For just about forever, I’ve complained that I don’t have enough time to write. If only I didn’t have such a full clinical schedule and so much on my plate, I would tell my partner, I would just love to spend more concentrated time writing my essays and my poetry. Maybe I’d even try short stories!
He would remind me that I work for myself and technically have full agency over my schedule.
Well, sure, I admitted. But it doesn’t feel that way. And even when I get a free hour in the day and I open my laptop, I realize that one hour isn’t nearly enough time to really get into it. I need more like two hours so I can really find my flow state. And I never have two hours!
And then a few weeks ago, a retreat I’d had planned to attend fell through. Suddenly I was faced with three full open days. Because I’d been scheduled to be away, my partner and kids were already out of the house and needed nothing from me. There were no appointments on my calendar, no projects immediately expecting my attention. It was the thing so many of us dream of emerging in real life.
I could write, I realized. I could finally sit down with a mug of tea in a quiet, relatively clean house with nowhere I was expected to be and no one I expected to tend. Just me and my words.
And so, of course, I cleaned out my closet.
Then I quite literally reorganized the pantry. Redesigned the laundry room. Ventured out on a walk. Went to a sound bath.
It was a lovely weekend, actually. By the end, I added in a massage and I felt more restored than I had in a long time. But I didn’t write. Well, that’s not true. I wrote two paragraphs that I ended up deleting and then shut my laptop in a huff.
And by the time Monday rolled around and my partner and kids returned, I realized I’d lost something important. I’d lost my tightly-held story that if I just had more time or all of the right conditions, I would be writing.
Now, I know some of you kind souls might try to tell me that it just wasn’t the weekend for writing. I needed something different on those days. There’s truth in there, I’m sure, but I could feel it as soon as the time opened up – the dread of doing the thing I claim I am desperate to do.
Because the reality is that writing is hard for me. It’s effortful. I will wrestle with words and ideas for hours figuring out what wants to come forward. I will question my ability to communicate (Do I even know English?!, I’ll wonder at least once every time.) By the end, assuming I’ve gotten at least something on the page, it feels invigorating and wonderful. But it takes so much out of me in the process.
More to the point, sitting down to write requires me to encounter struggle and my own self-doubt.
But I’d been telling myself the story that the real problem was my lack of time. And, if I got really honest with myself, I’d even kept myself busy during possible windows of time (of course the garage needs to be swept out today!) in order to keep that story intact.
I’d gotten the perfect conditions and had to face myself. There’s nothing like getting exactly what you asked for to force you to reckon with reality.
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When we find ourselves repeatedly doing behaviors that we don’t like or caught in patterns that we say we hate, it becomes useful to ask ourselves this question: What does this behavior or situation allow me to avoid encountering?
Let me say plainly that it takes courage to look at ourselves with the level of honesty that I’m talking about here. And it’s not always easy to figure out the answer, either.
When it comes to asking ourselves why we stay stuck, we often have an understandable impulse to ‘defend’ ourselves or point to other causes. We overcommit because people are always asking us to help out. We are saddled with all of the domestic labor because our partner is oblivious. We are scrolling constantly because social media is just so damn addictive.
To be very clear, it’s often not that those reasons are wrong or technically inaccurate. But we get to a point where they just fail to do much for us. True things can still keep us caught in an endless cycle and give us very little insight. By centering all of the power outside of ourselves, they leave little room for us to move in any particular direction.
Let’s take the behavior of overcommitting and ending up tired, resentful, and burnt out. Many of us struggle with this and have tried to change it. We might even decide one day that we’re done with perpetually taking on whatever is asked and declare that we’re going to start saying ‘no.’ But if you’ve been there, you’ve probably found yourself quickly slipping back into the familiar pattern of committing – now just more frustrated with yourself for doing so.
This is the point at which we may want to change the question from “Why can’t I stop taking on more than I eventually want?” to something like, “What does saying yes allow me to avoid encountering?” Or, “What condition does overriding my own ‘no’ create, and how is that actually serving me?”
Before we talk about possible answers to those questions, it’s important to note the spirit in which we are approaching the questions themselves. When we are entering this kind of inquiry, curiosity and self-compassion are pre-requisites. Those stances aren’t easy for many of us, but they are worth practicing. Asking these kinds of questions isn’t an attempt to catch or blame ourselves – it’s a chance to lovingly uncover something deeper that’s been getting in the way.
I think of it like watching a dear friend who has been trying to go out on a run but whose feet are caught up in an invisible rope. You’re not even exactly sure how it’s tangled, but you’re the only one who can see it. Without shaming or blaming, you kindly point out what you notice, and then you together work to unknot it.
So, back to overcommitting. If we get curious about what constantly saying yes allows us to avoid encountering, there are so many things we might discover. Saying yes might let us avoid experiencing ourselves as selfish, for example. If we always say yes, we get to avoid figuring out what to do with free time, which may be overwhelming. If we always say yes, we may avoid encountering downtime with our partner, which has perhaps been fraught lately. Saying yes to everything prevents us from working on that project we are excited about but makes us feel insecure.
