The Prisoner
How an unexpectedly profound passage has rocked me to my core.
I had this week’s blog post in mind all last weekend. Jennifer and I were (successfully) shame cleaning our apartment all weekend, so I didn’t have the time to sit down and write it then. My plan was to bang it out first thing on Monday, and then I could spend all week doing other things and not worry about the blog. Or I could write two posts—imagine that!
Monday came and I typed a few sentences, erased them, typed some more, and then erased them. This went on for some time. I saved the draft and went on to the other items on my to-do list. The mojo I had for that blog post last weekend had disappeared.
I need this pin!
I tried again on Tuesday. Same result. A big ol’ meh.
This is “Le Royal Meh” by 38 Sunsets
On Wednesday I actually wrote a decent amount without erasing it. A working first draft. A “working first draft” being a euphemism for a steaming pile of crap that I eventually erased. I did this a couple of times on Wednesday. Eventually a half baked first draft coalesced; one that I was going to finish on Thursday. Later. Always later.
You said it, brother.
On Thursday I whittled away at my to-do list, avoiding writing the blog post until later in the day. One of the things on my list was to read my book for one hour. I have been trying to read it for about a week and half with middling results. I am having a hard time staying awake when I sleep or watch television—undoubtedly my sleep apnea is the culprit. I need to make sure that my CPAP settings are up-to-date, get a new mask etc., but with the pandemic, the sleep specialist offices I have tried to contact remain closed—even as my primary care physician’s office has started opening up with special protocols. So reading time is often just fitful naptime. I set a timer for one hour and one minute, locked my phone up in the Kitchen Safe for an hour. I did this so I wouldn’t be tempted to doomscroll instead of read. I got in the easy chair with my Kindle and promptly fell asleep for a few minutes. I read along for a bit. Fell asleep some more. Read some. Slept some. Several cycles of this. Finally I woke up nice and refreshed from my many micro-naps, and started to read in earnest. I was making headway when a sentence just floored me. It was this:
“Avoidance is a prison. It’s a trap. It shrinks and restricts your life.”
The Binge Code by Allison C. Kerr
This is not an endorsement of this book; I have a reason to show you the cover.
This was way more profundity than I was expecting from a book with a sprinkled donut on its cover. Nonetheless, it is profound. At least it is to me.
And this guy is giving her a good think as well.
If you ask anyone in my real life, I am notoriously avoidant. Honestly, if you have read this newsletter for any length of time, you will also know that I am notoriously avoidant. I only have two modes in life:
Get excited about something and overcommit, knowing that I will avoid following through in the future. This blog is born of this impulse.
The catchphrase: “Sounds great!”
Take an immediate ‘wait and see’, noncommittal stance about anything that does not elicit initial excitement. Expend a large amount of time and energy avoiding these things until an external stimulus forces me to. This is where I spend the majority of my life.
The catchphrase: “I’ll think about it.”
Tom Reagan, the patron saint of avoidant bastards in the corner. His catchphrase: “I’ll think about it.”
A huge amount of the time I spend in therapy and in my constant ruminations are focused on why I am so avoidant, why I cannot just do things when they first appear. Why must everything be a crisis or an ordeal? Why can I not just, for instance, keep the apartment clean? Just do a bit of cleaning every day? And a deeper clean every week? A little deeper one every month? Wouldn’t that be better than having to spend hours and hours cleaning the whole thing at once after it’s a veritable shitshow? And to me the answer has always been an emphatic, NO!
To me, maintenance has always been a prison. Schedules are prisons. Monitoring my blood sugar is a prison. Discipline of any sort is a prison. I cannot be forced to do anything!
Better to wing it, play it by ear, wait until tomorrow, do it later, etc. Avoid at all costs. Whatever you do, avoid. Like a dalek programmed not to exterminate, but to avoid.
Avoid! Avoid!
We obey no one, we are the most equivocal beings!
I have always thought of myself as a profoundly lazy person. Cellularly lazy. Like my mitochondria are kind of moribund. Playing sports, I was a disinterested grass puller. I have no hobbies or interests outside of reading, and I think that I became an avid reader for the license to sit in a comfortable chair uninterrupted that it afforded me. Years of therapy have almost convinced me that I am not irredeemably lazy, but that I became avoidant as a means to protect myself. As a person with mental illness, I have many coping strategies to protect myself and avoidance is just one of them. Avoidance has been talked about as a once-helpful, but now maladaptive strategy by more than one of my therapists.
But I have never heard avoidance referred to as a prison. But it so clearly is. I expend so much energy planning my escape, shouting to be let out, pacing my cell, and shaking my bars. Energy I could use to improve my life, accomplish new things, fight for justice for others, etc.
A few years ago one of my old friends lost her father to a combination of dementia and alcoholism. And one of the things I remember her saying was that in his final days his world had become very small. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about what she said. I think about how my own life has shrunk with mental and physical health problems and how financial problems once made my life so small. And now I think about how Coronavirus has shrunk and restricted all of our lives.
“Avoidance. . . It shrinks and restricts your life.”
The last thing I want to do is cede more of my life’s territory to a construct of my own mind’s devising. The saddest part of this is that the key to this prison is sitting in the lock, just waiting for me to turn it. I don’t have to escape. I can just leave.
So why won’t I? Because I am afraid that once I get out of my cell, I won’t be able to really leave. There will be some loophole that says I have to stay, some paperwork I filled out incorrectly, some reason why I won’t be allowed to leave. Better to remain avoidant and not have the pain of having this freedom taken away. Right?
Right?
I don’t think that it is right, and I’m going to plan my orderly exit. Next week I’m talking with my therapist about this very concept, and about how I can give myself permission to leave the prison of avoidance. Permission that no guard or warden can revoke. Bulletproof, legal, and airtight permission. Wish me luck.
Small announcement:
I am taking next week off from the newsletter. I might post the draft I was working on before I dropped it to do this post, but probably not. I plan to sleep until I wake up on my own (or the cats wake me). Do some non-blog related writing. And hit the outdoors. I’ve got an urge to put on a mask and walk to the forest preserves and parks nearest me and do a bit of exploring. Who knows? I might even ride the bike for a bit. I will probably continue working on the challenges, but if I don’t, I’m not going to bum myself out about it. I’m on vacation after all!
Thank you, as always, for reading.
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