What If We Just Did What We Could?
and how do I weave 2006's The Break-Up and Frozen 2 into this very strange reflection? Come and see, won't you?
Welcome to this tiny corner of the internet where an off-duty psychotherapist keeps the conversation going on how to make sense of this life thing we’re all doing. If you ever wondered what your therapist does off the clock—which, who among us hasn’t?—this is like that. Think of it as the adult equivalent of seeing your elementary school teacher at the grocery store picking out lemons. 🍋 I typically oscillate between long-form psychoeducation pieces and narrative essays—sometimes I smush them together. I also do a biweekly podcast with my husband, advice-adjacent pieces, roundups and most recently started a segment of brisk thoughts on music, TV, and film. Today, we shall smush.
Hi hi hi hi! I took a little break last week which I’m sure no one noticed but me. It felt very weird. Like when you’re halfway to the airport and you remember you forgot your toothbrush. As I’ll soon get into, it was also a super necessary break.
I want to take a moment to welcome all the new readers here. Whether it was my newsletter on Taylor Swift’s new album or my other #1 girl, walking, I’m so glad you’re here in this weird place where I can write about both of those things with reckless abandon.
As I’m sure no one could miss even if they wanted to, and I feel you if you wanted to, yesterday was Mother’s Day. I would love to write about motherhood around Mother’s Day, but I just can’t. Or maybe, more accurately, I wish I could want to write about Mother’s Day right now.
It evokes this scene from The Break-Up1 where Jennifer Aniston’s character, Brooke, wants Vince Vaughn’s Gary to help her with the dishes after they host a dinner party. They go back and forth, litigating whether the dishes have to be done in that very moment. Ultimately and begrudgingly, he agrees. She pushes back—No, not like that I don’t want your help. Then she lands one of my favorite lines from a movie ever. Not because it’s earth-shattering in nature, but because in just nine words, it holds so much, “I want you to want to do the dishes.”
What follows from there is quite a relatable, sometimes funny, and heart wrenching fight that leads to what you can only assume happens in a film called The Break-Up.
I can’t do it, y’all. I’m Gary in this scenario. I’m feet up on the couch, playing video games completely incapable of summoning the want to do it. It’s just not in me this year. Has it ever been in me? I really don’t know.
Maybe I’m too cynical. Scratch that. I definitely am. I just can’t wax poetic about a role that many people want to be, but aren’t for a myriad of reasons. Or people who don’t want to, but are being forced to by this country’s laws. Or the billions who are mothering in one way or another and are unsupported and exhausted. I just can’t. My energy toward this holiday can be summed up in the passive indifference typically reserved for a teenager: literally, whatever, fine.2
If you love Mother’s Day and can really sink into it, I do not judge in the slightest. I’m envious. I hope someday that will happen for me, but 2024 ain’t the year it’s happening.
I don’t even have it in me to write something pithy, biting, or deeply honest about it. Thankfully, there were so many incredible pieces on this topic across Substack this week. So if you’re feeling an emotional hangover from Mother’s Day, I offer you these:
- wrote about what they actually wanted for Mother’s Day
Molly Dickens of
wrote about alternatives to the average Mother’s Day gifting- shared a beautiful essay titled, a mother in full.
- wrote about praising and seeing mothers for what they are beyond mothers.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0f1ee159-0214-455a-82f1-bc1557f83562_3977x2416.jpeg)
Instead, what I can bring you this week is a lesson I return to about a baker’s dozen times a year because as soon as I execute it, the message is long gone.
Ah, the brain. You sweet, forgetful fool of an organ.
This lesson is about meeting myself exactly where I am.
Meeting myself where I’m at in this precise moment means accepting pretty debilitating back pain and that I’ve all but lost my voice.
I’d been struggling with some back pain and what seemed to be some allergies/cold (?) prior to our trip to L.A. a few weeks ago. I saw no other option than to power through.