Considering what we end up avoiding by engaging in the cycle doesn’t solve the problem, but it locates it. As an overcommitter, we could practice saying ‘no’ a thousand times in the mirror, bbut if our psyche is more committed to avoiding being seen as selfish or be confronted with a fractured relationship, we will more than likely end up stuck in the same pattern until we work that through.
It’s the idea that we don’t always feel ready for the life that we say that we want. And again – to be clear – this is not to say we don’t really want what we say. We do. It’s just that what we want often requires us to encounter things that we also feel apprehensive of.
You may have heard the maxim that we will pursue a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven. Another way of saying this is that we will pay the familiar cost of a pattern instead of the feared cost of giving it up.
I believe this to be true – at least until the point we are ready to face what we fear encountering.
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Kristen had gotten to the point of boiling resentment. She was the only person in her household who seemed to know how to change the toilet paper roll, when the garbage was picked up, or what day the permission slip was due. So she did it all, plus the eighteen thousand other tasks her home and family called for. She reminded her family members of every appointment and exhausted herself making sure everyone had what they needed each day. She was on the brink of meltdown.
She would tell you that she desperately wanted things to change at home and couldn’t keep going this way, but not surprisingly, no one in the house was doing anything differently. Why would they when things were going pretty swimmingly in their books? Maybe they didn’t love her yelling and admonishment, but it wasn’t enough to move the needle. And honestly her yelling had decreased, as she was too tired to bother.
It was then that Kristen started to consider a little more deeply why things weren’t changing. She knew she was over-functioning for everyone, but she didn’t know how she could stop. Instead of implementing another system or more pleas, she asked herself this question: What does continuing to over-function in this way allow me to avoid encountering?
Honestly, the answers could fill a whole page. Over-functioning allowed her to avoid feeling purposeless, which was something she deeply feared since taking a reduced career path several years ago. It allowed her to avoid addressing the deeper issues in her marriage, which felt so unwieldy at this point that she’d stopped trying. It allowed her to avoid a completely chaotic home environment, which was something that created extreme stress and anxiety for her. It allowed her to avoid no longer being needed by her family in the same way, which was a grief that lingered beneath the surface as her kids aged.
I want to emphasize the nuance here. It wasn’t that the things she’d been avoiding encountering were her fault or that she needed to solve them all. It was simply that they were the whales, while she was exhausting herself fishing for minnows.
Did she deserve for her kids and partner to take accountability and start contributing? Absolutely. But deserving something and something actually changing are two different things. Was continuing to over-function in the same way making that happen? Not at all.
Maintaining her over-functioning was helping Kristen to maintain a particular story in her mind: the story that she couldn’t stop or everything would fall apart. The story that ultimately everything was on her shoulders and needed to be done. It wasn’t that she wanted this to be the story inside her – it just was. As you can imagine, it had been there for as long as she could remember.
The more Kristen worked to prevent things from falling apart, the more convinced she became that everything would fall apart if she stopped. Her overfunctioning wasn’t just protecting her from the things she feared encountering. It was also keeping her from discovering what might happen if she allowed herself to encounter them.
I can’t emphasize enough how difficult this can be. We’ll go to incredible lengths to preserve what we expect to happen, even when we actively dislike what we expect. We replay memories that are consistent with our narratives (Kristen reminds herself repeatedly of the one time she let herself go away for the weekend, and of course everything went to hell…). We imagine our undesired futures and already feel the stress of them in the present. We work so hard to preserve consistency – those familiar hells, if you will.
Until we stop, that is. Until we allow ourselves to encounter the thing we are avoiding and let a new story take shape.
I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Kristen stopped over-functioning at home and everyone suddenly stepped up to fill in the gaps. When she stopped, a lot of things didn’t get done. She got calls about missed permission slips. They missed garbage days on some weeks. Her house was much messier than she liked it.
But what changed ultimately felt more important to Kristen. When she stopped over-functioning, she started to spend some of that newfound time and energy on some new hobbies, which helped give her a different sense of purpose. She started a meditation practice that didn’t make her love chaos, but at least be able to tolerate it without blowing up. She was less exhausted, so she felt more emotional energy to work on her marriage and the resentment started to ease. Gradually, the people in her house started to change too, though that wasn’t even the point. It was a byproduct of something actually shifting.
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When we say we want to change, but nothing’s actually changing, it can be worth examining what not changing is actually doing for us. The reality is that while a part of us wants to change or pursue something, there will almost always be other parts that hold fears about what it will force us to encounter. Those fears are worth listening to. If we don’t, they – often unconsciously – turn us around in circles, utterly confused as to why we can’t do the thing we really want to do.
I do love to write, and I want to write more, but I don’t have to assign all of my not-writing to a lack of time. I can acknowledge that I also sometimes hate writing and that I’m afraid of feeling frustrated or stupid when I face the page. When I can acknowledge that, I notice that everything softens a little. It doesn’t force me to hold on to the story that I’m always too busy. It doesn’t force me to unconsciously make myself always too busy.
I can instead decide when I want to sit down with my tea and my laptop, ready to encounter the parts of me that get overwhelmed or self-critical. Not because I’ve figured out how to make writing easy, but because I don’t have to keep avoiding what makes it hard. Maybe the unfamiliar heaven begins here.
