giving in to giving up
I'm on my day 7 of the "survive September" challenge
What a week, y’all.
Even though it wasn’t a full work week, it still felt like I lived a month in just four days. But here I am — still standing … and not drinking.
If August felt like a month of anticipatory dread, September’s vibe is more like a slap in the face that wakes you up. Being awake makes me feel both extremely grateful while just a touch resentful — another paradox for me to consider.
This week brought me back to wandering the hallways at work, along with all the interpersonal responsibilities of being a colleague. Now that I’m seven months into my recovery (and starting the ninth month of the “Year of the Rebekah Rehaul”), I feel like I’m approaching life’s difficulties with a different perspective. Despite all the challenges I’m facing, I actually feel pretty okay.
My new life hack is to give up.
It’s not the kind of giving up I would do before. Previously, giving up meant fighting against the injustices or wrongs around me. I would push back hard because I didn’t want to feel the pain or the abuse of feeling taken advantage of.
The problem was that most of my “pushing back” involved the internal processing of how unfair everything was, demonizing the people causing me pain, and lamenting that all this was happening to me. It felt like I was doing actual work to fix my situation, but I was really just torturing myself because I wasn’t accepting the reality of what is, and what is happening in my life.
This week felt different. Still terrible, but not as terrible. Here’s a small sampling of what I’ve dealt with this week: my only child starting her final year of high school, returning to campus five days a week (resulting in work dramas), a scary incident at my kid’s school, the stress of introducing 4 sections of reluctant students to the joys of a required course, the persistent grad student panic/guilt of not being farther along, and managing to lose my keys on the third day of class.
But what felt different this time was that as I navigated these frustrations, I could feel myself letting go of them — ever so slightly. Don’t get me wrong, I still spun out a lot (!), and some of you reading this post were the ones who listened to me or read my miles of text messages. But I didn’t let myself stay stuck. I just accepted the crap.
Yesterday morning, right before an important meeting on campus, I could not find my office keys. And after everything else that had happened to me this week, this inconvenience felt like it could be the last thing to fully break me.
Emma and I don’t live in a big place, so it was easy to tear it apart looking for them. No luck. I tore apart the car. No luck. I called campus and the café to see if they were dropped there. No luck. I went to the Dean’s office to check for spares. No luck. The process of securing a whole new set of keys looked extremely tedious and exhausting. Great.
Yet even as I felt frustrated and upset, I could also feel myself releasing it. Sure enough, later that morning I swallowed my pride and started the process of informing the higher-ups that my keys were missing and that I would likely need to start the process of getting a new set.
The old me would have ruminated about the injustice and wrongness of my ridiculous missing keys all day long. But this Rebekah gave herself the time to be upset — and then just gave up. By “gave up,” I mean I accepted the fact that my keys were lost. All the internal processing and beating myself up about it wasn’t going to make them turn up, so I might as well keep going with my day.
It sounds ridiculous to say, but it feels like freedom to give up.
And when the time came for bed, in shifting around my covers, I somehow managed to unearth the missing keys.
Emma said something last night after we all celebrated finding the keys. She had been a big help earlier that day when I was tearing apart the house in my futile search. After we found the keys, she said, “I just want to remind you of what you already know — the moment you stop looking for something, that’s when you find it.”
My tiny teacher strikes again.
For a long time, I’ve been searching for fixes — and for a while, the “fix” was to distract myself from my problems. A big lesson I’m starting to learn is that sometimes the fix isn’t out there, in someone else or in some other thing.
The fix I’m looking for should first start inside myself. And part of that first step to that fix is learning to accept the world for what it is, and not resist it for not being the way I think it should be.
I think “giving up” may be another important step for me to take on this journey back to myself.
Things that brought me joy this week:
There’s a senior in the house!! Class of 2025, here we are. Last week I wasn’t ready to talk about it, and this week I’m still not. Emma is taking AP Psych this year, is on a cheer squad, will be starting a new job soon, and it’s gonna be a great year.
I’ve met all my students for the term ahead, and I’m already keen on them. This year I’m piloting a new discussion technique, the TQE method: thought? questions? epiphanies? We’ve only had one class using the technique, but I’m already sold! It’s so cool to get students engaged and talking. Remind me of this positive teaching energy at midterms.
It still feels like summer in these parts! This weekend looks to be one last hurrah of 30C temps. I’m here for it all.
Court: We have our Chambers day for Friday next week. The last docs will be filed early next week, and hopefully by this time next week, I can retire from my Family Law career.
PhDing: Committee meeting is looming, and I can’t wait to check in with them all and tell them what’s up. I submitted a conference proposal with a good friend in Sociology, where we want to talk about using the philosophy of harm reduction with universal design for learning techniques. This week I downloaded Scrivener, and I already feel excited to write and piece together my work in a format other than Word.
Watching: The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives (poor Danny) Listening: Deeper Well, by Kacey Musgraves Reading: a course syllabus I fundamentally disagree with
Meme of the week:
Scrivener! I want to know how you like it! (p.s. I know someone who uses it as their everything "dashboard"