When to push, when to pivot, when to coast, when to quit
When to push, when to pivot, when to coast, when to quit
living in the flow of an ever-changing self
Wild Letters is a newsletter about self-exploration and building a right-fit life.
Thank you for being here with me!
COAST
The pollen arrived in the third week of April, bringing with it a much worse allergy response than any I have ever experienced. Itchy eyes, runny nose, scratchy throat—those are the spring allergy symptoms I usually expect. The debilitating fatigue though, that was new. And brain fog so thick I could not see my way through it.
Here is what my Google search history looked like that week:
Can flowers actually kill you
No really, can they????
Mercury Retrograde sinuses
Sinus removal
What is a sinus
Neti pot legit?
Rub eyes too hard, blindness?
Allergy med overdose
End of spring exact date countdown app
And so it was that by noon each day during the third week of April (1pm at the very latest), I gave up and got back in bed. I was just so tired. More tired than when I had covid, more tired than when I hike 20+ miles per day, the kind of tired where even getting up to pee feels like it should earn me an Olympic medal.
I couldn’t believe how much rest I needed that week, but because I am practicing a new thing this year wherein I do not shame myself when my body wants more rest than I think it “should” need, I instead did whatever I could to meet those needs. I cancelled whatever I could cancel. I told my closest people that I’d probably be less responsive than usual. I pushed every non-urgent item off my to-do list. My brain was too foggy to do deep creative work, so I did not do deep creative work. Instead I did the bare minimum—just enough to get by, in every area of my life, but no more.
It was a week of coasting, of trying different allergy meds until I found one that (mostly) worked. It was a week of proclaiming—loudly and in what I hoped was a posh Victorian-era British accent—that I was “taking to my bed” even though it was only noon because “the very air I breathe has become much too much to handle, daaaarling.”
Victorian role play aside, of course it was logistically easier to give myself the rest I needed that week because I am self-employed and child-free, and because I live with a partner who could take on extra housework and puppy care until I felt better. And also: there have been many times throughout my life when the circumstances were such that I could rest, and yet I did not rest, mostly because resting ‘too much’ (what does that even mean!) felt like some kind of moral failing. (Wow, capitalism and ableism have really done their jobs, huh?)
But the inarguable truth is that some weeks we need to coast, to do nothing above the truly obligatory minimum. Sometimes those coasting weeks are actually months or even years, and the reason is not seasonal allergies but depression, illness, grief, trauma.
Our bodies need what they need. Our minds need what they need. Our hearts need what they need. These needs change over time. Changing needs are not a problem. We are allowed to rest.
QUIT
Last summer I set a much-needed boundary with myself: I would not buy any more online classes or workshops, not until I completed all of the ones that were already languishing, half finished, in a folder on my laptop.
I will tell you right now that I did not like this boundary. This boundary did not feel fun. You know what’s fun? The thrill of buying a new thing. The little adrenaline buzz of enrolling in yet another class that promised to somehow change my life.
I opened the folder on my laptop and counted: seven classes. There were seven classes in there that I had paid for and not completed. This knocked me right into a shame spiral; why was I spending my money on things and then not actually using those things? Shouldn’t I know better? What is wrong with me?
A quick aside:
One of the best decisions I’ve made in recent years is the decision to see any question of “what’s wrong with me” as an immediate flag to get curious—a shining beacon that alerts me of the need to stop, step back, and look more deeply (more logically, more objectively) at what might be going on. Because nothing is wrong with me, but there are indeed entire industries and oppressive systems that benefit (profit!) when I constantly believe that I am the problem.
So okay, there were seven classes I had paid for and not completed—a pattern that I can see repeated over and over throughout my past. Seven classes now, but many more in the last decade. Why might that be? No really: why?
I opened a blank Google doc and spent the next three hours doing perhaps the most Virgo rising thing I have ever done, creating a spreadsheet that evaluated each of the seven unfinished classes against a series of questions.
Question 1: What were you hoping would be different (better) about you after completing this class? Question 2: What problem were you hoping this class would solve? Question 3: Was the promised outcome of this class something you actually wanted, or was it just something you thought you should want? Question 4: Did the marketing language on the sales page push any pain points or manipulate you into a false sense of urgency? Question 5: Does this class represent something you used to be interested in but no longer care about? Question 6: What did you like/not like about the class itself? Question 7: Is there something in the unfinished materials that you still want to learn? Question 8: If you fully loved and accepted yourself as you are, would you want to go back in and finish this class?
