by Karen Karbo
Look at me, I thought. Just a girl in the world, tidying up, doing nothing special, free from the endless self-imposed pressure. I read a little Ralph Waldo Emerson, possibly the world’s greatest expert on just living life. “He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded by fret and anxiety.” Got that right, RWE.
I ate a bag of barbecue potato chips for lunch. I walked the dogs along my usual walk/run route because I didn’t feel like running. I deleted some emails because I didn’t feel like answering them. I read a novel instead of writing some essay I was supposed to be working on. I ordered a box of overpriced decorative folders that I didn’t need from Amazon. I had a glass of wine at 4:30 p.m.
The exhilaration I’d felt earlier in the day began to peter out. I felt a little gassy from my lunch of potato chips. I like to think of myself as a woman with a rich interior life. I read old books and pursue my cockamamie interests. I am a half-assed knitter and an excellent baker of blackberry pies, complete with flawless latticework tops. I ride a motorcycle. I volunteer at a dog rescue and have three dogs of my own. I believed that once I swore off self-improvement it would free up headspace for my other interests. I imagined my interests to be like goldfish, which are said to grow as big as their bowl. Who knows what I might attempt now! But I felt restless and anxious. I bought a subscription to Babbel, the language-learning app. I didn’t even open it. Instead, second glass of wine in hand, I found myself scrolling through DailyOM, one of the newsletter subscriptions I had deleted just that morning, to see if there was a gentle, rational regimen that could help me get “back on track.”
It turned out swearing off self-improvement was as fraught as launching into a new self-improvement regime. Trying to improve myself had been a form of self-medication, my habitual response whenever something wasn’t going the way I wanted it to. I never admitted it, but I felt I would only deserve whatever good thing I was hoping for—true love, a book contract, a body I felt comfortable in—if I was a better woman. I was used to the striving and misery. It was familiar. It was home. True Self was a stranger, someone I’d gone to great lengths to pretend didn’t exist.
I once married a man in penance for falling in love with someone who was so obviously wrong for me. He was straight-up blue-collar, something I loved about him. He knew how to get up before dawn, work a solid eight hours, arrive home dog-tired and in need of a shower and a beer. It was a confusing time in popular music. Sheryl Crow sang about being a rough-and-ready woman of the people who day drank with strangers in the middle of the week in her halter top and low-rise jeans (in my imagination) and hooked up with truckers in Barstow. All she wanted to do was have some fun. There was another girl singer who sang a more troubling song about getting involved with a sexy cowboy for whom she wears a sexy dress and pours him a cold glass of lemonade; years pass and she’s stuck in the kitchen cooking for him and their kids while he goes to the bar (possibly to hook up with Sheryl Crow). That’s the one I should have listened to.
My guy wasn’t a sexy cowboy but a sexy UPS man. You can laugh. I did, even as it was happening. It made no sense as a love story, but complete sense as a self-improvement story. With this man, who reminded me of all the boys I knew from high school who preferred less difficult girls, I could be the woman my mother thought I should be. The mother I had murdered by not being the kind of daughter she’d hoped for.
For the first time in my life I was thin enough. My doctor did a blood test to see if perhaps I was dying of some hidden disease, but I was only anemic and rocking size 6 jeans. The man had two young children who lived with us. One of their mothers had disappeared, the other lived in another state. I spent days baking elaborate cakes for their birthdays. We went on family outings to county fairs and locally famous waterfalls and caves. I would pack a picnic. He liked me to paint my toenails seafoam green. He liked me to sleep in one of his oversize T-shirts and string bikini underpants, even though I preferred to sleep naked. He liked every crappy science fiction movie that came down the pike, and I endured them because he liked to hold my hand at the movies. At night, after overseeing bath time, story time, and tucking-in time, I read about the Tudors. I went through a mad Elizabeth I phase (another of my cockamamie interests). Meanwhile, he played a video game called EverQuest, which seemed to be set during Elizabeth’s reign.
