THE TEN YEAR BLOBLESSNESS PROJECT: A MEMOIR
I was inspired to start this blog while reading The Happiness Project. Are you familiar? The idea is to incrementally increase overall happiness by taking manageable steps routinely. Sounded right to me, or at least do-able (aren’t those the same thing?). But, at the time, it was not happiness that seemed unattainable; it was fitness. I had moved to a fit town and was working part-time in a high-end fitness apparel shop, and feeling rather fraudulent. I could run a little, and I was acquainted with yoga; working my way up to curling 10-pound dumbbells and feeling good about it. Not terrible, but not everything I ever wanted, either.
I started going to yoga as a social outlet, and accidentally fell in love with it. I would eventually wind up converting the vacant apartment area my ex-husband left into a bona fide yoga studio, and later jeopardizing my first-time home purchase by paying for yoga teacher training, even though I knew I would never really teach. But those are stories for another time.
These days I treat yoga like church, attending once a week and wearing my best clothes when I go. I am curious still about if or how the bud of teaching may ever fully bloom for me. I don’t know anything about where the time in my schedule or opportunities in my community may be. I do know where the shyness, insecurity, and uncertainty of purpose are, though.
I had started running two years before starting this blog about it. Terrible at running in high school, I abandoned it — and all physical fitness, really — by college, avowing to only run when chased, and even then only if it didn’t slosh my beer. I carried that badge for years until I got my first real career-path job: An internship with the United States Air Force JAG Corps. It was my dream job, even though I didn’t really know anything about it. The more I am around, the more I think that is just how dream jobs work. I had obviously heard, at least colloquially, about physical training, but the reality of working out every day, running with your co-workers, both surprised and scared the hell out of me. I bought one tank top, one sports bra, and one pair of shorts, and I washed them everyday in the sink. My goal for that summer was to run one mile without stopping because I thought that if I couldn’t, I would be fired from the armed forces.
I — somewhat regrettably — chose a different job where it didn’t matter a whit if you could run anything but your mouth (just kidding, more like run the copier and coffee machine, if I’m honest). By the time I got that first mile, I immediately wondered if I could run two. Then, if I could run 3, I could get an ugly T-shirt. At 6, someone would give me a medal? For a mere 10 or 13 they’d give me an ugly T-shirt and a medal. I kept thinking, “What about one more mile? It is just one more round-trip from my parents’ front door to the second stop sign.” Until I ran the 18th second stop sign, I thought I might just keep adding forever.
I had experience taking baby steps, and I knew just as much about faking it as I didn’t (don’t) know about making it. But again, I was not on the hunt for happiness, yet. I didn’t know what I wanted to have, or do, or be. I just knew I did not want to be a blob. I did not want to wait for things to happen to me. I wanted to be active, physically but not just. I wanted to be like the yoga teachers, Air Force captains, and race pacers I saw who were secure in their footing, moving toward and attaining fitness goals with confidence that quietly but irrepressibly flowed across the rest of their endeavors. I started to believe that moving my body might move me more deeply. I felt my default setting shift from “I can’t” to “I will.”
Ten years later I am only now beginning to see that “can’t” to “will” was a blunt first move. I only saw the way physical activity could drive mental activity. I did not have any experience in that channel flowing the other way. I have spent most of these years asking binary questions: Is this right, or is it wrong? Which is better, this or that?
I think now that “I can’t” isn’t even really where I was when I started out. There were myriad things I couldn’t do (still are). So many, in fact, that what I couldn’t do felt like where I was, who I was. I was just a million things I couldn’t yet do. Then I decided instead to be a million things I hadn’t yet done. I could do them, I just hadn’t, yet. That outlook was pretty powerful for many years. Walking around thinking I could do anything I wanted to do if only I wanted to do it made me feel like I was keeping the delicious secret of my untapped potential, and that whenever I wanted to, I could deploy it like so many spring snakes from a peanut can. Surprise, world! I can, and I will.
I eventually started to should on myself.
My yoga teacher taught me that idea five years ago, and I think about it often. “Let’s not should on ourselves,” she said to the class, and we laughed knowingly to ourselves and to each other. We were doing that. We had been for as long as we could remember. And we SHOULD stop. I didn’t yet see that if “I can do it” and “I will do it,” why then wasn’t I? I really should. The weight of my expectations — that I could do it, that I would do it — slowly turned my confidence, my bones, my body to dust. Though they were crushing me, I clung to them, convinced that the weaker I felt, the farther from my real self, the more I must insist that “I can, I will.” The mantra stopped motivating me, the magic stopped working. Every morning I thought “I can, I will,” but by every nightfall I hadn’t, I couldn’t.
