(Image credit: Haigen G. Pearson)

This is Not Great But Not Dead’s twentieth post. That’s twenty Sundays in a row of sitting down and sharing my thoughts. Sometimes it’s really hard and the posts are messy and disorganized, and I spend hours carving away at them until finally accepting they’re as good as they’re going to get. Sometimes it’s fun and (somewhat) effortless. Sometimes they’ve surprised me and are better than I thought they’d be. Sometimes the opposite. But today is the first day in these twenty weeks (140 days), that I haven’t known what to say.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I have a lot to say. I just don’t particularly feel like saying any of it. Not in a lazy or avoidant way. In a self-honoring way.

I just don’t really feel like producing.

I’ve had a wonderful long holiday weekend: worked limited hours on Thursday to prep for a neighborhood sidewalk potluck/bbq we hosted on the 4th, on Friday we cooked and set up and spent the day in the sun with our neighbors eating food and having fun, on Saturday we rested, and today we cleaned.

Even though it was so nice, and it was really really nice, there was something about it—too much work one day, too much fun the next, too much leisure the day after that—that knocked me out of whack. I felt the discomfort of it—the restlessness, irritability, and overwhelm—creeping in as soon as I woke up this morning. It was delayed a little by a walk with our dog in the woods, but by the time we were back home and cleaning I was entering into a full spiral.

It started with just needing to put everything away and tidy up after the party, but then snowballed: nothing is organized, so many of our home projects are half completed, I haven’t touched many of them in months, why can’t I just organize my time properly? I’m always wishing for the thing I can’t have: if I have something to do, I want down time, if I have down time, I want something to do, but not any of the the things I have to do. All of those things (the aforementioned home projects, or going in to the office to get caught up, or writing this Substack) all felt like little sharp-toothed animals tugging at my skin.

How do I choose one over the others? Which one will make me feel better? Will any of them? To do any one of them would be at the expense of the others, and also at the expense of freedom: Freedom to read, or write something else, or bake cookies (I never bake cookies or even eat cookies), or exercise, or any other thing that I won’t be able to do once Monday morning arrives and my time belongs to someone else again.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with my little sister a couple of weeks ago. We were talking about what a dream life would look like if money wasn’t an object. Mine would be very simple, and look a lot like it does now, only the ratios would be different.

I would work less, maintain (shop, clean, cook) more, and the result at the end of the day would be to not feel so depleted. To not feel like my last hours before bed were wasted, spent on nothing, trying to get my mental and emotional reserves back into the black. Rather, I would arrive at the end of the day in balance, and my evenings could be spent collecting: reading, watching, listening, gathering it all up, going to bed with my reserves in surplus so the next day when I sat down to my work my cup was overflowing.

Anyway, this is a balance I (obviously, from how I told you my morning went) can never quite strike in my current circumstances. But if you, like me, have gotten it wrong and find yourself spinning out, I guess this post has inadvertently found its point. And that point is to share some things that help:

1. Shower: There are very few things scrubbed skin and clean hair can’t improve.

2. Give: It helps me get out of my head if I think about someone else. It doesn’t have to be anything crazy. Someone had asked for my feedback on a project so I sat down and took a couple of hours and shared my thoughts. I connected with some far-off friends via text. I commented on a post of a former neighbor sharing their cancer journey.

3. Vibe: Spend time with someone with a regulated nervous system. It’s contagious. Today, for me, that was shark conservationist Ocean Ramsey in her new Netflix documentary. I had no idea who she was before this afternoon, but spending a couple of hours with her energy—even through a screen—really shifted my whole vibe.

4. Grace: I didn’t feel like producing today, but I promised myself I’d never miss a Sunday, so I’m doing this in a way that feels good and honest and unpolished and easy, and giving myself the grace to do it.

That’s what I did, in that order, after the house was clean and I was good and worked up and on the verge of losing my mind. Each one helped more than the last, and I hope they help you.

A final, unrelated thing I feel the need to mention, this post being on the heels of the Fourth of July and all, came to me courtesy of a podcast1 I listened to this week, and it’s this: The men who signed the Declaration of Independence were essentially signing their death warrants. They had no reason to believe they could take a stand against the biggest, most powerful, country in the world and survive it. So why did they do it? What made them care about something so deeply they would face almost certain death for it?

It was the belief that all humans2 are created equal.

Up until that moment it was a given that there were certain people born above you, better than you, and that you couldn’t do anything about it. Those men said no. No. We’re all equal. You’re no better than I am. We all have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And we’re going to build a whole nation on it.

What a beautiful thing.

What an important thing to hold onto.