#3: The Art of Being Gentle With Oneself
A New Year Amid the New Normal
Hello and Happy New Year. (If ever there was a year to punctuate that greeting with a period over an exclamation point, it’s this one).
Previous newsletters have included essays I’d been hanging onto from last year or so. But today I’m sharing an essay I wrote in real time. Because New Year’s and stuff. Enjoyyy.
The Art of Being Gentle With Oneself
The other night, I was in a mood I can only describe as “tired from being tired.” Not “tired of being tired,” which is the experience of being worn out from being too busy. That’s the feeling you get to brag about because your calendar is just so full and you’d love it “if only there were more hours in the day.” No, this was tired from being tired, meaning the inertia and achiness in my body was somehow gaining momentum and begetting more fatigue.
So after streaming three consecutive 90 Day Fiance episodes, a show I don’t like so much as tolerate, I opened my top drawer and rummaged for a weed gummy. In a tin package, I found one, solitary half of a 5-grammer, which I’d bitten off sometime during early quarantine in an effort to consume precisely 2.5 grams, the perfect microdose for some languid silliness. Being ancient, it had, of course, hardened into a THC-infused stone, an edible rendered totally...inedible. (Although I’m gross and tried chomping on it anyway).
After spitting it out, I managed to find a bag with one remaining individually-wrapped gummy (read: still soft and delicious), and ate it. When 90-Day Fiance failed to be funny (a tall order for any amount of weed; the show isn’t funny so much as cringey), I retrieved the bag from the trash and realized the edible had expired, a metaphor, I thought, for the coping tools that have degenerated and become less potent as the year’s gone on.
Throughout the pandemic, we’ve had to maintain health and happiness within extreme limitations, forced to seek out activities, hobbies, and habits to keep us sane. If we’re lucky, we’ve developed creative ways to connect and stimulate our minds and keep ourselves relatively content. But amid all the ebbs and flows of pandemic fatigue, these tools have grown dull on an intermittent and unpredictable basis.
I know bingeing bad TV isn’t the way to feeling better. Sometimes it’s what you need in small doses, but this indulgent phase was becoming a full-on funk. I simply didn’t feel like reaching for my healthy routines. The idea of rolling out my yoga mat – much less, my neck – felt like a drag. Making a salad – my actual favorite food – sounded laborious.
Although what I’m describing is, quite exactly, the basic definition of depression, where you don’t feel like doing the things you usually find fulfilling, I also knew the heaviness was partly exogenous. It was brought on by the weight of the impending new year – the expectations to reflect, optimize, and achieve.
Not only that, but the pressure of this very newsletter, which I knew would be released January 3rd, just in time to make some statement of optimism. I was starting to feel obliged to have something uplifting to say, some message of renewal. No one had directly requested this of me, of course. But being entrenched in marketing, influencing, and wellness for the last decade, I was acutely aware of the concepts that made for acceptable New Year’s content. Energetic, self improvement themes had dominated every New Year’s in recent memory, and I simply wasn’t up for it.
It took me a few days, but eventually I remembered that “recent memory” had been all but obliterated. With the year’s unprecedented everything-ness, nothing was business as usual, jaunty New Year’s content included.
Once that sunk in, I started to see the motivational themes had dissolved from my Instagram feed. Rather than ushering in the New Year with the rousing zeal of New Years past, content creators and brands were taking a gentler approach. In fact, “be gentle with yourself” had become the new mantra. Reflecting on small wins, simple pleasures, and gratitude was the new norm, with an emphasis on giving yourself grace through these trying times.
It seemed that people generally wanted to lean into feeling reasonably bad and tired, and the internet had decided to let them.
I was relieved the pressure to feel optimistic was off, but I did actually want to be freed from my days-long listlessness, anxiety, and weed gummy desperation. I wanted back the motivation to maintain my healthy habits, which had served me well and kept me fulfilled during quarantine. So why were these rituals trapped in a revolving door of efficacy? Why couldn’t I just stay consistent this time? Why were my go-to healthy habits expiring along with my gummies?
To answer these questions, I did what any depressive freelance writer would do: I polled my friends for anecdotal input.
How my friends are moving through pandemic fatigue:
“I babied my plants at the beginning of quarantine. Now they’re lucky if I remember what day I watered them, lol,” said my friend, Susan. “Now it’s mostly lighting candles, and cleaning, really. Purging, as well as acquiring lol. I’ve been addicted to moving the energy in our house.”
“I was doing yoga daily for like 30-60 mins. Now I’m down to 15 mins maybe. The studio who was doing it free 4x’s a week online has ended (but honestly good for them 😂),” Haley shared. “Now I’m thinking about redecorating.”