The day we arrived in L.A., my husband ran to the grocery store while I hung with Archie at the Airbnb and unpacked. I was in so much pain, I shit you not, I was crawling around on the hardwood floors putting clothes away. By the time my niece and her partner arrived for dinner at our place, I had fully given up. I just laid on the floor, fully horizontal, while we caught up. This is the kind of hosting you can expect of me.
The very next day we went to Disneyland. For 11 hours, I managed tens of thousands of steps, carrying Archie periodically because we decided, of all the times to forget the stroller on a trip, this would be the right time. And I just did it. Undoubtedly, it was painful, yes. But, also doable. I’m not condoning this, at all. Butttt, it’s good for certain parts of me to see when I have to, I am capable of doing what is necessary. In some ways it was impressive to witness what adrenaline and sheer force of will can do in our body and minds.
After pushing through ignoring my body’s pleas for rest to that extent, pretty much the moment we got back home I veered into full-on cold territory, lost my voice, and was no longer mobile. I took a day off work and rested. I felt better, but my back was still a mess.
I had Pilates scheduled for Wednesday morning. In the 10ish days since the back pain started, I’d canceled Pilates several times. When I woke up Wednesday morning, I was still hobbling around. I looked vaguely familiar to how I did walking around 9 months pregnant. Going from sitting to standing was a multi-step process requiring three points of contact with anything connected firmly with the ground.
Very little in my conditioning suggested it’d be OK for me try anything physical in that condition. I get very “put her out to pasture” energy when I’m struggling physically. Whether it’s a cold or a physical injury. I have a part of me that considers me pretty much ruined. What use am I if I can’t do everything I usually do?
This is obviously dramatic. And yet, it happens every single time. I start to spiral about my usefulness on this planet and feel the walls closing in on my access to things I love (and keep me mentally wellish). If you’ve been here for a minute, you’ve heard me talk about this hopelessness before.
So, auditioning for leading lady in my life, I’ve got the part of me that lives on catastrophic thinking, stomping around declaring my Pilates days are done and my body is all but broken. In the same waiting room for casting, over her melodramatic monologue, I hear a whisper–y’all know I love a whisper. This whisper is coming from a kind of unassuming figure. Imagine she’s reading a magazine. Unimpressed, only listening to all this because she’s in earshot. She shrugs and proposes nonchalantly, “I don’t know. It doesn’t seem that complicated. What if you just did what you could?”
Hmmmmmmmmm.
What if, I just did what I could?
Now, that’s a thinker.
Maybe it’s not for you, but when you're circling the drain of panic and hopelessness, it’s kind of a radical thought.
What if, I just did what I could?
With that ringing in my ears, I suddenly realized if I went to Pilates and it hurt too much, I could just leave. Or, I could modify the hell out of everything.
I was intrigued enough by this suggestion that I went. Very timidly. I felt similar to how I did the first few times I started at this studio, years ago now. Nervous, unsure. Worried about making a fool of myself and seeming weak. I talked with the teacher to let her know what I was dealing with. She made suggestions of how to modify. Typically, when my body is up for it, I just do what they tell me. Never modifying. Pushing. Up-leveling whenever I can.
This time I went back to basics, making the moves as easy as possible and then adding tension when I felt my body was ready. I met myself EXACTLY where I was.
I kept saying to the pain, “It’s OK that you’re here.” I wondered what it needed.
“Is this OK?”
“Do you want more? Less?”
“What if we moved this way?”
The pain didn’t want me to give up. It just wanted to be, as it was. It wanted to be tended to. Consulted.
I felt so much space open up in this. Entirely in lock stop with my pain rather than resenting it. What was interesting is that once I was no longer fighting with nor coddling my pain, other parts of my body that weren’t in pain, chimed in. They wanted to help.
The class, and my movement in it, could be whatever I wanted it to be. The amount of agency and ownership I felt was so different than how I usually move through the class, an obedient student.3 To my utter shock, it was the first time in over a week my back didn’t hurt. This continued in the days following. It just got better and better. I’m still tender4, but I see things moving in a new direction.
As I’m sure you can imagine, I’m not here trying to advise how to get through a Pilates class. This noticing feels widely applicable to me.
