Tense, Stuck, and Ineffective

I’m starting to worry that I’ll end up living a boring life. It’s a new fear: my heart used to be full of pressing questions and concerns, and I never imagined that I wouldn’t just automatically live a life I was interested in. But these days, I feel dull. Sometimes I fear that I lack the boldness or initiative to make the changes I would need, to feel so eager again.

Mind, I don’t think I’m condemned to an unhappy life. Contentment seems almost within reach. I’m privileged with solid social, physical, and economic foundations, so mostly from here I could focus on the little things. Cook good food, take long walks, fall asleep reading a novel. Watch clouds puffy in the sky, or feel the crisp-freshness of a linen shirt. Enjoy being human. One day, I’ll raise children an delight in each developmental step; one day, maybe I’ll knit sweaters for my grandchildren. Of course there will be challenges. But I will try to persevere through them, learn something profound from heartbreak or injury or grief, love and love and love. And that’s enough. That’s a sustainable life, a meaningful life.

Somehow, though, this description of a life spent taking joy in the present manages to leave me cold. If you notice a flower bud opening, was the day remarkable? With no offense to the lilies, sometimes I doubt it. Spring turns along, self-standing: and even when I’m mindful and attentive, still the weeks seem to run through my fingers like sand. I can behold the sand as it falls with reverence, dust to dust and all. But sometimes I wonder if I mightn’t try to build a sandcastle, just for fun, before the tide comes and takes my progress out.

To be clear, I’ve got no ambitious drive to innovate or dominate or make a dent in the world. But I still want to lead a life of vigor: with questions threaded through it, and projects; with excitement to take a next step, and a next. The action might not move our species forward, but it would at least add some variety to the set of paths that humans take. It would be, as it were, an interesting life.

But I’ve been stuck. Week after week I refuse to actually engage, neither carving out time nor slipping hours in when I feel like I ought to be doing something else. Instead I stare deadly at spreadsheets and distract myself endlessly and choke myself by planning every evening hour. Oh, I almost wonder, is there a self-help book that could save me? or what about this cohort-based online class! – it’s a despicable-pitiable state.

A first pass analysis: I am tense and could do with relaxing. If what I want is to live a life I am interested in, I can just let myself gravitate to those things I would naturally gravitate to. This is probably the tack I’ll take, semi-actionable: I’ll try to loosen the leash I’ve got on myself, give myself some time to spend doing whatever it is I’ll do.

But I’ve got the prickling sense there’s something underneath my difficulty that may need to be addressed. Like: why am I so tense? Why haven’t I been carving out this space already?

My current dullness is a change from college, when the whole world seemed to sparkle and shudder before me. I wandered around the edges of the institution, following my interests; I took classes when I felt like I couldn’t go any further as a human being without learning their contents, and I worked on creative projects when there was something inside of me that needed to get out. I learned so much, so boldly. I was doing school, sure: I never doubted I would graduate on-time with an excellent GPA - I was still playing the default game in a low-risk way. But the degree program served as cover under which I was able to explore as I wished.

I don’t have such a good cover story, nowadays. I keep hoping that employment writ large can play that role, and certainly it works as a talking point for family and friends and strangers. But for myself, it feels less like protective cover, and more like a road to somewhere I don’t want to go, so that when I try to do work, mostly I feel like I’m pushing in the wrong direction. Why am I learning to put together our foreign exchange impact reporting, when I feel an apathy that borders on distaste to imagine actually updating these Excel files all the months ahead? This is not the life I want to be living. And that’s distracting, and unsettling, in the pit of my stomach.

I’m not used to the spaces I’m in feeling so wrong. In school, my values seemed to align with the ambient expectations. I did, as a teenager, question myself about why I was putting effort and care into every homework assignment, paying attention in every class, and generally jumping through every hoop set before me. But I concluded that my education was transforming my soul, and that I valued that change, and would keep trying to learn as much as I could from my teachers.^[1] Suspiciously convenient, maybe, but it worked: I was happy to serve up what my environment asked of me, for a long time, and I think I came out okay for it.

As an adult, there are still plenty of hoops if you care to look, but they’re kind of scattered about, and they glint strangely. It’s clear now that the default striving is no longer accompanied automatically by soul-transforming activity. How could I care about getting a promotion when what I do in my current role is just fine, and what I would do in a next role would also be just fine? I cannot now offload the responsibility of making sure I’m taking steps in the right direction to any external structure in my life.

This splitting apart of my true aims from the defaults of my environment raises two issues. The first: how do I hold on my own the weight of my own aspirations? But meanwhile also: how do I orient around the ambient expectations, if I’m not taking them as my own?

The second question lacks the import of the first, but it demands answering: I do have to figure out what to say and do at work. Sometimes I think I’d like to be able to ignore these things that could be goals but are not my goals completely; sometimes that seems irresponsible. And what am I to say when it’s time to talk career aspirations with my seeming-mentors? They’ve got their own judgments and hopes, too, and even though I don’t feel bound by their values, I can’t seem to let their comments go. I don’t have anything in my head to counter them with. And so there’s a pile of expectations I disavow that still I steadfastly feel to have a claim on me, and it is piling up high.

I suspect that if I were confidently moving forward with some chosen way of life, it would be easier to relax about the silly hoops: to consider them just part of the landscape, to be used when they’re helpful and ignored when they’re not. Nor am I worried, in the end, that the ambient expectations would start to bite: my social spheres are pretty benign. People respect thoughtful self-assurance. I would be okay, if I were marking out my own path.

But I don’t feel so confident, right now, moving forward on my own terms. I’m not marking out my own path, I’m just kind of flailing about. It scares me. That first issue I mentioned with losing external scaffolding for my aims - having to hold the full weight of my aspirations on my own? The thought makes me tense. I feel this urge to watchdog myself, keeping close tabs on everything I do, to try to make sure I’m making progress. But that’s way too much consciousness. It doesn’t work to try to shine a floodlight on all the tender inchoate things in the far-dark corners of my brain. Whenever I take a clear, serious look at my hopes and desires, I falter. I want to be able to take action without having to think so hard about what I’m doing. But right now - with the constant psychological drags from work - it’s taking too much thoughtfulness even to carve out space to act.

Eventually, I probably will change my environment. Maybe everything will be a little easier in a scene I fit into a little better. But for now, I’m still holding on. I want to be able to navigate environments like the one I’m in now, that are neutral-to-friendly, even when they aren’t a perfect fit. I want to be strong enough to be a version of myself I like within them.

Something will have to give. I’ve been ineffective these last months in all domains, and it’s getting old fast. I’ll try to relax. Slowly somehow I will slip ahead of myself, I hope, and transform this mire into something else.

Open my eyes to the light that shines in all things softly. Show me how what is here could already be enough. Release me from the hypnotizing desire to make progress.

Let what is vague and restless within me breathe in and out of specificity.

Open my heart to the calls of the world, and put my hands to work. Loosen my grip on the assumptions I’ve made about what my life will be. Let love flow through me.