the something-to-show-for phenomenon
and the it’s-rarely-as-bad-as-you-fear-it’s-going-to-be phenomenon
this week’s Thought (singular)
i have no idea what granola actually is. i only know that it’s incredible.
a very warm welcome to all new readers. i love new readers so much that whenever i get an email about a new reader, i manifest that they really really enjoy their breakfast. thank you for joining us. may you sit down at the dining table and chew so slowly because you don’t want the best meal of the day to get over too quick. breakfast is so good.
hi
we’ve got two ideas i’d like to elaborate on today. they’re both things that i noticed/felt/realised before, during, and after my college graduation ceremony last week. the first is a bit grim, the second is more hopeful. consider yourself warned.
Thing I - the something-to-show-for phenomenon
how do you qualify time passed as ‘well-spent’? i’m quickly getting tired of needing some major accomplishment to deem a few years ‘useful’. it feels particularly cruel and…reductive, somehow. how do you experience and feel and think and live for so many years, only to still believe you don’t have anything ‘to show for’ those years at the end of it?
i had struggled with the idea that i hadn’t done enough when i graduated from school, feeling like fourteen years of studying was somehow inadequate. i feel myself struggling with it now. that time spent without accumulating tangible rewards is time wasted. that my capacity should be greater, i should be good at a) more things, and b) the things that actually lead to those tangible rewards that i crave instead of other, apparently useless, things. it doesn’t matter if i may not have the brain for it, if i just push and push and keep pushing, maybe i can make reality match my aspirations.
i keep thinking about that phrase, about reality matching aspirations. i came across it first in this very awesome post by
where she writes -Reality has rarely matched my aspirations, even when my aspirations were modest. And, it is true, I tend to keep my problems and fears to myself. I tell myself this is because I don’t want to bother others; in fact, it is because I can’t bear sometimes to face how little I’ve grown, how much more work I have to do as a human being, and how hard and just plain embarrassing it is to list all the ways I’ve failed. So I grit my teeth in a smile, showing only the relatively straight incisors which conceal all the damage hiding behind them.
when a thing ends, i desperately need something to show for the time + effort i spent on it. but what am i even looking for? what do i mean by to show for? i delude myself repeatedly, aiming for something so far out of reach that i can’t even make out what it is. my gauge of my own abilities feels so warped, so off-kilter that it leaves me unbalanced. it’s immaterial that everything i want to achieve is unrealistic. i need something to prove that the effort meant something, will lead to something. if it doesn’t, what is there to do?
the something-to-show-for phenomenon occurs when, as things are ending, you feel a deep and gnawing regret-bitterness hybrid about all the things that you didn’t do, combined with the almost deliberate obfuscation/willful blindness of all the things you actually did do, distorting both groups into should-would-could positive + negative extremes.
i’d like to end Thing I with a forceful inward nudge to be kinder to myself and less dramatic, in general. it would make things much easier, i think.
Thing II - the it’s-rarely-as-bad-as-you-fear-it’s-going-to-be phenomenon
i felt like throwing up the morning of my graduation ceremony. everything i had done wrong or not done or let slide or clung to over the previous four years seemed lodged in my throat and i couldn’t spit it all out. for the week leading up to the day, all i could think about was the people i might run into and not know what to say, the people i had spent the majority of my time in college with but wouldn’t be graduating alongside, the fallings-out, the famed and exhaustively documented something-to-show-for phenomenon. everything but the sheer joy and accomplishment of reaching a significant milestone, really.
i debated not going, at one point. i thought myself in circles, wouldn’t shut up about my inane and exhausting internal monologue to friends who were patient and kind enough to listen, self-soothed and self-agitated in equal measure. i imagined scenarios that had a <1% chance of actually happening, and then somehow managed to convince myself that they could very well happen.
shockingly, after all the doomsday predicting, the evening turned out to be…not so bad, actually. fun, even. i got my degree. i hung out with lovely friends who had always been there. i felt the weird something-is-ending feeling that i didn’t think i would, which made everything seem so much more real. i had convinced myself so staunchly that i had nothing ‘to show for’, that i was surprised to feel anything at all. would nothing be able to end? would the ending of nothing lead to something feeling different the next morning, like a piece had shifted?
all of this to say - i was so scared. i didn’t have to be.
the it’s-rarely-as-bad-as-you-fear-it’s-going-to-be phenomenon is observed when you spend an extended period of time convincing yourself that something in the future is going to go terribly, concoct outlandish scenarios that you worry about incessantly, and get so good at self-delusion that you can’t even fathom the idea of things being kind of fine, actually; only to realise, after it’s over, that it wasn’t earth-shatteringly awful at all.
i hope identifying these things, cleping them ‘phenomena’, will make me better at handling them. maybe one day, i’ll write about the you’ve-got-loads-to-show-for-jahnavi phenomenon and the it’s-not-that-big-of-a-deal-jahnavi phenomenon and also the you-are-absolutely-one-hundred-percent-overthinking-this-jahnavi phenomenon. but for today, i’ll let you go.
A Picture!
English Recitation Competition
Night Sky, Joanna Klink (full poem here)
If you have grieved you have loved. Twinned, like the sun’s thread-corona, the moon’s deepening pearl. The violent deaths of stars an expanse through which everything moves—lights thrown from collapse. You are coastal, throatless, roaming through people that hold tight then let go. You are the blue forest through which sunbeams sweep. And you are nothing but actions of the loom threading aster and hunger. You are nothing but roads interrupted by wheels. What will be left in us but pure admiration? Dust released into night.
When the World Comes Clear, Andrew Colliver (full poem here)
when the world comes clear something pulling tight within your mind might fall away to leave a formless space, a fathomless space in which eternal life cannot be granted, or even offered, but only recognised, so simply, as what you are.
The Seven of Pentacles, Marge Piercy (full poem here)
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen: reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in. This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always, for every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
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this week’s Song
The End Where I Begin by The Script
find all shared songs here.
thank you for reading, and see you next week <3
1000/10