Cleaning up the Mess

To start the year on a grumpy note, holiday traditions have long struck me as organized superstition; as an adult, I largely participate because I am expected to do so. Holiday magic as peddled by the annual stock films and toys and products isn’t magical at all, at least not in the sense that it is miraculous or supernatural in origin: it is largely the result of a lot of low-paid and unpaid (as well as inequitably divided) labor. Cooking and shopping and organizing events—and cleaning up the mess—disproportionately falls to wives and mothers and daughters. Working in retail and food service and other career fields often means long hours, low wages, and few worker protections, standing in the background and serving the middle and upper classes who can afford Christmas merriment.

I worked at a café in a mall for almost seven years, so my grumpiness is based not only on sociological insight but on lived experience; it really did make me hate Christmas. There was something almost cruel about loudspeakers piping out the same tired old songs of joy and cheer and relaxation and merriment while I slogged through another double-shift, working double-time to serve more customers than any other time of the year—who, as the busy time intensified, became ever more impatient and inflexible. Gee, I’m sorry you had to wait nine minutes for me to make you a sandwich; I’ve been on my feet for eleven hours and missed dinner altogether. 

Anyway…despite these objections there is something intuitive and satisfying about marking the changing of the seasons. The holidays many of us honor were in many ways appropriated from older cultures that did just that—even the symbolism, bunnies at Easter and evergreen trees and Christmas and the like, are notable European symbols of fertility and enduring life, respectively, addressing and harmonizing our lives with the changing seasons.  The final weeks of December are the coldest, darkest weeks of the year, with the longest nights (if one lives in the Northern Hemisphere and outside the tropics, that is). There is something about that last week of the year, between Christmas and the New Year, in which the traditional notion of self-reflection and resolution holds great appeal.

I like New Year’s Resolutions. I know most people don’t “stick with it,” and that the gyms will empty out and the baked goods aisles will pick up in a couple of weeks, followed a couple of weeks later by the beer aisles and the liquor stores when “Dry January” comes to its inevitable end. The fact that most people try to make changes and fail almost doesn’t matter, in a way, because it’s the motivation—self-reflection, self-improvement, and “cleaning up the mess,” that matters. If you try to make a change enough times, it’s because you want (or need) to; eventually thinking it through and trying different things is more likely to lead to a successful effort toward enduring change.

I’m like so many others in these days; having found my way into the middle classes of late I find myself facing some of the same challenges: I, too, want to spend more time in the gym, drink less beer, drop a few inches off my waistline, sleep better, give myself more time to relax, live a life that’s just a little less complicated. It’s the last one that I’ve struggled with most over the years, and honestly it is, in my assessment, what is contributing to the other issues. I talk myself out of going to the gym because I “don’t have time.” This, as I wrote about last January, makes it more difficult to handle stress which in turn makes eating better more difficult (I give into cravings out of fatigue or rush through meals) and both of these make it harder to sleep better, leading to more cravings (including caffeine) which makes for less sleep and less energy and...it’s probably familiar.

So how does one go about making life less complicated? One thing I tried, with a good deal of success, was abstaining from social media for almost a year, which went better than I expected. At the same time, I have stepped into new roles and projects in my career, which I enjoy (but which is highly demanding). After a holiday break that was over in a blink and was hardly stress-free, I’m rolling out of bed to start 2023, and I already feel behind on everything. Perhaps also like you, I still haven’t recovered from 2020, let alone 2021 or 2022. But years, whatever they bring, are not to blame for my failure to better manage my life—that’s another form of organized superstition that I will stop short of in talking about transitioning into a new year.

There’s something that resonates with me from all this, though, a step to take here and now to try to get things back under control. In a word: boundaries. I have long struggled with this because I’m not sure I understood what setting boundaries really means or looks like. For one, I am an admitted workaholic; but I have also exhibited other compulsive tendencies. Boundaries aren’t something that comes from the outside—they are developed by you, and for you—no one can set them for you, and no one can reliably be expected to. Your time and money and attention are limited, finite; the world around you will always ask for more of these things than you can spare, regardless of what you do.

Boundaries, like holiday magic, aren’t something that is miraculous or supernatural; they require ongoing human effort to build and maintain. People and organizations will treat you however you allow them to, not because they are mean or heartless but because the world needs you whether you like to think so or not. Everyone has something to offer, and no one is good at everything. Saying “no” to something is the simplest way to start establishing boundaries, but in our fast-paced interaction-driven society, saying no is not a popular thing to do. There will be costs. It’s strategic, as well, then; setting effective boundaries that don’t result in a different kind of sabotage means assessing where one’s time and money and attention are most likely to be best used.

I’m speculating here, but people who do creative work may be more prone to obsession and compulsion. Not the disorder—that’s a different matter—but a willingness to spread ourselves too thin in the interest of pursing something we love to the best of our ability. It results in burnout and exhaustion and breakdown. It doesn’t happen all at once. It happens a little at a time. One more commitment, one more task, one more way to spread oneself thinner. Eventually it becomes unmanageable, but by then it’s already too late, because now you’re left in the face-losing position of walking back from previous commitments; saying “no” to what you already said “yes” to or simply being unable to deliver what you said you could. If setting boundaries has social costs, not setting boundaries, in the long run, costs a lot more.

The reality is that there isn’t one single thing I’m doing right now that I don’t want to do; but taken together, I feel like I’ve lost myself. It’s a deeply unpleasant feeling. This isn’t the “living for others” kind of life that we tend to admire so—it feels more like a sort of purgatory where I am pulled in so many different directions, I cannot seem to accomplish any of the things I have set out to do. Logically, there are only two ways forward: find more time or do fewer things. Finding more time means reconsidering how I’m dividing up and spending my time. Are there things I’m doing that take up a lot of time, relatively speaking, but don’t help achieve the things I want to do?

I gravitate from one obsession to another, hyper-focusing and withdrawing; I feel constrained and don’t function well at all in an environment that is too rigidly scheduled. This creates a problem because finding more time means doing fewer things. There is only so much usable time in a day, week, month, year... But I can’t figure out how to use my time better if I don’t know how I spend my time, and I can’t figure out how I use my time, let alone change it, if I function best without a rigidly set schedule. You see the problem.

To be clear, I’m fairly candid on this blog, and for a reason: I hope the experience, triumphs, and mistakes will potentially help others think things through, but it’s also a “time capsule” for me, a way of thinking about where I’ve been and where I’m going. It’s also a way to practice writing and to express thoughts that don’t have a home in my academic writing life as it currently exists. However, I’m not looking to play the “oversharing” game; what I do in a day, or a week isn’t something I plan to share on the Internet in gory detail. I don’t have a solid plan forward, but I am working to set some boundaries and rethink my time use in ways that I hope, looking back a year from now, will have tangible benefits.

To start with, I have to step back from the music; even though it’s sad to have to do that given that I’ve been able to accomplish some things last summer that I’ve long wanted to do and never seemed to be able to get done in the past. Not permanently or entirely; but enough to make some room. I should also say that my best friend and loyal terrier mix Chewie passed away in January after a long and full life, and though I plan to write something about him, and about the experience of losing him, in the future, I’m just not ready for that right now. I enter 2023 with a lot less optimism and more uncertainty than 2022; some of this is beyond my control. But other things are within my control, and the easiest way to start is to think about how to spend the next twelve months cleaning up the mess and making things a bit more manageable.

Image credit: winter, photo by author