19. Future perfect

The peril of high expectations

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When I was in first grade, my favorite thing to do after school was to go over to my friend Meara’s house and play with her Playmobils. Meara had dozens of little plastic people, and we’d spend hours designing lives for them and building a town in the living room. Kitchen stools became apartment buildings and we’d lay pieces of cardboard across the stool’s rungs to construct multiple floors. We’d set up a grocery store and a school. We’d allocate pets to each family. Only then would we begin to play. 

I never fell out of that habit of meticulous world building. Recently, I’ve been letting myself play this game of dreaming up another life for myself. It’s set a few years from now, so it’s not so much an alternate reality but a vision of a life that could be mine if things go the right way. This elaborate future isn’t static or set in stone, but it usually includes the same key elements: 

I’m a writer, a good one, and I’ve accumulated a modest but devoted following. I love my work and my days are meaningful and mine. 

In the daydream, I often live somewhere warmer than Boston, though the location changes, and when I’m feeling more generous toward New England winters, I work from a desk not so far from my current one. Clutter doesn’t exist in my cozy apartment. It’s quirky and colorful (my tastes haven’t changed). I’m swimming in natural light, surrounded by verdant house plants exhaling an earthy balm. 

In my could-be life, I have the body I want: thin and toned, but not anorexic. There are no bad hair days or bad skin days or bad body image days. My barely noticeable chipped tooth is fully intact. 

I still run. I can’t imagine my life without running, so of course it makes its way into my fantasy. I imagine that I'm the fastest I’ve ever been. 

Once I get all these prerequisites in place, once I’ve set up the grocery store and the cardboard/kitchen stool apartment building, I let myself loose to wander around the little life I’ve made.

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I’m embarrassed to admit that I indulge these delusions of grandeur. They’re superficial, failing to convey anything about my future life more than what it looks like. Which makes a certain amount of sense: visual fantasies are easy to entertain—it’s harder to imagine what my future life might “feel like.”

And I understand where they come from: my fantasies are seeded by reality and my desire to project a parseable future onto a blank wall. Right now I’m waiting for decisions from grad schools and can’t help but design futures in the cities where I applied. I’ll look up apartments I can’t afford or map myself a running route. I prematurely pick a favorite bar. I let myself coast on my bike through the city. 

I talked to a friend about this impulse to want to live in a life that isn’t mine, to construct this hypothetical world and she laughed: “Well of course you do that! You’re a writer,” she said (a writer herself), “It’s called narrative.” 

I appreciate a good story. And I don’t fault myself for daydreaming. But there’s a catch: imagining a future in such vivid detail might close the door to possibilities I haven’t dreamed up. I lift myself out of the present moment to live in another world, but I don’t make much progress toward making it my actual life. I’m always letting myself off the hook by saying, “My life will start when I’m in a different job or when I’m fully recovered or when I’m running competitively again.”

This translates to perpetual dissatisfaction with where I currently am. It creates expectations so impossibly high that even when things go well, even when an experience is objectively good, I still measure it against an imaginary world in which everything was better. Perfect even.

This pattern shows up again and again: 

I do it in running all the time. I’ll write a workout for myself that’s too hard, imagining that a faster version of myself will have no trouble with the paces. But my current self has trouble with the paces, and I walk away from the run disappointed, unable to appreciate the progress I am making. 

It’s not just running. I do it with everything. 

I tell myself,

“Moving to California will cure my depression once and for all.”

“An introductory call with someone in the podcasting industry will result in a fully funded 10-episode hit podcast hosted and produced by me.”

“Changing my hair will make me feel at home in my body.”

lol.

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A few weeks ago on a free Saturday, I dropped acid, something I haven’t done since I was 22 and road tripping around Iceland. I’ve been feeling that basal level of restlessness and constant agitation—frustrated my antidepressants never worked for me, stalled in my recovery. I’d gotten a tab from a friend a few months prior; nothing else seemed to be working, so I gave it a shot.

I didn’t expect one day on LSD to change my life in any serious way (it never has before), but I still went in with unspoken hope in the back of my mind that I’d come out of the experience with the self knowledge that would allow me to fully recover from my eating disorder. 

I scribbled down some intentions the morning I dropped: “I want to explore what’s blocking me from embracing recovery. What would my life look like if I fully and finally relinquished my grip on whatever is holding me back? What purpose is my ED serving at this point?”

Then I did yoga. By midday I was peaking: sitting in a sunny bathtub watching fractals materialize on my legs, feeling intense waves of emotion, dissolving my ego in the bathwater.

I journaled throughout the day, but nothing felt profound. I’d grasp onto the start of a thought that felt clear and intense, but it would slip away quickly, and I’d be left with the sharp jab of a feeling without the words to describe it. I walked to a swing set with my sister in the cold slinking sunshine, and by the time we got back to the apartment, I was reentering sobriety. We baked Claire Saffitz’s chocolate wave cake and watched Ocean’s 8. 

It was a nice day, a good trip, but into the evening I felt disappointed. All those hours had felt pretty normal. I didn’t resume my life with the key to healing. Or the key to anything.

Later, I looked through the twelve pages of journal entries I’d written while tripping, much of it murky philosophizing.

But I was struck by how I observed and wrote about my body as ornate geometric patterns washed over my legs and belly. I’d scrawled:

I recognized that my body is at a set point, unlikely to change much anytime soon. Then I continued,

In the midst of the trip and in the residual disappointment that it hadn’t been more than it was, I’d forgotten I ever had that thought—a thought I’ve been trying to internalize for a long time, but that hadn’t felt true until that moment. Reading the entry in the afterglow elicited an easy gratitude for existing, a glimmer of being at peace with my body and knowing that my decisions about how seriously (or not) to take running cannot be part of a strategy to use the sport as a means of manipulating my body.

It’s those kinds of realizations that get lost when I set my expectations at the level of “this piece of blotting paper will heal me.” The illusion of the quick fix is so powerful; it’s tempting to imagine an easy path to healing as a genuine possibility. In actuality, getting better happens in small increments: a moment of peace in the bathtub, appreciating a run for exactly what it is, dyeing my hair without the hope that it will make me feel more like myself. 

I don’t believe I have to fully dismantle my pretend Playmobil city in order to see my present life more clearly. But I do think I need to spend less time in my imagined world and more time in my actual one. I’m pretty sure that’s where the living happens.

Fortnightly faves

1. A recent episode of RadioLab featuring an essay by Lulu Miller about the experience of witnessing her son learning to speak. I read and reviewed Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist about this time last year, and a friend remembered how much I liked the book and sent me this exquisite podcast. If you’d prefer to read the essay than hear Miller narrate it, you can find it at The Paris Review.

2. The Office of Historical Corrections, Danielle Evans’ short story collection which was recommended and loaned to me by the “It’s called narrative!” friend who, in addition to giving great advice, also gives the very best book recs.

3. This Jim Moore poem I think about all the time.

   Teaching the Dog Not to Nip
   
   Do you think it’s easy,
   not biting
   the one you love?
   Try loving someone so much
   your mouth is only at home
   in the place where your teeth
   meet the flesh
   of your beloved. Try
   not tasting the flesh,
   not taking in your mouth
   the beloved, not
   going all the way.
   
   Jim Moore (2005)