To create is to commit

I love yarn. I love blank journals. I love new boxes of crayons. But when it comes time to cast on for a knitting project, put pen to page, or make the first waxy mark on a clean sheet of paper, I hesitate, vacillate, and procrastinate. Why?

These objects embody creative potential. That yarn could become a cozy sweater or a pair of mittens, that journal could be for research or sketching or the things I encounter that surprise me. But as long as I haven't started, these are all still possibilities. So to get myself to get started, this is what I say:

To create is to commit. 

You can't erase crayon, and you can't be creative without making some irreversible choices. Sure, most word processors let you hit backspace, and unknitting isn't that hard either, but eventually you will have to hit submit, or wash and block your finished garment. The potential in yarn and paper is only there if you can choose to do something with it.

This is why I'm writing a blog post here every week. I've "started" several blogs with no blog posts because I haven't decided yet what I want my theme to be. Life? Habits? Communication? Books? Math? I could dither forever. But waiting to start until I have the perfect idea will mean I never start, so I'm starting before I feel ready, and I'll figure it out as I go. And then every week, I wonder whether one of my other post ideas would be more timely or important than the one I'm working on, and equally whether maybe I should wait to post that one until I can really do it justice. So I tell myself that to create is to commit, just pick whatever topic I feel like I can manage to write about in one weekend, and do it whether what I make is any good or not.

And sometimes I manage to use those crayons too.

"Should" without the anxiety

• I should be saving more.
• I should be traveling more.
• I should wash the dishes.
• I should figure out what I want to do with my life.
• I should read more books.

Statements like these flit through my mind all the time. Clara wrote a few months ago about the way "should" statements induce anxiety: Whenever I book a flight, the "Can I afford this?" voice pipes up accusingly, and whenever do I sock away money for a rainy day, I worry that I'm not enjoying the sunny ones enough.

But here's something Clara and I have been doing lately to soften those "should" statements: add an "if."  Compare:

• I should be saving more.
• If I want to have more money set aside for emergencies, I should save more.

Or:

• I should be traveling more.
• If I want to have a more varied experience in Europe, I should be traveling more.

When I articulate why I would want to save or travel, getting the underlying desires out in the open, it makes the conflict between those desires and not between the actions they demand.  Rather than choosing the lesser of two guilty feelings when I'm deciding where a dollar goes, I can let my desires for variety and security reach a compromise, like "It's okay to spend Y per month on travel if I'm on target to save up X months of rent in case I lose my job."  Knowing that all my inner voices are heard is a great relief.

Sometimes, the exercise of adding an "if I want" is helpful in other ways.

• I should do the dishes now if I want to have the counter clear to prep food on later.

Just visualizing the outcome I want can make it easier to get off my bum and do it.

• If I want my life to have a clear path, I should figure out what I want to do with it.

I do want to know where my life is going, but even the best plans don't always work out.  When I accept that nothing in the future is certain, I feel less anxious about the vague need to "figure things out."

And sometimes, adding on an "if I want" is just silly:

• I should read more books if I ... want to read more books?

Poof!  There goes the guilt about not reading enough.  I read for fun, not because I should!

This adapts well to "You should" statements too, by adding an "if you want."  Which of these would you rather hear?

• You should defrost your freezer!
• If you want more space in your freezer, you should defrost it.

Why yes, I do want more space in my freezer!  But that's just one of many wants, and I don't need to act on them all right now.

I try to make sure I phrase my exhortations this way, to give someone an out if their priorities are different from mine.  Telling a student "If you want this passage in your thesis to be clearer, you should add more exposition" goes over much better with the "if" clause than without, if they turn out to be worried about exceeding the thesis page limit.  And when I hear "You should...", tacking on an invisible "if I want..." in my mind makes it much easier to keep from getting angry that people don't understand my unique situation.

To sum up, here's my attempt at a tweet-able epigram:

If you want to say "should," you should say "If you want."
(Click to tweet)

Who's Your Driver? Thoughts about Feelings

Riley's driver is Joy

A couple weeks ago I saw the new Pixar movie Inside Out, and was as I expected, moved to laughter and tears, but like the best Pixar movies it also made me think a lot. In the movie, we follow a 10 year old named Riley, and we experience her life mostly through her emotions (the characters, Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear, and Disgust.) Without telling too much of the plot of the movie, one of the interesting things for me was the little peeks we get into other character's brains. For most of her life it seems like Riley's driver (the emotion in charge of the control desk in her mind) is Joy, but when we get to see into Riley's mom's head, her driver is sadness, and Riley's dad's driver is anger.

