Soles flat on the spongy mat, energy rising through the backs of my legs, up my spine to my head. I’m not there, trying not to be, trying not to be in my head but my body. Deep breath to a count of three, closed throat, an ocean of air rushing into my lungs, raise my arms, face to the ceiling. Smoothly out, one-two-three, fold forward, palms to the mat. Breathe in, to fingertips, look up. My desk beneath the window, my succulent garden and laptop, the screen a single flat reflection of blackness.
Am I a bad person for having everything I really wanted from life, and being unhappy?
I know I’m not alone. After the pandemic, and resulting social disconnect and economic crisis, very few people are as happy as they would like to be right now (A quick internet search revealed over 40 articles relating to happiness before and during the pandemic. Obviously, it’s something a lot of people are concerned about). In fact, the depression rate in the United States tripled due to Covid-19, according to LoudCloudHealth.com1, which probably surprises nobody. The innocent assumption that death only comes to the very old or very stupid (or unlucky), and that following the guidelines for healthy living will offer a measure of assurance of longevity, has been torn away from the majority of the global population within the last two years. I know what that feels like. It feels like diving to the bottom of the ocean and having your air tank malfunction. You won’t know if you have enough oxygen in your body to reach the surface until you either do, or you don’t. I think I’ve been slowly rising towards the surface for years now.
In her book, The Gifts of Imperfection, shame researcher Brené Brown, Ph.D., defines a scarcity mindset as one major barrier to living a wholehearted life (which is her term for lasting happiness). Dr. Brown states that,
Over the past decade, I’ve witnessed major shifts in the zeitgeist of our country. I’ve seen it in the data, and honestly, I’ve seen it in the faces of the people I meet, interview, and talk to. The world has never been an easy place, but the past decade has been traumatic for so many people that it’s made changes in our culture. From 9/11, multiple wars, and the recession, to catastrophic natural disasters and the increase in random violence and school shootings, we’ve survived and are surviving events that have torn at our sense of safety with such force that we’ve experienced them as trauma even if we weren’t directly involved. And when it comes to the staggering numbers of those now unemployed and under-employed, I think every single one of us has been directly affected or is close to someone who has been directly affected2.
She wrote that in 2010, a decade before the pandemic. It’s even more true now that nearly everyone has lost a loved one to Covid-19, knows someone who has, or has otherwise been deeply affected by the pandemic. We are a country, and a world, of traumatized people, and it shows in the way we tend to hoard our resources, explode in anger at people who make us feel less safe than we already do, stress over finances, glance obsessively at our watches as though we can save time by counting minutes, and put up more barriers in relationships instead of reaching out. It shows in how I do those things. My lungs are burning: not enough.
Brené Brown continues:
Scarcity thrives in a culture where everyone is hyperaware of lack. Everything from safety and love to money and resources feels restricted or lacking. We spend inordinate amounts of time calculating how much we have, want, and don’t have, and how much everyone else has, needs, and wants. The greatest casualties of a scarcity culture are our willingness to own our vulnerabilities and our ability to engage with the world from a place of worthiness.
Never. Enough.
I have never had enough money available to make me feel financially secure, and the recession is pushing that anxiety button with a fury.
I have never felt safe in my own body, even around people I think I should be able to trust, and Trump’s election and the pushback against #MeToo has aggravated that predisposition to distrustfulness more than I feel comfortable admitting.
I have been blessed with a multitude of friends, many of whom make me feel genuinely seen and appreciated for who I really am, but I still find myself choosing the fake smile instead of the real frown because I’m just so much more comfortable letting someone else be vulnerable with me than actually being vulnerable myself.
I value generosity in theory, but when it comes right down to it, sharing is hella hard when I already feel like my own kids are unable to have everything I want to provide them with; even though I know that they are well fed and well cared for and happy, and I don’t even believe in always giving them everything they want anyway.
I am never happier than when I am oblivious to the passage of time, especially while absorbing sunshine and the vibrancy of green growing things, and yet I worry constantly over how many years I have left to “make something of myself.”
I’m not crazy, according to Brené Brown, I’m traumatized. “Worrying about scarcity is our culture’s version of post-traumatic stress.” Wow. That’s both comforting…and awful. Where are we to go from here?
Is there still a way to be happy, even in this culture of fake news and real school shootings?
Deep breath. Sometimes I think desperation is a good thing. I’m just really, really tired of being unhappy. So, I’ve decided on an experiment. For the next year I’m going to make one small life change per month and just see if it makes a difference in my ability to enjoy life. This is also scary for me, because I hate change. (No, really. I hate change. Like, moving furniture around in the house, or leaving for an overnight stay somewhere I’ve been literally countless times before, triggers an anxiety response in me.) But, there’s this idea I have, the possibility that I could actually live my best life in my 30s, that keeps nagging at me, kind of like the smell of fresh brewed coffee in a distant room on a cold morning. I just keep stumbling towards it and hoping.
It started the same year as the pandemic, with my best friend and a very dangerous book that she first fell in love with and then became an evangelist for. The book was Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, and if you’ve read it you know why I say it’s dangerous. It turned my life upside down, and it was about damn time. If I could trim Glennon’s work down to a single sentence it would be this:
The most wildly beautiful thing a woman (or anyone, really) can do is to learn how to live, not by what she has been told is true, but by what she knows to be true.
