Yesterday, I got three notifications from Substack, and I realized that I hadn’t written mine. I wrote three different versions on the bus home last night, and then I wrote this one this morning because I decided the other three were either terrible or too hard to finish.
I forgot about writing—one of my most central goals for myself this year—because I’m behind at work. Not really. I’m new at work. But there are things to catch up on, meetings to schedule, and I just took over responsibility for a major project that I genuinely don’t understand (oops). I want people to be impressed by me because I want this contract to become a permanent job. I feel like there’s something I have to prove, and whatever that something is, I want it to be indisputable.
I keep a note in my phone so that, every day as I’m leaving the office, I can check a box to confirm that I did actually lock the door behind me. I check this app periodically from clock-out to clock-in. I’m always worried about that damn door.
I feel like my Norwegian isn’t coming fast enough. Now, I’ve substituted most of my “free time” activities for things I can justify as studying. I listen to music in Norwegian. I get the news in Norwegian. Instead of reading, I do my homework for my night class. I feel like I never know what anyone is saying.
There is a massive pile of laundry on my bed to be folded, and a second equally-massive pile in the laundry room downstairs. I feel like a bad roommate for not moving it yet, but I’m only home for an hour or two in the evenings before I fall asleep. My sheets and my towels need to be washed.
I told my grandmother I’d call her yesterday, and I fully forgot.
I’m out of groceries. We’re in “rice and beans” territory again—there are worse places to be. I don’t even have to go to the grocery store; I have a delivery app (in Norwegian, does that count as studying?). I just haven’t carved out time to think about what to eat.
I deleted Instagram and Facebook from my phone because the news cycles were giving me graphic nightmares, and it was getting to the point where I couldn’t sleep at all. I spent an entire therapy session talking about what a privilege it is to have the ability to “turn it off.”
I realized how much of my writing and thinking is just navel-gazing. I’m writing too much about myself. Probably thinking too much about myself.
I downloaded an app and took a quiz. I have “low likelihood” of being a narcissist. The app asked if I wanted to send the test results of this glorified Buzzfeed quiz directly to my therapist. I declined.
I’ve been thinking about Mary Oliver. About poetry in praise of being present, appreciating nature, noticing the birds and the seasons and the miracle of fellowship.
I add “touch grass” to my to-do list.
I add “write a Substack about how hard it is to reckon with feelings without burying them under layers of irony and Internet-isms so that they feel less exposing” on my to-do list.
Am I happy? I think yes. I like my life. I’m just exhausted by it. I wish I had time to appreciate it a bit more instead of scrambling to “finish” it.
My favorite philosopher, Claire, used to talk to me about how frustrating it is to constantly deal with the expectation of self-improvement. Why do you always have to wake up and be a better version of yourself? When do you get to just like yourself the way you are, and to enjoy the way you’re existing as it is?
We’re not made to feel guilty for what, when you look at it squarely, is just the reality of being imperfect. No one expects perfection of us, and (almost) no one wants to see us run ourselves into the ground trying to be the first person whose ever managed to “do it all.”
And yet, and yet, and yet.