I’m on the verge of giving notice at my job, at a place I’ve worked for nearly nine years, the school I came to straight out of high school. I have been here for 12 years, my entire adult life.

This afternoon I am writing the documentation that is the last thing I have to do before I go, and then, “out of nowhere,” I remember what a peanut butter and honey sandwich on Home Pride bread tastes like, and I miss my mommy and want chocolate milk, with the Nestle Quik crystals not fully stirred up so when you get to the bottom of the glass, there’s powder that isn’t even wet you get to scrape up with your spoon.

I cannot actually eat any of those foods. Not a one! I’m lactose-intolerant and gluten-intolerant. I am a sugar addict and a peanut butter addict and a caffeine addict in recovery. I don’t want the actual experience of chocolate milk and a peanut butter and honey sandwich (nor, incidentally, do I want the experience of being with my mother); I want what those things did for me when I was a little girl, or what I thought they were doing for me. I want the comfort. I want the familiarity. I want the sweetness.

When my mom abandoned our family, I couldn’t run to her anymore. And it was much too painful for me to even think of running to her. I felt so sad and so scared, and I wanted her to come and comfort me, but I felt that way because of her, so the feelings built on themselves. I was triggered, and when I sought relief, I became even more triggered, in a seemingly endless cycle.

I loved my food, though. I loved it and it comforted me. I stood in front of the cupboard after school, looking at the bounty and furtively gathering my favorite foods. I took out slices of white bread and spread them with peanut butter, chocolate syrup, and coconut shreds. I smushed them into my mouth as fast as I could so no one would catch me. At the kitchen table, I ate bowl after bowl of cereal, adding more milk in between servings. I ate spoonfuls of sugar straight from the sugar bowl.

I did other things, too. I read books and I watched TV and I pretended outside as long as it was light out. I went to church. I petted cats. I listened to my records and cassettes over and over again.

The food, though, goes straight to the core for me. It is unmediated. It is direct and primal and central. You eat to live. You eat to survive. Nourishment. Sustenance. I needed to be nourished. I needed to be sustained, and I was.

There wasn’t a lot of love or tenderness in my life. I didn’t get a lot of the things a child– or any person, really– needs in order to survive. I couldn’t make anyone hug me or hold me. I couldn’t make anyone tuck me into bed or hold my hand. I couldn’t make anyone tell me it was going to be all right. But there was food in my house and I could get it myself. I could make a peanut butter and honey sandwich. I could mix chocolate into milk.

And now, I could easily do the same thing. I am powerless over peanut butter and honey and chocolate milk and white bread. If I didn’t give those things over to my Higher Power, it isn’t just that I could eat the sandwich and drink the milk, it is that I couldn’t not eat and drink them. What happens when I don’t comfort myself with food?

I get to feel the sadness and pain and discomfort of right now. What it is like to lose this place that has meant so much to me, these people with whom I’ve shared my life. What it like to miss them, to miss a place. How scary it is to go somewhere completely new. How scary to be independent, my own little self in the world. And I get to feel all the sad from back then that echoes now: what it was like when I was little to have everything I had known taken away, to be devastated and scared and comfortless and alone. What it was like to miss her. What it was like to wake up in an unfamiliar life, to wake up in the morning and for a few seconds be untethered, unsure of where I was, before I remembered with a whoosh, Oh, she’s gone.

(It’s not that the peanut butter takes that away, of course. The pain and the memories are right there, underneath, where I can’t get to them.)

There’s something else here, though, when I let myself feel: there is comfort. I can hear my Higher Power calling to me, holding me, sustaining me. When I don’t put something else in her place, there is room for the Goddess in my life, space for her to come in and comfort me, and an opening (and openness) for me to receive. It is bittersweet. I get to feel it all at once, the pain and the fear and the sad and the comfort and the sweetness.

I’m leaving this comfortable job, too, for what I don’t yet know. I get to feel what is under here, too. There will be sweetness in that too.

