Monthly Archives: January 2024

academic life/work, failure, grieving, life skills

Embracing Mediocrity

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I usually aim to do the best I can but that does not mean I aim to be the best. Often the best I can do is mediocre, perhaps a C or C+, if anyone is grading. I am a good enough employee, a good enough researcher, a good enough neighbor, a good enough mother. I have a few moments or days here and there where I’m a really great mother or a fantastic professor, but that is not the norm for me.

I don’t say this to denigrate myself or fish for compliments. I’m not looking for anyone to argue with me and tell me no, I’m a fantastic mother and a kickass professor! I’m totally comfortable with my level of performance in these areas. I’m a good enough mother that my children trust me with matters I want to be trusted with. I’m a good enough professor that I don’t worry about students not learning what they need to learn.

One of the lessons grief has taught me is that being good enough is good enough. That sounds simple, but I spent a large chunk of my life aiming to be the best and feeling inadequate. As a recovering perfectionist, when I first started being serious about mediocrity, I wanted to be the best at mediocrity, to hit it hard. I’ve chilled out a lot over the years and learned that the real power of embracing mediocrity is in letting go of standards.

Once I shifted my goal to being good enough, I started feeling much better about myself. The really interesting thing is that my performance didn’t actually change. What changed was where I put my effort. When I stopped worrying about being the best professor, I had more energy left for my family, which made me a better mother and wife. When I stopped worrying about being the best wife ever, I had more energy left for myself, which made me a better wife.

About ten years ago, I started selecting at the beginning of each semester one category of my job to prioritize and allowing myself to be mediocre in the other categories. Some semesters I prioritized teaching, the writing center, service, or scholarship, and then the next semester I would prioritize a different category. Not once did anyone seem to notice that I was performing in a mediocre fashion. The semester I won a service award was a semester that I was not prioritizing service. Several times I’ve been nominated for a mentoring award, and frankly, I have never aimed to be anything but mediocre as a mentor.

When my husband had his stroke, I allowed myself to be mediocre at everything except taking care of him. Again, nobody seemed to notice. People did notice that I was doing less than I used to—serving on fewer committees, for example. But the quality of my work was good enough that nobody commented. My student evaluations remained consistent.

After my husband died, I stopped even aiming for mediocrity. People gave me grace. I gave myself grace. There was a year or so of teaching I don’t remember, but again, my student evaluations remained consistent. I recently heard from a student I had during that time who mentioned, unprompted by me, how he had applied some of what he’d learned in my class since then, and holy moly, he learned exactly what I wanted him to. Despite my exceedingly mediocre performance. Despite the fact that I don’t remember teaching him what he learned.

I have fully embraced mediocrity in most areas of my life now. I still get nominated for awards and occasionally win them. I don’t get nominated as often as I used to, but I don’t do anything I do for the recognition.

What I’ve learned is that allowing myself to be mediocre doesn’t mean I am mediocre. It just means I take the pressure off myself. Many writers know Anne Lamott’s advice to start with a shitty first draft. Removing the pressure to write something wonderful helps many writers get past writer’s block and actually produce something decent.

One of my favorite writing teachers, Diana Goetsch, says that writers should allow themselves to write something that might suck—but it also might smack of genius (she’s quoting someone with the “smack of genius” phrase but I can’t remember who).

By embracing mediocrity, I’ve taken a “shitty first draft” approach to nearly everything I do. I’m astonished at how often what I do ends up sort of smacking of genius. And often it doesn’t smack of genius, and that’s ok because my job in life isn’t to be a genius—it’s to be a good enough human. By just aiming to do the best I can and not to be The Best, I have more time and energy left for what matters.

grieving

The Wild, Tangled Scribble of Grief (aka you’re never done with it)

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I posted last week about feeling good and then Thursday night, I did not feel good. Not good at all. I had an upset stomach and a brutal headache when I went to bed. I slept for a few hours and then woke up, having an anxiety attack. I was sick all day Friday, able to work from home but napping between meetings and feeling generally crappy, nauseous, and headachy all day.

Midway through the day, I realized: it was the 19th of the month, exactly two years and seven months since my husband died. There’s no name for the 31-month anniversary of a death and two years-and-seven-months doesn’t have a fancy term for it, but my body knew it was a date of import. Some months the 19th comes and goes uneventfully, but January was not one of those months.

