The nervous energy on a Thursday morning when a storage container is being delivered to the driveway (between 9 and 12) is palpable. I’m all over the place. I sat down at the computer at 5ish. Like most mornings, I wanted to write something. I wanted to try a new-to-me writing technique where I would declare the title of a poem and write towards that. I sat down to write a poem “Thursday Morning Towards the End of August.” The goal was a type of stream-of-consciousness / free association practice. I began to write about the shortening of the days and how for thousands of years, humans and other animals have noticed the days getting shorter at this time of year. Specifically, I was trying to think about what the apes/chimps/monkeys might think. I don’t doubt that they notice it. As I started to write “for thous…” Microsoft Word suggested an autocomplete, “…ands of years.” This was enough to get me sidetracked. I began to wonder if these “helpful” autocomplete feature will eventually diminish the robustness of our vocabulary. Is there some future in which we all start using the same phrases that are provided for us and begin to believe these are the only phrases available to us? Over time, how might these features impact our learning and usage?
That was the impetus for the start of this particular blog post. I began by trying to write about why I haven’t been writing any poems (something I frequently chastise myself for, but seldom address with behavioral changes):
I’ve been preoccupied with getting the house in order, taking care of the damp basement, and managing my low-grade worry about this next step (job, move, road-trip). As such, I’ve done very little reading and even less creative writing. To be clear, the worry part is both ineffective and, at times, counter-productive. If I let it get the best of me, paralysis sets in. If paralysis sets in, hedonism follows. Instead of buckling down, I go out to meet up with the friends I’ll be leaving behind. Instead of reading or writing, I scroll social media looking for ways to ignore all the things I’m ignoring. The worry and paralysis, if I can call it those things, is a type of rejection fatigue. Without a few small wins, or at least some sense of progress, the need to re-calibrate, the need to stop and figure out where I am on the map increases. Every time I get a rejection for a job I felt qualified for, I face a minor crisis of confidence along with this strange sense of….
Already, my mind had wandered away from writing about autocomplete features and language. Instead I was building up to how frequent rejection leads to feeling lost. If there’s a “no” at every turn, one begins to lose their way. One begins to feel so turned around that it’s hard to discern where one is headed and why one is traveling in the first place. I continued:
Shit, I’m not even sure how to describe the sensation. Sure, there’s disappointment with every rejection, but it feels bigger than that. It’s as if I don’t know what I’m doing, how to do it, or why I’m doing it. It’s a little like when you repeat a word so often that it loses meaning and starts to seem like gibberish (say the word chowder 100 or so times in a row), or like when you concentrate so hard on your on walking/stride/gait that the entire process of walking seems foreign (what are these funny sticks below my waist and why do they move that way). I feel like I’ve been wandering this job landscape for so long that the scenery has all started to look the same: all the jobs look the same, the applications look the same, the cover letters feel the same, the interview questions sound the same.
I attempted another paragraph about jobs and job applications and how I’ve been fortunate to have never (at least not in recent history) been forced to take a job entirely out of desperation.
But more than that, the confounding part seems to be this sense of feeling lost or just not knowing what I’m trying to accomplish. It’s as if I’ve lost my ability to even apply for jobs or understand what type of work I’d like to do. I’ve been fortunate in that I’ve never taken a job (at least not since my first career job in publishing) just for the sake of taking a job. I’ve always had jobs that were entry points to something I was curious about, or jobs that I was genuinely excited to take. This long experience of privilege in choosing what I do and where impacts my job search philosophy. I don’t apply to jobs that I’m just “meh” about. That may have to change.
I tried to turn the writing around and bring it back to my original intent – poetry and language and autocomplete.
