Not long ago, I told myself that once it came time to have a kid, the gravity of the situation would motivate me to become the person I needed/wanted to be. I wouldn’t even have to think about it—it’d just happen. First, I would read all the books. I don’t just mean the parenting books. I mean all the books. I’d start with the classics I never got around to: Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, Ulysses. As I was wolfing down great literature, I’d also want to be plowing through folks like Marx, Arendt, maybe that French economist, refining my perspectives on faith, politics, pedagogy. The goal would be to turn my mind into a finely tuned instrument for molding and shaping my child’s worldview, and also (bonus) for debating those assholes who show up at school board meetings. I hate those fuckers.
But it wouldn’t just be my mind that needed honing—I’d get in good physical shape, too, and having a kid would be motivating here as well. Stretching, which I hate, would become as easy as putting on a pair of pants. Likewise, I’d finally devote real attention to “my core,” that mythical group of muscles I keep being told holds the key to unlocking all my physiological life goals. Soon enough, my middle-aged glow-up would be underway.
Of course, with great musculoskeletal power comes great nutritional responsibility, so naturally I’d start eating better—the whole family would. I’d cook more frequently, more thoughtfully: grow my own fruits and vegetables, can and preserve them in my root cellar (I don’t have a root cellar). Everyone would feel great and look great, plus sound great when invited to speak on a podcast.
Spoiler alert: None of these things have happened. Our baby is due in a few weeks, and I’m devoting more time to playing the new Spiderman game on PS5 than I am to Das Kapital. I’m also in the worst shape of my life, and while my cancer adventure can be blamed for my current lack of fitness, it doesn’t explain why, in recent weeks, we’ve so frequently succumbed to the temptations of chain restaurants like Chili’s and Olive Garden. They don’t have root cellars either.
As it turns out, amid all the aforementioned aspirations, the only thing that’s stayed consistent isn’t my workout routine or my daily reading volume. It’s this constant, nagging feeling that I could be doing, should be doing better. It’s the promises I keep making and then breaking to myself. It’s the scorecard I maintain for my own physical and psychological well-being, the one I use to grade myself over and over again, never measuring up. Me and a former therapist used to employ a common cliché as shorthand for this set of feelings. We called it the hamster wheel.
I’ve been “working on myself” for twenty-five years—therapy, SSRIs, recovery, etc.—and I still can’t figure out how to exit the hamster wheel. Part of the allure of having a kid has been the assumption (fantasy?) that becoming a parent would somehow provide an easy off ramp from it. I can’t say for sure that it won’t, because I’m not a parent yet, but I’m a lot less confident now that the moment is almost here. Sure, there are those first few weeks and months when we’ll be totally focused on just keeping this new human alive, battling through sleep deprivation and the emotional tornado of joy and frustration that attends new parenthood. But eventually we’ll get the hang of it—the initial shock and awe will wear off, giving way to a new normal. That, I suspect, is when I’ll start to hear the siren’s call of the hamster wheel again, that nagging voice that whispers: None of this is enough.
At this point, I could tell you everything I’ve learned throughout years of therapy and recovery meetings that helps me to cope with the emotions I associate with the hamster wheel, feelings such as anxiety and guilt, depression and self-doubt. In the rooms we talk about “progress not perfection,” and instead of wallowing in these feelings or using them as an excuse to get loaded, we instead try to focus our energy on developing a practice of humility, self-examination, forgiveness (toward others, but also oneself), and gratitude. Through meditation, I’ve learned to view all thoughts, negative and otherwise, as passing phenomena, like clouds in the sky.
For anyone playing the Buddhism home game, you know the Buddhists had their own term for the hamster wheel, duhkha, which means “unsatisfactoriness” or “dis-ease.” As it turns out, the etymology of the term is especially apt here, even if it kind of mixes our metaphors: “kha” refers to the axle hole of a wheel, and “duh” means “bad” or in this case “ill-fitting,” so the literal translation of duhkha is basically “broken wheel,” the kind that will lead to a frustratingly bumpy ride as you roll through life.
As with so many things, acceptance is key. The hamster wheel is part of life—certainly part of my life, at least. I’m grateful that I’m no longer so desperate to escape it that I feel the need to drink myself into oblivion, even though I still get sucked in—some days more, some days less. The consolation for me is that for the most part, instead of trying to figure out how I can run faster, I try to make peace with not running at all. This is not always easy. Progress not perfection.
My newborn child is not about to meet a perfect person. What they’ll meet instead is someone who’s made mistakes—who’s betrayed people he loves, let down friends, made choices he regrets. They’ll meet someone who’s fifteen pounds overweight, with high cholesterol and an inability to resist enchiladas, who never even managed to finish Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, let alone Ulysses.
This is the Healings Newsletter. It’s sent out on Thursdays.
It’s written by Garrett Kamps and edited by Tommy Craggs. Today’s installment is illustrated by Ayana H. Muwwakkil.
It’s about illness and recovery, and comes with jokes.
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“Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” — Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
Just embrace it; you're human :)