Stop trying to optimize yourself

You're a squishy human, not a computer. Act accordingly.

During a recent couple’s therapy session, I sat next to my husband and told him to stop trying to fix everything. There’s a layer of tension that has made itself at home when we argue, and what we have recognized is that we approach my moments of tension completely differently. I come to him because I just want to be heard. He hears that I need something solved, and gets preemptively defensive if he feels he can’t smooth it out. So we argue, and we escalate, and things don’t get resolved. So I turned to him and told him, “I literally never want a resolution unless I specifically ask you for one. I just want you to hear me and tell me everything is going to be fine in the end.”

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Ben and I recently watched the movie Before Midnight (which really hits differently once you’re married, let me tell you). There’s a scene in which Celine, played by Julie Delpy, is unloading the loneliness she felt as a mother of twins, and how the instinct that people expect women to have toward motherhood — this innate ability to just magically fall into this role that is so unlike anything we have done in our lives — never really arrived for her. What a failure she felt like. It reminded me of one of my dearest friends, a brilliant writer and a new mother who appears to be raising her child in a way that allows her to still be herself. I am desperate for her to put her experience into words, but she tells me she doesn’t feel she has anything to add to the discourse, because she doesn’t really know what she’s doing.

But really, that’s the exact kind of person I want to hear about motherhood from. I want to hear about the hard parts, and the lonely parts, and the parts that are gorgeously exciting that nobody talks about. And I don’t want to hear about them in order to learn from them and optimize myself toward “good” motherhood. No, I want to hear about it because I think it is so important to build a community where we just listen without trying to teach or preach.

I hate my Instagram sometimes. Every time I scroll, I feel I am constantly being fed something that promises to enhance my life in some kind of way. Buy this thing. Read this book. Follow this tip so that you can be better. Be in the know. Be a person of value. Capitalism has fucked us into thinking that we need to constantly be optimizing ourselves in order to be…what? A better human? A high-functioning human? It seems sick to be that this system has made so many believe that in order to make money or get ahead, they constantly need to be encouraging people that something is wrong with them so that they can provide them with a service. That, without this tip or book or product, you will be behind the ball in some way.

I reject the idea that life is like a video game with certain rules you need to follow, quests to complete, boxes to check off in order to “win.” It does not appear that we get some kind of stamp of approval at the end of our lives for figuring out how to organize our fridge correctly, or for knowing the best restaurant to go to on a Friday night in New York. I don’t believe in a higher power who judges us based on whether we were the most advanced, productive versions of ourselves. I don’t want to be remembered for those reasons. I want to be remembered for the people I loved and the communities I was a part of. I want live my life not as a series of problems to solve, but as a beautiful opportunity to connect with people deeply.

I think that the reason so many of us feel so lonely these days is because we feel we need to present a put-together mask to the world in order to be a person of value while constantly being told that we need fixing. So we turn into ourselves, navigating the choppy waters of “adjusting” completely alone, lest we let that perfect mask slip. This is why I want my friend to write about motherhood, even though she doesn’t have all the answers. I don’t want the answers. I want community, for people to reach out and say, “Hey, we don’t know what the hell we’re doing either, but here’s a safe, soft place for us to talk about how out-of-control but also incredibly gorgeous things feel.”

I don’t want to be a high-functioning human. I want to be okay with being messy, and imprecise, and a little emotional sometimes. I don’t want to care if I spill my Sambuca at the end of a meal because I’m a little drunk and telling a story that makes my friends laugh. I don’t want to worry if there’s dust on my bookcases, or that I’m a bad wife if I’d rather write in my office one morning instead of having coffee with my husband. I just want to live, and be squishy, and roll with the punches, and contribute to a community where connection, not perfection, is the goal. Because at the end of the day, isn’t that what all of this is about? If not that, then what?