i’m listening to some ph**be br*dgers rn. i’m in a weird mood because the weather is warm — 50 degrees! — but I am too busy to go run and I have soccer later anyway. I despise 5-8pms: they are so empty, and require filling.
my post on the cherry blossom 10 miler training facebook page was removed. I was kind of trying to start an insurrection. Getting my post removed made me feel like I got in trouble, somehow. why do these kinds of things make me nervous? i’m not quite sure.
i have not found the time or mentality to write, despite being not super busy. travel has died down post-holidays, running and soccer were in their so-called off-seasons. what did i do with my time? work, actually, i think. work and roam around, enjoying the snow! the snow took up a lot of time. didn’t it?
Last week, I had a conversation with a recent college grad who was considering doing a PhD. She reminded me a lot of myself at that time period: Restless, unsatisfied with a mundane office job, eager to sink her teeth into something with not only meat but also bones — something to pick apart. She said PhDs have all kinds of weird uncertainty about them. How did you even figure out what you wanted to do with your PhD?
I gave the same unsatisfying advice I was given: You just have to get through it, and one day it’ll all come together. Trust the process! I caught myself, and tried to couch the advice in realism: This is the advice everyone gives, and I know it is unconvincing. But it’s true. This time, I swear it’s really true!
Does anyone ever actually take this advice? I certainly didn’t; it took 4 years for me to realize that things more or less worked out in the end, that it wasn’t as frightening as I thought it’d be. That I could still be happy and interesting without having a career in the arts that made everyone go: wow!!!
I have been mulling over a quote from David Lynch that circulated widely upon his passing, about being a smoker: “I don’t regret it. It was important to me. I wish what every addict wishes for: that what we love is good for us.” Perhaps the same can be said about fretting, an addiction of its own. Anxiety that kind of starts in your diaphragm and electrifies its way through your shoulders, into your brain. I wanted so badly to control everything, and I wished so furiously that doing so would be good for me. What was up with that?
When I was in therapy in my early 20s I would repeatedly argue about how I couldn’t stop caring and worrying, because the worry was what made me exceptional. If I didn’t care so much about everything, how could I be great? Nobody’s really asking for this advice right now, but I am still sitting here with it. That you just have to believe that you will be fine, even if you won’t be. No, that’s not right. Blind optimism? That can’t be it.
In The Inner Game of Tennis, Timothy Gallwey argues that tennis — like many other athletic pursuits — is difficult to learn through instruction on mechanics. The body has its own ways of learning organically, ways that our conscious thoughts (what Gallwey calls “Self 1”) cannot really help with. The more you think, Gallwey writes, the worse you play, offering a number of (pretty confusing, to me) techniques to help quiet the thinking, fretting self, and instead put trust and faith in the embodied, subconscious self. In a section titled “‘Trying Hard’: A Questionable Virtue,” Gallwey summarizes his thesis:
“Getting it together mentally in tennis involves the learning of several internal skills: 1) learning how to get the clearest possible picture of your desired outcomes; 2) learning how to trust Self 2 to perform at its best and learn from both successes and failures; and 3) learning to see “nonjudgmentally” — that is, to see what is happening rather than merely noticing how well or how badly it is happening. This overcomes ‘trying too hard.’ All these skills are subsidiary to the master skill, without which nothing of value is ever achieved: the art of relaxed concentation.”
One of my grand theories to emerge from this book has involved combining Gallwey’s ideas with the jock vs. nerd dichotomy. With obviously numerous exceptions, people who are good at sports are stereotypically bad at school, and people who are good at school are stereotypically bad at sports. OBVIOUSLY THIS IS NOT 100% TRUE. But I fear I believe that this is kind of true, and Gallwey’s argument makes me postulate that this is at least partly because the two activities — sports and academics — require completely different kinds of thinking, and in many cases disincentivize the other kind of thinking.
Okay, who fucking cares. I don’t really know. My eyes feel so dry because I decided to put my contacts in this morning since I was going to have to use them for soccer anyway. Except my dumb ass forgot that my daily job requires me to stare at a computer screen all day so now I feel like Spongebob when he was all dried out in Sandy’s tree dome.
The point, maybe: There is a sort of “listen to your body” ethos throughout The Inner Game, but one that acknowledges that our bodies aren’t always “correct.” Gallwey repeats throughout that the point is for Self 1 to trust the innate knowledge and wisdom of Self 2, even when it doesn’t achieve its goal. A great athlete puts all its trust in Self 2, quiets Self 1, and tries to see its accomplishments as successes or failures, but rather simply what they are. Only then can you get in the zone, play out of your body. All that stuff.
When I talked to Ruhee on the phone some weeks ago, I was particularly heartbroken. I had a crush shatter between my hands, leaving a weird throbbing piece of flesh behind. Having a crush, for me, is like running into a wall painted with a tunnel over and over again. How could I be so stupid? What was I thinking? Then I do it again, to no avail. The hope, of course, is that this time will be different. (The wish: that what I love is good for me.)
What other choice do I have than to conclude that I must be doing something wrong on a fundamental level? There is surely something wrong with me. If I changed that one thing then I’d be fixed, and I would be able to find love and be loved. These are thoughts I have often that are silly but also violent and cruel. Ruhee talked me down. With her trademark calm, smiling tones that my ears have gotten so used to, she told me that it’s not helpful, I may not even believe it, but she does. That she trusts the process and that something good will eventually come.
She said something to me on the phone: That she thought I was one of the few people she knew who had a strong sense of self. That felt like the highest praise anyone could’ve given me, after years of feeling like I was too liquid to ever stand up straight. I was made up of water and air, certainly not of something living, like cells. For weeks after, I held onto her belief. If I didn’t believe in anything, at least she did.
Another piece where I just present a bunch of shit without doing any kind of synthesis because that’s the hardest part. Once I develop the patience and energy to synthesize it’s so over for everyone in society. BOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!! 👎👎👎👎👎👎
some things:
go commies, first of all. thanks to my bills mafia friends (you know who you are) and emmie’s fantasy league i have started to care about football earnestly. after the commanders/r******s/WFT being ass my whole life, how amazing is it to have gotten even this far?
i’m reading that tennis book. i think that’s all. and my friend Raewyn’s blog
hmm. few things have been captivating me lately. just the usual: real housewives of salt lake city. Lisa Barlow saying “there’s a new 9/11 coming.” I haven’t started s2 of severance yet so don’t say anything. I have however watched the first few eps of Traitors with my parents as is tradition
actually i guess i was capitvated by this song recently and kept listening to it on repeat
my new years resolution to juggle a soccer ball is not going well
i have spent a lot of time these days being grouchy and complaining. hoping for a process to trust here
xoxo
PM
ily
Crazy to find one (1) other person on substack who lives in dc