This week I found myself at a “mindfulness” session, hosted by a fitness startup and held at a retail location for an athleisure brand in Flatiron. I went because I’m reporting a feature on the startup and I thought going would add good color, and maybe I’d learn something. I don’t know much about being good at mindfulness or meditation. I’m not sure I’ve ever relaxed once in my life. I can’t be alone with my thoughts in complete silence. I walk around my apartment with an old episode of Reply All playing out of my iPhone speaker while I put water in the cat’s bowl, or I listen to Kate Bush’s seminal 1985 album Hounds of Love while I make revisions to a story, or, as I am doing right now, I rewatch this week’s Vanderpump Rules while I write this newsletter.
In pursuit of addressing my lack of chill, I asked two friends to tell me about a time that illustrated my complete inability to relax. “Well, writing a color-coded chart for your therapist springs to mind,” Emma—who was on a date and shouldn’t have been texting me at all but that’s how good of a friend she is—wrote back. It’s true: I marched into therapy on day one with a hand-written chart, color-coded in highlighter by urgency and priority, of things I wanted to discuss with my therapist. Much in the same way that I showed up every day fall semester freshman year to COM 107: Communications and Society, sat in the front row, raised my hand to answer every question, and completed every extra credit assignment even though I already had an A, I was trying to impress my therapist. I admitted this to her a week later when we started getting into the real shit but I didn’t have to. She told me this is a common thing with her clients. I guess everyone wants to make a good first impression on the person they’ve decided to entrust with their baggage.
Even when I’m doing a nice, ostensibly relaxing activity I have no chill. Emma continued: “You prepared a beautiful chicken dinner for 6 people in Hudson at 11 pm. Which WAS chill but not for you really.” She’s referring to a trip we took upstate last year, during which we got to Emma’s dad’s house after battling Friday pm rush hour traffic. Instead of simply relaxing for a moment, we took to our roles instantly: Emma set off the entire alarm system in the house and opened a bottle of orange wine, and I prepared a whole chicken and several sides for dinner for everyone. Doing everything, always is the only way I know how to function, and it’s nice when it happens to benefit the people I care about. I did it again a few weeks ago in the Catskills, cooking for a group of nine friends, directing a couple unfortunate friends/sous chefs around the kitchen, massaging kale for the salad and making pancakes and doing the dishes. There’s something gratifying about playing this role in all of my relationships but sometimes I can feel the exhaustion seep into my bones. It’s a self-imposed compulsion and there’s nobody to blame but myself. This makes me sound like I’m miserable, but I’m not. I’m just always on. It’s how I’ve always been. It’s what makes me good at the things I’m good at.
In the same way you’d try to get better at running a 5K, I’ve been trying to get better at doing nothing. I set a timer, turn off my background noise, focus on my breathing, and see how long I can just...do that. The first time I did it I lasted 20 seconds. Then four minutes, then six minutes, then 11 minutes. I’m improving, which can probably be attributed to my obsession with numbers (see: last week’s newsletter) and not much else. I feel like I’m cheating because even though I appear to be doing nothing, my mind is certainly not doing nothing. I replay every conversation I had that day, or think about the unread and unanswered emails in my inbox. When I try to actively purge the thoughts from my head, I don’t know what to think about, so I start thinking about all the things I’m actively not supposed to be thinking about. It is a completely pointless exercise. I envy those who can simply be at peace with their thoughts and make it seem so easy, yet I don’t think there’s anything necessarily inherently better about having a clear head. My racing thoughts have always been enough for me.
Before the start of the event this week I eyed a charcuterie spread that looked like it wasn’t meant to be touched. When I was offered a drink I opted for a boxed water over a can of charcoal-activated matcha. The multipurpose basement room was sometimes used for yoga classes, I had been told, but tonight it was lined with rows of clear plastic chairs for us to sit and listen to some well-known women talk about being mindful. The lights were soft, the walls were off-white, candles burned, the bookcase held a copy of Elif Batuman’s The Idiot and the first Alison Roman cookbook. It was like being in my apartment, but conspicuously nicer. I sipped my boxed water and turned to two reps for the fitness startup. We talked about meditating and how difficult it was to actually do. We all agreed: we were bad at doing nothing. After a few minutes of group commiseration we each instinctively reached for our phones. In silence we scrolled, texted, tapped, and just performed the action of looking busy.
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