It’s a tremendous challenge for many of us to be fully present in the current moment. There’s a pull toward imagining the future and ruminating on the past – sometimes big, important things you dread and can’t let go of and sometimes quotidian things that really are not at all important. Regardless of their weight, these imaginings drag you out of the moment you’re in, leaving you less able to appreciate exactly where you are, what you’re doing, and who you’re with. And the inner voice pulling you away can be pretty loud and persistent, especially if you tend to be anxious (guilty!). I’m the sort of person who will obsess about a really dumb thing I said weeks ago as if ruminating over it could change what happened. And I’ve definitely wasted time imagining disastrous futures that never came to pass or fantasized about wonderful potential futures that also didn’t.
When I got sick – when every moment I felt relatively okay became a precious commodity – I became aware of how much time I was wasting mired in psychological spaces far away from where I actually was. I’m not saying that it cured me of rumination, but I’ve definitely been more focused on enjoying the present while it’s actually happening because I know how precious and fleeting a truly good day is and I want to be fully immersed in it.
Before I got really sick, I spent so much time living in the future, imagining the better life I would be able to live when I got through the stress and the big projects, became a better version of myself, or whatever I convinced myself was the hurdle I needed to jump over to finally fully enjoy my life. It was always “after this semester” or “after I get tenure” or “once I finish this big project.” I never felt like I was doing enough, no matter how much I worked, and I was always chasing a sense of enoughness by taking on more and more and more. My spouse also lived in the future, often telling me that he’d be able to slow down and spend more quality time with me “after ___,” but when ___ came and went, there was another project/hurdle and another and another. That future happier, less stressed life shimmered in front of us like a mirage, always just out of reach, and always with the promise that once we jumped over another very big hurdle, things would be better and we’d be able to fully live in that glorious better present.
Author and podcaster Jocelyn K. Glei calls this “future-tripping” and the “anxiety of potential.” She writes that “capitalism, the media, and wellness culture… keep us fixated on all that we are not, and all that we have yet to accomplish/change/fix about the world and/or our inadequate selves. They convince us to keep our eyes cast toward the future, to focus all of our energy on the ominous specter of unfulfilled potential.” When you don’t see yourself as being enough as you are, you anxiously strive toward things that you hope will make yourself feel worthy. You believe those accomplishments will fill a hole inside you. So you’re always looking to prove yourself, to get the gold star, to make more money, to look better, to climb the career ladder, or whatever you’ve convinced yourself will do it for you. Yet while our capitalist society (and your manager) will probably happily let you keep on striving, enoughness will never come from external recognition, approval, or finishing a project. It comes from embracing your inherent worthiness.
When you finally recognize that you were always enough, you won’t need to keep proving yourself and you can live more fully in the present. You can stop searching and recognize that, as Glei writes, “the power and purpose and peace that we have been seeking outside of ourselves is already present within ourselves.” Because as you’ve seen during all your striving, wherever you went, there you were. You were still that exact same imperfect but WORTHY you. You were (and are) enough.
Suleika Jaouad, a brilliant writer and artist who knows much better than I the pain of losing big future plans to illness, writes about the things we put off doing into the future and how illness affects that calculus:
One of the stranger lessons of living with a long illness is that I’ve had to stop waiting for the circumstances of my life to become more favorable before I begin living it. I’ve had to stop waiting to feel better, or stronger, or more certain, or less busy. To stop assuming there will be a more convenient season for foraging for joy.
Illness has definitely changed my calculus when it comes to putting things off. For me, that has meant buying a kayak and spending lots of time on the water with my husband, spending more time taking in beautiful places, taking my teenaged son out to restaurants or food trucks (since that’s when I can get him to talk these days) even if it’s unhealthy, and doing things that bring me joy when I’m able to rather than putting them off “until things settle down” (which less face it, will probably never happen) or thinking them too indulgent. Like Suleika, I think many of us would be well-served by making a list of, “Things I Keep Wanting and Not Doing.” What have you been putting off?