That, my friends, is a very dangerous—and wonderfully contagious—idea. Once you start living by your Knowing, reacting not to outside influences but to your own internal system of flooding warmth for yes and creeping cold for no, it is impossible to ever again submit to cultural conditioning of “place” and “worth” without feeling the wrongness of it all like a full-body scream. As I began to feel out this new Knowing I was growing into, I kept circling back to one particular section of the book in which Glennon discusses the importance of imagination. As a lifelong storyteller, imagination is a vital part of my existence. I simply cannot flourish, or even function very well, without it; I have known this about myself for a very long time. What I had not considered until reading Untamed was that I could also use my imagination to consult my inner self about the kind of life that I wanted to live. I read:
Each of us was born to bring forth something that has never existed: a way of being, a family, an idea, art, a community—something brand-new. We are here to fully introduce ourselves, to impose ourselves and ideas and thoughts and dreams onto the world, leaving it changed forever by who we are and what we bring forth from our depths3.
and I thought, yes! That’s it!
Then I read:
My job is to listen deeply to women. What many of them tell me is that they harbor and achy, heavy hunch that their lives, relationships, and world were meant to be more beautiful than they are…Discontent is evidence that your imagination has not given up on you. It is still pressing, swelling, trying to get your attention by whispering: “Not this.”
Sob. Yes, that’s me! I feel heavy and achy. There has got to be a better life out there than the one I am living.
And yet…I love my life. I love my husband and my kids. I love our house and our yard and my garden. I love our cats and rabbits. I love our families and our friends. I love that I get to homeschool our daughters and write and do both without leaving the house or even putting on a bra. It’s just that I have lived my life up until recently according to a blueprint that I was given as a very young girl. The blueprint was this:
Follow God’s plan for your life by being a good, obedient daughter. If you do this you will be blessed with a husband and he will make you happy.
Follow God’s plan for your life by molding yourself to your husband, existing only to serve him and make him happy. Then you, too, will be happy.
Follow God’s plan for your life by having children as soon as possible and instructing them to follow God’s plan for their lives. Then you—and they—will be happy.
I did all of that. I followed all the rules. I was so damn good. And instead of being rewarded with the perfectly happy clouds-and-haloes life I was promised, I got hit with one life-wallop after another in a short span of years. At some point I lifted my bruised and dizzy head up out of the proverbial mud and I was like, seriously? I sacrificed my teenage-wild-oats years for THIS SHIT?
I think that’s when my imagination kicked in.
“Language is my favorite tool,” Glennon writes, “so I use it to help people build a bridge between what’s in front of them and what’s inside them. I have learned that if we want to hear the voice of imagination, we must speak to it in the language it understands.”
That language, Glennon believes, is story. When women write to her asking for advice on fixing their achy, heavy lives, Glennon responds with a terribly simple and straightforward question:
What is the truest, most beautiful life you can imagine?
Uh………………..
I am a storyteller by nature, but one story I have never been able to tell is my own, as it could be.
Imagination is dangerous, because it springs from the well of our Knowing, and once we Know something we can never unKnow it and we’ll never be satisfied with less. I was immediately afraid of what my imagination might conjure up and what ways I might be compelled to change in order to accommodate that knowledge (because, remember, my anxiety about change). It took the entire pandemic (two years of me being even more heavy and achy than usual) to find the courage to imagine my story of a truly beautiful life. It turns out that it looks a lot like my life now, just more deliberate. Thus: the Year of Small Changes experiment.
Thus: yoga.
It is now August, which means the beginning of the school year. In just a few weeks my husband will be sucked back into the whirlpool of university professorship, not to resurface until fall break in October. At the same time, the girls and I will be starting our school year and preparing for our very first semester as part of a homeschool co-op. During the school year we are hard put to even find time to breathe, so that is my first challenge. Every day I will spend at least 15 minutes practicing breathing deeply through yoga. Even if I have to get up a quarter of an hour earlier to do it, or go to bed a quarter of an hour later (if it’s after midnight, does that still count for the day?). Even if I’m on my period and cramping and can’t do the poses that require me to fold in half because my abdomen has turned into a bloated sponge full of misery…I’ll do a less intensive flow, but I’ll do something.
I’ll do it because I can imagine myself, a year from now, living my best life no matter what circumstances I find myself in. I can imagine a freer, more vibrant version of me, someone who laughs and cries a whole lot more easily, with other people and alone. I can imagine myself moving through life with grace and purpose, like a goddamn cheetah4.
Am I happy?
Maybe not yet, but I’m working on it. I have all the time, money, safety, love, and resources I need to live my best life, right here and right now. I Know it.
That is enough.
https://loudcloudhealth.com/resources/depression-statistics/
Brown, Brené. The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are. United States, Hazelden Publishing, 2010.
Doyle, Glennon. Untamed. The Dial Press, New York. 2020.
This is an Untamed reference. If you didn’t get it, read the book. It’s worth the risk.