#9 Let's get medium

Mediocrity means you get to have fun?

I’ve always wanted to be the kind of writer who could sit down and bang out an essay or even a *simple communication* in an hour, and I’ve always ended up being the kind of writer who turns all those attempts into 10,000 word essays that she workshops between at least two equinoxes. Part of it is because I’m not a short-form writer—I write long-form and I love editing and the whole stupid horrible process. And, of course, part of it is because I’m a perfectionist.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, about how signing up to do this newsletter is signing up for something that is perpetual and relentless, a thing that I’d be worried about if (1) I didn’t love doing it and (2) I was under the impression that each week I had to turn out something better than the last, or that I would be judged based on how perfect each essay was, or that I had to hold myself to some incredible standard I don’t actually feel the need to hold myself to (as much) anymore.

Meaning, I’m not worried about having to “come up” with something every week because I promised myself this would be an experiment, and one I would only judge based on how much fun I was having or how much love I had for it, not by how many likes or comments or subscribers or any sad metric we’ve been portioned to esteem ourselves with or judge our work and worth by.

That you love some things is great, because I love creating and sharing those creations and there is NO GREATER JOY than when it all works out perfectly and comes out like it was in my head and sometimes better and I learn a thing I didn’t even know I thought about myself! and you get use out of it!! and we are like YAY THIS WAS GREAT!!! But here’s the other thing: The shit you don’t love, that you’re like “wait what?” or “hmmm that wasn’t really so [???]” or that you get half way through and delete or get halfway through and then unsubscribe from my entire newsletter because I am wasting your time, that’s also great. Because that’s normal. And if I’m not attached to one over the other—if I’m not clinging to the things that just hit and make me dance or averting the feeling I get when things flop and make me wonder about my career, then this gets to be fun?

In The Class class I was taking a few days ago, the teacher Sophia (my favorite is CJ since you were probably not wondering nor asking) gave us the option of doing a really hard regular burpee, or the “easy burpee,” and she simply said “friends, choose the one you need right now. DROP THE PRESSURE. There doesn’t have to be pressure!!! You just do whichever! No problem!” and I realized in the fraction of the second between her giving us the choice, and her letting us know there didn’t have to be pressure, how much pressure built up inside me. A whole conversation happened over a tenth of a second before she told me not to worry: I want to do the easy burpee because I’m lazy and I’m at least here but I should do the hard one because then I’m cheating myself of my full potential and I’ll probably feel bad if I just do the easy one like I’m not trying… And then a tenth of a second later she says: WE CAN JUST DROP THE PRESSURE.

I can just drop the pressure. I can just have fun? My whole life won’t be shaped by doing the easy burpee? It’s not that important it can be that simple?

There’s also this Theodore Bryan¹ quote I read in 2014 that I’ve been thinking about: “Perfectionism is the socially acceptable Siamese twin of a subconscious feeling called fear of mediocrity." I’m typically afraid of doing something that isn’t perfect because I’m afraid that if it isn’t perfect, it means that you won’t be distracted by my product, that perhaps you’ll look further and see through it and directly into me and see that I am not, in fact, enough. Perfection is the armor I wear to ensure that the part of me that is absolutely terrified she doesn’t matter at all stays comfortably hidden from view. Which is another reason why I committed to writing this newsletter week after week: I don’t want this part of me to run the show anymore; if it’s weekly, there are going to be things I do that I’m “Mehhhh” or “blehhh” or “oooof” about; and you’ll have to look further, and you’ll have to look directly into me and see that I am, whether I produce or I do not, enough.

Last December I asked my friend Ruthie²—who is this alien kind of person who seems to have absolutely no shame and lots of joy—how she walks into rooms to lead workshops and give talks. I think I said something like “How do you not walk in there with your head hanging down in apology or worrying that you’re not good enough to be teaching other people how to heal. What gives you the right to stand in front of a room and not explode?” I wasn’t asking because I think Ruthie is a fraud; I was asking because if I were to do what Ruthie does that’s how I would feel. Ruthie laughed and said “Oh sister! Because the part of me that thinks I’m a fraud is standing right up there at the front with me. They have a seat at my table, and because they have a seat at my table where they are respected and loved and validated, they’re not running the show from the basement.” (I’m paraphrasing all this but you get it.)

If we’re talking about perfection, and we are, we’re also talking about an incredible fear of inadequacy, or I am. And I can do all the work on my self-worth, and I do. Lots of sweet self talk, lots of reprogramming, CBT, DBT, EMDR, EFT, therapy, as much as all get-out. On Thursday, I actually played Can’t Take My Eyes Off You and sang it to myself while hugging myself and crying. You get it, you’ve done it, if you’re in recovery you’ve probably talked to a pillow too, you were there. But there’s a key to it, which is if you do all that acceptance or integration or release or whatever around self-worth, and you still have the part of you that feels totally inadequate locked in a basement, you’re going to have to keep calling the plumber, or I am. I cannot heal my perfectionism if I cannot completely esteem the exiled part of me that feels so absolutely worthless.

