Twenty days ago, I moved to Alaska to work as a live-in nanny for four months. It was okay at first, and then it got hard. I got lonely, the dark mornings (sunrise is at 9:19 a.m.) were darker than I had thought they would be, and my days were filled with a lot of alone time that I was tired of filling.
In my head, I told myself a story. It was the story that “this life should be other, and by other, I mean easier.” I wore it on my sleeve, I wore it in front of my eyes, and I really really believed it.
I got so good at playing the deserving game, it was as if I was shouting “I deserve this” from the sidelines at all of my imaginary players. On the playing field, I deserved to be happier, and it was unfair that I had to work for it. If I didn’t want to meditate, I shouldn’t have to make myself. If I didn’t have the motivation to get outside, I didn’t need to. Instead, I would stay inside and pity myself for the mood I was in, and how it was so unfair because I was such a good, deserving person. I had taken a chance and moved to Alaska, I had been kind and patient with the little girl I take care of each day. What had I done to deserve this sadness, this slowness, this derth of motivation?
Meditating and exercising when I didn’t want to were evidence that I didn’t have what I wanted. I didn’t want to be the person who had to work to be happy, who had to cultivate happiness. But then I remembered listening to the audiobook of Eat, Pray, Love where Liz Gilbert says a facsimile of that:
“Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.”
And yet I was so against swimming. I wanted to be afloat forever, with no effort at all. Because I deserved that, didn’t I?
Plus, yet I had enough evidence to counter Liz Gilbert’s claim. I had been soaringly happy for months at a time: when I was in love, when I was leading outdoor education trips in New Mexico, when I was working a busy shift at a cafe, when I was waiting on an incredible table at a restaurant, when I was home for the first time in months after studying abroad in Italy and all I wanted to do was read and write and talk with my family.
So I would pine after these times, imagining a time in the future when all my little puzzle pieces would fall into place around me.
I got so good at telling myself that I didn’t deserve the loneliness, the sadness, the [insert any difficult feeling] that I was currently experiencing. And so I allowed myself to take shortcuts. It was my way of rewarding myself, of affirming this narrative that life should be different. If I didn’t feel like running, I wouldn’t (even though I knew staying in my room would do nothing for my mental health). If I didn’t want to cook a meal, I would eat yogurt and apples and feel sorry for myself that that was my dinner, but at least I wouldn’t make myself cook.
I was so against making myself do the thing I didn’t want to do. And beneath that, another belief was buried: I didn’t want to be the type of person who didn’t want to do those things. I had hoped I would naturally want to run and cook every day. And so to escape this reminder that I was not, in fact, that type of person, I would bypass the activity altogether and sit in a puddle of self-pity, wishing I had the motivation to run. I would easily bleed from the subject of deserving to that of motivating, where I told myself that I lacked motivation.
I’m currently reading Atomic Habits by James Clear, and in it, he says that creating new habits is not about motivation, it’s about making the habits obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying.
Okay, so if you know me, you know that I run a lot. And so the above examples are all based on running anytime that is not first thing in the morning. Any other time, I can come up with so many things I would rather be doing than running. The ideas of changing clothes and showering later feel overwhelming, almost impossible (at times). But mornings are a different story. And I realize it’s because I’ve accidentally done exactly what Clear says to do.
I lay out my running clothes, pick out a podcast I’m excited to listen to, and commit. I don’t give myself time to think about what it would be like if I didn’t run and instead wrote in my journal, or called a friend. I tell myself one story and it is: how good it will feel to come back when everyone else is waking up, having already run five miles. I imagine showering, picking out an outfit, eating a delicious breakfast, and drinking my favorite tea. And I buy this story. It’s based on true events.
So here we are, back to telling myself stories. Perhaps it’s like Tommy Orange says in There, There, "[s]he told me the world was made of stories, nothing else, just stories and stories about stories.”
I want to drop the deserving storyline, it does nothing but make me sadder and take me out of my present situation, plopping me into a world that is full of everything not-this. To borrow a line from John Green’s incredible and moving podcast, The Anthropocene Reviewed, “deserving is the wrong frame for human experience.”
I’ve noticed that right before the story of deserving begins, there’s a glimpse into what I really want to do, even if it’s a little hard. Right before I tell myself that “I can’t believe it’s time to do laundry again, God this is so annoying, I just did laundry and I’ve had such a hard day,” I have an urge to grab my laundry basket and go downstairs and put a load in. Right before I say “wow I have no motivation to move at all,” there is a fraction of myself that imagines myself walking outside in the snow, perhaps giving my sister a call, perhaps listening to the crunch underneath my feet.
I’ve started doing this recently. My attention lands on some action that I don’t want to do, and I do it. It’s been amazing the way it will snowball: wake up early to do an arm workout, and suddenly writing in my journal is easier because I already conquered the morning workout. And later that day, I go for a walk when I feel a bad mood creeping up. And then on the walk I decide to call my mom because talking to her always makes me feel better. I let go of the story that “I shouldn’t be calling my mom, I’m twenty-six and I should be happy with people my age and not depend on her so much, she probably doesn’t even want to hear from me right now” and I just press her name (it helps if I start doing the thing quickly, before the story I’m telling myself gains traction).
I come back from the walk proud: proud that I walked, that I talked to my mom about my day and heard about hers. And then suddenly doing laundry isn’t as bad, mostly just because I feel good about myself. Maybe that’s all it is. Taking care of myself feels good. It’s hard, but it feels good. For now, I just want to chase that feeling—I want to create some new groves in my mind new roads for my habits to follow. Hopefully when I come back from Alaska, it’ll be just a little easier to meditate on a hard day or go for a run in the afternoon rain.
Thoughts/ Prompts:
What stories do you tell yourself? Maybe they're not stories about deserving, maybe they're about something else.
What story (stories?) have you told yourself today?
Did you resonate with the Liz Gilbert quote about swimming upward always in order to stay afloat?
What are your thoughts on motivation?
What story do you want to tell yourself tomorrow?