Riley's parents' emotions

When my friend Linden asked me and Owen, "Who's your driver?" it surprised me to find that recently the emotion driving me forward has been fear. That weird little purple character in the movie, frightened of everything. In a lot of my life I think I've varied between different dominant emotions—it's a pleasure to have had joy as a driver for so much of my life—but I like that one of the messages of the movie is that it's okay to have another emotion taking a turn at the wheel. In Inside Out, Joy keeps trying to push Sadness away, out of Riley's head, and that's a really normal thing in our culture. The number one thing parents want is for their children to "be happy" but this movie says (and I think they're right) that sometimes you need to be sad. And when you are sad, sometimes you really need to express that, and you need people you trust and love, who will still love you even if you're not feeling the way they wish you could feel. (For more on this topic see the excellent book, How to Talk so Kids will Listen, and Listen so Kids will Talk.)

But what does it mean to have fear as my driver? Nothing makes me feel more like a child than fear. When I had lived in the Netherlands nine months, I melted down sobbing because I was afraid that (not kidding) no one would come to my birthday party. People did come, and I had a wonderful birthday that year, but looking back I am amazed at quite how scary the thought of "I have no friends" could be, even as an adult. A lot of the experiences that helped me mature into an adult were doing things that frightened me or seemed challenging in some way, and then excelling in those challenges. Now that I am an adult, life is scary in different ways. The next step isn't usually clear. My support system doesn't necessarily have experience in my situation, and so it's hard for me to parse through the various advice I'm getting. Instead of people around me telling me to go ahead and take the challenging opportunity, there is so much cautious advice. When I was younger I felt like everyone was telling me to reach for the stars, and now there's a lot more "that sounds like a lot of work, be careful—don't get too involved, are you able to pay for that? How will that work with having kids?" Not exactly advice to combat fear.

In her book, Bossypants, Tina Fey tells some of the hurdles in her own life in hilarious and compelling detail. Near the end of the book she compares her own paralyzing anxiety about her work and the possibility of having a second child to two small Greek children her mother once babysat. These children had never been out of their parents' care in their entire lives, and were desperate, crying inconsolably. After hours of this, the seven year old Christo cries out in Greek to his little sister, "Oh! My Maria! What is to become of us?" which send's Tina's mother running out of the room in a fit of laughter. Those children are going to be fine. Tina Fey's gynecologist tells her simply, "Either way, everything will be fine." It took hearing those words for her to see that (to anyone with a real problem) she must look like the terrified Greek children; nothing to worry about, but worried out of her mind. Either way, everything will be fine. "But, but, but, what if it's not?" I still want to ask. "What if something terrible happens? What if the thing you desperately want isn't the thing you get? What if you work, and work, and work, and nothing comes of it? What is the people you trust and the things you depend on turn out to be not as dependable as you thought?"

Children's book edition of Maya Angelou's poem

In the Psalms, I read that my feet are set on solid ground. That God is my refuge and strength, if mountains are thrown into the depths of the sea—even then "we will not fear." And on one hand I believe it, but it is also hard, because I do fear—even when the mountains are firmly rooted in place. Elsewhere I hear that perfect love casts out fear, and I believe that too, and I am glad that loving is something I can do, something others already do around me to build courage, and tear down fears. Right now, I'm going to try to be gentle. Gentle with other people, and gentle with myself in the face of fear. But I will also try to check in and see which of my emotions is driving as I make decisions. One of my friends wrote me an email full of stories from her life, but also a bit of strong encouragement. She says she tries hard not to let fear control her decision making, and I'd like to do the same.

Life Doesn't Frighten Me by Maya Angelou (excerpt)

Don’t show me frogs and snakes
And listen for my scream,
If I’m afraid at all
It’s only in my dreams.

I’ve got a magic charm
That I keep up my sleeve
I can walk the ocean floor
And never have to breathe.

Life doesn’t frighten me at all
Not at all
Not at all.

Life doesn’t frighten me at all.