Lessons to Unlearn: Toxic Self-Reliance

The difficulty of abandoning a trait that's still in high demand

Here’s me, all alone in the world. Photo by author.

Hey there.

You might have heard of this little game called Wordle. It was (is?) kind of a big deal. Like many, I played the daily word game religiously for a few months. My streak was nearing 100 when I forgot all about it (as I am wont to do with my obsessions), but I had some great stats. It was the first thing I did every day, and the rare activity my friends and I could enjoy together though we’re never in the same place at the same time.

My friends used to share their strategies with me - their starting words and the mental flow chart they had developed to ensure the best possible result. My husband even read articles by players who had optimized their words to use the greatest number of unique letters. “Don’t tell me,” I’d say. “I don’t want to know.” And every time one slipped through, my brain would tell me, “Wellp, there’s another one we can’t use.” Because anything someone else figured out - any strategy not of my own design - was off-limits.

I’m like my two-year-old, saying, “No, I do!” and then un-turning and re-turning the page in his book that I’ve just turned for him. Except I can’t unhear those five-letter words, those perfect combinations of vowels and consonants (which I won’t leave here, on the off chance you’re like me and reading them will spoil your entire Wordle experience forever), and so I have to just cross them off my list of possible attempts.

It’s entirely dumb, but this kind of nonsense has caused me real trouble in life, real opportunities to be more efficient and connect with people. Jigsaw puzzles, for example, are a particular area of neurosis. I can’t do one without first taking apart all the accidentally paired pieces. And I don’t look at the picture. And if anyone helps, with even one piece, I lose interest and they have to finish the rest. I’m sure my husband can come up with another hundred examples of when my reluctance to accept help, or even use a different method that someone else came up with, caused me (and everybody else) time and frustration.

Independence and self-reliance are positive traits. And like any good thing, too much can be toxic. I refuse help to my own detriment, and then get upset when I’m the only one working while everyone else is enjoying themselves. I also tend to give away my time to people who don’t need it, because I’ve gotten it into my head that since I can help with whatever dilemma they’re experiencing, I’m the only one and therefore I must. And that, of course, leaves me less time for the things I need to do, which we’ve talked plenty about.

So, like a good partner and human, I’m trying to unlearn this lesson. After a decade of parenting, I can sit and do a puzzle with my children and be happy when they help. After 20 years of partnering with my husband and almost 13 years of marriage, I try my best not to be stubborn when he tries to show me a new and optimized approach to an old problem.

But here’s my dilemma: The world I live in keeps reinforcing this need for self-reliance above all else.

I bet you can guess what I’m about to say.

I’m without childcare again.

We all had to have known this was coming when I gushed about how “just right” this latest person was. Shame on me. And, of course, she left as I’d started to get really excited about my plans for all the work I was going to do.

I can’t go back on the search for babysitters. It’s too hard on me, and the revolving door we’ve had for the last several months is hard on my son, and probably my daughters. The only thing to do, then, is to stop looking, stop fighting and accept that this is the way it’ll be until the little one’s in school. I love my day job, but it’s not worth this level of stress.

So I quit. And I stripped my other work-style responsibilities back to the bare minimum, though I’ll still have to be pretty creative about fitting them in.

Of all the other jobs I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I can still freelance and run my news publication. I can work on the novel until the line edits are finished, but only because they’re almost done and I can do most of them without sitting at a computer. (Thank you, Siri!) I don’t know when I’ll next be able to work on fiction. Maybe I’ll write some more essays. I don’t know.

It’s not fair, but for now, that’s the way it is.

So all this toxic self-reliance I’ve been trying to unlearn, this martyrdom I’m trying to avoid - now we’re back to “No, I do” for the foreseeable future.

Autonomy was fun while it lasted.

What’s Entertaining Me?

This analogy by Alex Dobrenko made me LOL through the tears. Read it.

parenting: an escape room you can never escape

What’s Enlightening Me?

This thing my friend literally just texted me that sheds light on the entire problem we’re facing with childcare in the U.S.: “As a progressive woman, I feel like my professional success can’t come at the cost of other women’s abilities to be financially stable.”

And that’s what it is, isn’t it? Society doesn’t value the work of caring for and rearing children. Mothers get paid zero and actually pay out in emotional labor. Childcare workers - well, they get paid, but mostly it offsets the mother’s salary. For the mother to take home anything, they have to either find a better-paying job (good luck in most female-dominated professions and after having been out of the job market for years for the purposes of parenting) or pay the childcare provider less.

I’m not going to rant anymore about this - I’ll save it up for the essay I’ll never have time to write.

Postscript

I feel the need to say this, though I’m sure you already know:

My husband is not useless. He’s an amazing parent and partner. And also, he has a full-time job. His job makes it possible for us to live in this nice house and have nice things and for me to have the privilege to stay home and be a writer even though the pay (as stated) sucks. So, while I’m sure he’ll be willing to work with me to give me time to work on things outside those 10 hours each week I can steal before the baby wakes up and while he naps, I will never enjoy the professional freedom and autonomy he does - not while my kids are living at home, at any rate. Which, in this economy, might be forever.