Have you ever observed a dragonfly at rest?
Have you ever observed a dragonfly at rest?
A missive on the EXTRA.
Hi–hiya—I’m deveoping my About page and a Services page. If you want to hear more of how I got HERE or are in need of services I can offer (namely editing and creative coaching services), click and shout. I’m sure they need some pretty pictures, but as it is, someday. As always, love and gratitude for existing on this planet just as you are.
“While working on The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci regularly took off from painting for several hours at a time and seemed to be daydreaming aimlessly. Urged by his patron, the prior of Santa Maria delle Grazie, to work more continuously, da Vinci is reported to have replied, immodestly but accurately, ‘The greatest geniuses sometimes accomplish more when they work less.’”
–Tony Schwartz, Be Excellent at Anything.
A dragonfly’s little legs are microscopic in respect to its body and wingspan, so when a dragonfly lands, say on a deck on a balmy July afternoon to take a little rest from weaving and whirling, catching the many mosquitoes flying about, it already looks like it’s sleeping, or dead, as I once made the mistake of suspecting.
But give it a second and you’ll see its wings close a fraction toward the ground, and then another fraction. Almost imperceptible adjustments, a release, a letting go. Similar to how our tight muscles incrementally release as we breathe into them, small little jolts as the tension dissolves bit by bit.
This is how I feel I’ve been releasing the EXTRA.
The EXTRA is the collection of all the internalizatized stuff I have been trained to feel I must do in order to be loved, accepted, and paid well as a human-woman-neurodivergent in this capitalist world.
Do you feel the EXTRA? It’s been a hard thing for me to suss even after I became aware of it which was seven or so years back when Tara Brach told me I was enough in a podcast and I sobbed my little eyes out.
But over and over again I’m confronted with little ways in which I compensate for not feeling I'm enough by being or attempting to be/do extra.
In this world where gender pay inequity is a real thing and women are not only accustomed to literally having to work harder for longer than your typical man in the SAME job in order to earn as much, she also has to work thrice as long in gendered roles (usually caregiving roles) which are underpaid (if at all). And she usually has to mask and temper her needs, her feelings, her ideas to remain in favor.
Then she comes home and does the second shift: more of the child-rearing, housekeeping, and life admin in comparison to her partner in hetero cis relationships (statistically speaking) even when, as Brigid Schulte found in her book Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time, those couples had agreed early on to practice egalitarianism. (Is it changing for my young millenial friends and Gen Z? I wholeheartedly hope so.)
In interviews with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, researcher and authorof Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Schulte reported that he’s often asked some version of the question: But don’t you feel guilty for losing yourself in a task and shutting out the world? He says this question always comes from a woman, because we (women) must always be available to those who might need us. We must always be giving our attention to others rather than ourselves or our interests. And if we take even a few minutes for ourselves we feel guilty.
She also found that girls/women stop engaging in play, which is maybe the most earnest form of “flow” and completely necessary for our health across all levels, rather early on compared to men who mostly don’t stop playing in some form or another.
My shift away from play happened in late primary school. Sure, my friends and I were a sort of casual, active late 80s early 90s somewhat androgynous bunch and some of us played sports up through senior year, but I also remember on subzero days at recess during late primary school when the boys were tossing a football around at the other end of the playground, jackets thrown off they were so warm from running, we girls clustered around the main doors gently bouncing up and down, our teeth chattering just trying not to freeze to death. It just wasn’t cool or mature for us to play.
James C. Scott, in Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity and Meaningful Work and Play, reckons within patriachy we’re all raised to be subservient, I would argue even the little white boys who are “masters in training” but who also must remain subservient to their fathers, in other words to those with more power than themselves, which means within patriarchy women and girls are trained to be subservient to men and boys, and boys are trained to be subservient to their fathers, bosses, and the government which are still primarily made of mostly white men who were trained the exact same way.
(You can see how generation after generation of this training might get out of hand. Those white men inclined to desperately fight for the power they were raised to feel entitled to, and always coming up against another white man more superior than themselves. That must feel infantalizing even for the most powerful, generation after generation. No wonder some men, when they perceive themselves as not enough, get so bleeding emotional and wage war on an entire country just minding its business or, red faced and raging, declare the constitution should be overturned.
Gosh, if only there were another way.)
