asking for help

no, really

One thing I’ve realized (slash have actually been told by professionals) after plenty of therapy, is that I’m bad at asking for help. It is a common affiliation for first-borns, especially daughters. I like to give help, but I’m not great at asking for it. I definitely have some underlying control issues, but who wants to go into all that?!

But I’m going to try asking for your help here. Practice makes progress, and all of that.

I'm trying to polish up my book proposal for the book I’m writing about the benefits of living seasonally…and I’m stuck. I thought I would use you friendly newsletter subscribers to help me think through what I think. Does that make sense? I mostly have to say things out loud or write them down to figure out what I actually think.

I’m writing about how structure breeds freedom, so in the book, I argue that, when you live more in tune with nature’s rhythms, you actually experience more freedom because of the container that living seasonally provides. I think this is some kind of law of nature because you see it all over the place, right? Some examples I’ve been thinking of:

• Nature is abundant, but not without limits. Flowers don’t perpetually bloom. Trees don’t perpetually produce. Animals rest and many hibernate for a whole season. Our new puppy sleeps at least half the day.

• Parenting is all about providing some boundaries and perimeters for children to bump against so that they learn right from wrong and how to make better choices.

• Most schedules or systems often help you to have more freedom, so going to bed at a certain time every night helps you to have more energy to do the stuff you want to do or that is important to you the following day. This could be applied to pretty much all of the grandma habits - practicing them regularly helps you to be the best version of yourself the rest of the time.

• This is true in many different art forms:

  • the structure of a sonnet or haiku often sparks the poet’s creativity within the confines of the form

  • a painter’s canvas gives them boundaries within which to explore

  • an architect’s creativity depends on the confines of the space.

• This seems very obvious with something like strength training or distance running or even asana (the physical poses in yoga). A training schedule or program (i.e. the container) helps you to do more in the practice. So if you’re training for a long distance race, the training program enables you to actually finish the race versus if you didn’t stick to the schedule, you probably wouldn’t be able to complete the race without injuring yourself.

So here’s where you come in:

Have you seen/experienced this idea that some structure breeds more freedom? If so, where and how? If not, tell me more. Part of my story is that structure and even the word “discipline” used to - and still does sometimes - make me bristly, but I’ve learned that at least some of it also makes me into a better version of myself. Feel free to reply to this email or add where you see this in the comments. Thank you!

Rants and raves

👍 Indiana spring! I love all of it…the return of the birdsong, spying on the bluebird boxes, the barely budding trees, the dogwoods, the spring bulbs (even though the squirrels eat all of ours, and I finally gave up trying), the planting and planning.

👎 And because it’s an Indiana spring, it snowed a solid three-four inches at our house this week. Although the snow was really pretty, I am weirdly and intensely nervous about what it means for our little food forest and the dogwood blossoms, which I’ve been looking forward to for weeks.

👎 Work clothes. I had a virtual work event this week, so I dressed businessy up top with sweats on the bottom - and it’s just so dumb. I felt constricted and uncomfortable all day at least above the waist, and I just want us to stop with the business attire stupidity. Unless you enjoy wearing suits, then knock yourselves out.

👍 The Chauvin verdict. I think many of us let out a collective exhale we didn’t realize we’d been holding, and yet…

Be A King @BerniceKing

Oh, that George Floyd were still alive. But I’m thankful for accountability. The work continues. Justice is a continuum. And America must bend with the moral arc of the universe, which bends toward justice.

👎 I feel like I’ve been up against the pandemic wall since I wrote about it. Anybody else? I want a sabbatical. I want us all to agree to just hit stop on everything except leisure and rest for at least 30 days once school gets out for the summer. I realize this would never happen, but a girl can dream.

Stuff worth sharing this week

1. One thing I shared in the comments of this post is how wrong I’ve been about policing and how much I’ve learned from POC in the last year or so. I thought this was a great recap/education that synthesizes much of what I’ve been learning since George Floyd’s murder last year.

2. I felt a little attacked by AHP’s newsletter last week, especially this part:

The manager’s crisis refrain of “feel free to take some time, if you need it” is fundamentally a sorting question: are you someone who needs it or are you someone who can ignore that you do?

If you work for yourself in whatever capacity, you get the same question, only it’s coming from inside your brain. Are you a person who needs it, or are you a hustler who prides themselves on getting things done? Are you a person who needs it, or do you recognize times as crisis as a moment to distinguish yourself? Are you a person who needs rest and reprieve, or are have you wholly internalized the worst manager in the world and allowed them to shade every hour of your day?

I swear that 56 percent of my therapy sessions could be boiled down to defining myself by what I do/accomplish versus my innate self-worth. AHP seems to be in a similar boat. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it, but we are so culturally seeped the hustle mentality and the myth of meritocracy that it will probably take my whole life to unwind it.

3. The Pantsuit Politics ladies talk a lot about the care economy, but I had never really connected that so much of the care economy should come to mind when we think of infrastructure until this op-ed, which I wish I could assign to every congressperson to read, but in the meantime, I’m assigning it to you because it doesn’t take much imagination to see how care is integral to our economic infrastructure:

It makes sense that men with wives at home to take on the 16-hour-a-day care responsibilities involved in raising children, supporting aged parents or otherwise tending to the sick, those with disabilities and the vulnerable would need roads and bridges to grease the wheels of commerce and allow them access to their desks and deals. But let’s imagine — it’s not that hard — a scenario in which those same men didn’t have wives at home and yet still wanted to have children, or to ensure that their own parents received love and support in their final years. In that case, they, too, might just find that care facilities were themselves just as “essential” to their ability to do paid work.

I’m wondering too if we collectively start to see care as infrastructure, how that might impact our addiction to hustle and our collective difficulty in asking for help - because I know it’s not just me!

Seasonal view of the week

The snow was very pretty.

Cheers to asking for help in the week ahead!

Sara

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