May I Suggest #8: Sticky Mind Problems
If you have a question for ‘May I Suggest,’ send to: studio@bymariandrew.com
The question:
Recently, I’ve been getting very frustrated with my lack of ability to appreciate my current situation for all of the amazing things that it is. My mind constantly finds a problem, an anxiety, or a worry to consume the forefront of my brain. I feel so blessed and lucky in my life, so it seems wrong that I cannot allow myself a time period where nothing is “wrong.” It keeps me from being able to live in the moment and appreciate all of the beauty around me because I can never feel that my current situation is full and complete as it is. How can I feel satisfied with what I have without having to fix the next thing that “needs fixing?”
The suggestion:
Remember video stores?
It’s entirely possible that you’re too young so I’ll explain: When I was growing up, my local video store was the hottest place to be on an early Friday evening. My store had a two-night rental period, so we got to pick a couple movies to watch through the weekend on VHS.
The new releases were always taken by the time my mom got home from work and picked me up, so I was usually stuck with a recommendation from her youth or another viewing of My Neighbor Totoro.
Our video store was a small family-owned business, so the selection was pretty slim. It was rarely worth looking for something specific because they probably wouldn't have it, so I ended up watching a lot of older, foreign, and obscure films that I figured must be popular—until I got to college and nobody else seemed keen on quoting Smiles of a Summer Night with me.
In hindsight, I appreciate that the limited selection meant that my mind was formed by some wonderful films that I’d most certainly miss in the age of streaming: lots of spectacular musicals, highly specific documentaries, and stunning old children’s movies.
My attention span probably lengthened as I grew accustomed at a young age to slower-paced plots and subtitles (something that many Americans notoriously avoid). It wasn’t because I was smarter than other kids; I just had a worse video store.
It never bothered me that Premiere Video didn’t have a great selection, or that I couldn’t always get what I wanted. Neither occurred to me as a problem.
Until: We got streaming.
Now, if HBO Max or Apple TV or Netflix or one of the other thousand streaming services I apparently pay for every month doesn’t have the exact movie I’m in the exact mood for, I get antsy and feel like I'm missing out on something I'm entitled to. In an extreme case, I can’t even enjoy a different option because I’m obsessing over how my evening would have unfolded if I’d been able to find Muriel's Wedding. It's a bit sick.
I am someone who suffers from a fabulously sticky brain as well as anxious and obsessive-compulsive tendencies so I know ALL about the fixations that keep you from appreciating what’s here now. From what I can tell after, oh, just a decade of therapy, this type of brain is often formed during an unpredictable childhood, and is fortified in adulthood as a way to feel a semblance of safety and control.
I am so compassionate to your plight and I really struggle with this genre of self-made agony myself. And I know: The most frustrating thing to hear when I’m on an anxiety spiral is, “Why don’t you focus on what’s good in your life?”
LOL.
That’s like telling someone who has a debilitating phobia of heights to “just focus on appreciating the view” while on the 100th floor. Our culture loves to use gratitude as an antidote to anxiety, to worry, and to dissatisfaction, but I wholeheartedly believe that we can be very grateful and very anxious at the same time. We can look around at all the marvels in our life and still fixate on that one marvel missing, just as an arachnophobe might have trouble fully enjoying a five-course luxury dinner if there's a tarantula on the ceiling.
Like you, my own "What's missing?" question has stolen too many of my joys. At my loveliest birthday parties, I've been distracted the whole time obsessing over the one person who wasn't there. I've spent entire days on the most stunning vacations wondering if I'd be just a little bit happier if I'd brought a different book with me. I've agonized over whether one word would have made all the difference in a cover letter.
My mind finds a minor problem and runs wild with it, no doubt a protective mechanism, but a very annoying one.
Gratitude is an important practice in its own right, but not terribly helpful for these "What's missing?" fits, I'm afraid. In fact, sometimes I even feel worse when I count my blessings as a remedy and I realize how much happiness I'm overlooking when I'm distracted by a minor worry. It's like adding a big scoop of shame to an already-distressing cocktail of anguish.