I get this way with poetry too. I sometimes get to a point where I feel like I don’t know how to write or how words work. I actually started this particular blog post because I was trying a new writing exercise when I noticed the auto-complete suggestion on Word. I had written “for thous…” and word offered to complete the sentence for me “…ands of years.” I began to wonder how such functions might lead to all of us using the same stock phrases, how creativity might be squashed and language limited. Somehow, I got sidetracked onto whatever this multi-paragraph mess is…
By this time, it was 7:30am and my thinking was muddled. The nervous energy about the storage container being delivered was building. I gotta move the car. Will they be able to fit down the gravel road? What if they refuse to drop it off? I imagined having to plead with the driver. I started to wander around the house. Sink, bedroom, table, sink. Two or three times I came back to the computer to write about how scattered I was and how I would love to focus on just one thing.
It’s a little after 7am and I’ve gotten up from the table several times. I’ve thought about doing the dishes, moving furniture, going for a run, getting a shower, throwing away the gel I use for my hair because it feels gunkier than the usual stuff (which also prompts the desire to shower). I can’t settle on what I want to say about not doing more creative writing, about not having submitted any poems for publication for several months, about how I don’t want to “sell myself” for the next job because I’m tired of “selling myself” and sales pitches often lead to disappointments – I just want a job so that I can continue in this capitalist system and not starve. I stood at the sink briefly and realized that in this moment I feel incapable of focusing on just one thing. I thought, “I should do the dishes and only focus on doing the dishes.” I came back to the computer to write that down and then I got up and made the bed.
As I made the bed, I began to wonder if I have ADHD. I thought if I were diagnosed, I might feel a sense of relief and maybe even a little pride in recognizing that despite these episodes of scrambled and disjointed thinking, I’ve done a reasonably good job of moving through the world.
I’ve since showered, dusted and moved furniture back into place after having aired the basement out for a week, vacuumed the basement, scrolled social media, done the dishes, moved the car, walked heel-toe to measure the width of the driveway, looked for leaks in the garage, and gone to the window three times to check for a truck (even though it wasn’t 9am and they said they’d call as they got closer to knowing a specific time).
In the shower, I got lost again. I began to think about a person I know who has a tendency to be defensive and to often assume the worst of situations. If they don’t hear from someone, they assume it’s an intentional slight – that they’re being excluded or intentionally ignored or not valued. Enough other people have noticed this behavior that they find workarounds and talk about it in private: “oh that’s just who they are…” This happens all the time in work settings: management decides how to handle delicate or difficult situations and energy is spent on communicating around the issues and people as opposed to directly communicating about the issues with the people. I thought about how I might try to take a different approach and talk with this person directly. Mentally, I wandered down the path of growth mindsets vs. deficit mindsets. Open vs. closed. Assuming the best vs. assuming the worst. I began to wonder if deficit mindsets were correlated with conservative political ideologies and/or self-selected community isolation. I’ve experienced some of this tension at my own job. Still in the shower, I tried to think about how in a job interview I might answer the question, “why here, why now?” Can I adequately convey that one of the reasons I want to move on is that I want to be around more open and generous thinkers? With a former colleague, I was always the one promoting a more mindful approach to our work and I began to wonder if authenticity has a place in the workplace. Should managers be focused on their team’s personal and spiritual growth, or should they be solely focused on getting the tasks done? Is it an “or” question? In the case of the former colleague I addressed a sticky situation head-on in an uncomfortable but compassionate way. They said it was hard to hear, but that I might have saved their life. Can I get better at being bold and saying the things other people only say in private? Maybe I should be a counselor instead.
The storage container was delivered and I’ve moved on to other thinking and minor obsessions. I’m not sure my pondering about how using predictive text might be the downfall of writing and thinking had enough ummmph to last more than a paragraph or two. I’ll probably revisit the job application/interview process a little later. I may even try to draft a failure resume (instead of a list of accomplishments, it’s a list of setbacks and what was learned). I’m more comfortable talking about what I’ve learned as opposed to what I’ve achieved. Either way, I’m stopping here – I’ve played with this nonsense long enough on this Thursday morning towards the end of August.