs are thus reinforced. But Berlant suggests that, in understanding these forms of optimism as cruel, “we are forced to suspend ordinary notions of repair and flourishing to ask whether the survival scenarios we attach to those affects weren't the problem in the first place.”
I’ve started noticing something interesting: Most the people I look up to are what you might call “Type B.” I don’t mean people who are scattered and stressed as a result (I do love those types though), but the kind of people who laugh off the rules, aren’t trying to look or do things perfectly, and seem far more relaxed and present because of it. I’m thinking of people who are capable of tolerating mess, and for whom that tolerance opens up a lot of space in their lives. Of course it’s impressive when someone seems to manage to do it all or whatever (shout out to the dream girl of the 2010s), but I’m far more intrigued and inspired by someone who seems capable of living well with less than that.
I’ve started searching for more tolerance in tiny ways: by leaving this or that mess, by letting go of my preconceived hierarchies of tasks, by seeing my ability to relax in an unkempt living room as a sign of maturation rather than the opposite. These are just the most literal versions of what I’m talking about, but I’ve been shocked to discover how well the attempts have worked so far, how much looser and more open they’ve made me feel without much effort. I felt it this morning while putting on Sunny’s shoes, her toys scattered around us—that little spark of feeling more evolved and seasoned than the version of me who would have put them all away as if my entire day depended on it.
I’ve been thinking about functional tidying versus anxious tidying, and trying to sharpen my eye to the difference. Obviously a clean home and a clear mind can serve a purpose, but when that purpose is just to quiet the voice in your head that’s placed moral value on scrupulousness, legibility, and coherence, the achievement amounts to an energy-draining back-pat, and of course, a reinforcement of the fantasy that life is under our control. But I no longer have the time nor space to repeat this fruitless search for absolution. A search which, ironically, is taking me further and further away from myself. There has to be another way.
My inability to answer Michelle’s question about the highlights and challenges of this past year was probably a result of my being overextended, which I hope to change, but in the meantime I’m accepting the messiness as a price paid for other aims. If staying in touch with “my narrative thread” doesn’t actually concern whether I’m growing and changing, two things I don’t doubt at all, maybe it never concerned those things in the first place. And maybe I’m capable of satisfying far more than my cruel thirst for coherence. I can’t imagine a worthier goal.
My favorite article I read last week was “The Left Is Always Right Too Early,” by Alex Skopic for Current Affairs. A deeply frustrating but also satisfying read, and an apt description of what’s happened with the atrocities in Gaza.
Last week’s 15 things also included the skirt I can’t stop wearing, my favorite new bakery, the perfect Magnetic Zeroes reflection, and more. The rec of the week was what to do with the last stretch of summer.
On Dear Danny last week, we discussed an unfortunate selfie face, an ill-conceived butt slap, a semantic in-law problem, a fear-of-authoritarianism relationship gap, a nose-picking coworker, a friend fully ignoring another friend’s pregnancy, and a married neighbor who won’t stop hitting on our question asker. Amazing questions as always. Also thank you to the DD community for loving the long eps. This one is 2:22:22 👼🏼
Hope you all have a nice Sunday!
Haley
The coolest thing about my mom was that she didn’t mind mess. She was very orderly with time and relationships but she let our house be like the forest rather than that other photo in your graphic. Throughout my childhood almost every single one of me and my sibling’s friends told me they wished they lived at our house. Sometimes after we were playing with toys we would ask, should we put them away? And she would say, what do you think— what if we want to play with them later?! lol. Every week we would have a “putter” day which included cleaning. Her friends made fun of her “bad housekeeping” but I think she is one of the few who understands how to keep a house a home for children :)
Lovely reflection today and so relatable! Reminded me a little of this essay by Rachel Cusk - I'll never forget the description of the kitchen with a layer of crumb debris underfoot
"Another friend of mine runs her house with admirable laxity, governing her large family by a set of principles that have tidiness as a footnote or a distant goal, something it would be nice to achieve one day, like retirement. In the kitchen, you frequently feel a distinct crunching sensation from the debris underfoot; the stairs are virtually impassable with the possessions that have accumulated there, the books and clothes and toys, the violins and satchels and soccer shoes, all precipitously stacked as if in a vertical lost property office; the children’s rooms are so neglected they have acquired a kind of wilderness beauty, like untouched landscapes where over time the processes of growth and decay have created their own organic forms. In the kitchen, the children make volcano cakes or create chemical explosions; somewhere in the upper regions of the house, a singing teacher leads the older ones in hollering out show tunes; in the corridors, there is always a multitude of friends and pets and hangers-on milling around. One day a hamster got out of its cage; it was found six months later, living happily with a brood of offspring in a wardrobe. My friend looks at it all with mock despair, then waves it away with her hand. If that’s how they want to live, she says, then let them. In this house, the search for happiness appears to be complete; or rather, in the chaotic mountain of jumble it is always somehow at hand, the easiest of all things to find. The foreground is entirely human here: The rooms may have been neglected, but the people haven’t been. It is clear to me that by eradicating the tension of the material, my friend has been able to give her children exactly what she wanted to give them — love, authority, the right advice — where for other people these things got mixed up and snagged on one another."
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/magazine/making-house-notes-on-domesticity.html
Also here to recommend getting a babysitter just so you can BE BORED. Not so you can do productive things but specifically so you can chill out. No plans! Feels crazy indulgent and also like the best money I will ever spend (we've been tricked into thinking it's okay to spend that money on a material good but not on help!)