Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice, Vol 4, Iss 21: We Don't Have to do Everything Ourselves
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Hi friends! I hope that if you live in a place affected by the time change that you are adjusting alright. I recently saw this Instagram post where the creator explains that she does not have allyship fatigue; the things that are actually exhausting her are white supremacy, colonialism, etc. It resonated with me a lot. I am not tired from caring about people. My ability to care for others is wide and deep. What is causing me fatigue is all the hate, the capitalism, the racism, the transphobia. And then we are expected to keep acting like this is all normal, which is another type of exhausting.
When the world feels particularly destructive I am always pulled to create. Right now this is taking the form of two different flavors of projects. The first is that I just want to be cooking and baking all the time. We have a huge island in our kitchen and since we moved in last February, it’s been covered in stuff and unusable as a surface beyond storing clutter. I have finally hit the tipping point of wanting to use it to bake and cook more elaborate things that I started clearing it off. Clearing it off meant that there needed to be a pantry reorg so that dry goods on the island can go in a cabinet. On top of the cabinet sat the ice cream maker (it does not belong there). It had been sitting out because I wanted to make gelato with a bunch of strawberries we had frozen when they were in season. The ice cream maker insert has been in the freezer for months, ready to go.
So to clean off the island, I needed to clean the pantry. Part of cleaning the pantry means putting the ice cream maker away. In order to put the ice cream maker away, I need to make the gelato with the insert that is in the freezer. As you can see, cleaning off the island has been some kind of If You Give A Mouse A Cookie nonsense but I woke up at 7 o’clock in the morning the other day so I could fit in making gelato. I am now another step closer to having the kitchen island cleaned off and even though there is still stuff everywhere in our home, it feels good to be a few steps closer to having some room for rolling out pasta and baking cookies.
The other creative project keeping me sane is the podcast we’re working on that I mentioned last week. We haven’t quite launched yet (but since you're a paying subscriber, I'll let you know that we quietly uploaded the trailer last night. You can find that here). This project has been a tremendous help in learning something that my therapist has been trying to get me to do for years: let go of things. Specifically, I had always been the kind of person that had the, “If I want something done right, I gotta do it myself” mentality. On top of that, I have been incredibly strong-willed and independent since I was a child and I was raised by a lot of strong-willed, competent women. This has translated into me historically taking on all kinds of work, duties, projects, etc. and doing every bit of them myself and not delegating or letting other people help.
Creating this podcast with my wife has been a giant exercise in letting go and trust. I have been recognizing that while there are a bunch of things that I can do, not only should I ask Nicole to do them but she will legitimately do them so much better than I will because they are in her wheelhouse, not mine. Like we do in our home and relationship, we are dividing the podcast labor by strength, a sense of equity, and who hates something the least or enjoys it the most.
I know this is going to sound silly and I may be the last person on the planet to realize this but allowing other people to do work on projects and not doing all the work myself? Groundbreaking. Life-changing. 10/10. It’s actually making the project incredibly fun?! Imagine: not martyring myself out of some desperate grasp to feel relevant but instead allowing people to help me not run myself into the ground. Sounds fake, I know.
This plays into my larger ethos of community care and recognizing that community care is multidirectional and reciprocal, not just an individual caring for a community. I don’t know if I’ve said that here but I want to be explicit: community care means letting the community care for you, too. I learned this lesson hard and fast when my mom got sick and I’m trying to hold on to this because community care is not only for times of crisis. It is a way of being a part of the world. Every day, I learn new ways to be a part of the world.
That’s it for this week! You can shop many books I’ve mentioned in this newsletter at my affiliate shop, The Infophile’s Bookshop, and support independent bookstores. In fact, any Bookshop, Amazon, or Etsy links in this newsletter are affiliate links so if you shop through those, it helps support my work. Or you can leave me a tip on Ko-fi, Paypal, or Venmo.
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