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What do you do to get yourself out of a shitty rut?

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Meditative Cleaning

I highly recommend Meditative Cleaning if you’re an anxiety-prone person like me with an overactive hippocampus. Sitting meditation is nice and everything, if you can stick with it, but I’ve always found my hands and body to be restless and listless while trying to just sit and do nothing but watch my thoughts for twenty minutes straight. Meditative cleaning, on the other hand, or really any mindful mundane task you can think of, gives your body something to do and your mind something to focus on.

This morning my mindful cleaning session involved emptying the dishwasher. I hate doing dishes and emptying the dishwasher, I think it’s a dumb extra task that I have to figure out how to fit into my daily schedule and would rather not do. I’m not complaining, cuz hey, I have a dishwasher for Christ’s sake, but I’m just sharing with you my general distaste for dishes in order to illustrate the transformative power of meditative cleaning. 

I love mindfully emptying the dishwasher.

What’s the difference, you ask? The difference is that instead of hurriedly putting bowls and spoons where they’re supposed to be while my mind flits in a million different directions, a very chaotic scene, I pay attention to each lil spoon as I pick her up and place her in her rightful position in the silverware drawer. I am fully present as I stack the plates in size order and hoist them into the cupboard. I am diligent and I am aware of what’s going on and for one goddamn minute in my day I get some peace and quiet from the ever persistent roar of thoughts turning over in my mind.

Meditative cleaning gives my body something to do and my mind something to focus on which makes being present a hell of a lot easier than when you’re simply sitting in a chair or on the ground doing nothing. Frankly the inside of my head is WAY more interesting than an empty room where I’m sitting and doing nothing. I know that’s the point of meditation, to appreciate the moment for what it is, but the fact of the matter is that sitting meditation is so goddamn boring that I never stick with it for more than a couple days before I find something better to be doing with that half hour in my morning.

Meditative cleaning, on the other hand, fulfills the dual purpose of giving my mind some stillness, awareness, and peace for at least a short period of time, while also fulfilling my need, engrained in me since childhood with the help of society and my mother, to constantly be productive. It also has the added bonus of the stress relief that comes from have a clean and tidy space.

So if you have an over-active, anxiety-prone mind like I do, I highly suggest trying your hand at slow, deliberate, meditative cleaning. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m gonna go pay REALLY close attention as I clean up the pile of clothes that’s accumulated on my bedroom floor.

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My greatest challenge right now is accepting that I control nothing while also accepting that I will always have the urge to control everything.

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Big Magic

Tonight I started reading a book called Big Magic written by Elizabeth Gilbert, the woman who wrote Eat Pray Love. 

While I have a lot of qualms with the whole idea behind Eat Pray Love, I think Gilbert has a lot of constructive things to say about creativity and the human spirit. Big Magic is about creativity and fear and living a creative life freely without letting fear hold you back from creating, doing whatever makes you feel full and free, and doing so unabashedly. This goes along with my theme from my Mediocrity post a few weeks ago. Especially now in times of real fear, pain, and confusion (if you live in the US you know what I’m talking about - though this is a universal truth) unfiltered creativity is so important. Creativity with no fear is one of the truest forms of expression and protest and some of the best art comes from times of strife. That is my one solace in all of this. We’re gonna get some damn good art. I can feel it bubbling inside me and the artists I’ve met in the past week. Honestly my disgust with the current state of affairs has in a very strange way empowered me to give fewer fucks. Why should I want to fit into a society that elects an orange trash bag to be its leader? Why should I want to be palatable to people who are willing to overlook xenophobia and misogyny in favor of the possibility of a tax break? Fuck. That. This pussy is grabbing back. I don’t know how to do that in any way other than writing my truth and doing so fearlessly, so I’ll be doing just that from now on.

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Mediocrity

I’m terrified of being mediocre. When I was 7 I was practicing Britney Spears songs and dancing in my bedroom. By 10 I had decided that becoming a famous singer was the only thing I wanted to do with my life. It was the only thing that was even worth doing with my life. Anything short of fame and the adoration of millions of people wasn’t good enough.