Most of this dissonance grew in the widening gap between my single, childless past self and my now married, mother-of-two reality. There just never seems to be any time anymore. Before I had kids, I had time, and if I wanted to do or be something, I simply put some time into it. There are still a million things I want to do and be, but now I read that being too busy for something, not having the time, is just another way of showing yourself and the world that it is not your priority. If I truly value something, I will pay the scarce hours in my week for it.
For four years, I have been budgeting my time this way. Daily expenditures are for necessities like dinner, bath, and bedtime for the kids. Weekly I pay down on debt by spending time with friends who graciously extend me credit against our friendships for not texting back, not calling to check-in, and not meeting for coffee. Monthly I make long-term investments in my professional growth paid in four-hour increments on a Saturday morning or late on a Tuesday night perfecting a special project no one as even yet requested. Annually I splurge on weeks at the holidays spent planning, purchasing, procuring, and packaging perfect presents and parties.
I obsessively prioritize the things I want to do, but this has not resulted in the perfect, logically sound satisfaction I have sought. It has brought more feelings of guilt and inadequacy because almost every prioritization pits against each other two things I desire the most: time with my kids versus time with my husband; time with my friends versus time alone; time on my work versus time to work out, time to travel versus time to get my home in order. I cannot abide the idea that when I don’t accomplish these things, it is because I do not prioritize them, or that the fact that do not do them proved the don’t mean enough to me.
I SHOULD do all those things that are meaningful to me. If I do not do that, am I devaluing them?
When I choose extra stories for the kids at bedtime instead of a glass of wine and conversation with my husband, I hear in the back of my mind “Remember: It is the marital relationship that is the cornerstone of the family.” When I choose the other way around, wine with my husband but the kids go straight to bed, I hear, “They won’t be little for long, this will fly by, and I’ll miss it. Plus, they need me!”
When I choose a wine date with girlfriends to laugh, catch up, and vent instead of a long hot shower, quick chapter of a good book, and an early bedtime, I hear “If I run myself too far down, I will get sick, and EVERYTHING will fail.” The other way around, a relaxing night in while my friends meet up without me and I hear, “I’ll fall out of touch with them if I skip too many times, and eventually the will stop inviting me.”
When I work through lunch and snip away at least a few of the dangling loose threads of tasks I have left too long undone instead of hitting up a fitness class to keep in shape, keep healthy, and burn off some anxious energy, I hear “I would think more clearly and get more done after a workout, and if I skip too many workouts I will lose whatever fitness gains I may have made, and undo work I have already done.” The other way around, I work out, but less work gets done at the office and I hear “People must see when I am not there, and they see when my stuff is not done, and the know I am a total flake.”
Who is more important: my kids, or my husband? What is more fulfilling: time with friends, or time alone? Do I want to be fit and healthy, or do I want to be competent and successful? These are the blunt moves I have been making, pin-balling between all of the binary flappers: him or them, them or me, this or that, all or none.
I heard that balance is not something to achieve every day, but across all of your days, and often I hear about seasons of life (turn, turn, turn). I understand that I do not have to choose all or nothing, but I also see the way that even the smallest choices every day aggregate without my realizing it into something I have become, and not just something I didn’t do once Wednesday night. For months I have settled in comfortably prioritizing my family’s healthy dinner, or my friends’ needing to vent, or my shot at office inbox zero over putting the laundry away. On any given day, the laundry simply does not rate. Yet, monthly later those small decisions add up to the fact that I am not a woman with any orderly, tidy, household. What I chose then is what I am — or am not — now.
I want to start using finer instruments to organize and analyze my life. Have I outgrown the basic binaries “can’t” and “will?” I am ready to dig my way out of all the should. I want to fill the deep valleys of my lows, not only to bring them closer to the highs and elevate the sum of my experiences, but also to smooth the rolling pitch of my life.
I have thought, “I couldn’t then, I can now, so I will.” Now I want to think, “I wouldn’t then, I can now, so I might.” If I do not do a thing, that does not make me culpable negligent. I do not, in not doing a thing, so devalue it as to deserve any feelings of shame, or guilt, or fear. All of the things I want are good; happy, healthy kiddos; a loving, lasting marriage; fun, fulfilling friendships; a strong, able body; a vibrant, promising career; and a warm, welcoming home. So any stem I manage to take toward any of these ends is good for me. To not move toward one is not bad. But, to not move at all is blob.
And this is why, after ten years, though sources and methods may change, the aim remains: My own bloblessness project.
FROM BLOB TO BLOG 