Do A Bad Job.

Go ahead. I dare you.

Dear Friend,

(NOTE: I started this letter to you yesterday, before I knew that I currently have COVID. I feel pretty horrible, like I can’t take a full breath. Last night I couldn’t sleep through my fevers, but right now, as I write to you, I am fever-free and drinking bubble water. But anyway, I’m not 100 percent sure my brain is all the way working. That’s my personal caveat. More on this in the “Parenting Paragraph.”)

Still life of things right now.

I owe you an apology. I didn’t write to you last week because I had a stomach flu. I didn’t really know what to do — like, it didn’t feel worth it to just email you  and say, “OH MY GOD I HAVE A STOMACH FLU AND I THINK I AM DYING,” because that would just be fishing, wouldn’t it? And it would be drawing too much attention to my absence, right? But I also didn’t want you to think I wasn’t thinking about you. So I tell you now: I was thinking about you. I really was. But I was also vomiting and having a fever. The writing was simply not coming. (THE VOMIT WAS COMING!)

This stomach flu had terrible timing. Not only did it hinder my ability to write to you, but it also came during the first full week of teaching of the year. I have taken on two extra classes this year to support our more expensive lifestyle (our roommates are moving out this month, and our daughter recently moved in, and immediately began demanding “food,” “clothing,” and “medical care.” ) The new classes are on top of decisions I’ve made recently to improve my existing syllabi. Honestly, it’s been time to upend my Journalism course for a few years, but I’ve put it off, squeezing all I could out of topics and articles that were relevant in 2017. That may not seem like it was that long ago, but in Journalism world, it’s an eon. Basically, my point is that the week was straining ALREADY. I’m starting to see clearly how difficult the coming months are going to be for me.

And that’s OK. It’s an opportunity to lean into the “enough” of “good enough.” In fact, when things get overwhelming like this, it can be a great time to decide to do a bad job at certain tasks. One of the most liberating things I’ve ever done for myself is occasionally choose to be the exact opposite of a perfectionist.

For example: I’ll be bad at meditating. “Bad meditating” means I show up to my big red chair, I set a timer for four minutes (a terrible, short amount of time!), I close my eyes and think about my breath, sort of, but also let my mind wander if it feels like wandering. The goal is to put a check-mark next to “meditate.” That’s all.

Or I’ll do some bad writing, or make some bad art. Bad writing is when I sit down with a pen and a notebook (maybe a bad notebook, that I don’t have respect for, like a free one from a conference) and let the pen move me forward. Sometimes I intentionally write cliches. As many cliches as I can. A good starting sentence for me is, “Marianne wasn’t sure what she wanted to wear to the dance.” I’m just looking for something that will let me write, for a short amount of time, and have a nice time.

A bad journal entry: sit at the table, let your mind wander, write down words, numbers, and lists as they come to you. Don’t worry about cohesion or sentences. Make long to-do lists. Check things off; scribble. Write things that you’re feeling anxious about. Don’t finish your thoughts if it doesn’t feel fun. 

A bad workout: Dress for a run, but have a walk instead. YouTube “10 minute yoga video” and do yoga while wearing your regular clothes, without a mat. Do 20 squats in the kitchen. Check it off the list. 

A bad salad: buy it in a bag with everything pre-cut for you. A bad smoothie: whatever is frozen in the freezer, plus water. (Not, like, meat; you get it.) Bad reading: set a timer, scan the pages, get the gist, don’t get deep. A bad email: “Dear Friend, I got your email, I’m thinking about you. I’m slammed right now, but you’re on my mind. I have every intention of sending more soon. Here’s a picture of my cat. Please send one of yours! Love, Friend.” 

The epitome of this, for me, is to take a bad bath. Keep in mind that I am the kind of person who LOVES a bath. Not everyone does. No need to take a bad bath if you hate a bath; if you hate a bath, you don’t need to put “bath” on your list of things to do. But I LOVE a bath, and the internet has me believing that there is a right way to have one. If you want to max out its self-care possibilities, you should give yourself loooooottttttts of time. A whole evening, if you can spare it. Scrub the tub. Gather all the samples you were ever mailed from Sephora, and an impossibly expensive bath bomb from Lush that you’ve been saving. Light candles. Pour wine. Have a bamboo tray that straddles the tub so you can put your phone out and a novel you’ve been meaning to devour. (It has to be the kind of novel you do not merely read.) Then you slip into the bath, and all the good smells surround you, and you call it a ritual, and it changes your life. Or at least your night.

