THE STRIVING

Lately, I’ve been spending a good deal of my time in one of the twin armchairs tucked in what I call my reading nook. On the round pie-crust table in-between are two piles of books waiting to be read and a daily planner. A notebook and pen are on my lap. Many thoughts come unbidden as I sit in this chair, covered under the cozy throw my granddaughter gave me for Christmas. I have written, launched, and promoted my book. My grandson is in full-time daycare and the work on our new/old house is nearing completion. There is a large hole looming before me. The deep, dark emptiness of it instigates panic and fear. I begin, admittedly, somewhat obsessively, to think about what will be next for me, triggered by brainstorming about what I should do to keep promoting my book.

The ideas come rapid fire, staccato bursts of neurons firing. Should I reach out and get a brand to sponsor a book tour? Should I write another book, try my hand at fiction? How much should I keep posting about the book on the social media apps I secretly want to delete? How should I transform my Instagram, Substack and website, and use all the attention I’m getting now as a jumping off point for a “platform” from which I can launch something new? Should I become an aging advocate/expert? A fashion sustainability activist? A cultural critic? Go back to school? The word SHOULD fuels this train of thought. A word that suggests obligation, duty, implies a criticism. An invisible hand on my back rather forcefully giving me a shove. Disguised as inspiration, these thoughts do not make me feel energized, they tire me. That is how I can distinguish between something that is a demand, not an interesting idea. That it’s a “SHOULD” thing. I put aside the notebook and rest my head on the back of my beautiful forest green velvet chair, feet up on the brown, cracked leather ottoman. I pull the blanket up and tuck it under my chin. There is a moment where I think, you should not be sitting on your ass, you should be exercising, you’re getting fat. My Instagram legacy.

It seems there is no good word to describe the feeling that signals a time when we need a change that helps us to grow, or when we move into a transitional state, a passage from one time of life into another. There is no good word that does not impose some sort of expectation that you do something more. There are many moments in life that suggest this transitional state; “graduation”, “empty nest”, “retirement, the death of or divorce from a partner to name a few. The word “reinvention” has become a commodified cliché and suggests that where we are at in life needs to be dramatically changed. In business, the word signifies a complete overhaul or reimagining of an organization’s purpose, identity, and direction. Most reinvention stories or books I’ve read involve big adventures like traveling the world, quitting your job, starting a new business and doing something completely different from what you were doing before. These tales usually involve a radical transformation and imply you leave everything from the past behind and create something entirely new. It must be something monumental. Maybe because of the internet and social media, we feel we SHOULD do monumental things, things that trick an algorithm or cause a particular YouTube video to go viral. They require a large savings or retirement account to execute. You are usually by yourself in these stories, applying true American grit and individualism. I provided the media world with a big, glamorous reinvention story myself. When I left my past behind and resigned from academia in 2019 to devote myself completely to my “reinvention”, it was the beginning of the end and an invitation to great unhappiness not to an incredible new life. I have a different relationship with the word now, we’ve broken up. Reinvention carries too much of a burden, too many expectations, too many SHOULDS.

I’ve used the term, “What Now?” before and today, head tilted back and resting on my chair, it feels kinder and softer than the word “reinvention”. It’s more like the gentle invitation that is prompted by curiosity about something. I turn my head and my cheek rests on velvet, a fabric with a dense and even pile that makes it feel soft and smooth. There is rest and ease here. “What Now?” implies satisfaction with whom we are at our core, the notion that this state is normal and is simply a precursor to a fresh burst of creative self-expression. It is a state of perpetual openness to whatever may come before you whenever and however it does. It’s the question you might ask after a loss or change in your circumstances. It’s what you might wonder when you are bored, when your life seems to have lost its purpose, when you realize you have lost yourself and need to be found again. When you think about how to be old. When one door closes and you are standing in the hall, yet you have no desire to go outside. You don’t want to move out; you just want to explore another room.

I lean into my tiredness and every bone and muscle in my body succumbs to an overwhelming feeling of exhaustion. This is depletion of a self at a cellular level. My reclining position, like the one we assume on a psychoanalytic couch, coupled with fatigue, allows vulnerability to sneak in a door I have kept heavily guarded. Slipping under the crack is a breathtaking epiphany. All the exhaustion I feel today is not the product of what I am doing in my life now but comes from the enormous expenditure of time, labor, energy and care of others I directed towards being known, being seen, being needed, being loved, having enough money to live, and being thought of as “good” in the course of a life. A “good” daughter, sister, mother, wife, partner, friend, social worker, professor, grandmother and, in recent days, writer. Being a “good” girl. A “good” woman. A “good” girl receives her direction from “SHOULDS”.

Yet there is another source contributing to my weariness. It’s the time, energy, labor and care I exerted to resist the “SHOULDS”, to be publicly good because there were many times that privately I was not. To resist, both overtly and covertly, with behaviors that sometimes allow us to claim our true self and in others that cause harm to that self. The nickname given to me by friends who have witnessed or whom I have confided my bad behavior to is The Good/Bad Girl. I learned early in life that persons and institutions with power decide which girls are good, and which girls are not. I remember all the ways in my early social work career I was complicit, the times I judged, surveilled and disciplined other women and girls. All because I could not bear to see myself in them or take ownership of behaviors we shared. Using professional jargon to distance myself, I labeled these articulations “acting out”. Because of privilege, mine occurred in private and was, most times, unseen. I was furious at my mother for not “seeing”. It did not occur to me at the time that maybe the women around me could not see my pain for the same reasons I distanced myself from those I worked with. For the women in my family and for many of the women I worked with as colleagues and clients, trauma, alcohol abuse and the demand to be good and the fear of being called bad, was a legacy that was unspoken. It was was consequently “acted out”. A way to speak without speaking. There is a lot of good/bad women stuff going on right now. I cringe when I remember how, when my granddaughter does something we want her to do, we say, “That’s a ‘good’ girl.” We cheerily exclaim, “Good job!” While we are scrupulous about never calling her a “bad” girl during her sometimes bad behavior, we never consider the ramifications of calling her good.