(with thanks to Jimmy Eat World for the title)

Thirteen Things I Hate About “Lifehacking”

Lifehacking is a “geek chic” term which gussies up the kind of “tips and tricks” articles that are more usually found in grocery store magazines. You know, the fluffy ones aimed at moms in line at the checkout counter. Ten Tricks To A Slimmer You! Thirty-Minute Vacations! 19 Tips For Calmer Kids! Improve Your Intelligence in Four Weeks!They cover a variety of topics, but they all have two things in common. First, they all have numbers, generally promising vast things in small amounts of time. And second, they all have superficial instructions. Whether they promise tips or a whole lifestyle, tips is what they offer: a few little tweaks that you may be able to add to the changes you are already making.

That’s what bugs me about this subgenre of self-help writing. It’s never about systemic change. Systemic change requires fundamental shifts in the way we approach our lives. It doesn’t fit neatly into a top ten list, and it’s not easy to describe clearly via a page of quick suggestions. It comes from finding out what someone else’s life was like (identification), what they changed (description, not prescription), and what it’s like now (hope). Lifehacking, women’s magazines, and a lot of self-help books, on the other hand, are prescriptive. They exult in at least pretending to tell people What To Do to Change Everything – not least because that kind of shiny snake-oil promise sells.

They’re selling a kind of hope, but often a false one. They claim to be able to tell people how to… achieve serenity, organize their homes, make more money, deal with abusive co-workers, et cetera… but while these ideas excite and even motivate a very wide audience, they are only helpful to a much smaller crowd.The process of change, as I understand it, tends to go something like this:

First, we become aware that change is possible. We struggle, often subconsciously, with the pros and cons, and eventually (hopefully) become willing to experience that change. We start to become aware of what we are doing that is blocking it, and that lets us participate actively, taking steps toward more change. We start to integrate those changes, and their effects, and we move into a new place in our lives, refining the steps we have taken, enjoying the changes we are experiencing, and looking toward the next change in our lives.

People can only really use lifehacking tricks in two of those stages: when we are participating actively in making a change (if it is the particular change that the author is talking about, and if the tools they suggest actually apply to our lives) and when we are refining it. Like, I always used to see lists of (for example) 25 Ways To Decrease Clutter, and I’d get all fired up and promise myself I was going to binge-clean that weekend or that I would at least buy some boxes or that I would certainly print out the list and save it to use over the next month, and then… the fire would die out, because I wasn’t ready for that shift. There was nothing deep down to fuel it. Sure, I wanted a cleaner home, but I wasn’t involved in any kind of shift toward that – or I was too early in that shift to be able to implement those tips. And, of course, at that point in my life – like anyone who is living in self-abusive clutter and chaos – I was all too eager to shame or berate myself for not being able to use those lists or figure out why I could never get around to using those lists!

Mainly, I object to lifehacking, by any name, because:

1. Lifehacking is all about control. Specifically, it’s often about trying to control the things we can’t. It targets the areas that people find unmanageable and says “Try this! No, now try THIS! No, no, THIS one will fix it!” Like, oh, are you disorganized? Have too much scheduled, took on too many commitments, and don’t know what to do with it all? Try THIS new gadget for “calendaring”! No, try this killer app for Getting Things Done! It just promotes the struggle with unmanageability, because people are very tempted by the idea that there is nothing they cannot change if they just try hard enough.

2. Lifehacking is so superficial. There’s nothing wrong with being superficial about superficial things. I don’t want a 300-page tome about how to get more mileage out of my car or clean out my email. But a ten-item list about serious psychological issues or deep-rooted emotionally-laden relationship stuff sells the reader short.

3. Lifehacking is so damn prescriptive. I’ll happily admit it: I don’t like people telling me what to do. Who does? I don’t mind advice I’ve asked for, or support from people I respect, but I’ll be damned if I’ll take, for example, a Tylenol ad telling me to eat breakfast to avoid headaches.

4. Lifehacking doesn’t know how to use I statements. I don’t want to hear what you think I should do. I want to hear what has worked for you. “Shoulding” on others is really controlling and invasive. Sure, I’ve done it; we’ve probably all done it. But, you know, it’s something to keep an eye on. When I start thinking about what other people should be doing, I know I’ve taken my eyes off my own paper and that I need to change my focus and get out of their business. Not time to go make a website or a book about how other people should be living their lives.