I do not have time for this bath.

I cannot find a picture of a nice bath. I can only find this picture of when we bought our house and I had to power-scrape gunk off our tub. But I feel proud that I did that, so here’s that picture.

Late in my pregnancy, when I was miserable all the time but could not drink, or smoke, or eat sugar, I discovered what it was to “take a bad bath,” and now I do it all the time. A bad bath is: fill the tub with hot water, get into it. Don’t even wash your hair. Don’t clean the bathtub. Don’t worry too much about how grimy the tiles are, or what else you have to do, because this isn’t about that. This is just, be in hot water for a little bit. And then it’s over, and you can go back to the thing you were doing. A bad bath is about 20 minutes long, and it can turn the whole day around. (Especially if you have time to couple it with a bad-getting-dressed, which is where you DON’T get dressed, but get in your bed naked and let yourself dry off while listening to a song you like.) No one has to know you’re taking a bad bath, because it’s not unreasonable to be in the bathroom for 20 minutes, and no one is going to ask.

Something I forget a lot, because we are culturally obsessed with perfectionism, is that very often doing a bad job at something is the same as doing a good job at something. Just showing up and doing the thing, no matter how feebly and terribly you do it, is more than most people are going to do. And there’s another benefit to declaring that you plan to be doing a bad job at something: it takes the pressure off the thing. Sometimes when I go out for my run and decide to do a bad job, and so I walk instead, I find that 15 minutes in, I’m ready to do a little running after all. The nothing-story about Marianne’s dance reminds me of how much I’ve been enjoying yellow and violet together in nature, and I get an idea for an essay about symbiotic plant relationships. Without the pressure to be good, surprises bloom.

When I come to work and I haven’t done everything I wish I could have done before I am ready to teach, I try to be transparent with my students. It might go like this: “I feel happy to see you today, and I’m really grateful you are here too. I want to be truthful and tell you that I am not as prepared for class as I’d like to be. I’m sorry. I’m hoping we can work together to make sure this time we have together isn’t wasted.” And then I focus on being present for the three hours I have with them. This isn’t the same as doing a bad job. But it requires that I get honest with myself and with other people about how I’m showing up, and sometimes that requires me to say to myself, “OK, self, you’re going to show up, even if it’s not the way you wanted to.”

I hope you can find little ways to liberate yourself into doing a bad job at some things when stuff becomes too heavy and too much. It can be a secret you keep with yourself; you can allow it to tickle you. “Oh, I ‘did yoga’ today. Yes, I did.”

Love,

Sophie

Parenting Paragraph

T also has COVID. Luke took her to Urgent Care to get a PCR test. Annoyingly, it’s the first time in literal months that she doesn’t seem sick at all; no boogers, no fussiness, no fever. But she has COVID, and I have COVID, and the main thing I feel (which I’ve read is normal) is shame. I ached to have to text her daycare and tell them that she had tested positive, because now the daycare is going to have to close for the rest of the week, and that is our fault. By “our fault,” of course I mean, MY fault. I think about all the things I could have and should have done differently, and all the ways I failed this baby and the people around her by probably not being cautious enough. T and I are the first people to get COVID in our house — we had been a house of six publicly-employed COVID-free humans until yesterday. I feel guilty, too, for breaking the streak. Luke has to stay home all week (though he is testing negative) to watch T and take care of me. This is something that’s hard about partnership, is it isn’t exact reciprocity. So much of it is gathering the available resources you have, looking at them in a pile, and deciding how to use them, even if it means one person has to give more than the other person. This week, Luke has to give more than I do. As a person socialized female, I would be much more comfortable if the tables were turned. But this is how it is; this is what is required. T has been watching gobs of “Sesame Street” because that’s kind of all I have in me to do, is put “Sesame Street” on. // In other news, T is saying “Mama” in a way that feels LIKE A WORD. I’d always assumed it would be obvious when a baby was saying their first word, but it isn’t. T says real words all the time, but it’s impossible to know if she knows what she’s saying. I feel fairly confident that she knows how to say (and how to mean) “mama,” “dada,” and “dog.” (She says “Doc,” which is the name of the dog we live with, but I think no one will notice but us.) When she looks in my eyes and says “mama” I feel a BIG FEELING. Too sick to describe it. But it’s big.

This Week In Sophie

Shirts and prints of “Don’t Be A Good Person” are in! I just need to inventory them and put them on my website. You can count on those links being live (with a discount code) next week! Stay tuned! (Here’s a teaser.)