the whiplash of the moment

on overthinking.

“The attempts I made to get out of my own head were sundry and full of nonsense,” writer Amanda Montell starts in The Age of Magical Overthinking,“[…]my brain felt like dust. I was doing everything I could to defect from the state of overwhelm and consumption that had become my life in the roaring 2020s. Anything to gain some perspective on the mental health exigency I’d been experiencing, and trying to rationalize, for the better part of a decade.” Then, later in this opening chapter: “We’re isolated, listless, burnout on screens[…]The machine is malfunctioning and we’re trying to think our way out of it.”

this book is good you should buy this book.

Montell is much younger than me, the crisis she’s describing here is in large part generational. Still, the ideas she outlines in this (thoroughly researched/ engaging/somehow still actually fun) book reflect back feelings many of us older-school overthinkers have carried our entire lives: The zero-chill ways we often spiral through the world; the unending assessments of our own behavior, relationships and surroundings, our minds detectives on the hunt for clues in the case of the many (real and imagined) crimes that come from being alive.

This is a newsletter about aging and ambition. Overthinking was the secret in the success sauce of my former big ambitious career. My always-on hypervigilance meant I anticipated every work problem before it became a problem (a manager’s dream!). But I also immersed myself in work in order to blot out the brain noise, the state of overwhelm Montell’s book lays bare. All-consuming work provided a false sense of order; meeting and exceeding “goals” felt clean in a way real life could not promise nor provide.

I’m a recovering workaholic. In the whiplash of our particular moment, it’s ever-tempting to bury my head in endless-work sand. The planet’s pain is louder than maybe ever. Each day, I fight to keep myself away from old patterns, to face my feelings instead of trying to escape them, to move forward instead of back. To simultaneously create a life that’s meaningfully small and purpose-fulfillingly big. Ambitiously engaged with the outside world and still deeply centered within. It’s a puzzle of time and attention and money, a riddle I’ve yet to solve.

i’m 51, i like to kick and stretch

I’m trying to maintain something like balance. Last week, I attended my first yoga class since February 2020. Much like Conan O’Brien’s recent ‘Hot Ones’ episode (which, if you haven’t, I recommend jumping away from my middle-age rantings and diving into his, post haste), my first foray back to group exercise was both exquisite and grotesque. I didn’t know how much I’d missed pushing my body for 90 minutes in a space where the social contract meant I was too embarrassed to pause and pull out my phone. I felt grateful to live in a body that can still bend and contort on command, proud that all these post-pandemic years later I still knew and could pull off the moves. But I also felt distinctly uncomfortable around the other sweaty bodies, intolerant of my fellow students’ smells and sounds, their exercise quirks and minor faux pas (Did that girl have to lay her mat so close to mine? Can this man not tell his feet are inches from my face? WAIT, DID I JUST GLIMPSE BALLS). Truth is, I’m rusty around people. I’m still not always sure what it means to be interwoven in a group, who I am outside.

Beyond the stretching and sweating and purported “toxin cleansing,” the class served a further purpose: Keeping me off a screen and away from life inside the chaos of Instagram where the current whiplash between “HERE BUY THESE STEAM-CLEANING CAT BRUSHES” and “ARIZONA RULES WOMEN CAN BE GUILLOTINED” and “GIRLS NIGHT OUT: MARTINIS!” and “THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN HIDDEN BECAUSE IT IS EITHER THE WORST HUMAN ATROCITY YOU CAN IMAGINE OR POSSIBLY A FORMER SUPERMODEL’S NIPPLE” is growing a bit, shall we say…much?

Normally, I’d peace out at this point, take a mental health break, temporarily drop the app like the (worst) bad habit. But I am six weeks out from a book launch [🤡🤡🤡PRE-ORDER AMBITION MONSTER NOW 🤡🤡🤡]—Instagram is currently, contractually, attached to me like an unwanted third nipple the app would never let you show. When I log on each day (lol 167 times per day), I’m loathe to contribute to the chaos, but I’m also pragmatic: this is just part of my job now, I think, as I wave my Remember me? arms across stories and reels, ride my self-promotion tricycle (ding ding!) and blow my pre-order bullhorn into the main feed: A BOOK LOOK SHE MADE A BOOK A BOOK LOOK A BOOK. No writer likes this part. It’s against my GenX girl nature to engage in something so earnestly uncool. I’m a sensitive overthinker with a trauma-informed perfectionist streak. I’m trying to learn how to be outside here too.

me, promoting my book

On Friday, I went to an anxiety-inducing party and drank one too many vodkas and smoked .5 Capris. The over-thinky self-loathing I felt over the half cigarette and the vodka and the innocuous words I said that maybe I didn’t mean was enough to keep me under self-sequester for weeks. Instead, the next day I walked 13,000 steps with a friend I love deeply but rarely see; listened closely to her small and big crises, her own mid-life laments; took in her features; hugged her face. Instead, I forced myself to be in the world, in all of its mess. The machine is malfunctioning around us, we can’t think our way out of it. All we can do is gently, patiently get out of our heads long enough to love and connect with ourselves and each other, to find moments of joy — even when it all feels like nonsense — in whatever is left of our ride.

REMINDER: I am legally obliged under penalty of death to tell you to pre-order my book Ambition Monster everywhere I go until June. It is, I’m told, a good book.