Thats the first time I remember thinking I wasn’t good enough. That phrase “I’m not good enough” has plagued me ever since. I’ve spent countless hours on my therapist’s couch talking about how much fear I have about not being good enough. I set parameters around everything I do and measure every action against an unrealistic standard so high that only about 2% of my actions on any given day actually fall within what I’ve determined is “good enough”. So for the other 98% of the time, I’m not good enough. To myself.

My fear of mediocrity spans not only my expectations for my career (I’ve dropped the Britney act and now my dreams include writing a series of best-selling memoirs that are both heartwarming and hilarious that shoot me into national comedic fame all before I’m 30) but it’s also on the every day minute level that I sit around judging myself in all my mediocrity for literally everything I do. Nothing I say is as smooth and cool and funny as I want it to be. No outfit is quite as hip and chic while also looking like I just threw it on as I want it to be. My body, when I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror as I pass, is always slightly rounder than I want it to be. My lips are thinner than I want them to be. My hair isn’t the perfect tint of silver. My eyelashes aren’t long enough. When I walk into a room and am forced to mingle with people, I don’t say the right thing, I don’t move in the right way, I don’t hold my hands properly, my posture’s a mess, and everyone can tell that I’m completely falling apart.

As you can imagine, living like this is exhausting. After a significant amount of time on my therapist’s couch I’ve learned to identity that voice inside of me that’s constantly judging and watching. Per my therapist’s recommendation I’ve named her Becky, because she’s not who I am, she’s a manifestation of my fears and anxieties. It’s also extremely cathartic to yell “SHUT UP, BECKY” in my head and have her flit off into some corner of my subconscious for a while. 

The thing is this judgement is entirely within my own head. You’ll notice everything I’ve listed is based on a parameter I have decided. Yes our society and our culture has some pretty fucked up expectations for how we should look and act and I’ve certainly internalized much of that, but in the end the expectations are entirely within me. No one besides that bitch Becky in my head is telling me anything I do is not good enough. Sure I’ve been rejected and told I’m not good enough before, but not in the destructively personal way that Becky does. My mom is thrilled by everything I do. My friends are kind and love me for all my quirks. Passing strangers on the street either catcall me or tell me they love my hair. NO ONE is telling me I’m not good enough, except that bitch Becky whom I’ve allowed to enter the holy space that is my mind.

I’m not sure what Becky thinks lies on the other side of mediocrity. Or who she thinks actually lives up to every standard she’s set for me. Perhaps social media is to blame, the daily onslaught of pictures of everyone doing so many things and looking so perfect while doing them all. Maybe that makes me and Becky think that everyone else is out there overachieving and out performing me on every front. 

The final question I’d like to pose to that bitch Becky and to you, the reader, is WHY DOES IT FUCKING MATTER? Who am I trying to impress? The entire world? Frankly no one gives a shit. And I don’t mean that to be a self-pitying line I mean that to be a self-liberating line. No one is watching me with the kind of expectations I have for myself. No one is rooting for me to fail. And if I did fail (at what, I’m not sure. Life?) then I would pick myself back up and continue and a few may notice but they will all eventually forget and so should I.

The reason why I bring up this tirade about my fear of being mediocre is because it’s held me back from a lot of creative endeavors because creativity is truly the essence of who we are and letting it out of me makes me vulnerable to myself, to Becky, and to others, of not being good enough. Of my art being entirely mediocre. So to compensate I don’t even try. And that is truly the saddest thing of all of this. That I have this extremely active, creative mind but I close her up and shut her away because she might produce something mediocre. So here I am writing this all up today as a way of starting my path towards self liberation. I’m going to keep writing here, and taking pictures, and hell maybe writing songs or trying my hand at pottery or whatever the fuck I want to do, and some of it will be mediocre. But some of it might be pretty good. And either way it doesn’t matter because creating, being creative, feeds the soul, as cliched as that is, and I’ve been letting Becky rob me of that for far too long.

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Life & Death by Raluca Anghel

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photography / hipster / indie / grunge

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Take A Seat

www.danielcasson.com

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patterns in nature

IMG_7266 by Terrence Rorie

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Work by marknevard Follow our Twitter: @goodtypography

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