In those months when the 19th hits me hard, I often wake to a memory of holding my husband’s body in my arms in the hospital’s neuro-ICU. All the tubes and monitors had been removed, so for the first time in days, I could actually get my arms around him. Holding him while he took his last breaths, feeling his ribs move against my arms and then not moving, then realizing the very last breath was complete was the most intimate experience I’ve ever had in my life.

Compressed into those last breaths were the happiest and saddest moments of my life. I got to do exactly what I promised to do when we got married—to be with him until the very end. And then I had to keep living.

When I realized that my illness was a grief response, I thought of a meme that shows up periodically in the widow Facebook groups I belong to: on one side is a neat line progressing from loss and shock through guilt, panic, isolation, finding new strengths, and ending at affirmation; on the other side is a wild, tangled scribble ricocheting around those same terms, bouncing from one to another over and over and so often that the end of the line can’t even be discerned. Over the first image is the heading “stages of grief”; over the second is the heading “my experience.” Well, friends, that wild, tangled scribble is my experience for sure.

The general trajectory is toward some sort of overall peace, but the day-by-day experience can depart significantly from that arc. The time between tough days gets longer, but the tough days don’t stop coming.

Megan Devine has done wonderful work at Refuge in Grief promoting the idea that the phases of grief need to be retired. I’ve been following her work since my husband died, so I’ve been well aware since this journey started that I would not have a linear or orderly experience. I’ve still been surprised at exactly how much emotional whiplash I’ve experienced. I’ve had intense lows and highs back to back. I’ve had some of my worst grief days a year or two after my husband died.

My body has often reacted to a milestone date before my mind processed what the date was.

When a tough grief day hits me unexpectedly, I let it. I don’t bother telling myself it’s too long after my husband’s death for me to be feeling this way or I don’t have time for this emotional crap right now.

Here’s what I do:

  • I remind myself that everything is temporary and that this wave of grief will pass.
  • I take everything off my schedule that can possibly be bumped.
  • I give myself permission to be a mess—to nap between meetings, to close my office door and cry, to wander around the house touching things that remind me of him, to talk to him.
  • I bring one of my old-fashioned cloth handkerchiefs with me everywhere I go.
  • I spend as much time as I can with my two dogs, who never judge me and know just how to put their heads on my lap in a comforting way.
  • I give myself grace. I am kind and empathetic to myself, just as I would be to anyone else in the same situation.

I did all these things on Friday. None of these things seemed to have made the grief hurry up and pass, but it made Friday more bearable. (I figure I can be grieving and mean to myself or grieving and kind to myself—either way I’m grieving and it sucks, but I see no reason to make it worse.)

grieving

31 Months Out: Grief No Longer Filters Everything

I noticed last week that the corners of my mouth were cracked, the result of the dry cold winters bring to Denver. This has happened to me every winter since I moved here nearly 30 years ago. But this is the first time I’ve noticed it since my husband died, meaning I didn’t notice it for two years. I’m sure it’s happened for the past two years; I just didn’t notice it.

I wouldn’t have given this much thought except that it hurts enough that it causes me to put ointment on the corners of my mouth multiple times throughout the day—and I realized that for the first two years after my husband died, I was in such a fog I didn’t notice things that caused me physical pain. I didn’t notice the corners of my mouth cracking—but I’m sure they did.

I think I was too consumed by emotional pain for physical pain to even register with me. Not too long after my husband died, I had two major surgeries: a hysterectomy a few months after he died and brain surgery a little over a year after he died. I bounced back from both quickly enough to surprise my doctors and hardly touched the pain medication offered after both. I hope I would have done that regardless, but now I wonder if general grief and numbness to my own condition contributed, making me unaware of physical pain.

I’m not saying grieving improves your pain tolerance but rather that grieving can impact your pain tolerance. I suspect some grieving people would have the opposite happen—less tolerance for physical pain.

For me, this new awareness of my own physical pain corresponds to a generally heightened awareness of my own needs. I’m not just trying to get through the days as much. I’m noticing myself being hungry and thirsty in ways I haven’t for a long time. I’ve been hungry and thirsty since my husband died, but the hunger and thirst felt somewhere in the distance, not quite in my body. The sensations were reminders of something I had to deal with, but I felt detached from it. That detachment is fading.