5. Lifehacking is amateur advice. This goes hand in hand with it not being personal experience. That cleaning article or that weight-loss advice might have been written by someone who is great at cleaning or who has lost a bunch of weight, but that doesn’t mean that they have a handle on the causes and influences or the different situations their readers might be bringing to the table. Which leads to a lot of wacky or horrifying gaffes or just plain misfires.

6. Lifehacking is bland. It’s generally either reviews of potentially useful products, which can be interesting (and which, uncoincidentally, usually do fall under personal experience rather that prescriptive advice), or basic common-sense (and often inaccurate) mainstream information about life. How many articles have you seen in women’s magazines about using bubble baths, personal time, and light reading to relax?

7. Lifehacking hijacks geek chic. Oh, maybe that’s too strong. It can’t kidnap the entire culture or its terminology. And it uses geek language because “lifehacking” started out as life tips, organizational tips, and “killer apps” being shared between coders and engineers. It was natural to them to think of it as “hacking” life. The places that use the term that way are kind of awesome; they tend more toward the “review” end of the scale, people sharing tools that have worked for them and telling others what has and hasn’t worked. It brings personal experience back into it. It’s the sites that do co-opt the term and apply it to something you’d be more likely to find in Woman’s Day magazine that bug me.

8. Lifehacking is just that: a messy hack, a patch to fix part of a problem, not a system update. If you overeat compulsively, lifehacking will not say, for example, “Here’s some information from other people who do this, and what they changed, and how it helped; here are some tools you can use to change your relationship to food and eating by addressing the underlying causes, and some ways to develop good basic ground rules for yourself.” It will say “Here is a list of fivetools that people sometimes try! One, exercise more. Two, keep a food diary. Three, stay away from fast food restaurants. Four, eat without doing anything else at the same time. Five, try a support group like weight watchers.”

9. Lifehacking pretends to be great recovery but it lacks even the boundaries to speak from its own experiences. Even articles that begin with “we” or “I” (“We all know that we should eat better,” “I have a terrible time with overscheduling,”) switch abruptly and irrevocably to “you” when they get to the list of “shoulds.” Telling someone you don’t even know what to do is terrible boundaries, and that’s often reflected in personal remarks from the writers – much of the time, these lists are written by people who admit they have not tried what they are suggesting, or for whom what they are suggesting has yet to work. They are often just sharing “common sense” or “common knowledge” suggestions – and unfortunately, what “everyone knows” is frequently wrong. Likewise, commenters rarely (sometimes, but very rarely) share that the whole list has worked for them; usually, the comments either say “Great list!”, “This misses the mark because….” or “I do item number 9 sometimes and I like it.”

10. Lifehacking promises what it cannot give. This is much like problem #8. It states a goal and implies that doing what it says will fulfill that goal, or at least help people achieve it. But with the majority of these goals, the reader has to have done a great deal of the groundwork beforehand in order to even implement the suggestions given. There’s a huge amount that goes unaddressed by lifehacking. The worst of it is that generally, if someone has the kind of life problems mentioned in lifehacking sites, and hasn’t done that groundwork, they are carrying around a lot of (misplaced and undeserved) shame and guilt about their lives – and the “you should” format of lifehacking sites only feeds into that shame. Readers often berate themselves for not following the suggestions or wonder why they can’t seem to do these simple things, which furthers the vicious cycle of shame and resistance that keeps them stuck in self-harming patterns.

11. Lifehacking brings bureaucracy into your personal life. There’s a whole area of lifehacking that straddles the line between “here’s a killer app for organizing your contacts” and “here is a killer way to be organized.” It focuses on bringing terms like “personal productivity” and “GTD” from the office into our everyday lives. What’s next, sternly worded memos? It’s the terminology of control again, but with a Dilbert-like spin.

12. Lifehacking sets the bar really low. Okay, the bar is already set really low: sometimes it seems like almost everyone could use some kind of life skills class. Like we’ve discussed before, abuse often strands people in adulthood without any idea how to have a healthy relationship with people, or food, or work, or substances, or money, or whatever it is that our parents couldn’t teach us because they lacked themselves. Lifehacking sites take that low skill level and run with it. Any given site, for example, will usually aim all of its food or exercise or money tips at people who have no skills in those areas – no matter how many years they spend giving out those tips. The same goes for magazines. Not only is there no suggestion that readers might be able to revamp their entire relationship with, for example, food, or that they might want to – there’s also no awareness of the personal issues underlying those relationships, or how they fit into the whole. It’s all “you need to stop having a sedentary life,” “you need to spend more time with your kids,” “you need to start eating breakfast,” all the time.

