A Giant Ball of Yarn

If you’re anything like me, it’s easy to spend too much time in your head. It's easy to come up with grand scenarios, these wild fantasies about what life could be like in two year’s, five year’s time. Easy to have in rotation a list of amazing expectations of what could be possible with the right amount of hard work and determination.

My life right now is nothing like I ever expected it would be.

I had meant to graduate high school early - I bounced off my bedroom walls in so many 3:00am bursts of motivation to get my grades and schedule in order, set up so many unreasonable academic standards that doomed me to failure from the start. I ended up barely eking by without any real evidence of academia to be proud of.

I had meant to have traveled by now - had planned to escape my life and get out of the country right after an early graduation - but never saved up enough money and never mustered up enough follow-through.

I had meant to be at a different level of fitness than I am now - meant to be someone who goes running every morning and eats a healthy breakfast and drinks orange juice and goes to bed at the same time every night and speaks three languages and always has the energy to text back right away and is an amazing artist and musician and- you can kinda start to see my problem with expectation management now, can’t you?

Because for some reason, whenever I make a self-improvement plan, it's never slow and steady or one at time. My goals comes out as this giant, tangled ball of yarn, full of different colors and textures, each task and habit and hobby an individual thread that’s completely knotted into the others. But my expectation is still for each of the different strands to come out as a perfectly fitting, warm, crocheted sweater that I can wear, comfortably and happily, with all my friends telling me that they can’t believe I made it myself.

But I make this ball of yarn so big, and I don’t account for the fact that I haven’t built the stamina yet to untangle all of it. And it’s so heavy. Too heavy. It’s impossible to push forward or pull along with me, no matter how hard I try or how long I look at it in stasis, imagining how perfect all of those sweaters are going to be.

So my only choice, every single time, is to abandon it.

So, why? Why is it a chronic issue - trying so hard to be an overachiever that the only option is to become an underachiever?

I have a collection of printed pages, stapled together at the corner, that my sister gave to me at the end of 2020. It’s a worksheet from Matt D’Avella’s Slow Growth Academy, a self-guided course aimed to help construct realistic habit-building plans that we thought could be fun after a year of inactivity at home.

The first question, bold and looming at the top of page 1, reads: Why do you think you failed to build habits in the past?

My handwritten answers that I distinctly remember took me 20+ minutes to come up with:

• I’m afraid that if I succeed, it will prove past failures are because of me and not my circumstances.
• I used to be able to succeed without trying, so now effort makes me feel like an automatic failure.
• It’s embarrassing to be less than perfect.
• Changing my life forces me to confront how much of it I’ve wasted.
• Good habits are a gift to your future self and I don’t care about myself enough to gift them.

Most of these will strike a chord with you if you experience or have heard about Gifted Kid Syndrome, something I was skeptical about by title until I learned more about it and wait, oh my god, you’re telling me there’s a term for that? But even with these answers I wrote over a year ago, I’m still stuck transforming them into a step forward.

Because what’s wild is that, despite some pretty cutting realizations that answering that question had me thinking about for the first time, I never actually finished the worksheet. It’s dated 10:04pm, November 19th, 2020, and instead of completing it to the last page, I stayed up until early in the morning, practicing guitar and Spanish and reading books and articles, getting a jumpstart on the skills and habits that I was determined to build since I thought I had figured out what was holding me back.

That night was another giant ball of yarn. It left me exhausted and burnt out, and I still don’t have a sweater.

So, back to the drawing board.

Why can’t I follow through with the goals I set for myself?

It’s easy to blame circumstances for any perceived failure you’re experiencing. To say there’s something else holding you back, keeping you from being the person you know you could be. It’s what I wrote down in my list earlier, and is still the answer that hits me the hardest.

I’m afraid that if I succeed now, it will prove past failures are because of me and not my circumstances.

Sometimes circumstances really do carry a share of the responsibility. A wildly unsupervised and neglectful home-life wasn’t really conducive to the stellar academics I wanted, and my homeless stint when I was 15 didn’t do me any favors.

Being 18 at the start of the pandemic, when all I wanted to do was find a job and save enough money to start an actual life, was just some really bad timing.