While also a motivator, the unstable capacity of those of us with chronic illnesses (and often those who are caregivers as well) can also make it hard to live fully in the present because everything feels so tenuous. Crip time is real and it yanks you out of the dominant temporality and rhythms in myriad ways. With my illness, my day-to-day capacity is entirely unpredictable. Just recently, I had ambitious plans for a perfect weather Saturday that I had to entirely drop because I was experiencing a flare. My body felt heavy and spent, my joints were swollen and painful, and my brain felt like mush. I didn’t have the intellectual or physical capacity to do much beyond watching the day pass me by from the couch. A flare can last a couple of days, weeks, or even a whole month and I never know at the outset which will be the case. And there’s nothing I can do but rest, do light exercise (which helps me with the pain but feels almost Herculean given the fatigue), and be patient with my jerk body. I try to be zen about the upending of plans, to hold onto things loosely, but there are moments when I really feel angry about the loss. This Summer, my health has been so up and down; I don’t think I’ve even had a full week where I’ve felt ok every day. I try to make the most of moments when I feel good and sometimes maybe I push myself too hard on those days to wring out as much joy and fun as I can. It’s so hard to find a balance.
As a result of that unpredictability and debility, I feel like I can’t engage as deeply with things at work that used to bring me such joy. I used to be very involved in state library association work and regional consortium work and I stepped away from it all completely, which felt (and still feels) heartbreaking. I miss feeling connected to other library workers across the state, to contributing to things I deeply believe in. But I’m scared of being the person who takes on too much and then has to let people down. I was often the person who picked up the pieces when well-meaning people took on way too many things they were excited about and then couldn’t deliver. I’ve been the vice-chair with the flakey chair who ends up doing both jobs, the project lead whose colleague simply didn’t complete their part of the project but also didn’t inform anyone, the co-author who ends up doing the vast majority of the data analysis and writing. I’ve been bailed on. I’ve reached out for help and heard crickets. It made me feel like my time was less valuable and, frankly, like I was less valuable.
We talk a lot about how, in this field, the reward for overwork is more work. And it’s not just managers who cause that problem. I’ve seen peers contribute to this because they know their conscientious overworking colleagues will pick up the slack. I don’t want to make someone feel like that. While, yes, those workaholics also need to recognize that they don’t have to take on the burden someone’s dumped at their feet, we don’t have to take advantage of a workaholic and contribute to their burnout. So I undercommit even though it makes my worklife less satisfying.
I wrote a couple of years ago about my vision for something I called “community time” and I think that would allow those dealing with instability (caregiving responsibilities, disabilities, etc.) to take on more without fearing that we’d let people down or have to work beyond our capacity:
My vision for community time is one where we see all the work of libraries as a shared project and contribute as our capacity allows. And on the other side, we provide mutual support as our capacity allows, without looking to be paid back or for labor to be exchanged on a 1:1 basis. I agree with Piepzna-Samarasinha that seeing our work as a collective responsibility and providing collective care can be a beautiful and joyful experience. Imagine the peace of mind of always knowing you have the support you needed when you simply couldn’t get things done (because of illness, disability, caregiving responsibilities, etc.). Imagine the freedom of feeling like you can fall down and rest and won’t let the world down or jeopardize your job. Imagine the joy of providing support to your colleagues when they really need it. Imagine the deep relationships and trust that come from a communal vision of time. Think of how vulnerable and human you could be in such an environment. And perhaps there is a new kind of freedom in such an arrangement as Ivan Illich suggested: “I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value.”
In community time, when I felt well, I could engage deeply and when I didn’t, I could step back without feeling guilt, knowing that someone else would pick up the slack as I would for others when I had capacity. If all the work were seen as a shared project, as it is in my marriage, it would be easier to pick things up when someone needed to let things drop, but I don’t think this is how things are usually seen in most workplaces. People are often looking for exact reciprocity, like the reference shift swap that leaves you with exactly as many hours as you would have had previously. And that creates equality, but not equity.
My illness is one I’m going to have for the rest of my life and though it’s possible that with new medications, it could get under better control, it’s probably always going to impact my capacity. So I’m going to have to find a balance that feels ok to me and to also try and foster a work culture that better enables interdependence and allows us all to be fully human. I obviously have very limited influence in my work role, but I can at least try to model that behavior by being vulnerable when I need support and supporting my colleagues when they need it and I have capacity instead of worrying about perfect reciprocity or that everyone is doing the same amount. If we all did that, we could absolutely achieve a “community time” that provides the beautiful freedom of interdependence. What is keeping you from trying it?
