On garbage soup
I had "one of those days" when it felt like my mind was full of garbage soup and gremlins spewing out garbage thoughts.
Wednesday, February 21, 2024
I’ve been writing and re-writing this month’s post for weeks. It started off as a roundup of my favourite books that I read in 2023. Then it morphed into a review of just one of the books on that list. I was hoping to wrap up that review tonight. Tick. Another item checked off the infinite to-do list. But today that review feels suddenly pointless. What’s the point of putting my opinion about a book out into the world? What’s the point of blogging at all? Maybe I should just pack it in.
In fact, all day I’ve felt like there’s a garbage soup stewing away in my brain. It’s a familiar feeling. One that seems to bubble up every now and then. Sometimes for no apparent reason. Sometimes I can guess at the reasons. Today I can point to the fact that I didn’t get a great night’s sleep last night. I went to bed half an hour later than I normally would and got woken up by the baby crying at 5:30 a.m. All morning I craved caffeine with an intensity I don’t normally crave it. I could tell it was going to be a long day.
I can also point to the fact that I looked at the news while I was eating my breakfast. Goodness me, the news. What a horror show. I won’t repeat what I saw there. You can look for yourself, or not. I go days without looking and then I do, because I feel like bearing witness to it all is the very least I can do. But I can feel the hope draining out of me with each article I read. As I read, my daughters played with Duplo on the floor, and C disturbed my reading from time to time to show me her latest creation.
I can also point to the fact that it is a Wednesday, my one full day with both kids, and so Wednesdays are always exhausting.
After breakfast, as I stood at the sink, washing something or other, and looked out the window, I found myself grasping for something. Some sense that everything is going to be okay, that my children will be okay, and that we aren’t all doomed. Then I paused for a moment, took a little breath, and told myself: Actually, it’s okay to feel this way, you’re allowed to feel stressed and anxious and like your stomach is in knots. It’s a perfectly reasonable response to the current state of the world. This thought didn’t untangle the knot in my stomach, but it made it a little easier to bear.
It’s not always immediately obvious to me that I’m having one of those days. Today, it took me until mid-morning to fully realize what was happening. There are little gremlins that like to pop up out of the garbage soup and spew out garbage thoughts for me to think. They’re sneaky and subtle, preying on my insecurities. As I sat with J at the playgroup we go to on Wednesdays and watched the other mothers with their children, the gremlins of comparison chimed in.
Oh gosh, C just completely ignored that other mum when she said hello. She’s going to think you’re a terrible mother.
That mother breastfeeding her two-year-old is a better mother than you because she didn’t give up on breastfeeding after just three days.
She hasn’t failed as a mother because she clearly still has her pre-baby body.
And then it clicked for me. Oh, right, the garbage gremlins are back. None of those thoughts are true. Of course the world feels like a terrible place. Everything was bound to feel terrible. I thought of a line from a song by Jo Rose1 called Mary’s Dress: “My mind chewed ’em up like a dirty old machine.” That was my brain today: a dirty old machine, chewing everything up.
The book I was going to post a review of is called Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic and What We Can Do About It and it’s by Jennifer Wallace. Never Enough is about the ways in which children, particularly once they reach high school, are pushed to achieve good grades, as well as participate in extracurricular activities and volunteer—all so they can get into a good college. This achievement culture has a profound impact on children’s and teenagers’ mental and physical health. One young woman who Wallace interviewed describes doing track practice with her eyes closed because she was so tired from staying up late to study. The central theme of the book resonated with me because I also pushed myself to get good grades in high school, and I would sometimes stay up late or wake up early to study.
In one of the chapters of Never Enough, Wallace writes about countering this achievement culture by encouraging children and teenagers to add value to the world. Instead of focusing exclusively on what they can do to further their own educational and career goals, Wallace argues, young people could have more external, community-oriented goals, benefiting themselves and their communities. Wallace gives the example of Andrew, who started volunteering with his local ground search and rescue while in high school. The experience of recovering the body of a young man who had died by suicide led Andrew to volunteer with a teen crisis helpline, which in turn led him to set up a student support group at his school. Beyond simply being fodder for his resumé and college applications, these experiences gave Andrew, Wallace argues, a sense of competency and of mattering, to his classmates and to his community. This sense of mattering, in turn, has a huge impact on a person’s mental health.
I’ve thought about this chapter ever since reading it because it made me realize both how internally focused my goals have always been (get good grades, get into a good university, get x, y, z job, have a resumé that looks a certain way), and how my efforts to improve my mental health have mostly focused inward. Of course, things like getting a good night’s sleep, nourishing myself, and getting outside are important. Self-care is important. But I’ve wondered if I should look beyond myself. I thought about this as we walked home from the playgroup. I noticed how much trash there was on the side of the road and I thought, I should bring a trash grabber and garbage bag next time we come this way and pick this up.
Picking up garbage seems like an excellent way to counter the garbage-soup gremlins. Who knows if that’s something I’ll ever do. And I can’t say I’ve ended today feeling much better than I did at the beginning. Perhaps it is simply one of those days when the only answer is more sleep. But writing this down has helped. And perhaps it’s not true that my goals have always been about me. I hesitated to write this post. But as Substacker Kylie-Ann wrote recently about her own attempts at blogging honestly: “... if I wasn’t completely open and truthful I wonder what the point of it would be.”
I write because it helps me process my own life. But I put my words out there, in part, because I think there is value in sharing our experiences. There is value in saying, hey, this is what I’m feeling and going through, maybe you feel similarly, and maybe we’re not all alone in this.
While googling for the song to check I had the lyrics right, I discovered that Jo died recently. I knew Jo very briefly, a very long time ago, and he was such a sweet soul. I love his album Spurs. I listened to it on repeat when it was released, and still do quite regularly. I’ve thought, from time to time, about reaching out to him, to let him know how much I love his music. But I talked myself out of it, told myself I didn’t want to come across as a hanger on. So, maybe this is your (my) reminder to tell someone the thing.
This resonated in so many ways. “because I feel like bearing witness to it all is the very least I can do”
Now I have a visual picture of garbage gremlins in my brain and I visualize them disintegrating every time I focus my energy on anyone or anything outside of myself