In limbo

You can't live with the emotional equivalent of the stomach-in-a-moving-elevator feeling.

Dear Evie,

What do I do if all aspects my life are in limbo with no promise of changing? How do I know if I should uproot and change everything, or wait it out?

Signed,

Destabilized Human

“Uprooted tree” by Twiffy is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. 

Dear Destabilized,

When everything in your life feels tenuous, it’s the polar opposite experience of feeling stuck, but the emotional outcome is the same. You’re not tethered to anything that’s making you unhappy, but you can’t count on anything either. You are simply floating in a cloud of ambiguity, and you can’t see anywhere to put your feet and rest. It’s exhausting.

I don’t want to lean too heavily on the state of the world here to explain your personal experience, because I think that’s both too easy and unsatisfying a rationalization. Talk about no promise of changing — you cannot personally control the trajectory of the economy or the climate or the state of government. And yet, all of those things have contributed to a real sense of societal unease: everything is unaffordable, everything is on fire, and a solid contingent of the people and institutions with the power to change those things are both untrustworthy and self-oriented.

Again — I’m not pointing this out to diagnose the source of your aimlessness, but to contextualize it. When everything surrounding you feels unstable, and your own life feels unstable, the net effect is that nothing feels real. You’re living with the emotional equivalent of the stomach-in-a-moving-elevator feeling, all the time. Any person would feel both nauseous and insane!

“Rooftopper climbing elevator shaft” by FreeclimbZurich is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

That’s why I want to look at the words you use here, which hint at a lack of sanity in your reasoning process. The term “uproot” indicates that you have some semblance of rootedness in your life right now and, therefore, somewhere to put your feet. And you say that there is “no promise of changing,” but then imply that if you do uproot, you suddenly acquire the power to change everything.

This raises two questions. The first being: Do you need to cut the stability that you do have to gain the agency you need to create some structure and purpose in your life? The answer might be yes! If a plant is struggling, sometimes it’s because the soil is bad and you do need to dig it up and put it in a new pot. But it could also be that you haven’t been giving the roots what they need to thrive.

The second question is whether repotting — so to speak — actually does promise to change anything. What do you know — and I mean truly know — will make you more stable when you’ve ripped out the roots and transplanted them somewhere else?

People tend to define what keeps them stable with three categories: home, romantic relationships, and career. I assume those — or at least a combination of them — are the aspects of your life that are in limbo. I’m not going to tell you they’re not important, and they definitely provide structure and definition, but they’re also not guarantees of indefinite satisfaction or sanity. Your home will require a constant, maddening cycle of cleaning and maintenance and general Sisyphean upkeep, your significant other will inevitably piss you off, and your job will, at times, infuriate you to the point where Limp Bizkit becomes gospel. And then you will need to return to what keeps you truly sane and grounded.

You need to remind yourself that you have a real life, that you live in the real world, and that you do, in fact, have agency to change things. You need to water and strengthen your roots, to get rid of the stomach-in-the-elevator feeling. This is where I’d like to argue that the real stabilizing foundation of daily life comes not from career achievements or romantic validation, but all the stupid little things you do to feel like you exist and, more importantly, that you enjoy existing.

In the space of six months, I left a very good job and a long-term relationship with a wonderful person. These were stabilizing forces in my life and they gave it structure and purpose, but something shifted and I knew I had to build or find something else to shelter myself, like a hermit crab. And yet I felt very much unmoored without that work and that person — a naked crustacean scuttling around on the ocean floor, waving its claws.

In that very … fluid state, I realized that if I wanted to keep madness and mental collapse at bay, I would have to design my own architecture around my days.

“A hermit crab (Paguroidea) emerges from its shell” by Satheesha J. is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Let me, for the sake of illustration, present you with a spectrum of my own stupid little things that have provided structure, from most to least embarrassing. On the former end, I spent two months in the springtime going up to my attic three times a week to spend 30 minutes doing a series of exercises fed to me by an app called “SWEAT with Kayla.” I would army crawl around on my asbestos-ridden tile floor and then wave eight-pound weights in the air to a soundtrack of Drake. In the moment, this made me feel like the most ridiculous and sweatiest woman who has ever lived. But week after week, I could feel myself getting stronger and my anxiety becoming more manageable.

On the less humiliating end of the spectrum, I cannot overstate the importance of talking to your friends in person, regularly, honestly, about both real life problems and successes and completely inconsequential pieces of gossip. Friendship — IRL, face-to-face friendship — should be part of everyday life! Who do you think will ground you when some aspect of the Big Three — home, career, romantic relationship — is driving you insane?

And in between those two points, I have relied on any number of silly and/or mundane things to keep from permanently floating away on waves of anxiety: baking scones, head-butting my cat, listening to the same Taylor Swift album 29 times in a row, planting things and seeing if I can keep them alive. These are not Great Accomplishments, and they are not making me any money, but they are parts of my life that bring me satisfaction and that I can control.

Just try this: For one month, try to make every day consistent, and try to make at least one part of every day good. Spend time with your friends. Fill the ambiguous space in your day with stupid things that make you like your life and want to build onto it. At the end of that month, you will feel solid enough to see your circumstances more clearly, and to understand what you have to do to change them.

Constructively,

Evie