My friends were polite. My best friend said, “But, is this you?” By me, she meant True Self, the one I was always trying to abandon in the name of self-improvement, the one my mother believed was too much, and not enough. My best friend knew me to be smart, curious, adventuresome, loathing of domesticity, sardonic. I said, “I don’t need to be able to talk about Dostoevsky with him. I have you for that.” That hadn’t been her question. Later, thinking back, I would note that I leapt straight to what would reveal itself to be the insurmountable problem between us. Several years later, after I had married him and the marriage was in the process of falling apart, I was going to the movies with this same friend. We were going to see Pollock. My husband and I had reached that stage where anything was grist for a knock-down, drag-out argument. I baited him. I said, “I’m going with Kathy because I didn’t think you’d want to see a movie about Jackson Pollock.” He looked blank. I added, “. . . the artist.” He said, “Oh I see, he’s a fucking tortured artist like you?”
The grief at the end of that marriage was grief for love lost. Grief for mother lost. Grief because no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t be the woman my mother felt I needed to be to have what she felt was a good life. Guilt because I wanted to want to be that woman but could not. Guilt because I wanted to want the sort of life I had with this husband, one that I felt my mother would have approved, but I did not. Not really. Not ever.
That calamitous marriage ended in 2000. Now, on the night of the morning I swore off self-improvement in April 2017, I couldn’t sleep. This was unusual for me. One of the things I never needed to improve about myself was my capacity for a good night’s sleep. During the few weeks I was tethered to my Fitbit, I learned that it took me less than two minutes to fall asleep. Turns out even my half-ass daily exercise routine, consisting of thirty minutes of walking one block then running one block around the neighborhood, helped me sleep well. Clearly, I didn’t need to swear that off; plus, my walk/run was a break in the day that I truly enjoyed. As I lay in the dark staring up at the ceiling with everyone snoring around me—the three dogs on their respective beds, the husband next to me—I suddenly said, “Huh!” right out loud. I saw how swearing off self-improvement could easily become yet another self-improvement regime. Yeah, no, that was totally not happening. I needed to find another way.
A word about self-improvement versus self-care.
Whether we’re hamster-wheeling the self-improvement program du jour or practicing yeah, no, not happening, we need to take care of ourselves. It’s not a special occasion thing we splurge on when we’re two steps from a rubber room.
Self-care, in its current benign and twee iteration, is signified in images of overpriced throw pillows marching along the backs of comfy-looking sofas; cups of artisanal hot chocolate served in a mug calligraphed with Live, Laugh, Love; and bubble baths with enough pillar candles artfully arranged around the perimeter of the tub to suggest a satanic ritual. So far so good. Not arguing with this message.* It’s good to sit on the couch with something warm to drink. It’s good to take a bath. We need to do more of it, every day. Full stop.
But most of us don’t do this. We find it to be a waste of time. Or we say we’ll take a break when everything else is done, but everything is never done—a situation further confused by the value we place on appearing to work ourselves to death. Instead of taking care of ourselves, we whip ourselves into a paroxysm of insomnia and stress-related ailments, self-medicating along the way, until we’re on the verge of a breakdown, then collapse into the arms of self-care. This often translates to “treating ourselves” to a girlfriend’s getaway, long weekend, or spa package
, which brings its own stress—spending money we don’t have, fretting about how we look in a swimsuit, feeling guilty about taking time off/leaving the spouse and kids to fend for themselves. As often as not, we then come home feeling like we need a vacation from the vacation. The inbox is exploding, the house looks as if it’s been ransacked by a covert search team, and the healthy vegetable casserole we guilt-baked before we left hasn’t been touched.
In many ways, self-care bills itself as a supplement to self-improvement, but like self-improvement it usually becomes yet another thing we’re supposed to be doing and end up failing at.
Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Jennifer Conlin reported on her efforts to wedge some self-care into her days. Her life is a not-unfamiliar picture of stress: high-pressure job, husband whose equally stressful job takes him often to perilous parts of the world, one child a senior in college, the others launching new careers in far-flung cities, elderly parents under her own roof and for whom she is the sole caretaker. She needed some “me time,” stat! She downloaded a meditation app, signed up for Zumba classes and a once-a-week piano class, and started seeing a therapist.
“Between work, family, travel, and my outside commitments, I started falling further and further behind on my self-imposed schedule,” Conlin writes. In her weekly therapy appointment, she discussed her failure to keep up her self-care routine, and her therapist nodded in agreement. “My self-care almost killed me.”
We need to take care of ourselves. But here’s some good news! Since we’ve all been on the receiving end of easily a zabillion “wellness” messages for years, we already have a pretty good idea what it entails. We know how to do this already. If you want to stop feeling like crap when you go to bed, stop eating barbecue potato chips for lunch. If you want to have more stamina, run around the block on a regular basis. When you need to stop, stop. When you need to rest, rest. Get the correct amount of sleep. Drink some water. It’s not difficult.
Care for yourself in the way you would a beloved pet. Every day you make sure she gets a nice walk, some good food, and naps. You know her favorite treats and the place behind her ears where she loves to be scratched. You pet her head and talk to her and make her feel loved. Even on a busy day you do this. If you can do this for a pet, you can do this for yourself.
According to Samsung, the average person will take twenty-five thousand selfies in their lifetime. This sounds like a number pulled straight out of the hipster chapeau of some front-facing camera marketing lackey, but no matter. That’s a staggering amount of look-at-me-look-at-me right there. We’re living in an era of unapologetic self-absorption, which is at the root of our obsession with self-improvement. To short-circuit the self-improvery impulse, we need to cut the connection, focus on something else. And I don’t mean your family and their endless needs—chances are one of the things you’re also concerned with improving is how to be a better wife and mom, which usually translates to doing more for your family, not less—I mean expanding your knowledge of what it means to be a yeah, no, not happening woman in the world.
One of my first cockamamie—and extremely nerdy—interests was reading National Geographic magazine. My parents were longtime subscribers, and their old issues were among my most cherished possessions. About the time I was starting to connect the dots—that the sanctioned lot of females consisted of dusting, vacuuming, grocery shopping, and cooking the nightly meal for people who couldn’t care less, and yikes! that would be my lot one day if I wasn’t careful—I discovered Amelia Earhart and Jane Goodall. I saw immediately that Amelia and Jane were a different kind of grown-up woman. They didn’t seem to spend any time standing in front of the stove, stirring a pot of spaghetti sauce. They didn’t drag their plastic laundry baskets to the Laundromat once a week, that I could see. Instead, they threw themselves into the world, and pursued their passions without apology. They devoted their lives to flying airplanes across oceans and studying chimpanzees in Africa. That’s what they cared about, and that’s what they did. They wanted to be good at doing things that mattered to them.
In college, I went through a mad Gertrude Stein phase. Stein lived in Paris between the wars, collected art, nurtured and sparred with Hemingway, loved Alice B. Toklas, and lived an entire life devoted to not going along with the crowd. Her self-proclaimed masterpiece, the 925-page The Making of Americans, remains impenetrable and unreadable, even to the most ardent of Stein scholars. She was hailed as a genius of modernism, even though almost no one could get beyond her most famous observation: “A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” And that’s only because Toklas embroidered it on their tea towels.
I wish I could bottle and sell Stein’s moxie, slipping it into the pamplemousse La Croix of every woman I know. Stein had a philosophy class with William James at Radcliffe. He was her favorite professor but when it came time to take the final exam, she wrote him a note on the top of the test paper: “Dear Professor James, I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy today.” Then she got up from her desk and went home. The next day she received a postcard from Professor James: “Dear Miss Stein, I understand perfectly how you feel. I often feel like that myself.” For having the guts to put her own feelings and desires first, she was awarded the highest grade in the class. Or so the story goes.
