Hi (from India!), friends—
I started writing this weeks ago, back in Berlin, halfway through changing my sheets.
While pummeling my bed linen into submission, I reflected that changing sheets is a straightforward job that, when done wrong, feels like birthing a lamb, but in reverse. It can end up looking and feeling like a fist fight with a Scooby Doo ghost. It’s the sort of task that makes you curse your choice of a solitary and independent life and feel more alone than ever. In the end, it took me about an hour, with several breaks in between, to successfully change those sheets.
Small things were an ordeal last month, a chaotic time of enormous changes and even bigger logistics, all of which seemed insurmountable (even though I know that, by their very nature, logistics are things that can be done). I’ve never had so much therapy in so short a time.
In between shaking my fist at the heavens, I reminded myself that sometimes life just puts us through the wash—in the end, everything comes out nice and clean, but the process is…drowning and then being wrung out, basically. I’ve done it before, and I know I can survive it. And yet…
I’d like to say that I handle these cycles with grace; but in reality, I alternated daily between two modes:
a)
b)
In the former mode, I handled everything badly. In the latter, I stared catatonically into the void and thought a great deal about surge capacity, and how our systems are built to helpfully carry us through the worst, and then promptly crap out when the worst is over. In between the two, I somehow got stuff done.
There is a very sophisticated self-preservation technique I’ve developed over the years for dealing with all hell breaking loose, and I’m happy to share it. Are you ready? It’s this:
Just leave.
Does this sound like avoidance? Suspiciously so! But I’ve found that, as long as I answer only to myself and I’m not letting anyone else down, running away gets a really bad rap. I mean this mildly, of course; not a desertion of responsibilities, but a respite from them—as simple as walking into the next room or taking myself to lunch. When I’m in the midst of a crisis, the best thing I can do for myself is to do something for myself.
So when my friend Brittany, whom I hadn’t seen in two years, texted me spontaneously to ask, “Do you want to meet me in Italy next week?” she may as well have asked, “Do you want to leave all your troubles far behind?”
Impulsively, I decided I could afford a week-long reprieve (haha, I couldn’t!), and off we went to the Cinque Terre, a region so beautiful, with food so delicious, that every time we turned a corner or put a fork into our mouths, we would look at each other and deadpan, “Is this a joke?” Because Brittany is a literal comedian, that was also often true. It was exactly the palate cleanser (or in this case, the bowls—and bowls and bowls—of pasta) I needed.
My cup refilled, I got back with enough energy to make it through a slew of necessities that were a colossal drag; and now I am in India, relieving my mother of caring for my father so she can attend to many other arduous, but necessary, tasks.
Here’s one thing I’ve learned in the past five years, since my dad had a stroke: If anyone has ever made you believe that at some point, life gets easier, don’t believe them. It is a LIE. Quit the job, move to that city, start singing classes, go live on a cheese farm, do whatever you’ve been putting on the shelf for Later. I implore you to prioritise joy over convenience right now because, inevitably, the choice gets taken away from us.
I’ve had five years to get used to it, but still, when describing my father’s condition, I struggle to produce the right adjectives. Elderly; invalid; disabled; infirm; handicapped—these are all technically correct. But I can’t bring myself to use any of them in reference to my dad. I always resort to the long answer:
My dad suffered a stroke five years ago. He was paralysed on his right side and needs 24/7 care as he is no longer able to do anything on his own. Since contracting COVID-19 in April this year, he has suffered neurological degeneration that has further affected his cognitive ability and his speech.
I’ve seen his decline over the past five years and, for the most part, his condition no longer fazes me. Apart from a few occasions when I suddenly see him—really see him, as he is, with the rarely-exposed part of my brain that isn’t numb—and run from the room crying, the only real shock was in the beginning, when my mother came downstairs one morning to find him on the kitchen floor. Our reality turned unrecognisable in seconds, and the year that followed was the lesson I never wanted in how unthinkable horrors can become our perfectly regular day-to-day reality.