Having grown up moving states every couple of years and bouncing in and out of different socioeconomic statuses, leaves me counting back the years since I had an actual bed and not just a foam pad on the floor, an Army standard cot, or my current set-up of a sleeping bag for a mattress and a cardboard box for a frame.

So, yeah, it is easy to ask what could have been. It’s always easy to let what could have been haunt you, because there’s always a better reality to wish you were living in. What if I’d had more guidance as a kid? What if I’d had more money or opportunity or friends, or been raised with a better work ethic? What if I had the life and comforts now that I know other people achieving my same dreams do?

But at the same time, people have done more with less - that’s not even in question. What if’s will kill you - there’s clearly a problem here, and the only common denominator in all of these failed resolutions is me.

So. Drawing board.

What’s bringing me back every time? Why do I make a list every New Year’s?

I don’t dream about being fluent in more than one language just because it’s useful. I don’t fantasize about being able to sketch out beautiful portraits in a matter of minutes because I think it’d be cool. I practice these things because I love them. I love learning, I love memorizing all the little details and rules, saying the same thing over and over again until Duolingo gives me a new badge, buying new sketchbooks and wearing down pencils until they’re unusable. I find myself stuck in the Wikipedia rabbit holes of link-hopping until what started out as a simple curiosity about Italian geography has you completely invested in the names and history of the craters on the moon at four in the morning just as much as, if not more than, the next guy.

But if I love the journey so much, then why do I hate the climb?

I’m finally figuring out that maybe I’m not built to schedule the things I’m passionate about. Maybe I’m making it into work. Maybe putting fun as an appointment on a calendar and tying my joy of a hobby to a societal standard of success, a strict idea of progress on an unforgiving timeline, is boxing me in instead of lifting me up. Maybe comparing myself to people who are already further along than I am, or to people who have pulled themselves out of worse situations than mine, isn’t the source of inspiration that I thought it was. Maybe it’s an invalidation, a constant rain cloud I keep standing under until I have to leave my projects completely.

Yes, others have filled bigger shoes with smaller feet. Yes, I am capable of amazing and groundbreaking things. But why am I setting ‘groundbreaking’ as the standard? If ‘amazing' is the standard, there’s hardly anything to even be amazed about anymore. Amazing just becomes normal. So let’s dial it back down to normal, and see where my momentum takes me from there.

I’m going to think about what’s fun, and about what makes me happy. About what makes me feel like I’m actually living in the world instead of just existing in it. No more scheduled hours of productivity. I’m going to come home from work, make something delicious to eat, and ask myself what sounds fun. Sometimes it might be scrolling on my phone or catching up on a TV show with my friends. Sometimes it might be crashing to sleep for a couple of hours. But most of the time it’s probably going to be practicing something, or reading something, or learning something new. Something I do because I want to and not because I’ve convinced myself I have to.

No more comparing myself to other people. No more looking at my progress like there’s some kind of deadline I have to meet. I'm done doing the things I love with my eyes on the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow - I’m just going to vibe in the rainbow. I'm going to take the pressure off, be kinder and easier on myself, and enjoy my Wikipedia rabbit holes - because even if I didn't perfect that guitar bar chord, or complete the Spanish Narrative level on Duolingo, there's always tomorrow, and I had a lot of fun learning about the moon. And I can guarantee it’s going to leave me with way fewer balls of yarn, way more rested nights and energetic days and memories made, and maybe even a few sweaters.

And I’m going to revisit that worksheet, as many times as I need to, and read the last thing I wrote on that page:

It’s time to write a letter to yourself. Find some words to forgive these past failures (and challenge yourself on the growth that’s yet to come).

Some people have intrinsic strength to pull themselves through hard times. Just because you don’t doesn’t mean you deserve to stay in them. You can earn your strength, which is like way sexier anyway.

You put pressures and expectations on yourself that you never would put on anyone else, and when you inevitably burn out, you don’t have any energy left to even meet the average. In a way, this means you try too hard, not that you don’t try hard enough. Now you just need to try different.

No one you admire had it easy or figured out right from the beginning. The time you wasted only stays wasted if you don’t let it make you sexier.

Happy New Year’s, friends. Let’s go be sexier.