Unless you are magically perfect and always do everything right. (Sad to say, but doubtful.) Or if you’ve decided you’ve done enough to get better and now you can stay the same as you are forever. (Don’t do that. It makes things awkward for the people who have to interact with you.)
I am, at many times, an anxious perfectionist who has to accomplish things or I feel like I haven’t done enough. I have grown more aware of my own foibles over the years and have even come to accept a few of my shortcomings (maybe, just barely). I am making definite strides in the right direction.
But there’s some shit that I’ll just never learn. I’m going to wake up thinking I’ll change it today, then I won’t change it, and then go to bed promising myself I’ll do better tomorrow.
Hilarious.
You’d think by now I would just accept that there is some stuff that’s just not going to happen. But I absolutely will not. My brain is convinced that future me will unlock the key to the secret that changes who I am. (Narrator: She will not.)
Here’s what I should know better but will never actually learn.
I’ll go to bed early tonight.
I absolutely will not do this. Instead I will look up from bottle washing or from dog walking or from folding laundry and sigh heavily.
When I am training for races, I manage to convince myself that I’ll wake up early and run. I don’t. I managed to do this successfully for a stretch of a few months when my first kid was a baby. I will never get that magic back. Instead I will do the four mile run after the kids go to bed. (But don’t worry. I’ll still get to bed early.)
I’ll have more time to read next week.
In addition to going to bed early, I will also read an actual print book in bed before I fall asleep before 10 p.m. Oh wait. No. I won’t do that.
I’ll start regularly cleaning parts of my house on a schedule instead of when it gets too disgusting to stand.
Anyone who has ever known me my entire life can attest that I have never, not once, ever done this. (I sometimes have flickers of understanding, but they never last.)
I’ll get that that show on my watch list.
No, I haven’t seen The Wire or Friday Night Lights or Call the Midwife or Chernobyl or Killing Eve or Homeland or This is Us! Saved on my lists across various apps though. Don’t worry, I’ll never get to them.
I will successfully cook a healthy meal every night, work full time, do all the laundry and the dishes, update my blog, go on a run every night, and still get to bed early every night.
Just a parody of myself at this point.
I’ll invent time travel, go back to the Regency era, and find Mr. Darcy.
I will successfully convince people online that they should be more empathetic.
Never will anyone online be convinced of anything ever. It is why I type out impassioned defenses and then always hit the ol’ backspace before posting anything.
I will come to terms with the fact that I can’t do everything all the time and that’s okay.
Maybe this one’s not fair. I do come to terms with it sometimes and feel good about it on occasion. But it never lasts. Oh! There it is:
The self-improvement efforts I make will stick once I’ve made them and I won’t have to continually work on them like other humans do for reasons.
Turns out self-improvement doesn’t exist on autopilot.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to sign off so I can go to bed early, wake up at dawn to go on a four mile run so I can be ready for a full day of work, using my thirty minute lunch break to fold the laundry and prep dinner. That’ll give me enough time after dinner to read a few chapters and then hit the hay early.
This blog post brought to you by sick children and no sleep brain.
I subscribe to several newsletters and several of them are written by mothers of young children and they often talk about things that get to my soul.
In the past couple weeks as I’ve been starting new things in life and absolutely losing my grip on reality (okay, by reality, I mean dishes), these newsletters have been a source of comfort for me. I also don’t have time to do the things I want to do! I, too, have been neglecting laundry, forcing my husband to run through all the cycles until we end up with absolute mountains of unfolded laundry that need to hastily be folded and put away when we realize nobody has any underwear left.
Or, also as likely, to be folded and put into the correct hampers and then have those laundry hampers sit in your room for a week and you just pick the clean clothes you need out of the hamper as the pile of dirty clothes collects on the floor next to the hamper.
Yeah. I’m not much of a homemaker. Cluttered, disorganized living spaces are my bread and butter. Ever since I was a child, I’ve been absolutely abysmal at keeping my living spaces tidy. My desk at work? Immaculate. My family room? Please don’t look at it, you might go blind.