Since then, my dad’s condition has become the-no-longer-new normal. I’ve long since accepted that this is who he is now—but still, every time he appears in my dreams, he is never this version of himself. In my dreams, my dad is able and cheerful; he strides around in his trademark, purposeful gait; he builds things with his mechanical engineer’s hands and races his cars; he is independent, and bright, and quick to laugh and crack a bad joke. My subconscious seems to have compartmentalized that who he is now, as much as I’ve accepted it, isn’t who he is at all. I suppose that accepting isn’t the same as moving on.
There’s so very much more to say about living with the reality of my dad’s condition, and our experience as a family—not least, my mom’s role as his carer for the rest of her, or my dad’s, life—but it’s still hard so to articulate. It is also impossible to speak on my dad’s experience; I can only surmise how he feels, because he won’t talk about it—or, really, anything.
He was always uncommunicative, even before his stroke; he never spoke openly and, over the years, we developed our own way of communicating—one that, if I’m honest, only worked for him. As an adult, I tried to draw him out more, to get to know him; once he had his stroke, any hopes of better communication were off the table.
(As a side note: I want to take this moment to debunk the romantic trope of the “strong, silent type” which refers exclusively, as we know, to men. There is no “strong” silent man. There is an avoidant, silent man; there is a withholding, silent man. What is perceived by others as a silent man’s strength almost certainly exists as the suffering and misery of the people around that man. God help us from silent men.)
Part of living with my dad’s condition is accepting that I will never really know him. There’s a grief that doesn’t get talked about very much, which is the loss of a person who is still alive. My cousin, who went through a similar loss with her father, my dear uncle, described it to me yesterday as, “Losing someone twice”—or at least twice.
I learned last year, when I went through a different loss of my own, that this is called disenfranchised grief. For this kind of loss, there are no condolence cards, or funerals, or any type of mourning or facilitated closure; the closest thing to it is finding other people who have experienced it and can recognise our grief, and who understand that there’s no solution for this, only support during, and acknowledgement of, our lived state of protracted mourning.
As an adult, there are so many times I’ve felt exasperated and fundamentally failed by the education system, and I often wonder what I learned of actual value that has served and equipped me to be a functioning human being out in the world.
Why, for instance, are we not prepared for the illness and/or loss of a parent? Or taught how to take care of ourselves in the event that we must care for another? Why are we not taught how to grieve, to ask for help, to give help? Why did I have to learn the hard way how to do my taxes, and why, at the age of 38, am I still navigating the minefield of attachment styles in the pursuit of a healthy relationship?
The latter is a conversation I’ve been having lately with many friends also pursuing healthy relationships in their thirties, forties, and fifties. The reality is that we should become educated about attachment theory much, much, earlier than this. Everyone I’ve spoken to has had a lightbulb, “Ohhhh” moment upon learning their attachment style—and, invariably, the attachment style of every single person they’ve ever been in a relationship with. (Spoiler: It’s “anxious” and “avoidant”. Every time.)
Without understanding our attachment styles, most of us are doomed to repeat—at best, dissatisfying or at worst, toxic—relationship patterns throughout our lives. We’re probably faced with a lifetime of “Is this it?” or “I thought this one was different”. I’ve lost count of the number of relationships I’ve been in where I tried to make things work past expiry, or thought I’d finally nailed it, but it didn’t work out for the exact same reasons as the last one.
Even though I’ve been trying to retrain my attachment style for several years, I tend to relapse; but central to attachment theory, where it pertains to ourselves, is self-acceptance, acknowledgement of our own needs, and a commitment to healthy relationships, which are all pretty great North Stars.
The cliff notes are these:
Our attachment style is the one we get at birth, based on the attachments we form with our parent or caregiver; in light of this, there is no “wrong” attachment style, because we didn’t choose the one we got.
There are three attachment styles: Anxious, Avoidant, and Secure. (There is a small group that falls into a fourth style, Anxious-Avoidant.) The biggest theme of attachment theory, as I understand it, is that two attachment styles—Anxious and Avoidant—are always drawn to each other, resulting in the most familiarly problematic relationships. (This dynamic was illustrated beautifully, just last week, by this lovely Modern Love essay.) It is not hyperbolic to say that most unhappy people I know are in Anxious-Avoidant relationships—this has also been my pattern. (I am Anxious, FYI. Surprise.)
