Living with my puny, vulnerable self

thoughts on obsession & acceptance

I was walking down the sidewalk recently when I noticed a braid on the pavement that had gone rogue. This is not the first and only time this has happened to me, where I have come across a braid-gone-rogue. There is something so humorous and sinister about finding a lock of fake hair on the side of the road, abandoned. Did they just not want it anymore? Did it ever belong to anyone in the first place?

The theme this week is obsession. I’ve been thinking a lot about obsession: processing it with my therapist, feeling it, asking myself questions about it, wondering about it. Obsessing over obsession. I’m a very obsessive person. I say this about myself often and without hesitation. This begs the question: am I actually experiencing something ordinary, but I’m telling myself it’s an obsession to shame myself out of feeling it? These are the questions I ask. Perhaps it is normal to listen to a song as many times as one can in a day. Perhaps one hopes to become sick of it. I have realized that sometimes my style of obsession goes like this: I want to obsess as hard as I can with the hope that I will somehow purge the thing from my mind, my body, my soul, whatever. In a conversation with my therapist yesterday, she asked, do you want to squash this [obsession], or do you want to keep it? I told her I wasn’t sure. “We can squash it,” she told me, “but you have to want to.” She was right. But I wasn’t sure if I was ready to squash it. Sometimes the first step is asking yourself what you’re afraid of losing by letting go of a part of yourself that hurts you or causes you psychic and spiritual anguish. So what am I so afraid of letting go of? If obsession hurts, then why do I want to keep doing it so much?

I don’t know that I have an answer to that, but one thing I have observed is that obsession is about escapism. It’s intoxicating. It gives me dopamine and I love that. I really want dopamine. I want pretty much as much of that shit as I can get my hands on. So as I milled around Bushwick the other night, haphazardly and unsuccessfully nursing some blisters on my feet from a new pair of sandals, wondering about obsession, I realized something. I just wanted to go home. I wanted to go home and be bored and boring. Sit on the couch and finish Baby Reindeer, eat a frozen pizza, and call it a night. But it is very hard for me to want to go home and be boring. I have this thing where I always think something exciting should happen next. I’m almost completely serious when I say that I genuinely hope, and maybe even expect, an asteroid to fly out of the sky, land directly in front of me, and make demands of me that will lead to a very exciting evening. It’s like craving food that doesn’t exist; I want a message to arrive on my phone about an event that isn’t taking place in a city I don’t live in with people I’ve never met who also probably do not exist. The problem is that I don’t really want that, though. I just want to go home. So what am I waiting for?

I am capable of getting obsessed with anything. Sometimes I will sit in a room, notice a foul odor, and sniff at it obsessively, determined to locate its origin. I obsess over music, other people, social media, my hair, my skin, my body, a routine, an idea, a philosophy, a plan. Sometimes I turn on the extra-bright Hollywood vanity lights that line the top of my bathroom mirror and look for blackheads I know I don’t have. I’ve noticed the decision usually coincides with some spiritual unrest or social anxiety. When I say something stupid, I punish myself by pinching the invisible dirt from my face and making myself clean again.

I’ve asked myself the question: is the opposite of obsession freedom? But I don’t think it is. I think the key is to feel free to obsess, to consider yourself entitled to it. After all, it can do you some good. During a particularly harrowing episode of perfectionism, while finishing my Bachelor’s Degree at UC Berkeley, I found myself blinded by obsession. I was obsessed with perfecting my writing. I was obsessed with making every assignment perfect and I was obsessed with impressing my professors and I was obsessed with the idea that everything in my life leading up to that point was now riding on this very moment, which would make or break me. In retrospect, and even in glimmers then, I realized that I genuinely believed that if I put as much pressure on myself as possible, I would succeed. In what way I do not know. Financially? Spiritually? Emotionally? Capitalistically? My therapist often asked me what I hoped to achieve and I was usually unable to answer the question. I had no idea what future I was idealizing in my mind—was it one in which I was accepted by everyone around me? Time and time again this seemed the conclusion I returned to. When it’s happening, though, and I am in the trenches of obsession and perfectionism, I’m unable to recognize it because of whatever costume it’s arrived cloaked in this time. In the case of my academic “journey,” the cloak was that I wanted to do a good job “just because.” I justified my self-punishment and obsession by telling myself that I just. really. wanted. to do. a good. job. But when I asked myself why I wanted to do such a good job, I was a deer in the headlights, and I was left, again, unable to deny that what I really wanted was acceptance.

So what can be good about that? Well, I think obsession is a beautiful thing because what I’ve realized is that people who obsess tend to care a lot. About…almost everything. I rarely arrive at a situation careless and opinionless. Even if I “don’t care,” I probably have something to say about it. I’m trying to accept myself as an obsessive person without abandoning myself. I also think there is something romantic and devotional about obsession, and I try to see that as a good thing. I notice how sometimes I treat obsession like a manifestation: in the throes of it, I get caught up in some belief that if I obsess over something hard enough, it will “come true.” That might be sad, but I also think there’s something kind of fantastical and childlike about it. So when I’m walking around at night obsessing over whatever my brain has chosen to torture me with that day, I prevent abandoning myself by returning to myself; I ask myself what I want in that moment. Obsession takes me away from myself. Not always, but often. It consumes me so fully that it is difficult for me to distinguish, or even consider, for that matter, my self. As in taking a moment to ask and to notice, “Wait, I have a self, and what does that self want?” This week I had the realization that obsession is, for me, often tied up tightly with self-abandonment. Not always, but often. The good thing (and the cool thing), is that I went home that night, sat on my couch, watched TV, and went to sleep. And I felt happy.

I don’t think the point of life is to be happy. In fact (and I know this might sound cliche, but bear with me), I think happiness is actually kind of overrated. I care more about (self)-acceptance than happiness. I care more about feeling fulfilled, feeling free, feeling like I can just be with myself. There is a Maggie Nelson poem I have always loved, and I will leave it with you as a closing sentiment:

MORNING EN ROUTE TO THE HOSPITAL

Snow wafts off the little lake

along Route 66, momentarily encasing the car

in a trance of glitter

Live with your puny, vulnerable self

Live with her

Thank you for taking the time to read with me and be with me. It is so appreciated. The hope, the goal, the aspiration, and the desire (oh, the desire!) for this Substack is to:

A.) Keep my writing sharp/sharpen my writing.

B.) Have something.

C.) Share a little piece of myself with you.

D.) Remind me that I am human, that I exist, that I have thoughts, and

E.) That people want to hear them.

A playlist for you

Cook with this

LOL

Poor New Yorkers should know about this

XOXO,

Mikena