Diary of Surrender: Week One
Giving up takes work.
About ten days ago, I wrote that I wanted to give up, to say fuck it to striving for anything. I wrote this as if it were a revelation, but if I’m honest with myself (and therefore you) I feel this way at the end of every year. Everyone else does too. I don’t think I’m special in this regard.
But there is one difference, for me, this go-around: I understand that the practice of giving up actually takes some work. Ironically, you need a basic level of discipline to stop doing exhausting yet futile things. At the end of each year, I’d vow to give up one thing or the other, and then come February I’d be back to trying again: trying to lose weight, trying to find a guy, socializing, going places, planning trips. I’d mindlessly fall back into the groove of attempting shit, exhaust myself, and then make the same promise during the last two weeks of December.
I just never wrote about it before, and now that I have I realize that giving up takes actual, conscious work. So this year I’m going to document it. Observe it. Figure out where I go wrong, why I stop trying to not try. I’m going to keep a (public? can’t decide yet) diary to understand why it is that I mindlessly fall back into the race. I should therefore offer a disclaimer: the writing below is more for me than for you. It really is a diary to help me make sense of what I’m trying — or not trying — to do. In this way, I’m breaking the contract between writer and reader.
If the last few days have taught me anything, it’s that old striving habits die hard. You have to kill them dead. Case in point: as soon as I told myself last week that I was done trying to find love, I fired up the Bumble app and swiped like crazy.
This makes no sense and I don’t know why I did it. It feels similar to the proclamation that “the diet starts tomorrow!” and then eating a cheeseburger and fries. With ranch dressing on the fries. And a chocolate shake. One last hurrah in the cesspool of the dating app economy.
I was surprised to get matches at 51; I was under the impression that one really does age out of the dating pool at some point, so that was interesting. But as soon as a match wrote back, I got exhausted and abandoned the whole endeavor, even though I had that little Jewish grandmother voice in my head whispering “write back, you never know.” But I do know.
I knew floating in that warm mineral pool that these things won’t work out and can’t work out. There is my snoring. There is my dog Fish, who simply won’t allow dating, or men in the house, and I am — for better or worse — letting him run the show now. It’s been raining in Los Angeles, and Fish has decided he is no longer housebroken; he simply refuses to go outside. This makes me miss my old shepherd who couldn’t understand why we weren’t walking in torrential downpours. It’s just water, she would message me telepathically.
Not this new little twerp. At first I fought him about it, got upset. Then I just gave up and covered the house with pee pads, and he politely uses those, as if to say, “See, we can compromise once you just give up on perfection.”
Now that it’s sunny in LA, the plan was to take Fish on a big hike, for my physical health and his mental health. But as I type this, all I want to do is crawl back in bed. I’ve been having trouble sleeping, and taking some powerful drugs as a result. They don’t work, but I wake up in a fugue state, which also pushes me toward full surrender. Fish probably won’t get his hike, and he will be fine with this. (Don’t worry). I’ll probably crawl back into bed, something that would have previously sent me into waves of self-condemnation, but now that I’ve decided to say fuck it to everything, it feels increasingly okay.
What I’m having more trouble understanding are all the other things I’ve unthinkingly done that run counter to giving up. A few weeks ago, I got false eyelashes, and I’ve made an appointment for next week to get them filled. It doesn’t make sense that I, someone who has vowed to stay home and not do anything, would spend money and time on fake eyelashes. If I stick to my give-up-on-everything plan, no one is going to see them except Fish.
But boy, are they a game-changer. They make me look like a middle-aged anime character, bombshell adjacent. But am I going to sit in my house, alone, with eyes like a baby fawn? I guess so. It doesn’t make any sense, but here we are. That money could go to credit card debt or my retirement or my mortgage, but somehow I’m not willing to give this up. Once you look like a cartoon, it’s hard to go back.
Same with manicures. When I got those false lashes, laying on a table so long I fell asleep and snored, the woman who placed them on me, one-by-one, so meticulously had bright blue fingernails. Now I want bright blue fingernails. I’ve thought about them for weeks. If I were really giving up, I would go to the nail salon, remove my gel manicure and look forward to a lifetime of freedom from nail polish color choices, fluorescent lighting, frivolous spending.
But I want bright blue nails, and there doesn’t seem to be a way around that feeling. Maybe there is an inner version of me planning a small rebellion, to make sure I don’t throw in the towel completely on my vanity. It feels that way, because both the eyelash and nail appointments feel inevitable, impossible to change, like I’m possessed.
I’ve done other inexplicable things. I ordered every book Joan Didion ever wrote, and plan to work my way through them from oldest to newest. I bought razors and paper cement, so that I could get back into making collages, something I used to do just because. I’ve continued religiously using MyFitnessPal, because I don’t want to break my streak and I really have become strangely curious with how many calories I eat every day. My friend, who is a professional hot person on Instagram, forced me to go to Soho House for dinner, and I actually went, and it was surprisingly totally fun. I’m obsessed with reverse engineering a salad I had there, and that’s a another tiny future plan, along with the lashes, nails, Didion books and collages. So it’s not total surrender.
On the other hand, it’s almost three in the afternoon and I am still in sweats. The hike for Fish won’t be happening, the cornbread sausage stuffing I was going to make with leftovers won’t be happening. I’ve watched all the television there is to watch. There is no more television left for me.
And so it occurs to me that I don’t know how to give up at all, and yet I can’t rally for the important things (Fish’s hike, sausage stuffing, getting dressed). The fugue state isn’t just because of the good drugs my sympathetic doctor gave me. I know if I go lie down I’ll stare at the ceiling for hours. I want out of this in-between space; I want to be in the game or out. I just can’t figure out how to push myself in either direction.