I could talk about attachment theory more, but I really, really want people to find out about it for themselves. IMO, it’s one of the most important things we can do for our personal (and, according to one entrepreneur I spoke to who uses it as a yardstick for his cofounder relationships, professional) lives.
I will share a funny conversation I had with one Avoidant friend, who’s in a relationship with an Anxious; the dynamic is causing them problems. He was intrigued to hear about attachment theory and asked, “So what if I don’t want to do it but she works on herself to be less Anxious, would that solve our issues?”
I mean.
1) That’s the most Avoidant thing I’ve ever heard, and
2) As I told him, sure, she could totally work on her own attachment style—but then she would probably end up leaving him and ending up with someone Secure, or at the very least someone who has also done the work, because the whole point of attachment theory is to break out of unhealthy relationship patterns.
There is a very reader-friendly book called Attached that makes attachment theory simple, with its use of case studies (why is it that it’s so much easier to look at ourselves by looking at other people?). My dear friend Colette recommended it to me years ago—I confess it took me a while to, begrudgingly, read it, but now I can’t recommend it highly enough to, oh, everybody. If I could, I’d make it required reading for teenagers and young adults, too—because which of us wouldn’t like to have been saved from at least a decade of relationships that were horrible because we didn’t know any better? I’ll tell you: Secure attachment types, that’s who.
The other day, I read these words by Aminatou Sow:
“I know that some people really do not have any mental health issues and I truly love that for them. Imagine having your factory issued neurotransmitters still firing correctly after all this time? Gorgeous.”
and was forced to reflect for a moment that, wow, I am not one of those people.
It’s one of those things I know, but am still surprised about when I’m reminded of it. I don’t think of my anxiety disorder as a mental illness—I don’t even think of it as a disorder, I’m only told to by a culture that makes me feel like there is something wrong with me for being stressed by things that apparently don’t bother other people as much. But the way I experience life is such that I so often have asked myself, “What’s wrong with me?”
Addressing this is something I’ve started working on with a new therapist who specialises in Highly Sensitive People, or HSPs. (If you’ve ever felt or been called “too sensitive” and are not already familiar with the work of Dr. Elaine Aron, I recommend taking the self-assessment test for almost-certainly life-altering revelations. This also applies, and is equally important, if you suspect you have highly sensitive children—there is also a children’s test.)
My therapist Jackie is evidence that the therapists we need are found through personal referrals (thank you again, Erin!). Jackie is actually whom I didn’t know I needed—she is the first person to ever make me stop trying to optimise myself to fit a world not designed for people like me, and instead to really know, understand, and accept myself and what I need so I can create a world that fits me.
It turns out that I’ve lived my life having bought into a fiction that I need to make myself “better” by being more this, and less that. For years, the only books I consumed were personal development or self-help, and my benchmarks for growth were always other people; some people I know personally, but mostly people on TV, Instagram, or LinkedIn.
I’ve been completely consumed by modern culture’s fanaticism for “excellence” and “winning” that exists everywhere we look, aspiring towards it because anything less must be failure—or, worse, mediocrity. I have also spent my career working in an industry that glorifies outliers, who by nature can’t be emulated, but in the pursuit of which an entire culture has been built on trying, anyway; a culture that talks about “crushing” as a good thing, when in reality the only thing being crushed are, probably, our spirits.
When 18 year-old Emma Raducanu won the US Open this week, so many posts on LinkedIn looked like this:
Others praised not only her win, but her A* and A grades, implying that this is the aspirational bar. It is not enough to win a global sporting competition; we must also do it while sitting exams, and be 18 years old, and get A* grades.
It is so very much pressure, and I fear for young people who are like I was as a student. I think of the school I went to, which was so entirely the wrong educational environment for me; that measured success in the same metrics used to recognise achievement as world-star athletes who are also straight-A students; that could not recognise talents and gifts that were non-quantifiable; that told me not to pursue what I loved because I wasn’t good enough.
It has taken me 20 years, an entire lifetime since I left school, to find out what my own talents and gifts are—indeed, to realise that I have them. And that the pursuit of winning and excellence by other people’s standards has been diverting me, all along, from what that might be for me—which might look as simple as personal fulfillment.