This problem has only compounded with having small children about. In the before children era of my life, I would just take a weekend to scrub the place down and try to pass myself off as a presentable adult. Now that my weekends are full of…well, kid stuff, I don’t have that option anymore. The only time you have available to vacuum is when the kids are taking naps or have gone to bed and that is not exactly the best time to get that chore done.
Add that to the fact that I’m desperately clinging to the parts of my life that make me feel like a complete adult human separate of having children (hello, blog!) and that causes everything to fall into even more disarray.
Sort of the state of having young kids, right?
NO. Get on the internet and figure out some life hacks, you lazy slob!
The key is motivation. The key is making a schedule. The key is being a magic fairy who can make both your kids sleep for 10 hour stretches uninterrupted. (If you possess this magic, please share.)
I have always liked exploring personal and professional development in the form of exercises and discussions and reading books, but earlier in this week I was in one that struck me in a weird way. The content of the training was great and the advice totally made sense and I thought there were actionable steps in there.
But not ones for me right now, I don’t think.
As the time came to an end, I wanted to ask if the trainer and if anyone else in the class had babies or once had babies and if they had any advice on how to wrangle the steps into being when you also shared a house with chaos.
I can set my running shoes out the night before and set the alarm early to get up and exercise. But what if I am up four times in the night? What if one of the kids wakes up before my early alarm even goes off? Where does the scale land when it comes to trying to balance getting enough sleep for the night and getting a two mile run in?
In the fall of 2019, a time so distant and beautiful I can scarcely remember it, I used to take the nights when it wasn’t my turn to put the toddler down and go to the gym, where I would run as many miles as I wanted to.
Now I never have a night off from bedtime because there are two of them and the baby still nurses and I don’t feel safe going to the gym so I can’t run after dark.
How do I life hack and schedule myself around that?
My husband is a swell dude. I could ask him to cover one night a week and try to go out and run at a more reasonable hour. Assuming it isn’t 90 plus degrees out that day. And then that’s only one run week. Not exactly a pinnacle of fitness over here.
I find this intersection of life approaches extremely interesting. In one corner is a bunch of tired moms (and dads) who are letting some things go just to get in a little relaxation or pursue one measly hobby. In the other is the promise of improvement if you just approach it from the right angle.
Is there a right angle? I don’t know!
Some people would argue that my giant pile of laundry and inability to sweep is not the right angle.
But surely neither is scheduling yourself into a corner so that you must run yourself ragged trying to get done all the things you want to get done.
Is the answer that there are simply no life hacks? That you can’t do all the things? Is that what prioritization is really about? Realizing that you have the pick the most important one and let the others fall to the side?
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I have a storied history as a perfectionist who can’t let things go. So it’s hard to accept I can’t do everything I want. I just have to try a little harder, schedule it out a little better!
Or I maybe I accept the encroaching entropy and do the little part I can to push back against it. Without sweating so much about all the rest of it.
So I guess my life hack is…let go of the life hacks.
And don’t worry so much about the unfolded laundry.
Looking for a job is pretty stressful and part of that stress is generated by applications. After all the hours you spend crafting a perfect resume and a portfolio and other materials, all you want to do is go find things that look interesting, attach your carefully curated information, and then go spend your time elsewhere.
But it’s not so easy as all that. Sometimes you have to fill out forms, either entering information from scratch or editing autofill forms that are a garbled mess. Sometimes you have to answer questions about availability and salary expectations and years of experiences. And sometimes you have to write a cover letter.
*cue screaming*
“I need a high five after reading the most brilliant cover letter ever!” What happens every time a company reads my application, probably. (Photo by krakenimages on Unsplash)
I have never liked writing job application materials for myself. And the cover letter is one of my most dreaded. For me, it’s impossible to feel good about myself while I’m writing the cover letter. Sometimes I am a little proud of the final result, but I always feel like an exposed dork once it’s been sent off.
Talking about yourself and your accomplishments is hard enough. Doing it in an engaging and meaningful way is difficult. Then, when you don’t get asked for a first round of interviews or receive a form email politely rejecting you, you have to wonder…did anyone read that cover letter in the first place? Are you screaming into a void populated by robots and keyword checkers?
