Celebrate Good Tries, C'mon!
Yahoo! It's up to you.
IT’S FRIDAY! You’re doing it!!! You made it through the week!!!!!!!!!!
Maybe this amount of celebration for surviving another span of 7 human days seems overkill, but I think we all could use some self-celebrating.
If I’m being honest, I don’t think I celebrate myself enough.
I blame perfectionism. I blame hustle culture. I blame puritan work ethic. I blame the expectation that we should all maintain a 100 miles-per-hour speed on the relentless hamster wheel of productivity in a sisyphean-style human reality.
And, mostly, I blame myself.
Last week I talked about how recognizing our own mortality can help us maintain a sense of connection to our lives. But I’ll be honest, sometimes I find myself having a hard time maintaining a sense of connection to myself.
Life feels like just too much sometimes. Too many balls to keep juggling up in the air. Too many balls I’m dropping. Too many mental balls rolling at me like that boulder in Indiana Jones.
And when I’m feeling overwhelmed: I space out.
Anyone else?
I escape with my go-to, often destructive coping mechanisms because I feel shame for being less-than-perfect and eating Taco Bell while binge-watching old seasons of Survivor is cheaper than therapy.
When I don’t think I’m doing “good enough at life,” I avoid being present in it.
And something I’ve realized lately is that I have this belief that I can remedy the sickness with the virus—I think I can effort myself out of the shame about not putting in “enough” effort.
I feel bad I can’t do it all, so I dissociate. Then I feel bad about using escapism to cope, so I resolve to be “better” (read: perfect) so that I can do it all…annnnnnnnd rinse and repeat, over and over, the cycle continues.
Logically, the antidote to all this isn’t more trying. But what is it?
More being?
Being present to the uncomfortable feeling of wanting to dissociate. Being present to my feelings about “being good” or “being bad.” Being present to the things I can achieve and my trigger-hair guilt about what I can’t.
Weirdly, you also have to TRY to be present. So, yeah. Catch 22.
I don’t know what the answer is. But I just stopped writing this to do an impromptu dance to Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration”—complete with robot moves—so maybe that’s a start.
Celebrating your tries, even if you think they’re not “good enough”?
Maybe that’s it.
Tell me in the comments: how do you maintain a sense of peace when you’re NOT getting everything done? How do you keep showing up to overwhelming tasks? What are your “Kool and the Gang” methods of celebrating yourself or “being” in your days?
Love,
Annie
THREE GOOD THINGS
Please enjoy this interview with a New York man who listed a Craigslist ad to “give away” a human-size hamster wheel. It was discovered to be a fraud (see #2 Good Thing) but his answers are still ::chef’s kiss::
Now here’s the REAL creator of the hamster wheel.
Kool and the Gang. Because OF COURSE