Even as a young woman of no importance, Stein was sure about what mattered to her and what didn’t. She was born in 1874 and came of age during the era when women of her class were expected to be frail things, spending most of their time in bed with “nervous headaches.” Gertrude was stout and hardy and loved hiking in the middle of summer until she had to stop and take a nap on a rock in the shade. She said yeah, no, not happening to heteronormativity, traditional femininity, letting anyone interrupt her while she was working, suffering fools, and punctuation.
This allowed her to say yes to what mattered to her: her work, collecting Picasso (whom nobody was crazy about back then), driving all over the road like a maniac in her Model T Ford, the aforementioned tramping around in the dead of summer, and Alice. She lived a modest life of ease and luxury, all because she said fuck it all to everything that was expected of her and yes to what mattered to her. Stein believed she was a literary genius, but what she is famous for is being a singular woman who built a life that suited her. I wanted to be that kind of woman.
I’ve become a student of women’s soccer star Megan Rapinoe, and the way she lives life on her own terms. Cocaptain of the championship 2019 US women’s soccer team, Rapinoe took grief for refusing to censor her opinions or rein herself in for every unapologetic display of triumph. Even though it all seemed girlish, free, and genuinely authentic, when the US team spanked Thailand in the opening round of the 2019 World Cup, she was chided for her behavior.
Aside from her extraordinary athleticism and brilliance on the field, Rapinoe is a hilarious free spirit. After the quarter final match against host country France, which the United States won on her two goals, she freestyled some commentary, “Go gays. You can’t win a championship without gays on your team. It’s never been done before, ever. That’s science, right there.” Her incandescent fame predictably has attracted a kaleidoscope of haters. It is to be expected, and she doesn’t seem to care. When a woman says fuck it all, there is always pushback. It goes hand in hand with being a competitor; perhaps this is something men have always known. If a woman learns to compete, whether on the sports field or in the market economy, and she learns how to cope with not being liked, look out.
It’s instructional that, despite refusing to suppress her personality or apologize for being herself, Rapinoe has managed to sidestep the infamous Likability Trap. In 2019, she won the prestigious Ballon d’Or Féminin, awarded to the most outstanding female soccer star of the year. She was also named Sports Illustrated’s Sportsperson of the Year. She graced the December 2019 cover of SI in a white Valentino gown (with long sleeves, a turtleneck, a graphic print of pink roses, and an image of a sculpture of a
couple locked in a passionate embrace), holding a sledgehammer. Rapinoe’s hair is still short and pink, her expression a confident, playful-yet-defiant smirk. If this isn’t a cause for optimism, reader, I don’t know what is.
Eccentric actress Frances McDormand is also a poster woman for the yeah, no, not happening ethos. McDormand appeared at the 2018 Oscars with finger-combed hair and no makeup, wearing a long-sleeved gold-brown dress that looked as if it were made from the clippings found on the floor of a busy dog groomer. She had just won her second Best Actress Oscar for her performance in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Her appearance signaled that Hollywood’s rules were of no interest to her. In her stream-of-consciousness speech she thanked her husband and son, “both feminists,” compared her feelings to that of Olympian snowboarder Chloe Kim, who’d just killed it with back-to-back 1080s in the half-pipe, and suggested to the mucky-mucks in the audience that rather than chat insincerely about working together at the after-parties, they finance her projects and those of her fellow nominees. At the end of her forty-five seconds she left the audience with two words: inclusion rider. She dropped a look on the audience that said, “look it up, fools.”* Then she picked up her Oscar, which for some reason she had placed on the floor beside her, perhaps so she could gesticulate more freely, curtsied a little sardonically, and left the stage. The New Yorker headline reported, “Frances McDormand Makes the Oscars Weird Again.”
It may seem silly to collect stories about the lives of famous women as if they were trading cards, but let’s not forget the power of mimetic desire, the powerful innate urge to imitate that which we admire.