Category — Uncategorized

Oliver Burkeman mentioned a book and idea in a recent post about intrusive thoughts that resonated with me. The book is The Path to Aliveness by Christian Dillo, and the idea is not to try to bar these thoughts from entering your mind but to adjust your level of hospitality when they get there.

He writes,

“The host’s job is not to barricade the door but instead just not serve any tea.” Maybe I can’t exactly let go of my counterproductive thoughts – but I can resist the temptation to indulge them, metaphorically inviting them to sprawl on the sofa for hours at a time, with a nice hot drink and a generous slice of cake.

I loop through the same anxious what-ifs at 1 am, essentially serving those thoughts tea, cake, and asking if they’d like to take my kitchen table while they’re at it. I’ve been trying to set down the teapot and instead literally think about myself taking back a cup of tea and holding it for myself instead of letting those negative thoughts get comfortable. Does it always work? No. But having a visual when I realize I’m doing it has been helpful.

There was a book on sale about your personality’s colour. I didn’t want to purchase it or do the test. It seemed easier to poll everyone in the room on my personality’s colour. We decided on a dark blue.

I asked what number I would be if I were a number. Which element if I were a witch? And finally, which letter of the alphabet would I be if I were a single letter?

“An M,” everyone decided. Not because my name begins with an M but because I’m a little spiky and rigid, but I slot nicely into many words.

A perfect statement of who I am. An M.

I loved Ness Labs’ recent post about change fatigue. It perfectly describes the spikiness that comes out in reaction to change. She explains, “Change fatigue [is] a feeling of resistance or resignation in the face of Change. When things keep on changing, and we don’t feel in control, our adaptive systems start breaking down.”

I haven’t been feeling in control because I’m not in control. The twins are going off to college whether I like it or not. It’s what happens next (life beyond this home), and they’re stepping into it whether I’m ready. But knowing this term helps me get my brain around why I feel like falling apart over buying and getting accustomed to a new vacuum or learning one more new tool.

How do you do with change?

On the topic of great confessional Substacks (I’m still Team Blogging, but I let a few Substacks into my inbox to go along with my blog reading), this one on envy was also thought-provoking. It begins:

I turn thirty-five in a couple of months, and it’s absolutely true that children come to define your social landscape at this stage of life – even if you don’t have them. Not being a parent feels like an identity I acquired at some point in the past few years, increasingly cited as a justification for my lifestyle and choices being different to many of my contemporaries.

That quote, “Not being a parent feels like an identity I acquired at some point,” — except it is only women. I don’t think most men feel defined by not being a parent before (if ever) they’re a parent in the same way that women are handed this identity like we’re moving off a conveyor belt.

She unpacks the envy she feels as she sometimes listens to younger friends experience those earlier stages of life — unconnected to the parenting thing — and she reminds herself that envy doesn’t need to be negative. It can be illuminating.

Maybe Baby, a great Substack I read, recently wrote a newsletter about infertility. She has such a warm, friendly voice, and it felt a little bit like the old days of blogging when reading something felt like spending time with an inside-the-computer friend.

By this, I mean that it had the deep honesty and frankness of old blog posts before people could track metrics or curate things. Keeping things to yourself, sure. That’s what we do daily. But true curation felt like it started when we moved from words to images.

I nodded through most of the newsletter, but this part summed up the experience so perfectly:

So far, the worst part of trying and failing to get pregnant isn’t that I don’t have a baby, which is honestly fine, at times a relief, but that I’ve been waiting for the biggest news of my life—sweating about it, preparing for it—that never comes.

Go over and read her whole analogy with that paragraph.

And this: “It’s still early, in the grand scheme of things. Still, it’s been hard. Lonely, exhausting, almost impressive in its ability to carry me swiftly from the sense of joy and stability that compelled me to try in the first place.”

Yes. All of this. Exactly. And once again, the Internet reminds us that we’re not alone.

I gave you the first thought yesterday from the Substack. The second was the idea that we need to get better at suffering and acknowledge that grief extends beyond the people closest to the situation as a society.

She writes,

Only a handful of people “get” to fully grieve the loss of someone close to them, but how many others are acutely sharing that grief? I’m thinking about how beloved friends of the deceased don’t necessarily get to take their three allotted bereavement days from work because they’re not family members. I’m thinking about the pals who don’t get updates on a buddy’s medical condition because the friends haven’t passed some sort of closeness test.

It’s such a deeply profound thought because, as a society, we almost need to prove that we’re allowed to grieve. We have to state our relationship to the deceased or ill — and we’re judged whether we’re close enough to the situation to warrant the space to hold our feelings. And yet, our emotions don’t get that message. Our feelings ask us to stop. Society, work, and relationships ask us to go on.

There is a difference, of course, in inserting your grief. Of asking someone else impacted by the situation to hold your grief for you. But Mari’s point is that we should expand the idea of who is “allowed” to grieve, to have their feelings acknowledged and honoured when they need space to explore them.