13. Lifehacking states the very obvious, and sometimes the freaking insane. Hitting three major lifehacking sites reveals a consistent combination of good-but-superficial-patches and hackneyed, overrepeated suggestions. My favorites: take the stairs instead of the elevator to get more exercise! Count your blessings! And on the deeply insane side: If you help people, they will get addicted to you! (Lifehacking readers might notice that lifehack.org isn’t linked there. I’m giving them a pass because they tend to have more effective how-to articles and to have good information about things like emotional health.)

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In Alcoholics Anonymous, they often say that alcoholism is not the problem, it is just a symptom. Many people, especially in early recovery, enthusiastically cast aside drinking for another addictive behavior, and just about everyone in every twelve-step program discovers myriad other self-destructive behaviors they’re engaging in as they take inventory of their lives. These behaviors echo past trauma and abuse. The true problem is that these traumas have taught us that we deserve pain and chaos. We have learned to seek out and recreate our unresolved traumatic experiences even after the original harmful situations have passed. It is immaterial whether we perpetuate it by starving ourselves, berating ourselves, short-circuiting our bodies with harmful substances, underearning, choosing and staying with abusive people, cutting our bodies, or something else entirely.

So what’s the solution?

Well, don’t worry, we have our top psychologists, scientists, and therapists working on that around the clock… oh. We don’t?

Well. Here are a few pieces that might fit.

Every twelve-step program uses the same twelve steps, regardless of the behavior being addressed. And, I believe, part of the reason that this is done and that it works for all our addictive “symptoms” must be that it addresses this core problem. Let’s see what the steps ask us to do that might be vital to recovery from trauma and abuse.

The first step, of course, is to admit that we have a problem. It is a very profound step: it helps us begin to see what we are doing that is harming us. It shows us what is not working, what we want to change. It helps us begin to be honest with ourselves and others, instead of harming ourselves with denial and fear.

Step two gives us the opportunity to explore what we believe about the universe, and what parts of that have and haven’t worked for us. We get to see what has worked for others, too, and see that other people have found relief from these painful problems. In step two, we begin to experience hope that things can be different, which I think is crucial to any kind of recovery.

In step three, we learn to ask for help. We seek a willingness to seek out healing from outside, trustworthy sources – to stop trying to do it all ourselves – to realize that our methods have not been working for us. This is mindblowing for many people, especially for those of us who have learned not to ask for help because we are just a burden. Beginning to understand that that is not actually true, and to see ourselves as worthwhile human beings who deserve support and who deserve to get our needs met, is nothing short of a miracle.

The fourth step brings us back to that honesty. We take a long, hard look at our lives, being as honest as we can about our resentments, fears, and relationships in general. This has tremendous implications: it can lead to much deeper clarity about what things have been like and what is harming us; it can bring us back to the emotions that we’ve numbed for so long; it can teach us where our boundaries really are and what we need to do to take responsibility for them. It is an incredible and far-reaching exercise.

The fifth step is even more terrifying for many people than the fourth. It asks us to share everything we learned in the fourth step with another human being and with a higher power of our own understanding. But when we share this with someone who is trustworthy, we learn amazing things. We learn that we are not alone. We learn that our feelings and actions and experiences are not so horrifying that people will run from us if they find out the truth about them. We even learn that those feelings, actions, and experiences are not who we are. And with all of this this comes a greater ability to trust, and a step toward self-acceptance.

Step six builds on that fourth step work too. We get to look at all of the behaviors that are harming us and start thinking about the possibility of maybe someday not doing them anymore. We get to just be willing for things to change, and to know that for the moment, that is enough.

So with the first six steps, what do people get that helps them recover? The beginnings of honesty; hope; help; reality; feelings; boundaries; trust; the possibility of change; and a door opens toward self-acceptance and compassion. That compassion is not located in any specific step, but undergirds the whole process. It’s the motor that powers all our healing.