The answers to these questions helped me to create a decision-making rubric for what came next, and I decided to finish two of the classes and quit the other five. That act of quitting was such a relief!
Why do we demonize quitting? Intentional quitting is a beautiful form of completion. Saying: I thought this thing was a good choice but in reality it is not, or: This thing used to feel correct for me but no longer does, that is the language of evolution, of self-trust, of real-time love.
The edict is often to finish what you started, no matter what. But this obsession with completion ignores the nuance that not everything we start is something worth finishing.
You do not have to eat every morsel on your plate if you are already satisfied. Just because you’re 60 pages into a book doesn’t mean you need to keep reading. Getting married doesn’t mean you need to stay married. Sometimes quitting is the kindest thing we can do for ourselves.
PIVOT
Today was supposed to be my final day on social media. Instead, today is a celebration of the fact that we are allowed to change our minds.
The truest thing I can say about why I am delaying my exit from social media is that I did not know what I did not know.
More specifically, when I decided to quit social media earlier this year my book hadn’t yet been published, which meant I did not yet know how much I would enjoy connecting with readers on Instagram. I did not yet know the small pings of joy I would feel each time someone shared a photo of my book — real actual people holding my real actual book in their real actual hands! People who were reading the book in the park or in a hammock or while curled up next to their adorable pets.
I found your book on Instagram, readers kept saying to me. I’m enjoying it so much!
The more these messages popped up, the more uncertain I began to feel. All of the reasons why I initially wanted to quit social media still felt as true as ever, only now social media was giving me something I had never had before: a concrete, pleasurable, practical reason to stay.
What do we owe to our art? That’s a question I’ve spent the past few weeks exploring in my journal. Is it possible that our art, our writing, our goals, that these things have their own needs, needs that might feel different from our own?
I find this question fascinating, especially when I think of how much effort and care I’ve put into my two books—the one that just came out and the one that will be published in September. What do I owe to these books? The answer to this will likely change over time, but right now I feel like what I owe my books is to not abandon them, and for whatever reason that’s how I would feel if I left Instagram today, as if I were abandoning my sweet books.
So now I get to experience what it’s like to sit in the tension of two seemingly contradictory truths: that I will quit social media at some point, but that I will not quit today. This feels correct, even as it also feels itchy to “go back” on a previous decision. But I am not beholden to any former version of myself, nor to any of my earlier decisions. I am always allowed to pivot. Part of being human is the gift of living in the flow of an ever-changing self.
PUSH
By this time next week I’ll be hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail.
I was able to arrange my schedule for May to make space for 21 days of hiking, and so later this week I will fly to San Diego, get dropped off at the trail’s Southern Terminus, and start hiking north.
My approach for this particular hike is one I have never tried before. It feels a bit scary to name my intention now (because the possibility for failure seems so high), but here it is: I want to find out just how far I can go. On a hike with no pre-determined geographic end point, how many miles can I cover in 21 days if I really, really push?
Instead of setting up camp around 6pm each day like I usually do, what if I hiked until 7pm, 8pm, later? What if I hiked in the dark? Started hiking at 5am instead of 7am? What if I took fewer breaks throughout the day? Spent much less time in each resupply town? How far could my legs carry me if I did not hold myself back in any way?
The grittiness of this style of hiking has always intrigued me, in much the same way I used to devour memoirs about ultra-endurance running back when I was a runner myself. Not because things need to be extra hard in order to be worth it (they don’t) or because there’s some kind of glory in suffering (there isn’t), but simply because I want to know what that kind of effort feels like. When I am tired and want to stop but choose not to stop, what happens? What might I find in that uncharted space?
As of now, the farthest I have hiked in the first 21 days of a long-distance trek is 393 miles. So that’s the number to beat: 393 miles.
I will tell you right now that this feels like a truly unhinged plan. My current fitness level can best be described as: meh? I haven’t done a hike longer than six miles since last summer. It’s going to be 30+ degrees hotter than I’m used to. Carrying tons of water in the dry dry desert makes your pack so heavy. Plus: there’s still a decent amount of snow in some of the higher elevation spots, and I really dislike hiking in the snow.
And yet, I still want to try.
Knowing I want to try feels like enough of a reason to start. If trying leads to failure, that is okay. I have failed so many things. I have quit so many things. I have succeeded at so many things, too. And in all of those outcomes—the failing, the quitting, the succeeding—the only consistently true lesson I’ve learned is that the trying is what heals you.
The trying is what heals you.
And that is all I need to know in order to go forward and see what happens next.
**
More soon—
Nic