I’ll tell you what HAS helped me when I obsess over something that’s keeping me from enjoying all that I have. What helps is repeating this phrase:
There isn’t a problem to fix.
I say that to myself about 50 times a day. I say it when I start ruminating over what someone said to me two years ago, I say it when I can't handle my envy over someone else’s living space, I say it when I fixate on last week's failure, I say it when the only thing I can think about is whether I should have moved to a different neighborhood...or said something different...or been a different person...or...
I don't necessarily believe the phrase in the moment, but I've found it to be a million times more soothing than scrambling to appreciate all that I have.
Browsing the aisles of my childhood video store, I didn’t know I had other options. I didn’t know that streaming would one day be invented. I didn't know that other video stores had a bigger selection. When you’re used to the options not being there, they don’t bother you.
Your problem and mine is that we KNOW there are other options: they’re everywhere. A quick scroll through Instagram stories shows you a million lives you’re not living, a thousand concerns you haven’t ever thought about. Should I be vegan? Should I be taking a ceramics class? Should I have been learning French for the past 5 years? Am I a good enough person? Is everyone making TikTok pasta without me? Would I be more fulfilled if I, too, were getting my masters degree?
In January, I decided I wanted to watch more movies in 2022. Movies are my favorite medium; they’re more dear to me than books. Even so, I realized that I hadn't seen many in the past couple years. In fact, I watched under ten new movies in 2021: an outrage for someone who used to spend every Saturday at the cinema.
You know what I did in order to watch more movies? I DECREASED my options. I decided to go through the British Film Institute's Greatest Films of All Time (my mom’s variation on this is to watch a list of movies set in New York). I realized that streaming was so overwhelming that I ended up not watching anything.
Somehow, decreasing my options and creating a container around them actually made me feel like I had MORE options—like when you do a big closet clean-out and somehow feel like you have more clothes. Without the paralysis of choice, decisions are easier.
I’ve watched more movies in the past month than I did in all of 2021 because I gave myself a limitation. I’ve re-created my childhood video store experience by decreasing my selection from infinity to 100.
So, here’s an idea: Get it in your head that you don’t have unlimited options. You can’t take back what you said yesterday, you can’t suddenly be in grad school, you can’t worry your way into speaking French. The things that pop into your head as enhancements for your current situation most likely aren't even a possibility if you really think about it. A human life isn't a streaming platform; there are only so many options. This isn’t a problem to fix.
One of the great lies of the First World in 2022 is that you can and should have everything you want in life, but that's not true. You may not ever get the job, the romantic love, the house, the friend with your same shoe size. In fact, you probably won't! If you got everything you want, you'd be an extremely unusual scientific case and you'd also probably be pretty dissatisfied.
I remember hearing an interview with Elizabeth Gilbert about why she didn’t want to have kids. “Don’t you worry that you’ll miss out on the experience of being a mother?” a friend asked her. Elizabeth replied, “I won’t have every possible life experience that someone can have on earth. I’m all right with that.”
Elizabeth also probably won’t become a surgeon, or an acrobat, or a Broadway chorus girl. She may never go on an Arctic expedition and may not ever make it to Finland or Indiana. We have to be okay knowing that our options in life and in our days and at our birthday parties are limited. That’s not a problem to fix.
I’d love to see us move from a culture who tells you HOW TO GET EVERYTHING YOU WANT into a culture that tells you how to sit with the feelings of inevitably not having everything what you want.
It’s actually okay to feel regret.
It’s okay to wish you had done things differently.
It’s okay to wonder what might have been.
It's okay to ache for something you can't have.
It’s okay to yearn for the road not taken.
Our society will tell you that none of this is okay: I’m here to tell you that it’s okay. We have so many ways to avoid regret, avoid uncertainty, avoid longing…but they’re just illusions. Avoiding these feelings is impossible in a human life.
For those of us prone to obsessive thoughts like you and me, sometimes we work so hard to avoid regret/wishing/wondering/aching/yearning that we completely fixate and forget to feel.
