How Scraping the Spaghetti Plates Saved My Life

Experiments in the Art of Fully Inhabiting My Days

Y’all, I have so many confessions to make that I swear I should have just named this Substack newsletter, “The Confessional.” 

Step on inside, because I’ve got a doozy for you today. It’s about worthiness, or rather, unworthiness. And how I’ve been transforming my relationship to it in the past few years. 

Growing up, I was one of those over-achiever kids. You know the type—getting straight As, playing first chair violin in the orchestra, playing the lead in the school play, scholarship to college, blah blah. As an adult, that drive to “achieve” didn’t diminish—happy marriage and two healthy kids, successful career, house in a leafy suburb.

I’ve focused on getting all the top prizes in Adulting—drinking 64 oz water every day, learning to twist myself into yoga pretzels, running a half marathon, quitting flour and sugar. I’ve even gone for the mental health and spirituality gold stars—meditating daily, sitting silent meditation retreats.

Yet, despite my desperate attempts to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t,’ to do it all perfectly, I still found myself at the end of most days feeling… bad. Like I wasn’t doing “enough.” Sure, I’d accomplished stuff and achieved some goals. But there was always one more thing (or seven!)  I could be doing “better.”

Photo by Cassidy Dickens on Unsplash

I was caught in a vicious cycle of always hoping the next achievement would be The One. The thing that could make me feel content, fulfilled, happy—all the good things I wanted to feel in this life—once and for all, foreverrrr.

But after 44 years of getting nowhere on that hamster-wheel, something began to click. Clearly collecting more and more “mountaintop moments” wasn’t the answer. Maybe I could find a solution somewhere in its opposite? 

I remembered the words of a meditation teacher at a daylong retreat I’d taken. We’d just finished a period of sitting meditation and as we shifted around and came back to the teaching circle, he remarked off-handedly, “You know, I’m really curious about our relationship with the in-between moments of our lives. Where do our minds go between finishing up a period of meditation and that very next thing we do? What’s happening in those moments when we think we aren’t “doing” or “thinking” anything at all?” 

This question stayed with me. And as I began reckoning with my own perfectionism and achievement addictions, I could see the way that chasing gold star after gold star had been preventing me from fully being in my life, from fully inhabiting the rich spectrum of my days.

I realized that there were countless, maybe hundreds, of minutes each day during which it seemed I wasn’t doing anything at all. Moments I thought of as kind of a “waste,” because they weren’t tied to Going After the Big Goal. Was there a way to somehow use these in-between times to cultivate some kind of aliveness, some amount of the “enough-ness” or contentment I could never fully seem to land by only ever shooting for the stars?

I started experimenting. Playfully shifting the way I approached the neglected, unsexy moments of my life—waiting in the interminable line at the pharmacy, slapping moisturizer on my face before falling into bed, ferrying kids’ shoes, jackets, pencils, empty juice pouches, school papers, hair brushes back to their various places in the house, driving in the car fetching a kid from dance/piano/art class, scraping crusty tomato sauce off dinner plates and into the garbage disposal.

With these experiments, I started intentionally injecting these in-between times with hits of delight, awe or ease, to see if it were possible to somehow wriggle out of my all-or-nothing, perfectionist, productivity mindset, my interminable never-enough-ness. 

To my delight and surprise, as I’ve layered these experiments into the in-between times of my days, my daily satisfaction meter has begun to climb. Instead of asking myself what I achieved or produced at the end of each day, I contemplate the ways I’ve cultivated the presence, emotions, and aliveness I desire most to have.

And these days, two years into launching my experiments with the in-between times of my days, I fall asleep feeling less a dismal, disappointing failure, and more like a terrifically content badass.