“I was really leaning into cooking when the pandemic first started - buying fancy ingredients and just giving up on having a food budget, but now it’s all exhausting and I don’t want to do any more dishes ever again,” said my cousin, Tallie.
“Escapism has helped! I’ve been reading a lot of romance novels, I strongly recommend getting into romance for some escape. (She recommended this one). Also TikTok. The thing that helps the most is getting into nature - hiking or walking, even if I don’t want to if I do it I feel much better afterwards.”
“During the first couple months, we were doing more outdoor adventures and car rides,” said my friend, Brooke. “We did a build-a-fort contest, Zoom happy hours, garden produce boxes from local farmers, fancy dinner dates at home, and drive-by friend visits.”
“Now, I find myself really digging into lost and forgotten art projects: sewing, embroidery, flower pressing, etc. And thrifting these days, I kinda combine the two by mending and patching old clothes and more that I find. I continue to find a lot of joy in my point-and-shoot camera. It gets me out of the house, especially on walks with Maven” (her adorable pitbull pupper).
My friend, Maija, had a ton of great ideas: “I started watching Masterclass episodes to curb my addiction to Netflix shows like The Office and New Girl - I’ve been at the point where I’m re-watching episodes! Haha so I’m forcing myself to watch something inspiring/self development-oriented so I start the next day IN THE ZONE. I also reassessed my wardrobe, did a lot of very focused online shopping for staples, and dyed some pieces for me and Donnie that we would have otherwise thrown away.”
“I’ve actually gotten a little back into yoga vids, had fallen off the wagon pre-Covid. As you know, I go on long ass walks, a change of scenery - traveling and staying in Tahoe for a couple months has helped! Backyard hangs with the neighbors thru the summer was fun at first, but the debauchery got a little old after a couple months. Now I walk and talk with said neighbor!”
“I also got an iPad Pro and have been drawing doing some music art stuff which was a fun upgrade. And I got a nice size monitor for working to take care of my bod! Helps with the work-from-home sitch.”
I felt comforted and inspired upon reading my friends’ personal journeys. They went beyond the “how are you” and into the nitty-gritty of evolving against the marathon of daily tests. And they made me realize I’d done a lot to iterate my habits. I was trying new things all the time – I took an online class on how to write a New York Times: Modern Love story from one of my favorite writers, joined virtual discussions hosted by my favorite podcaster, learned choreography via virtual dance tutorials, and started this newsletter.
Still, I couldn’t help but internalize a tempered disappointment in myself. Though I was a firm believer in the idea that “you don’t have to make the most of a pandemic,” I was frustrated that depression got the best of me some days, some weeks even, and sucked valuable time from my life.
Jill, my best friend and equal in terms of anxiety and neuroses, made me feel seen in this struggle. She, an ambitious comedy writer, had juggled goal-setting and anxious behaviors for years. Her thoughts on the complexity of a doomed mindset:
“I think it’s different for me cause I have a lot of anxiety, and I’ve been mostly using the time to write. My problem is I feel I have an infinite amount of time to do so, but suddenly it’s been almost 6 months of unemployment and I finally almost have my script done,” Jill said.
“I didn’t really develop new hobbies because any free time I have needs to be devoted to writing so I can continue having a career in this industry.”
“My problem is that I’ve been bad about my anxiety and insomnia ‘habits.’”
Her anxiety from the nebulous pressure of a writing project resonated, as did her anxious habits. The latter reminded me that, amid all the tempered disappointment in myself, I was proud to have suddenly – almost spontaneously – given up a nervous habit I’d had for over a decade: biting my lip.
It’s been one month and one week since I’ve fiendishly bitten the skin off my lip in a compulsive, subconscious trance. I’m actually counting the days because it’s such a feat. I can hardly believe I’ve done it.
Biting my lip, to me, has always been a comfort – there’s something soothing about the pursuit to “smooth out” my crusty lips, which are perpetually peeling precisely because I’m always biting them off.
To the people who know me, it’s an unsightly, confounding habit that they’ve begged me to stop doing for years. “It looks really weird,” my mom would always tell me. And in the nicest way possible: “Do you know how you look...?” Andrew would urge me, “Be nice to yourself. Your lips are always ripped up all the time.” He’d started giving me a Pavlovian nudge each time he saw me start to go at it while we watched a movie. It would work for a minute, but I’d always start up again.
I never expected to give it up during Covid of all times, but one day I decided – like many times before, really – that I was done. Wearing my retainer at night helped. But aside from that, it was a sheer refusal to go back to being controlled by a fixation that was both torturous to the host and ghastly to onlookers. It felt like any addiction, though I hadn’t experienced any traditional ones firsthand, in that I knew that to dip a toe back into the habit would be to dive back into the all-consuming complex.
So I stayed away. Knowing, with a healthy fear, that its addictive trance was but one nibble away.
