The Evil of Two Lessers
Dear Friends,
I’m an artist who works well with constraints. For this newsletter, my constraint is this: I don’t start writing the letter until the first workday of the week it comes out. So on weeks like this one, beginning with Labor Day, I am writing on Tuesday morning, and you’re reading this three days later on Friday.
Sometimes, over the weekend before I begin writing, I’ll have an inkling of what I’ll write about–something that’s been on my mind, some conversation I’ve had, or a worry, or a realization.
This Monday, coming off of a week out of town and a long weekend spent laundering every item of clothing my family owns, I got a text from Natasha.
It’s newsletter week, right?!
Oof. Sure is.
I got nothin right now, I texted back. Let’s hope something shows up in my brain tomorrow. Any requests?
Natasha, whom I’ve known for a decade but only met in person once, is one of those friends I can always count on to come along for the whimsical ride. She’s a poet, a teacher, a mother, a musician, but above all, a deep thinker–someone whose questions about the world often make me reach further in my own life and work.
What about decision making? Natasha offered. The burden of the right choice…over-researching options. I feel like more often than not recently, I’m choosing either the lesser of two not-great options or what’s more familiar, even if it’s not necessarily “best.”
I thought of Emily Oster’s decision-making mantra “There is no secret Option C,” in which she advises her readers to remember that having two not-great options doesn’t mean that a third, better option is waiting in the wings.
She gives the example of getting divorced vs. staying in an unhappy marriage, and another example of a couple trying to choose between two great job offers in different states, or two meh job offers where they’d get to live together. In both examples, both options are going to suck to experience in some capacity. But by not committing to one, things may just get worse, or the decision gets made for you.
Oster writes, “It doesn’t make it easy to choose something with downsides, but it forces us to accurately weigh the risks and benefits of both choices, rather than weighing them both against an imaginary (but dominant) option…by facing the decision head-on, you may be able to make the options you do have better.”
I really like this advice. And yet, when I thought about Natasha’s suggestion and what decisions I was making in my own life, I realized I had a different problem.
Strangely, I texted Natasha, I feel like I’m in a spot where decisions are made for me and I just have to ride the wave.
While we make plenty of in-the-moment decisions, much of our decision-making occupies the headspace designated for The Future: thinking about it, planning for it, worrying over it.
And for my family, the future is both decided and…totally nebulous. My husband’s job with the State Department will take us to our next assignment in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, in less than a year. And yet, Bishkek takes up very little of my future-worries headspace.
What will our house be like? I dunno. When we went to Doha, we didn’t get our housing assignment until five days before we arrived at post. Not a lot of time to plan logistics around that.
What about the language? Jake started a full course of Russian language training this week. There are courses spouses can enroll in, but that requires a person to be available during the day. I have a job and full-time caregiver responsibilities, so I suppose I’ll be making do with Duolingo and Google Translate. Привет!
What about…everything else?
The thing I always think about, especially with a big international move, is that this is the plan until it isn’t. Once we’re on the airplane it’s probably final, but until then, anything could happen. Our assignment could get broken for any number of reasons. A political coup, a natural disaster, a global pandemic. A health condition that renders someone in our family no longer “worldwide available.”
These things happen more often than you’d think.
And really, it’s like this for everyone, not just globetrotting bureaucrats. Nothing is ever certain. Making decisions about the future requires striking the balance between preparation and staying present .
While it’s true that humans hate the unknown, I’d invite you to instead consider that there is calm to be found in the liminal space. There is peace in these rare times of few decisions.
Of course, most decisions aren’t on the scale of “should I pick up my entire life and move to Central Asia?” There are also those decisions I think of as “milestone” decisions. Should I quit my job / propose to my partner / find a new apartment / have a kid / go back to school, etc.
In my current phase of life (as you’re well-aware from all my whining), I am the parent of a small child. Parenting comes with about a million decisions to make, and yet I find that the same problem persists: even the “milestone” decisions tied to this stage have been made for me. (Except for whether to have a second kid. Decision made: one and done.)
In the decision-storm that is back-to-school, my child will be attending the same preschool she attended last year. We know everyone, including my kid’s brand-new teacher, because she’s the mom of one of Nora’s former classmates.