A name comes to mind for this state of exhaustion. I have a tendency to name things that are much bigger than I and out of my control. An amalgam of sorts, kind of undefinable. Somehow it allows me to wrestle with it, to make it something more easily reckoned with. It contains it. I call this exhaustion, “THE STRIVING”. It has a gender. It contains the demand to be “good”, the fear of being labeled bad and a litany of SHOULDS, resistance and mitigation. It is the author of the need for monumental reinventions. Its motto is, “No matter how hard you try, you will never be enough or do enough.” In my older age I have learned to resist, to say no, to mitigate the damage when I do. Faced with the THE STRIVING, I have learned how to do harm reduction. It lessens the harmful effects but does not take away what causes them. As my life rolls before me today like a film on fast, blurry rewind, I feel the toll THE STRIVING has taken. It shows up in the parts of my body that are now worn down, the disintegrating parts of my cervical spine, the pain in my knees from carrying too heavy a load. Hidden injuries that become known through the need for a hip replacement. The fine lines around my mouth from keeping it shut when I didn’t want to, the bunion on my right foot from wearing shoes that were too high and too pointed.

Yet, admitting to The STRIVING and naming it also brings the possibility that I do not have engage with it anymore. I do not have to comply. I still worry the torrent of tears that follow this realization will stain the velvet of my armchair. They do not. These tears are pure, and since I no longer wear makeup, they lack black mascara traces. The demands of womanhood, youth, beauty and goodness do not mark them. I stop telling myself to get up. Your ass can sit and rest as long as you want. I wander deeper into the dark forest of my chair. I relish the warmth and comfort of the gift from my granddaughter.

Virginia Woolf once said, “No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.” This seems to indicate a space that can exist in the absence of THE STRIVING. I’ve yet to imagine it, but it calls to me. What does that absence mean for my “What Now”? The “What Now” that will fill the looming empty hole I now find myself in front of? Based on conversations I have with many women who come to events for my book, I am not the only one standing on the edge of a hole and wondering what will fill it. In this “What Now” time, if I think about beginning something from scratch, THE STRIVING makes me feel frantic about the time left to do it, time to practice, and time to live one’s deepest desires. So many of us are re-finding the woman within during older life, the person put on the shelf during times of competing responsibilities and during periods of grueling work and caregiving. When we were STRIVING. Many of those approaching older life are in a state of anxiety and indecision, a state of not knowing. We want to re-find ourselves, but do not know what to do or how to go about it. There are health and financial constraints. I am now on a fixed income. Resisting THE STRIVING means I do not view this as a limitation or even try to go beyond it but finding out how to live successfully within it. We may not know how to begin. So fraught, we may decide to not do anything at all and maybe that’s okay. I believe these questions about “What Now” create anxiety because we fear it will involve THE STRIVING again. I’m allowing my mind to embrace the idea that it does not have to, that it will not. We bring a plethora of experiences, knowledge, and skills to this time of life that we can use in the service of creating something. We are never really starting anything from scratch because we have lived a life. What if we just wait in the hall until a door opens and someone or something walked through? What if we sat in a coffee shop and see who might approach us or approach someone who makes us ponder, “I wonder who that person is?” What if that were as monumental as we needed to be?

In the immediate moment for me, a “What Now”in the absence of THE STRIVING means an acceptance that I have released my book into the world and if I do nothing more, it will be free to do what it will do, what it is meant to do, just as will happen to me. I don’t need to reach out to a brand to sponsor a book tour or spend my now fixed income on sponsoring one myself. If things come to me, I will explore them, but I will no longer grasp or reach out for and towards them. I remain here, still and at the moment content in my chair, in my house. While I want to keep writing and get better at it, I don’t want a goal. I want to soak these old bones in the process. While some alone time is necessary for reflection and self-assessment, during this time, especially now, when there is a loneliness epidemic, erosion of empathy, lack of in-person conversation and social interaction between us, during my “What Now” I want to investigate possibility in the company of others. While writing is often a solitary pursuit, I want to do it in a way that I am in collaboration and conversation with others. I think Substack may just be the space to do it. It’s a “house” that has many rooms to explore.

I will continue to get to know my new city, its strengths and challenges. I’ll attend meetings and events, listen and observe. Keep writing my monthly local newspaper column. Hang out in the coffee house and sit by the river. When New York City with all its glamor, glitz and artistic inspiration pulsating with THE STRIVING, beckons, I’ll stay here in the Hudson Valley, find new galleries and museums, go to the monthly Salon hosted by our local Arts Alliance, be with my family and finish up the house. I will just be in these spaces, with nothing else required from me except my presence and attention.

What has been most inspiring in the aftermath of my book are the events where I am in conversation, in real life with others who are asking themselves, “What Now?” When I talk about THE STRIVING and giving it up, many heads nod. I never have to define it. The women who sit before me know it. We want to know how to have a stimulating life in its absence. Perhaps this is a journey we can take together. I’ll share mine here and hope you share yours.