Jill took it a step further and compared curbing anxious impulses to the pandemic:
“When you feel an impulse to repeat a bad habit or do something you know is detrimental to your happiness, health, or well-being – fight it,” she said.
“Consciously don’t do it. Take a beat. What I’m working on is changing one habit at a time, slowly. Instead of looking at the end goal, which I thought was one step ahead: don’t be afraid of sleep, stop OCD behaviors. It’s not that easy. There’s actually like 20 steps between me and that goal since I’ve fallen into this pattern of bad habits and detrimental thought patterns.
“I feel Covid is the same. There’s 10 more miles left, so don’t look at the end goal, thinking, ah I just want to travel and go to a bar. Settle for easy wins. Give yourself a goal you can achieve, and take it one day at a time. Maybe you force yourself to go to a park two days a week to read or take a drive to a new place you’ve never been once a week.”
This was exactly what I’d been grappling with – the wisdom of what is required to get through, coming up against the unrelenting, unknowable vastness of it all. And, as an answer – the occasional dark impulse to give up and disengage.
I said that these depressive episodes steal time from my life. But perhaps the rhythms (staccato) and color (dark grey) they add – being gentle, fighting impulses, riding the ebb and flow – are all part of it.
The potency of healthy habits and coping skills might be mutable. But I do have new skills that are showing me new things about myself. Not for nothing, I have miraculously overcome an all-consuming nervous tick. And, as is always the case, I have a new world to explore. And I’m doing my best to explore it, even if some days, I’m too tired to reach for my walking stick, and I reach for the remote and an edible instead of my compass.
10 Things to Fill You Up
Eva Recinos’ general existence as an arts writer who takes it upon herself to guide others through the space. Her webinar, Pitching 101: Arts and Culture Journalism, inspired me to send a super-thorough pitch to a news outlet for which I’d never written, and they accepted! The editor responded that my pitch was almost too well-crafted and essentially doing too much (although appreciated). Nonetheless, I am in!
“I Suddenly Want to Cover My Body (and My Home) in Checkerboard,” a satisfying explanation as to why we’re seeing the “fun and rebellious” checkerboard print everywhere, from New York Magazine’s The Strategist. I, too, want to cover my home and body with it, and am well on my way to doing so.
Daily Dose of Internet’s annual “The Best of the Internet (2020),” which rounds up the most awe-inspiring and, let’s be real, CUTESSST clips.
“Cancel New Year’s Eve Forever,” an essay by Sarah Miller for The New Yorker. Her examination of, “what if our acknowledgment of every new year was merely clerical, like with most any other day?” made me laugh.
Tycho’s Sunrise Solo Ascent, which had me dancing from bed as I streamed it on my TV at 7am on New Year’s Day (after which, I promptly went back to sleep). Dan Hansen, aka Tycho, ventured out to a clearing in the Sonoma hills and played a gorgeous set, complete with aerial views and pulsing lights. It’s available for purchase through tomorrow, and totally worth it.
This simple message from artist, John Zabawa, whose work I like very much.
“I Have Come to the Humilating Conclusion That I am an Extrovert,” by for The Cut. I found this essay, which compares before-times to our present day Zoom-iness, super relatable. It explores the journey from one’s steadfast self-idenfication as an introvert, to the eventual realization that interacting with others is actually quite invigorating.
Reply All’s more recent episodes, which became even more fascinating and intimate as the year went on. Check out “The Happiness Calculator vs. Alex Goldman” or “The Least You Could Do.”
My two most recent Getting to Know profiles for Comstock’s Magazine: Owner of Bohemian Aesthetic, Lei Green, and the co-founders of Last Supper Society.
Phoebe Lovatt’s “Best Things I Read in 2020,” which I loved and am including as a cheat since I didn’t get around to creating my own. Although I did post this lil Instagram roundup about my favorite books I read.
Extra Thing: Google’s “view in 3-D” mode for animals. Andrew and I rang in the new year by looking up a “Scottish Fold” cat to see how it would look in my apartment. The outcome: very cute!
That’s it for now! I hope you’ve had a refreshing start to your year.
Thanks so much for reading,
Vanessa
Looove this take. I was thinking more about it, and the shoulda woulda coulda thinking is what really trips me up. I think we have to learn to trust our behaviors and choices in the moment. They are motivated by how we feel, and being like I SHOULD have done something different with this pandemic isn’t going to help us move forward. It’s going to force us into a Netflix binge even more. So instead of that, thinking about things in terms of I CAN. Like I can start getting out more, I’m looking forward to making a pie, all that bullshit actually helps. The verbiage of it. anyway, happy to be your comrade in anxiety, thanks for being mine. Now I just gotta figure out how to take my own advice
Great, Vanessa. I hope you apply this on your self too, you are being gentle, kind, and optimistic!