How social media made my blood pressure rise (this time)
I started thinking about the usefulness of cover letters recently as I always do when job searching, and then I saw this post on LinkedIn about whether cover letters are necessary.
I voted yes so I could see the results and because I was feeling salty at the time.
I thought people might have some interesting insights on how useful cover letters were, so I dove into the comments. And…yikes.
A bunch of recruiter and hiring manager types talking about how cover letters were absolutely necessary and good (which is fine). Others discussing how a cover letter automatically moves someone’s application to the top of the pile. How they always moved applications with cover letters to the top of the pile but never actually read them.
I’m sorry, what?
Granted, there are probably plenty of job searchers who just stick a copy/paste cover letter on a resume and move on with their lives, but come on! To just say, “Well they wrote one so they probably care more than everyone else” and then never read them? I don’t like this.
As if reading my mind, LinkedIn then recently showed me this other post:
More of a humblebrag, I think.
I actually find this post hilarious (the author is obviously tongue in cheek here), but it is depressing that the idea cover letters are never read is so pervasive this guy can make a successful joke about it.
Curious about what the people in my life think about this stressful piece of writing, I took to social media.
Conducting some important and scientific research
When I posted a Facebook status asking people what they thought about cover letters, I had no idea the variety of responses I’d get. It turns out my friends are thoughtful humans and all of them had great stuff to say. I had a lot of responses from people who’d hired others and their thoughts on a cover letter’s usefulness.
Some of the points made about how cover letters can be useful:
If you are applying to a writing job, the cover letter can act as a mini writing sample.
If you are making a career change or your resume doesn’t quite match the position, you can fill in the blanks and tell your story.
If your resume isn’t quite as strong but your cover letter is great, that can bump you up the pile.
If the candidate pool is largely recent graduates without much experience, cover letters can help differentiate.
Basically, a good cover letter can help highlight who you are and if the hiring manager reads the letter, it helps them get to know you better and improves your chances.
When cover letters are not so useful:
For jobs where writing skills aren’t that necessary or where it’s much more important to have specific certifications and qualifications that can just be listed on a resume.
When you have a portfolio that highlights relevant work for the position and gives better context than a cover letter would.
When the positions are more entry level and there isn’t much to say about them so writing a cover letter is kind of pointless.
When they contain errors that make the application weaker (in this case, no useful for the applicant).
I had a few people arguing that for writing/marketing positions they wanted cover letters and others who said they’d rather see a portfolio and writing samples for those positions instead of a cover letter. And finally one friend made the brilliant suggestion that if you want a writing sample, consider giving a writing prompt instead of asking for a cover letter.
I want to note that all the above points are great but they are coming from hiring managers. The comments from jobseekers largely said they’d rather not write them. I got a great point that requiring cover letters can be too high a barrier for some applicants and cause extra stress for people who are neurodivergent. Should they pretend to fit the ideal candidate role to get an interview? Is this disingenuous? Will it end making them a bad fit?
A couple people commented that they suck to write but seems like including one increases your chances of getting contacted. Right? Right?
Because I’m a huge nerd, I kept track of my current job search in a spreadsheet. I noted the job, dates applied, when I heard back, and whether I wrote a cover letter.
So out of 19 full-time jobs I applied to, I wrote cover letters for six of those positions. A couple where I didn’t write cover letters required short answer questions, and those took enough time to answer, I figured they didn’t also need a cover letter. I got asked to eight phone interviews. Of those eight positions, I had written cover letters for three.
Which I guess means I had a higher success rate for jobs I didn’t write one for?
Part of this is because I tend to write cover letters for jobs that are more outside of my wheelhouse or are maybe a touch beyond my experience. I’m trying to provide the extra context to show I’m a good fit. But I get weeded out for whatever reason.
This is fine, but it can be sort of demoralizing. Some of the cover letters I worked hardest on, tried to be the most clever with, tried to really show who I was and what I could do got met with nothing but a rejection email. If that means my experience simply wasn’t there, I get that. But then did the cover letter really do anything?
I had one job interview this time around where the interviewer referenced my cover letter, and I was sort of shocked. I don’t know that I’ve ever had that happen before. It was pretty cool. At least I know that they read it!