So given this as a reasonable supposition, women especially have little understanding of what a realistic ENOUGH is, nor would we feel easy inside of our bodies and inside of our brains that it was ENOUGH even if we KNEW logically that it was. In other words: we cannot shut off.
We can’t stop thinking about the to do list, we can’t stop worrying about the kids, we can’t stop worrying about the bills, we can’t stop writing that dissertation or creating that powerpoint in our heads even when we’ve sat down to dinner. And, we don’t have the outlet of play to release any of it. It just keeps building and building.
These roles are so internalized that we sort of fall into them unless we give them a lot of time and attention and actively check in with ourselves over and over, and over and over again: Am I in the EXTRA?
Schulte found this to be true across her research. Her focus was on mothers taking on all the EXTRA in order to fulfill the “Good Mother” role, but it’s not specific to mothers, there’s also the “Good Worker” role that all humans in capitalism are susceptible to. Which is to say: come in earlier, stay later, always keep your phone near you, and never take a vacation.
And of course most mothers are trying to fufill the Good Mother role as well as the Good Worker role. Then there’s the extra layers of not enough in LGBTQ folks, brown and black folks, neurodivergent folks, and the disabled. These intersections working double and triple time in not feeling enough and having to the EXTRA.
No wonder I haven’t been able to figure this out. While sussing my recent graduate thesis an ever evolving rotary of new ideas kept threatening to overhaul the small pile of perfectly fine projects I’d already started. It was better to start from scratch in the middle of thesis year, than it was to fully develop an existing project that obviously wasn’t good enough.
I abandon initial essay drafts one after the other rather than choosing one to focus on because surely the next idea is a better idea and nothing is worth publishing.
Almost everything I buy ever but the iPhone spending spree over the course of a few short years as described in my last missive because there was some perceived better value to the new model.
I buy yet another course on a new healing modality, read yet another productivity book, watch yet another infomercial on the best adaptogens/supplemnts/foods/movement practice because whatever I’m doing, whatever I’m practicing, whatever I’m eating, whatever I’m reading is not enough and it is not the right thing. There MUST be something more I can do, something better.
And, erm, collecting qualifications and graduate degrees? It was once suggested that if I wanted to write I just needed to write, rather than get yet another graduate degree, and she was right but I was stung. I couldn’t even see what that might look like let alone practice it.
So as I explore myself as a practicing writer, I find that whatever it is I want to write is not enough. And I tack on the EXTRA, because I think things like interviews with other creatives about their practice will give this space the value I, apparently, cannot. And when those interviews, despite my earnest conceptual interest in them, don’t come to fruition and when there are weeks between missives, I just cycle back to feeling desperately NOT ENOUGH.
Even though it’s my feeling that I’m not enough that prevents me from actually doing anything at all.
So here I am at the end of 2022 taking stock. I’ve started EFT Tapping recently (another new modality) and it’s astonishing how things are clearing out so quickly. I don’t know if I yet feel wholly and fully ENOUGH, but I have started to strip away some of the EXTRA.
It’s funny, I’d just read all these books on productivity. Really helpful books. I raved about Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, by Greg McKeown a few weeks ago and Cal Newport’s A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Communication Overload. Both got me super excited about stripping back, focusing on my one essential THING and HOW to do that.
And they were helpful in thinking those things through, and setting boundaries around my time, but three weeks ago, before EFT Tapping, I would have sworn to you that all the things I was doing and all the things I wanted to do and planned to do were definitely, 100% in direct connection with my one essential THING. But one week of Tapping on I’M ENOUGH has me seeing all the EXTRA I’ve been trying and failing to do.
And how overwhelmed I was by all the different projects I was trying to put my attention on.
I brought this “How much is enough?” question to an Instagram post the other day sparked by the da Vinci quote up top, and though it started in reference to how much work must we do, how much is enough work, I ended the post asking: “So how much rest is enough? How many hours do you have to go wandering around aimlessly for your brain to come back to its natural creative state so that you might accomplish more by doing less?”
Which I think is the actual important question many of us can’t even fathom considering, how can we possibly rest when we have to compensate for not being/feeling enough? And how does one find that answer when we’re so bloody overwhelmed and exhausted already doing the EXTRA?
I don’t know, but if this is you, I hope you can find it.
Through Tapping my wings seem to be shifting in imperceptible movements toward the ground, coming ever closer to feeling enough and into my most authentic self.
I hope. I think! Gosh wouldn’t it be great if it were real?
As always,