And so I did, and here’s what that looked like. Find the room I’ve stuffed worthless girl in; open door; meet her, tell her hi, give her a huge hug (if she wants one, she probably doesn’t); maybe give her a bath, dress her in a robe (she only wears robes); take her hand, walk her upstairs to the main hall, invite her to the banquet I’m having with all the other wild, terrified, dark, hypervigilant and unruly parts of myself; sit her down next to me at the table, ask her what she’s got to say; listen to all her fears, THANK HER for doing her job and worrying about being an embarrassing unworthy piece of shit no one loves or pays attention to so the rest of us don’t have to do all that work, tell her she’s every single bit as important as any other aspect of myself, she gets to sit tall at this table and not change herself at all or be made wrong for her core beliefs. Then take it from there and make the decisions a whole person would make, not a person run by an aspect of herself that’s been living below the stairs who’s screaming and banging on the door “we are not good enough!”

So far, it’s kind of working. I mean, I’m sending you this.

I love you a lot. I HOPE THIS MADE SENSE or helped or whatever. If it didn’t that’s okay! We’re okay.

---

Free and paid subscribers of Recovering get the same exact content. Paid is for those who’d like to offer financial support, and be patrons of this newsletter and my work.

---

ICYMI

My Quitted episode aired this week. I pasted what I wrote about it on Instagram below. I beg you! Please, please, please rate us on Apple or leave us a review. It helps tremendously.

This episode launched yesterday and when it didn’t feed to apple for six hours I took it as a sign that maybe it wasn’t meant to be heard after all.  There is rarely anything that I share anymore that feels big and scary and for some reason, this does. It’s in part because it talk about something I haven’t know how to talk about, the why of fully leaving tempest. But mostly it’s because I’m in process, and sharing what the in process looks like from the in process is something we typically make wrong. 

We don’t want the in between; we don’t want to see people’s grief or lost or mess or middle; we acknowledge two phases: (1) I need help/I need to change/something just broke/some tragedy just occurred, and (2) the after: I am whole I have risen I have taken that terrible fucked up thing and made this shiny new version of myself out of it. We want before and after and we get bored or scared of the messy forever middle. 

This habit of celebrating the reckoning and the rising, and hiding the middle means people who are in it, the ones relapsing or the ones who cannot get out of bed or the ones who cannot stop crying or the ones who are crawling through, are made to believe that precious time just surviving or just grieving or just trying is not a whole state. We celebrate what people do with their pain IF it looks desirable. We are swimming in it; you stopped the drinking you managed the depression you ran the marathon you got out of the debt you got the degree; we love the triumph, the making of something out of it; we have no patience or reverence or even way of celebrating the often ugly brutal process. Or the just being as we are.

I kept waiting to become an end product to start creating again; I kept thinking “when this is over then I’ll have two legs to stand on” and my experience of the middling process would be a story I told of how I became the new, respectable thing. And when a year came and went and it was still ugly, I decided to come as I was, and let that be wholly and holy. 

I wrote a newsletter last week and most of the letters I received were kind and full of me too; and then there were the ones that said I was very sick or insert mental health diagnosis here or that I needed “professional help”—the ones that wanted to fix the place I’m in instead of celebrating what is. There are a billion shades of existing and living, how is it that we are so afraid of the shades we are that have no explanation other than: this is where I am. 

The letters I have received over the years have primarily been from people in the middle of some process, and so many of them are soaked in the shame of that. As if we go from A to Z and all the meat in the middle doesn’t count. I promise you; it counts. I promise you, your middle is more beautiful than your endpoint.

One last point: yesterday after leaving this very tearful voice text w my friend Sah about the war and the trans kids and their families in Texas and how do we keep creating so much war on people, I got cut off in traffic and laid on my horn and screamed at some guy “mother fucker.” oof. That’s how; we witness the ways we wage war hundreds of times a day, we work with that. It’s not grand or heroic like we imagine we need to be to help; but how we each live and love, each of the choices we make as cells of a global body, it adds up. We keep choosing love. @together.rising is helping kids in Texas, @sunflowerofpeace is an org you can support for Ukrainian folks.

Let’s keep it tender. Let’s be sweet to ourselves as we navigate this world and all it’s impossible requirements.

Subscribe • Donate • Ask me a question

The Mantra Project, a 40-day email course to support quitting drinking, is available for purchase here.

1. Theodore Bryant wrote a book called “10 Days to Self-Discipline” which I bought in 2014 and100% never applied to my actual life

2. Her book There I Am is extremely good, and this meditation you get from signing up for her newsletter is helpful for some of the stuff I wrote about.