Why I’d still rather not have to write them
I get that a good cover letter can help make your case. I do.
But writing a good cover letter takes forever. I carefully read the job description and pull out the bullet points that I think are important or that I have good examples for, leaving the points that are covered well enough on my resume. I go to the company website, see what makes them tick, see if they make any points that fit hand in hand with my own experiences. Then I try to craft the letter telling a story about why I want the position, how I’ve done work and have skills relevant to what they’re looking for, making sure to hit those relevant bullet points. After I do that, I have to go back and edit myself, condense my points, make sure everything fits onto a single page. Then I have to read again for proofreading purposes.
This whole process takes roughly an hour, sometimes more. Factoring in the entire application experience, applying to one job can take up to two hours.
That’s a long time! Especially because I am cramming in my job applications at night after the kids are in bed, after I’ve washed bottles and prepared things for daycare, sometimes after walking the dog or cleaning dishes or folding laundry. If I spend every weekday night doing nothing but applying for jobs that require cover letters, I might get in five applications over the course of a week.
Might.
The only reason I was able to apply for the number of jobs I did this time around was because I wrote cover letters for fewer than half the jobs I applied to.
And a couple of the ones I tried hardest on yielded no results.
There are plenty of reasons a cover letter can be helpful. I understand why someone might want one from me, especially because I’m often looking at content jobs.
But I’d still like to not have to write one and go to bed thirty minutes earlier instead.
I don’t know anyone who is feeling refreshed and excited and ready to rejoin the world right now. Pretty sure almost everyone is some kind of burnt out mess. Vaccinations helps, but have not provided the cure to our collective anxiety. Some people are planning to have a good time this summer, but I’ve also seen a lot of people posting about how they’re going to join the cicadas: go outside, plant themselves in a tree, and scream.
I’ve been telling my friends I’m a step beyond that. I’m the brittle little shells the cicadas leave behind. A pure human embodiment of insect remains.
I have spent a lot of this year screaming and crying and worrying myself into an anxiety spiral. I don’t think that makes me unique.
A pandemic happened (and is still happening! IT IS STILL HAPPENING). A whole bunch of political stuff hit the fan. We’re reckoning on the realities of systemic racism on a national level. There is an underlying layer of trauma in all our interactions.
Everyone is realizing that the way things used to be kind of…sucked? Maybe they shouldn’t be that way anymore.
So let’s not be that way anymore.
Traditionally, I am the kind of person who runs myself into the ground. I say yes and yes and yes and take it all on until I can’t remember the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass (shoutout to my man Frodo who knows what’s up).
In the past, my mom would give me stern talks about how I needed to tell people no. That it was okay to focus on my own stuff and not everyone else’s. These days, my husband is the primary “focus on yourself” pep talker.
And have I ever been in need of one of those talks. It’s nice to think that the end of 2020 brought about the end of all the stress. But it didn’t (spoiler alert).
Finally, I realized that making jokes about being a cicada husk wasn’t cutting it. I had reached peak burnout and needed to make a change.
So I did. I decided to leave my work situation and try something different. Forge a new path. Maybe, find a new job, embrace unemployment, watch the kids during the day, pursue freelance work, the possibilities are vast! If nothing else, taking a few weeks to find new work means more continuous time off than I’ve had in years.
I realize that not everyone is privileged enough to do this and that leaving your job without a backup plan is fully impossible for many folks.
But what if we all looked at ourselves, our little screaming inner selves and embraced the burnout? Can you just stop a thing (even a very small one)? What can you do for you?
A lot of people are doing it. Changing careers, looking for meaningful work, refusing to go back into the office. We should all do this! Embrace your burnout. Make a change. Be free! Even if that means a baby step, one dropped responsibility, a plan to start something that will lead to change. Fight exploitation and injustice on a tiny micro scale or a great big macro one.
We should all spend the summer as cicadas screaming in a tree. Because screaming is cathartic and wonderful.
Our massive cicada family can rise up and scream in unison. Let’s do something else. Going back to normal is not the answer. Let’s not do normal. Let’s do something different. It’ll be hard and weird and we’ll find ourselves burnt out again at some point or come to the conclusion we never really conquered it, we just harnessed it in a different way.