There are a lot of parallels with emotional pain—the tender spots of us. When they get really sore we, understandably, want to avoid aggravating them. But, they kind of need us the most in that moment.
“Please don’t ignore me,” they plead. “I won’t ruin you. I won’t completely overwhelm you. If you could just turn toward me for a bit, we could work together, no?”
This all reminds me of something I learned many years ago, not from my education, but rather straight from my clients. I’ve heard time and time again that when they get stuck, like really stuck—frozen, basically—they ask themselves some version of, “What can I do next?”
This isn’t an entirely new thought by any means. It’s a version of a million psychotherapy tools, but it sounded so much more accessible than, “Think positive!”—which that suggestion, personally, makes me want to hurl.
Speaking of being frozen and what we can do next, let’s talk Frozen 2 for a second.
Stay with me, I promise it tracks.
Not to throw too many spoilies at you from a children’s movie that came out 5 years ago, but Olaf has ostensibly died, or whatever it’s called when a snowman is no longer with us. Anna is stuck in a cave and she is struggggling. It feels like she’s close to calling it. But instead of giving up, she starts, as you do in any good Disney film, singing:
“I won't look too far ahead
It's too much for me to take
But break it down to this next breath
This next step
This next choice is one that I can make”
The song is called The Next Right Thing. It’s not just about grieving a snowman or her sister being lost, AGAIN (Elsa, honey, we gotta talk about having hard conversations rather than just running off). It’s about depression and anxiety.
If you’re feeling stuck, hopeless, powerless, for whatever reason—maybe your snowman friend dissolved into dust, or something like that—I invite you to wonder, what if, with your tender parts in tow, you just did what you could. I’ll be there with you, walking the finest of lines between trying not to overextend myself and refusing to count myself out.
Questions for you:
What if you just did what you could?
Does this resonate with you? Do you have the polarities of do everything or do nothing?
What does getting stuck look like for you? Where do you tend to get stuck?
Do you find the line between honoring where you may need to scale back and where you need to show up as hard as I do?
One for funsies: What item do you almost always forget on a trip?
Note: Apologies about the longer than anticipated hiatus on the podcast. With my aforementioned lack of voice, we decided to wait until I’m back up and running vocally.
You can find more info and my full disclaimer on my about page here. Abridged version: I’m a therapist, but not your therapist—even if you are a client of mine ~hi, dear one!~ this isn’t a session. dialoguing is an educational and informational newsletter only, not a substitute for mental health treatment.
Also, if you’re interested in submitting a question for the dialogue league, recent example here, please email me at dialoguingsubstack@gmail.com—or if you’re reading this via email you can just hit reply and send me a message. Love hearing from you for any and all reasons!
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The Break-Up is a CRIMINALLY underrated movie. This scene I reference in particular is brilliant. I think this may be some of the best acting they’ve done. I may have to do a dialoguing on dialogue on this one.
As I wrote that very line at a coffee shop, I watched a woman on a little date with her daughter, maybe 10 years old. She was showing videos of her daughter from when she was young and babbling. Did this make me feel tears prick the back of my eyes? Yes, yes it did. I’m not 100% dead inside. It’s more of a coin flip situation.
Which, I will absolutely return to when my body is ready. Part of the mental relief I get in these classes is the mental relief of not having to make any decisions.
Just looked up synonyms for “tender” and they are to die for: soft, edible, succulent, juicy, ripe, kind, warm, feeling (Source: Oxford Languages via Google). This is my new imagery for my tender parts. A juicy peach. I need to be careful with it, sure, but I’m not throwing it away. No way.
You went. To Disneyland. Without. A stroller!!!! 😨😱 My heart goes out to you and your poor back!!! Thank you so much for this piece, I laughed and related so much.
When you're a kid, you think people are capable of anything and everything. And then you grow up and have a shitty work day and get a flat tire and realize how easy it is to max yourself out. And now I can look back with compassion on the people I've met along the way -- Maybe they were doing all that they could!
Thanks for the shout out!! Big hugs!