What on earth could be left for the last six to provide? Read the rest of this entry »

Tylenol has a new ad campaign. Apparently, their hook is to tell us what to do to avoid using their product. Examples include: “stop slouching,” “eat breakfast,” and “lose weight.” The tagline “Feel better.” I am projecting onto it that it is a command– I am an addict, after all, and I like to believe that I can control everything, myself included. I like to think that I can will myself better or control whether or not I get sick. Or whether I slouch or eat breakfast or lose weight.

Yeah, I said that! For whatever reason, I cannot make myself do any of the things I know I should do. Tylenol suggesting (sidebar: in a rather flippant manner; I mean, Tylenol, I barely know you!) that I stand up straight is like Tylenol suggesting I go to France: yes, I would love to, and I, too, think it is a great idea, but how do I get there?

Enter Zen Habits’ article 12 Practical Steps for Learning to Go with the Flow. So, I live in the (San Francisco) Bay Area, and I will admit my life is pretty “crunchy.” I have heard these suggestions before, and I know that that is not the case for everyone. Leaving aside questions of novelty, I find this list to be mostly impractical, or maybe more precisely, impracticable. Impracticable in the sense that I am incapable of practicing them. I cannot make myself laugh at things, even when I know that laughing will make me feel better. I cannot make myself “become aware.” I can set that as my intention, but I cannot make myself aware.

Which brings me to what I can and cannot control. This is the key for me. You have probably heard the Serenity Prayer– “God, grant me serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” I love this prayer, and as I have worked with it, I have gotten a clearer sense what I can and cannot control.

Let’s take the example from the Zen Habits’ 12 Practical Steps article:

…Let’s say you’ve created the perfect peaceful morning routine. You’ve structured your mornings so that you do things that bring you calm and happiness. And then a water pipe bursts in your bathroom and you spend a stressful morning trying to clean up the mess and get the pipe fixed… you can control your morning routine, but there will be things that happen from time to time (someone’s sick, accident happens, phone call comes at 5 a.m. that disrupts things, etc.) that will make you break your routine.

Yes! You have created a routine which brings you peace– a practice I highly advocate, but which I could not do on my own– but the routine will get interrupted. In fact, the author says that it is not just that the routine “might” get interrupted; it will get interrupted. I totally concur.

But– and this is where I depart from the author– I don’t actually believe that you are in control of your morning routine! It may appear as though you are in control of it, when it is actually working. You set your alarm, and when the alarm goes off, you get out of bed. But what you are in charge of are 1) your intention, i.e., I would like to get out of bed when my alarm goes off, and I would like to set my alarm for [x] in the morning; and 2) your input, i.e., physically setting the alarm and physically getting out of bed. You do not, however, control the outcome. All the possible things that could go “wrong” are out of your control, as in the example, but all the things that go “right” are also out of your control. We control setting the alarm, not the alarm going off.

I think that this gets to the heart of the difference between what we can and cannot control. I don’t make the alarm clock ring. I set the alarm, and I trust that it will ring. And yes, it is likely to ring if I set the alarm, but I can only contribute my part to it. I don’t get to control the outcome. But– here is the beauteous part– if I don’t set the alarm clock, it is not going to set itself. I can do all the right actions that lead me toward the outcome that I want, and maybe I will get that outcome and maybe I won’t, but if I don’t take those actions, there is no chance (barring someone else’s intervention) I will get that outcome.

Thanking Tylenol and Zen Habits both for their suggestions, I can use them as jumping-off points, intentions to set. But in order to take the actions to lead me there, I need to accept that I cannot control my slouching or whether I find my shortcomings amusing or when I am going to France. (Was that not Tylenol’s idea?) When I accept that I can’t make myself stand up straight or laugh or go to France, I can be real about what I actually can do. I can research yoga or chiropracty. I can seek out things that actually amuse me and start to develop a sense of humor from there. I can look at my spending plan and see where I can find money to fund a trip to France.

I’ll hazard a guess, however, that the advertising company would reject my proposed tagline: “Let go of the outcome of your intention to feel better, ask for guidance from those who have gone before you, and take the steps that others have taken which led them toward wellness.” Or, you know, just take some Tylenol.