So much of the first two years after my husband died is hazy in my memory but lately I’ve noticed my memory for things happening seems sharper. I’m better able to remember what I did last week or a few months ago. I don’t feel disoriented all the time anymore. The fog of grief that was a layer between me and everything else is fading. The grief is still there but it every experience I have isn’t filtered through it anymore.

As I make plans for the future, my first thought is no longer automatically about my husband being dead. I can now plan a trip and think about what I want to do without that thought being closely followed by, “He would love that” or “he would hate that” or “I wish he could have gotten to do that.”

What would have been his 64th birthday passed last week. Fits of weeping took hold of me several times, but unlike previous birthdays, I was able to focus on other things for a good part of the day.  

Before my husband died, I started working on a memoir of being my husband’s caregiver. We were actually working on it together, with me reading him what I’d written and then him talking through his thoughts, which I added to the draft. We envisioned a co-authored memoir.

After he died, I kept working on the memoir, but obviously it was no longer co-authored. One challenge on this project has been seeing myself as the protagonist. Nearly everything I wrote before he died positioned him as the protagonist and me as his trusty sidekick. After he died, it was hard for me to shift that focus and at some point I realized I was writing a memoir of my husband rather than a memoir of being his caregiver. I was writing from the perspective of his caregiver, but it wasn’t about my experience, it was about his through my eyes.

I’ve continued to struggle with positioning myself as the star of the story, but this new experience of being aware of my own physical pain seems like a positive development. I wonder if I’m entering a new phase of grief, one where grief is still with me but it isn’t the membrane through which all experience is filtered.

grieving

Grief + the Weight of False Memories

I’ve worked hard to adopt the attitude that I did the best I could when I was taking care of my husband after his stroke. Afterall, we were all dealing with a pandemic, I had never been a caregiver for someone with the high level of needs my husband had before, and the person I would typically turn to for support—my husband!—wasn’t available to support me. I was exhausted most of the time and making things up as I went along, learning skills like how to assist with a wheelchair transfer on the fly. Given all that, I did a pretty good job most of the time.

I still find myself wishing I had done things differently, but I’ll follow up that thought with a quick reminder to myself, “But I did the best I could.” Sometimes even after that reminder to myself, I would feel the heat of shame on my face. I would wonder had I really done the best I could? Would someone else have done a better job? Did I make my husband’s last year worse than it needed to be? Or—the big dark question—was his death actually my fault?

Those last two questions are the ones I struggled with the most. “Did I make my husband’s last year worse than it needed to be?” because I had failed to help him reconnect with someone he had lost touch with during the pandemic and “Was his death actually my fault?” because the surgery he never woke up from was necessitated by an infection that I had not noticed until it had progressed to a life-threatening level.

I did a lot of work in therapy on accepting that I had done the best I could at the time. I was imperfect, as we all are. Many things fell through the cracks during that time. I was working remotely, which allowed me to be home and take care of Tom, but balancing my job with his care was tricky and I was imperfect at both. That doesn’t mean his death was my fault or that his last year would have been measurably better if I hadn’t forgotten to get in touch with his friend.  

A couple months ago I did a search of my text messages looking for something related to one of my dogs. The search results showed a conversation from a few months before my husband died with the friend he wanted me to reconnect him with. We’d had a text conversation spanning a few days. How had I forgotten that I had done what he asked? I had been holding myself responsible for making his post-stroke isolation worse than it had to be—but I hadn’t done that.

Ah, but what about me possibly causing his death by not noticing the infection?

Around the end of the year, as I was reviewing my notes for a chapter of my memoir, I was reminded that there were at minimum three healthcare professionals seeing my husband every week. Each one took his temperature and asked him questions about his health. He mentioned being worried about the infection to them. None of them were concerned.

I had been holding myself responsible for something health care professionals didn’t notice. That realization made it possible for me to release the feelings of guilt. I’m just sad about it all now. Sad that he was worried about an infection that went undetected, sad that he had the bad luck to get an infection, sad that he died. But I know it wasn’t my fault.

Our memory is unreliable at best and when you add grief and stir, memory gets even worse. I’m grateful for my journal and notes, but even those rely on memory to some degree. When I journal each morning about the previous day, who knows what inaccuracies and misinterpretations I’m introducing. I’ve taken to understanding my memories as interpretations.