Give your burnt out self or friend or spouse a big old hug.
And then…I don’t know.
Anything can happen after that dried out husk blows away.
So you’ve realized you’re human this week and it kind of stinks.
I get it. I’m human too.
We all are.
I don’t know why watching sunsets make you contemplative about the world, but they do. (Photo by Heshan Perera on Unsplash)
We blast into the world with all that we are. And we screw up. We are disappointed and we disappoint. We unintentionally hurt someone. We say the wrong thing. We can’t get to our goals. We discover yet again that our journey toward self-discovery and self-improvement has hit some sort of obstacle.
We’re not perfect.
That last one has always been difficult for me. Whatever the right mix of anxiety and achiever lands you on perfectionism, I’ve got it. And while it can sometimes make my work better than it ever needed to be, usually it just serves as a reminder that it’s impossible to achieve the perfection I so innately crave. That I can’t get there. That I’m a human.
It’s served at times to make me into a procrastinator. I don’t have the right idea or the best approach, so I can’t get started. At other times it’s held me back from trying new hobbies and activities. When I do try a new thing, if I’m not good at it right away, my first instinct is to quickly give up and go back to what I know I’m already good at. (This philosophy has applied largely to sports of all stripes as I am a bad athlete to my very core. Oddly enough, this never applied to my writing even though I spent many years being one of the worst writers in the entire world.)
As I get older, I realize this trait in myself, and I work to mitigate it. I don’t have to be the best and I don’t have to achieve mythical levels of perfection.
This mindset allowed me to finally start running. I am a thoroughly mediocre runner, and I’m okay with it. I do try to go a little faster or a little longer, but I’m able to measure me against me. And the realization I’ll never run a record breaking marathon (if, in fact, I ever even attempt to run a marathon) is fine with me. I don’t run to be the best at it. I do it to take my mind off things, to pound out my frustrations and fears and joys into the pavement. To focus on a good audiobook at the path in front of me.
Sometimes, though, I can only get so far.
The last year and a half has been tough. The last six months, since my second daughter was born, have been tough in a different way. The past couple months since I’ve returned to work? Another difficult transition. And while I have triumphs and successes along the way, sometimes it feels like the full weight of all the toughness have compounded on each other. It’s pretty humbling to look at yourself and realize you don’t measure up to the standards you’d like to set for yourself.
I haven’t been quite getting there. I never really do, but I’m more aware of it lately. I’ll never be the Platonic ideal of a mother, although I do okay. I am far from the perfect spouse. I can be a decent daughter, a middling friend, a worker who keeps trying to find the solution.
But I can’t meet perfection. Not the kind I want. Not even the kind I’m sometimes willing to settle for.
So what’s the next step?
Breathe a little. Find something to appreciate. Maybe the feel of a dog curled up next to me in bed. Sitting exhausted in a rocker for another late night feeding, I can hear the patter of rain outside. Huffing and puffing my way down the sidewalk, I can watch the flowers blooming. Revel in a spontaneous “I love you” from the three year old. Appreciate a really well-written passage in a book I’m reading.
The little moments are there to fall back on. And while I’m far from perfect, sometimes the moments can feel a little like perfection.
Breathe a little. Find something to appreciate.
A beer? A cookie. I can compliment you.
So you’re human. You showed up late, you didn’t get enough sleep, you forgot to do an important task, you were a little short with your kids.
You and everyone else. All of us are making small screw ups and small corrections. Finding personal failings and potential successes. Looking at moments to rejoice and those to mourn. All of us are collectively grasping at our own forms of perfectionism and then, far more often than we want, falling short.
I just logged in to get this screenshot. I SWEAR. (Thanks to Visual Watermark for the text on image assist.)
I quit Twitter a couple weeks ago.
Again.
My relationship with Twitter has often been unhealthy (a common refrain of Twitter users), but during the pandemic, it really ratcheted up in terms of being a life sucking source. I could not stop doomscrolling. Continually glued to all the absolutely horrendous news about politics, police violence, widespread protests, the fact that California was on fire, just all of it.
