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| Spoiler alert: This guy has a chronic masturbation problem in Thanks for Sharing. Incongruously disturbing. |
Given that cast, it should have been pretty good, but it ended up being such a downer, focusing on the three main characters' sex addictions. I guess parts of it were okay, and maybe if I was in a different frame of mind I would have liked it. But the last third was dark, dark, dark. I was hoping for a goofy romantic comedy, because these days I don't watch many movies and when I do watch one I want to 100% check out and just enjoy the shoes and hairdos and pratfalls.
This movie was not that. It bummed me out, honestly, and I had to eat a quite large hot fudge sundae and do some knitting after dinner to feel better.
But it got me thinking more about addictions and not-quite-addictions, behaviors and habits that maybe work against the vision we have for our lives but also scratch some kind of itch, so we keep doing them. I don't think shopping was ever really an addiction for me--I never got in super big trouble over it, and I maintained a pretty balanced life otherwise. But it definitely scratched the itch, and I used it to avoid all the feelings.
Gah. I don't even know how to write about this stuff in a real way because, duh, it involves feelings, which I apparently am very bad at, and also because the new-age self-help literature has just dominated the conversation about this. I love that work, a lot of it, but it's hard to even find my own words about what this means for me and what it even is. This whole thing is new for me, and I'm not sure it's even real yet, but I've been slowly playing with the idea of just breathing my way through the itchy feelings as they come up.
Maybe this is just the next phase of Shtopping. I thought the work of this experiment would be denying myself things or feeling deprived, but nope. It's the feelings. The feelings have been coming and going since I stopped shopping, obviously, but with the end of the semester and the holidays there were plenty of distractions and I still could focus on stuff a lot and not on the feelings. The last few days, however, have been a lot slower, I'm getting back to work, I'm home alone with the kids all day, and I've had moments of sadness and anger and boredom and frustration.
I had to go read a lot of Glennon Doyle Melton's essays over at Momastery because her words make so much sense in this regard. I'm pretty sure she saved my bacon, my marriage, and my good sense more than once this week.
Here's what goes on: Essentially, my brain just wraps itself around ideas or things when I get like this--if it's a thing on my to do list, it has to get done. If there's a shirt I want, it has to get purchased. If there's something I don't like about E., we're not meant to be together. Dish in the sink, wash it; thank you note to write, write it.
You get the picture: Dog with a bone, dog with a bone, dog with a bone. And typically I just do things about the ideas in my head and then they calm down and go away until the next thought comes up. This trait of hyper focus has served me super well in terms of setting goals and accomplishing things, especially at work. It has held me together. I have been in constant motion.
But it doesn't serve so well when I'm trying to, say, expand my capacity for kindness or patience or love or rest. Which I think is the real meaning of Shtopping: slow it down, wake it up, breathe it in, feel it.
And, following Melton's advice, what this looks like for me is just choosing to go and breathe somewhere for a while--right now that means sitting on my bed with my mala beads and counting my 108 breaths. Honestly, I'd rather be unloading the dishwasher most of the time, but I'm trying to make the choice to do the breathing thing when I start to feel pissy or resentful or sad instead. The breathing is a reboot, but it also forces me to, you know, acknowledge that I'm feeling a certain way and not try to chase it away or choke it down and above all to know that IT WILL PASS. I also keep working out and journaling everyday and just doing the work: The work of marriage, the work of being with myself, the work of being more honest with me and everyone around me. It's work because sometimes I don't want to do it and sometimes it makes me feel like shit but it also feels like the truth.
Honestly, sometimes this whole thing sucks. Sometimes I wonder why even worry about doing it this way. It is just much more fun to get an effing package in the mail, right? Ooh, I still check for one everyday (even though I know they aren't there). My brain still would like that little ping.
But what I don't miss are the many lost half-hour chunks vegged out on online shopping, or fretting about organizing my things. I thought I would miss that, but I don't at all. I have so much more time and find life so much more interesting as I'm living it as opposed to how I'm imagining it through retail therapy. We gave a lot of money and gifts away this holiday season, which felt amazing, even though we still worry about money ourselves. This seems like a good trade--time, money, and generosity in exchange for more stuff--to me.
This is the home stretch of the experiment, and at the beginning I had a lot of anxiety about how to transfer out of it. But now I'm not sure things will be that different at the end of these next five weeks. I'll still buy something when I need it. I'm just making the hard work of breathing and feeling my varsity sport instead of shopping.
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