Hallo from A Sunday in Winter! Today’s exploration is about how it feels to be in charge of your own life, and what we’re supposed to do with that reality. Maybe you’ve already figured this out? If so, page me immediately—marked URGENT. If not, I’ll settle for the most delicious, hilarious, or mundane pic from your camera roll this week. Here’s mine!
If you’ve lived in a cold climate and owned a car for a while, you probably know this, but I didn’t: when it’s freezing outside, the “low tire pressure” icon on your dashboard tends to swing by for a visit. And if your car is an overachiever, it might also flash a high-stakes, hard-to-ignore warning, like: “pull over immediately and check your tire pressure. Otherwise you may die!!!!!!!”
When this happened to me last week, I gave myself 30 seconds to clench my teeth and dramatically roll my eyes in annoyance. Mike, to whom I would usually bequeath the task of “figuring this out,” was working (and freezing) his butt off in Vegas for the week, so if I wanted to drive anywhere, I’d have to “figure this out” myself. So after indulging in my eye-roll, I re-routed to the nearest gas station, rolled up to the air-fill machine, and cracked open my favorite book the owner’s manual to my Subaru. Time to figure out how to fill some tires.
The same week, scholar and spiritualist
wrote about the challenge of accepting responsibility, referencing the 1978 mega-bestseller The Road Less Traveled. The book’s thesis, she explains, is that much of success in adulthood can be attributed to “whether you see yourself as capable of solving the problems in your life, or are more interested in sidestepping responsibility and placing blame on external factors.”Oof. This framing caught my attention, not just because I’m thinking about what success looks like in this phase of adulthood—but because I love to blame “external factors” for my problems. #1 favorite hobby TBH!!! My top scapegoats for day-to-day frustrations tend to be the classics: capitalism, the patriarchy, and all the ways our modern society helps perpetuate those systems. But I’m of course not above blaming the simpler things, like a weird tortilla.
I’m exaggerating; I’m not the world’s biggest blamer (in fact, you know those tests you can take that identify your “top skills” as they might relate to potential careers? I always rank super-high on forgiveness … to which I’m like, well that’s nice, but how relevant is this skill in the job market unless the role I’m applying for is … Jesus?). However, as I’ve become more familiar with capitalistic and patriarchal systems, I often find myself framing the biggest challenges of my life as a direct result of these mega-forces.
For example: the reasons why it’s so difficult to find childcare? The patriarchy. My frustration at my constant need to reform myself in order to be seen as “valuable” by society? Patriarchy, and also capitalism. The fact that I want a silk pillowcase? Definitely capitalism.
I think we all do this a little bit, and writers like
, , and have built successful beats and thriving communities around creating safe spaces to be able to talk about the ways that life’s challenges can be tied back into these structures and systems. It’s cathartic to be able to think and speak this way, as evidenced by the vitality of AHP’s weekly threads (this recent one, which asks subscribers to share the concrete details of how they were able to purchase a home, is ample evidence of these systems at work). Perhaps because we went many years without acknowledging the ways patriarchy and capitalism make life hard for the Non-Bros, these spaces have acted like a steam valve release; we’ve needed a place to explore these realities.However, our scapegoating can go too far. What The Road Less Traveled is trying to point out, I think, is that there are consequences to behaving as if you have no agency in the game.
Here’s Peck, the book’s author, as quoted in Elise’s essay:
“We cannot solve life’s problems except by solving them. This statement may seem idiotically tautological or self-evident, yet it is seemingly beyond the comprehension of much of the human race. This is because we must accept responsibility for a problem before we can solve it. We cannot solve a problem by saying ‘It’s not my problem.’ We cannot solve a problem by hoping that someone else will solve it for us. I can solve a problem only when I say ‘This is my problem and it’s up to me to solve it.’”
I love how unapologetically condescending this is. Don’t you feel like you just got lectured by your dad?!1 But Peck is totally right; we won’t get anywhere if we expend all our energy finger-pointing at the patriarchy and none of it taking action ourselves. Even AHP, made famous for bringing the vernacular of burnout-as-systemic into mainstream culture, acknowledges that her work has “detoured around the question of individual agency in burnout.”
So what is the role of individual agency in accepting responsibility for life’s challenges, then, versus the delicious pastime of blaming someone else? I do know that it feels a little wild, and intense, to reach a point in life where you actually are the most responsible party in your immediate vicinity. Here’s Peck again:
“Most of us are like children or young adolescents; we believe that the freedom and power of adulthood is our due, but we have little taste for adult responsibility and self-discipline. Much as we feel oppressed by our parents—or by society or fate—we actually seem to need to have powers above us to blame for our condition. To rise to a position of such power that we have no one to blame except ourselves is a fearful state of affairs.”
Other than a gd shiver down my spine, what I get from Peck’s directive is that once we make it to the top, we’ve basically … gotta act like it.
It makes me think of a scene from an episode of the The Morning Show I watched this week: Reese Witherspoon’s Bradley Jackson, a rising star journalist, is frustrated that she can’t break a politically-charged story on abortion because her network fears it will alienate half of their viewership. In response, Jennifer Aniston’s Alex Levy (Bradley’s seasoned co-anchor) says to her: “You’re evening news now, honey. You’re Dan Rather, you’re Diane Sawyer. You’ve wanted this chair since you landed at UBA. Why don’t you try just sitting in it for a while?”
I’m definitely not at the top of much right now (I’m more like … under the table, constantly cleaning up oatmeal), but I am a homeowner x3, an almost-parent of two, half of a marriage … you get it. While I may not be the actual Dan Rather, I am Dan Rather compared to myself 10 years ago! You know?! Aka, I’m the toppest2 I’ve ever been on the adulthood ladder, and I need to accept responsibility for that. And I’m grateful to Elise’s essay for that reminder this week.
I’m still figuring out how I want to acknowledge the role of powerful, shaping forces like patriarchy and capitalism in our lives without negating my own agency, though. Maybe that looks like filling up my tires with air when I really don’t want to, developing my taste for self-discipline. Maybe it looks like making those systems a truth of my reality (hat-tip to the complexities of job-searching while pregnant), without letting them rule me (hat-tip to job-searching anyway!).
Or maybe, as Elise’s essay pointed out for me this week, it’s starting to simply notice when I’m having fun blaming an invisible castle for my problems, instead of trying to climb the turrets and dismantle it myself. That feels like a good start.
Thanks for reading ❣️ If that felt like a pep talk to myself, well, it was. Please share your most annoying “being at the top” problems of recent days, and/or how you’re ~*accepting responsibility*~ for them, queen! Tell me I’m not the only one flipping through their car’s owner’s manual this week and then celebrating by eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
My dad basically doesn’t have a condescending bone in his body, but reading this reminds me of classic lines he used to toss my way growing up, like “You need an attitude adjustment. And only you can change your attitude.” Which obviously made me furious, because I knew he was right.
Def a word