There were times when I thought or said out loud that I needed to stop. Having the internet prove to me every day that the entire world was an absolute dumpster fire was not really the most calming habit I could have picked up during a stressful time. It also made being pregnant real weird. (Even weirder than being pregnant during a pandemic was already.)
I officially logged out a few times and managed well for a few days or a week at a time. One time I had successfully left Twitter and then Ruth Bader Ginsberg died a month before a national election. When the election itself actually happened, I stayed off all social media for a few days because my anxiety had already reached such a peak I didn’t think I’d be able to survive it. Then, when the votes started suggesting that the results wouldn’t be disastrous, I got back on to celebrate.
Sometimes there is good stuff on Twitter! Nothing makes me laugh out loud quite like an absolutely bizarre tweet or meme that you only understand when the Twitter brain worms have fully taken over. Because I am officially an Old, and will never download TikTok, I got to see some of the best of TikTok through Twitter. This particular dance to “Rasputin” by Boney M. for example. So delightful!
The less pleasant aspects of the platform, though, started to outweigh the other stuff. Dunking stupid tweets and dogpiling people seems to be Twitter’s favorite pastime. And although I hardly ever tweet and am too scared to voice opinions to become the Twitter main character of the day, the ghost of that threat seems to loom over all interactions.
Piling on can be fun in the moment, and it can often reveal truly bizarre intersections of humanity (the most recent examples being Bean Dad and the Cinnamon Toast Shrimp Guy), but it finally started to dawn on my that this meant all my feed was breeding was negativity. Everyone is criticizing everyone. Either because they won’t open a can of beans for their daughter or because people are taking the bean thing way to seriously or because nobody can just have fun on the internet anymore or–
Even all this might not have been enough to do it. Social media addiction is real and so is starting the doomscroll anytime you have a free second.
But I had a second kid in December and went back to work in March. I’m up for an hour in the middle of the night most nights. My sleep is pretty destroyed and my days are an absolute blur of taking care of children, trying to productive at work, cramming in a boatload of chores, and then collapsing in an exhausted heap so I can sleep for three hours before the baby wakes me up.
Most nights, I try to squeeze in a tiny bit of personal time before the exhausted collapsing part. Read a little bit, watch a short show, have an actual conversation with my husband. When Twitter was how I spent my personal time, I got sucked in for far too long, which was then further destroyed my already terrible sleep schedule.
It all came to a head and I logged out. It’s been two or three weeks now. (I honestly can’t remember just how long because time means nothing these days.) I miss the memes and the goofiness somewhat. But I’m also getting a little more reading in. If I pick up my phone mindlessly, I try to open an ebook or put the phone back down. I can’t marvel at hot takes that truly bend the fabric of the universe, but I can get to bed thirty minutes earlier.
What I look like talking about how much I’ll achieve now that I’m off social media. (Find image here.)
Does this make me a better person than anyone still on Twitter? Nope. Social media can be great for people for a whole of reasons.
Which makes me think. Just because Twitter isn’t good for me right now, could it have been at some point? Despite all the bad on the platform, could the sheer amount of time I spent doomscrolling on Twitter in 2020 have been a little bit good? I was anxious all the time, but that would have been the case anyway. And because I couldn’t see anyone and was essentially trapped in my home, I could at least log on and see that everyone else was feeling the same. We all sort of went a little bit mad together, true, but would it have been any better doing that alone?
The isolation of the pandemic was pretty heightened for me. Being pregnant is difficult and doing it mostly alone was ever harder. Not that anything I was doing online had to do with the pregnancy. But still. Maybe it was helpful while it needed to be and now I’m entering a new phase where it’s not. Different things for different stages of life and all that.
Will I stay off Twitter forever? Unlikely. I will be very proud of myself for hitting some milestone in the future. Tell myself that I’ve broken the habit and it can’t hurt to log back on and take a peek for just 30 minutes. Then I’ll discover that someone thinks baking cookies is anti-feminist or that some person we all used to love is actually super problematic or that the shipping wars have fired up over a new media property. And I’ll be right back in it.
Hopefully, next time, with more really fun dance routines.
Gabs Writes 