Impersonating Ourselves

on what keeps us from finding new things to love

Last week I was talking to a friend whose husband is going to the UK to visit family. When, excitedly, I asked if she would be joining him, she said no - I’m going to have an adventure just staying home by myself and when I asked what exciting things she has planned, she said none. It felt…self-respecting and powerful.

My friend is 82. She’s travelled the world already. For her, a rich internal life characterized by a deep curiosity is adventure enough.

It made me wonder when she started to recognize her own contentment with smaller things.

Impersonating Ourselves

In 1994, when I was three years sober, the wheels just sort of fell off. I don’t know if “mental breakdown” is an entirely accurate term for what I experienced, I just know that I was losing my ability to make sense to myself. I was in emotional vertigo, like I kept reaching for a light switch and missing. 

Sure, I was young and just experienced an ugly break up, but those things did not fully account for this particular level of collapse. I now know what did, but it took a lot of therapy to get there: I had spent those first three years of my sobriety attempting to live the exact same life as before I got sober, just without the drugs and alcohol. Why? Because I could not let go of who I had been. I would cop dope for other people and not even take a cut, simply because the idea of being someone who no longer knew how to score was too terrifying to incorporate into my self understanding. Yet leading the same life with the same people in the same scene and sleeping around with the same exact kind of people, well… it ends up that is a very painful life to lead without the benefit of intoxication.

So when the pain of trying to live the same life when I was not the same person anymore was acute enough, I became willing to think differently about myself. And thank God, because I desperately needed relief from a life in which I was just impersonating a previous version of myself.

I may have been sober, but I didn't start to get well until I could accept who I had been, who I was becoming and accept any distance there was between the two.

I’ve thought about that time in my life a lot recently, because now, all these years later, I again find myself in a time of change (as many women in their 50s do).

Off-Grind

A couple weeks ago I was a guest on the We Can Do Hard Things podcast, (the show will air near the end of the year), but unlike other times in my life, I had no book or podcast or project to promote, and in her typically clever way, Glennon described my current life not as living “off-grid”, but living '“off-grind”. And she’s not wrong.

As I have mentioned before, in 2019 I was on 90 airplanes and in 7 countries. Then in 2020, I was in my apartment.

When the stay-at-home order went into place, I remember thinking, I can’t do this. But I was wrong. It wasn’t that I couldn’t stay at home for a year and a half, it was that I had not yet met the version of me who could. And when I met her, I kind of liked her. Which felt weird.

Because I had been “grinding” - striving, achieving, accomplishing - for so many years. And my life kept imperceptibly speeding up, so I just assumed I wanted it that way since the pace of it all meant I was “successful”. But I wasn’t content in my life, I was just living life at a pace that kept me from any sort of meaningful self-reflection about it all, and that’s not the same thing. Maybe I can be forgiven of that since in this culture more is always better, and bigger is always better, and faster is always better and it’s easy to assume that if you have MORE success and BIGGER media attention and all at a FASTER pace, then you must have a better life than when you had less.

But in 2020 when it all stopped and I felt this restless discontent, it took a minute to realize it was my hungry ego tapping me on the shoulder and saying “feed me”. The little asshole had grown to an embarrassing size without me even really realizing it, like a spiritual Little Shop of Horrors, and there were no first class upgrades in my apartment, if you know what I mean. There was just me.

It took the imposed stillness of the COVID lockdowns to realize something: if what I always want is MORE, then more will never feel like enough.

Which brings me back to now.

One thing I have discovered in the last couple years as I have stepped off the book publishing carnival ride, is that I do in fact have the capacity to feel satisfied. I’m pretty sure most of my ambition left with my estrogen, which helps. But living an “off-grind” life allows me to have so much more curiosity about other people, and so much more openness to discovering new things in life to love. And friends, there are so many things to love in this life. So. Many. But when I am stuck impersonating previous versions of myself, I shut myself off from discovering them.

So yesterday when I was in the Jackson Wyoming airport, coming home from a leadership retreat, and I bought this:

A National Parks Passport book. It’s hard to imagine any previous version of Nadia buying this, much less getting excited about visiting more national parks and collecting stamps, because when you have spent your adult years making proclamations like I’m what you would call, “indoorsy”, you sort of assume it’s true now because it was true when you first said it. ¹

At Grand Teton National Park. I mean, come on. Soooo outdoorsy.

…when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.  1 Cor 13

Please tell me what new things you have found to love!

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1. It is also difficult to imagine a previous version of myself that would feel ok saying I’m so proud to live in a country that sets aside and protects the most beautiful lands to be enjoyed by the people; because saying I am proud of anything about the US is the same as ignoring everything that is shameful. But I’m starting to think that kind of dualistic thinking steals so much from us without really giving us much back but maybe pridefulness.