The stories we tell ourselves are powerful. I told myself the story that I should have recognized my husband’s infection for years. Although I’ve released myself of the guilt, my mind does sometimes try to seize on the idea again that it was my fault. I have to remind myself in those moments, “No, that’s not true, multiple medical professionals didn’t notice it, either.” The story is still real to me sometimes, despite what I know to be true. The story feels true.

And I still don’t quite believe that I got in touch with the old friend. I reread the texts from time to time to reassure myself that I did reconnect my husband with his friend.

I trust that at some point, the facts will outweigh my false memories.

Buddhist life, grieving

5 Ways Grieving People Can Start 2024 Peacefully

I like to take some time in December and January to reflect on the year that has passed and to use that reflection to think about how I want the next year to go. This is my third time going through that reflection process as a widow. I haven’t changed the process I use in those three years, but I have noticed that the kinds of planning I’ve done for the year ahead has changed in response to my grief.

I end every year with a review of my journal, calendar, and camera roll to identify the key events, challenges, and developments of the year and start planning the next year intentionally. The two times I’ve done this since my husband died have been really helpful in allowing me to realize that I am moving forward even when I feel like I’m not. This year, for example, I was able to appreciate all the work I did to clear out the garage in the spring and become a better steward of my husband’s vines over the summer.

I find the process cathartic—it’s emotionally exhausting and gives me an intense feeling of lightness at the same time. It helps me lay bare the joys and challenges of the last year and gives me a sense of a trajectory for the year ahead.

After I reflect on the past year, I think about how I want the next year to be similar and different, or I what I want to bring forward from the last year and what I want to leave behind.

Before my husband died, I made resolutions that hinged on things I wanted to accomplish in the next year, such as articles to write and fitness goals to hit. Since his death, I’ve been moving toward a different kind of resolution that focuses more on practices than goals. For example, instead of aiming to write and publish a certain number of essays this year (a goal), I am planning to spend one day each month identifying submission deadlines in the next 30 days that I can write toward (a practice).

The concept behind many New Year’s Resolutions is basically, “I suck but I’m going to change that in the new year.” I prefer the attitude described in this beautiful Buddhist story: we can accept ourselves and our imperfections and our resolution can simply be to enjoy our imperfect lives. By committing to the practice of spending a day each month looking for submission deadlines, I’m aiming to shift my writing practice. What I’m not doing is setting a productivity goal that will stress me out and suck the joy out of writing for me.

Here are five practices from the past year I am taking with me into 2024 that I think could be helpful for anyone grieving:

  1. Give yourself amnesty. For email and all the other things that didn’t get done. For all the times you didn’t show up the way you wish. If you’re grieving, some of the time and energy you might normally put into keeping up with daily tasks or being social has gone into grieving, whether that means attending memorial events, dealing with your loved one’s estate or belongings, curing up on the couch and crying, or something else. That’s normal—and allowing yourself the time and space to do those things is more important than keeping up with email or mail or social events or whatever. Feeling bad about letting that stuff go for a while doesn’t do anyone any good, so I say, give yourself amnesty, release the guilt, and move forward. (If the idea of email amnesty is new to you, check this out for inspiration.)
  2. Give everyone else amnesty. If you’re holding onto a grudge because someone else didn’t behave the way you wanted, consider letting it go. That doesn’t mean you are saying their behavior is ok, it just means you are releasing the anger about it. In the year before he died, my husband and I worked hard on forgiveness. We were both holding onto anger that wasn’t serving us. We both found that letting go of the anger allowed us to feel peace that holding onto the anger had kept us from feeling.
  3. Make commitments to yourself for the new year. I suggest gentle ones that will make you feel more at peace. Make commitments grounded in kindness toward yourself and others. In 2023, I committed to talking to myself with the same kindness I talk to others, which meant no calling myself names. It was hard at first, but now it feels natural.
  4. Honor your loss with some time to go down the grief rabbit hole. Near the end of last year, I gave myself a weekend to wallow in grief. I plan to do that again in 2024. I don’t know exactly when, but I’m certain that at some point, my heart will tell me it’s time to take a weekend off. I’ll cancel whatever plans I have and have a guilt-free weekend to cry, look at photos of my husband, and miss him.
  5. Look at the year ahead and block off the days that might be difficult for you. Your loved one’s birthday, your anniversary, whatever it might be. Based on the last few years, I seem to have a pattern of being a mess in the days leading up to special days and then feeling much better afterwards, so I’ll block out the day before each special day and the day itself.