I realize I’m projecting here, but I’m guessing you, too, have a sticky mind. You know what’s cool about having a sticky mind? It’s usually a sign of creativity and sensitivity. It means that you might remember mundane moments in a special way that may be missed by others. You probably feel more deeply and think more lusciously. Maybe you can hear music perfectly in your head; perhaps you can remember paintings remarkably well in your mind's eye. Your brain, in all its stickiness, is as rich as honey.
You also might have some tendencies of the Enneagram 4—a personality type defined by our inability to be satisfied because we’re always looking for a more complete experience. That’s because we have vivid imaginations and we are wildly inventive, intricate storytellers! Cool, huh? I think so! I know that some of my worst mental fixations are a direct result of being so good at telling myself stories; I just have to remember that the stories aren’t always real.
One of my favorite movies growing up was Anne of Green Gables, a well-worn VHS tape at Premiere Video. I identified with Anne because she, like me, had a lot of anxieties (probably from growing up in a haunted orphanage with a window as her only friend) and thought all her problems could be solved with a different hair color. But she channeled her stress into imaginative adventures, and ultimately became appreciated for her special way of seeing the world. Amélie is similar; the movie tells us that she had social anxiety as a child and now she delights all of Paris with her charming preoccupations.
Could you channel some of Anne and Amélie during your spirals? Instead of stressing over what might be missing, tap into that glorious stickiness and lush imagination and cultivate a sense of wonder around it. If you’re fixating on what’s “wrong” with this present moment, maybe shift that “wrong”-ness into what’s possible.
If you were a child with a big imagination, it might be fun to revisit that part of yourself. Instead of ruminating on the parts of your job that are falling short, maybe play around with what could be. It can be a pleasurable thought exercise simply to envision possibility around what could be different, knowing that imagining a new reality doesn't mean this one is lacking anything.
May I suggest: BE YOUR OWN SHITTY VIDEO STORE.
You write "I can never feel that my current situation is full and complete as it is."
What if (stay with me here) your current situation is not full and complete? What if there ARE always things missing, or things not-quite-right, or things that would make it 'better' by someone's metric of success?
What if it's okay to have an incomplete, not-always-full life?
I loved Premiere Video entirely for its not-completeness, its not-fullness. I loved that it was NOT Blockbuster Video, or a streaming service. There was no problem to fix!
I warmly invite you to take pressure off yourself to always feel perfectly satisfied with your life (impossible), but learn to appreciate the lack as something potentially beautiful and wonder-invoking. And maybe even appreciate that your trait to constantly obsess over what’s wrong might be a sign that you’re observational and creative (I have never met a truly creative person who isn’t also very anxious).
When I was in college, I read this description of Wabi-Sabi in Utne Reader that stuck with me precisely because I struggled so much with this constant lacking feeling of which you speak:
Broadly, wabi-sabi is everything that today’s sleek, mass-produced, technology-saturated culture isn’t. It’s flea markets, not shopping malls; aged wood, not swank floor coverings; one single morning glory, not a dozen red roses. Wabi-sabi understands the tender, raw beauty of a gray December landscape and the aching elegance of an abandoned building or shed. It celebrates cracks and crevices and rot and all the other marks that time and weather and use leave behind. To discover wabi-sabi is to see the singular beauty in something that may first look decrepit and ugly.
My beloved old video store (that I'm clearly romanticizing) has some wabi-sabi lessons: It's missing almost everything (including the second VHS tape of Titanic), there's just one broken candy machine, the posters on the wall are faded and ripped, and yet there's no problem to fix.
Repeating that phrase over and over has helped me snap back to the present moment, without frantically mustering up a gratitude list or striving to be entirely happy with no complaints. It's perfectly okay to say "I don't have every single thing I could ever want, and thank goodness," and then let your mind play around with possibility just for fun—knowing that it's not a threat to your ability to appreciate.
There is so much wonder to be found on those limited video shelves, and in this finite life. There’s no problem to fix; this is enough in its incompleteness. May we all get cozier with that feeling.
Thank you for reading Out of the Blue, a weekly reflection on something that's caught my attention, and an attempt to learn deep lessons from the shallow and light wisdom from the dark. If you haven't subscribed yet, sign up for free here!