Do I have my child start kindergarten “on time” or redshirt her a year for academic performance? Well, with a November birthday, on-time it is. I’d start her a year early if I could.
Should I send her to the public school down the street, apply for the lottery for the Spanish immersion school, or start playing the lottery to afford private school tuition? Moot point. Nora will be attending whatever English-language elementary school is available in Bishkek when we arrive next year.
What activities and extracurriculars should my child be doing? Well, she hated ballet, her parents hate soccer, gymnastics is too far to bike to, and we only have one car. Music class it is.
There is some relief in not having to make some of these decisions, but there’s also an element of powerlessness to it. If you’ve ever been in this boat, do you resist riding the wave and make things more complicated than they are, or do you just hang tight and see what shakes out?
The answer probably has to do with whether you, too, are A Person With Anxiety. Because people like me–we love to make extra work and problems for ourselves.
Recently, Greta, my therapist, called me out about this. I had made the decision to ask a friend to babysit Nora while I went to a baby shower. But I was anxious–my friend had never watched Nora before; she didn’t have a ton of experience with toddlers. And, perhaps most of all, if it didn’t go well, this is a friend whose opinion and esteem I value.
“I can’t skip the shower, but maybe I’ll just go for a short time and then come right back…” I said in therapy.
“What would it feel like to not spend the headspace worrying about this? What if you just go and have a nice time and it goes fine with your friend babysitting?” Greta asked.
“What would it feel like? I don’t know! I don’t know what it’s like to live that way!” I told her.
As A Person With Anxiety (an APWA? Do we need an acronym?), it’s not so much that I’m actively ruminating on this at all times, but it’s sort of just there in my head, like a framework–the box on the calendar that holds the day itself. Ugly scaffolding around a LEED-certified building.
Too often for me it’s not that I’m worried about decisions or trying to make the right one–I’m a decisive person. Sometimes I can even know for certain I made the best possible choice. But I still feel anxiety about how things will turn out.
I know that my child is enrolled in a preschool where things are familiar, safe, and fun. And yet I still have a bit of dread about the first day next week, when she’ll probably have a hard time at drop off.
I feel totally at peace with our decision not to sign my daughter up for soccer this fall (even though we joke that we’ll lose our Alexandria citizenship if we don’t do it because EVERYONE does soccer).
But there’s something my anxiety is still trying to construct–we’re not prioritizing or emphasizing sports because, right now, it’s not appealing or convenient for us. But are we depriving our daughter of an activity (and entire branch of extracurriculars) that she’d really enjoy?
It’s not the science of the rocket. It’s just toddler soccer. It 100% doesn’t matter.
But if you’re a person with anxiety, sometimes it can feel like everything matters. Or at least everything takes up headspace. Or makes up the structure of the headspace, even if it’s not the whole space itself.
I saw a quote on Instagram (yeah, yeah) last week that was something like “We self sabotage because it’s comforting to know the outcome.” In some ways, living as an APWA must be like this. Even if the outcome of events is that things turn out fine, the outcome of anxiety scaffolding is suffering, and well, hey. We know suffering!
In the end, with decision-making, we probably all contain multitudes. I don’t know why I’m able to embrace the calm unknowing of a move to Kyrgyzstan, but going to a baby shower feels like something I need to take to therapy.
It’s good, then, that I’m in a phase of riding the wave and making few decisions. Except for the really big ones: “what should I write about for the newsletter this week?” And for that, may we all have a Natasha in our lives.
Take good care,
Dot
And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
-Rilke
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Links We Like
Using music to reduce anxiety (WaPo).
I frequently recommend Mari Andrew’s “Grief Baby” essay, but this “100 Things I Know” list is new. So much good advice for being thoughtful and taking care of your mental health.
New artist’s uniform?
If your teen is feeling pressured, focus on mattering over achieving. (WaPo)
I always love Austin Kleon’s writing on life and art. But his collages!
Attn: wellness nerds: Elizabeth Gilbert is now on Substack.
Studio goals (canine included).
Wishing my headspace looked more like this photo by Anna Petrow:
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