Striving and being enough
Sundays are a quiet day for me, when I’m not with my kids. I’ve usually already taken my long walk in the woods the day before, and connected with friends at another time. Sometimes I participate in a group meditation, but mostly, I wake up with no plans for the day.
The contrast between waking up in a house with kids, who are in and of themselves your to-do list, and waking up without any obligations, is a little disconcerting. Every separated mom had told me about this before my separation.
Part of me wants to move at a fast pace, and fill my day with activity. Another part of me whispers, slow down, it’s ok to be still. I’m not sure which voice to listen to, in that moment. I think one of the reasons I struggle with these conflicting messages is that, somewhere along the line, I got the message that to not be productive is to not be a valuable person. When I was planning my first maternity leave, which in Quebec lasts almost a year, my mother asked “what else” I was going to do with that time. What else, besides raising a small human and feeding it with your body, and turning your entire life inside out? I have told this story as a joke so many times over the years, and how I responded with something like, “well, I’m not going to do a PhD.” There is always something MORE I could be doing, improving, working on, striving for. It can be exhausting.
Even when it’s not productivity I am striving for, it’s constant hits of excitement or pleasure. Another insight! Another aha moment! Another meaningful connection! What does it mean when there is a lull?
The part of me that wants to allow stillness isn’t sure of itself either. Sometimes I fear that if I stop striving, I’ll become stagnant, depressed. That it’ll be too tempting to never move again. Good thing I know that when it’s Fear talking, it’s usually just messing with me.
I realized on Sunday that what I’m doing right now, even when I am not “doing” anything, is stretching. Stretching as in growing, as in practicing something new. Just waking up some days without a full day of kid-management on my plate is new. Having space and the desire to figure out who I am again when I’m not just being someone’s wife or someone’s mom is completely new. Who is she? What are her goals? How does she like to spend her time? It’s like a whole new person is being formed, and of course I’m not going to do a PhD while I’m nurturing that person!
Brené Brown has a great podcast episode, where she interviews Scott Sonenshein about what he calls Stretching and Chasing, and I’m calling stretching and striving. Here’s a quote from him in the podcast:
“These chasing mentalities: We’re focused on comparing ourselves to others and thinking we just need to one up each other and if we can’t do it in person, because of the pandemic, it’s on Instagram… But are we really looking inward? …What is it that would make the type of meaningful and joyful life that I want and am I spending my time that way?”
Brené then notes that, while at first she was labeling people “stretcher” or “chaser”, she came to realize that each of us can be both. She gave her own personal example of “chasiness”:
“If I feel insecure or doubtful, I need to buy a new desk, I need to repaint my study, I have to get all new office supplies.”
This is how I knew I was chasing or striving, or overly attached to an outcome on Sunday. Not because I felt the need to buy stuff, but because of the underlying anxiety that says “what you are doing (and therefore who you are) isn’t enough on its own”. You are not enough. What a horrible thing to say to oneself, and yet I recognize I’ve been saying it to myself for years, in a quiet whisper I wasn’t even noticing, other than that subtle feeling of “I should be doing more.”
The opposite of that is what I felt in the very late stages of giving birth to my son. I had started feeling the (totally normal) panicking right at the end, and was saying something like “I don’t know what to do!” Clearlight, my yoga teacher, was there and she said the single most helpful thing ever. I can’t recall the exact words but it was along the lines of: “There’s nothing for you to do. Your body knows what it’s doing. Let it do the work.”
This time, I’m willing to put down my pencil and stare out the window for a while, and give myself the time to experience this as it is: a period of intense learning and transition, with crazy busy times and slow times. My body is doing the work, and I’m letting it.
P.S. An even better podcast about striving and being enough is this one, by Tara Brach.