I read a recent installment of Ask Polly (which has been especially good lately) last week, and these words really stuck with me: “You don’t have to be better anymore. You just have to be you.” I think that LinkedIn, and much of modern culture, would short-circuit if everyone adopted this philosophy. I daresay many people would be a great deal happier. I find it absolutely thrilling.
Things that helped this month
Good love
Specifically, a beautiful essay about it.
Scrapping “potential”
This highly unhelpful word has been a theme all my life. It’s what I was told I had all through school, it’s what always made me “not good enough”, it’s even what I’ve dated for. It creates a standard that’s impossible to meet, because it simply doesn’t exist. As my therapist said to me, “No one has ever sat back and said, ‘Ah, I’ve finally reached my potential.’” This is a fantastic read about the delusion of potential.
Jason Reynolds
Bennifer!!
I’ve been somewhat embarrassingly thrilled about Bennifer 2.0—I’m relieved that I’m not the only one (and this was so funny I cried). I think it’s the happy ending so many of us needed, even if it isn’t our own.
The 90s
My cousin is having a 90s-themed birthday party this week, and I’ve had the most joyous time recreating throwback lewks for funsies. The lipstick! The chokers! The straight hair! The 90s were the illest—perhaps this is also why Bennifer feels so good. Speaking of which, this, from 1999, seems appropriate—enjoy.
So many books
I recently rediscovered my Kindle, and have finally conceded that I just read better on a device. As a writer who loves nothing more than physical book-shopping and supporting independent book-sellers, I hate this. Be that as it may, in the past month and a half I’ve inhaled the following, all of which were excellent:
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett (my fave, I think)
I just started Sally Rooney’s new book, Beautiful World, Where Are You and haven’t been able to get past a minor detail: in emails that the narrator exchanges with a friend, she opens with, “Dear Eileen.” I’ve found it too hilarious and distracting to continue. Does Sally Rooney not have friends? Or am I the only person who greets friends with “Sup bish”, “What it do, sis?”, “What’s good, fam” or just, “Hey, friend”? (Also—are we emailing our friends? Am I doing friendship wrong??)
I liked Ordinary People a lot and really enjoyed everything she had to say in this interview, so I’ll try again—although I already have books by Donna Tartt and Elizabeth Strout, neither of whom I’ve read yet, queued up. On my Kindle. Le sigh.
A question to my friends who have navigated this moral/literary dilemma: is there a more ethical, less Bezos way to read e-books?? Please share it with me and save my soul.
Apple TV+
Why are there so many good shows? I binged Physical a couple of weeks ago—the show itself is fun-but-discomfiting, and Rose Byrne is riveting. Season 2 of The Morning Show starts tomorrow. I fear for my productivity.
Jonah Hill
I’ve never been a fan of Jonah Hill or anything he’s ever been in, but I really, really enjoyed this interview. Is Jonah Hill a modern-day Buddha? Ok that is ridiculous and also sacrilegious, but anyway I like him a lot now. Would I like him if I met him IRL? Maybe not—maybe I just like famous rich people saying chill things.
Chai
There is not a bad mood that chai can’t fix—at least temporarily. All my time now is spent either drinking chai or waiting for my next cup of chai. Incredible that a simple concoction of black tea leaves, cardamom, water, milk, and sugar can be brewed into such soul-soothing ambrosia. (While we’re here, people who say “chai tea”: do you know you’re literally just saying “tea tea”?)
Cats that helped this month
Alas there are none, for we are separated by oceans and time zones 😭 If this is what you come here for and feel cheated, I promise to make it up to you. Meanwhile, I shall weep into my chai until my children and I are reunited 😪
I just made my dad laugh by telling him about how my cats zoom around the house after they’ve pooped. It is such a strange phenomenon—can you imagine if humans did this? What would the office be like? “Oh, there goes Jerry from Accounting. Just give him a minute.” I left the room and could hear him still chuckling, which is a great success.
OK, I’m going to get my next cup of chai.
Have a great day, pals 😘