You can stop expecting so much of yourself.
Everybody complains about small talk.
“So, where are you from?” “So, what do you do?” And unless your answer is intentionally defiant (I’d like to hear it!), the answer is a job title that may or may not have anything to do with who you are as a person. Maybe you love your job but feel you have to tone your passion down a bit. Or maybe your answer is an apology that you’re “just” a stay at home parent. Or–and have mercy on me, this is me: you completely dismiss what lights you up and say something else because it’s scary to admit to strangers what you’re truly on fire about.
At least now we’re all properly sorted into our little boxes and everyone can settle down and know what to expect of each other.
No wonder we complain. Too often, small talk reinforces the expectations forced on us due to easily observable identities and roles.
Slightly off-topic, but, do you know any good “large talk” questions? One I’ve been using lately is, “What’s keeping you busy lately?” (I think I’ve borrowed that from Gretchen Rubin.) That gives a person permission to share what matters to them outside of where they fit in some social matrix that might not say much about who they are–or might even be oppressive to them. If you have any other suggestions, would you share in the comments?
Okay, back on track here…Our roles fix us into a position related to the roles of other people. They focus on what we do for them. How we serve a broader social construct. So often, these roles don’t leave us room to be wild and creative. They don’t leave room for a little mess and exploration.
And isn’t that the stuff you really want to talk about?
A pile of pale blue and lavender yarns, still skeined, on a wooden crate. I’m going to knit them all into baby gifts, but…I’m not expecting myself to be quick about it! It’s a lot of yarn…
If you look at it a slightly different way, though, our roles can reveal a lot about our values. If you’re in a job you hate, you probably do that because you value the health and stability that comes from having food on the table every day. If you’ve made a lot of sacrifices to stay at home with the kids, you probably value involvement in their lives. If you always set your crafting time aside to clean the house, maybe you value order and organization.
I can’t imagine seeing a person as bad because they value health and organization and being there for their kids. In all these cases, you might also value safety, which you attend to by performing to expectations. It’s also not bad to value safety–you probably wouldn’t be here if you didn’t, by the way.
Unfortunately, our values can come into conflict with one another. That value of safety (that all functioning living organisms share) quite often feels at odds with, oh, little things like courage and creativity. Same goes for stability and security. Of course you want those things. Of course it’s hard to do two things at once that are at odds with one another.
Conflicting values is hard to deal with. It’s a hurricane on the inside. And it’s normal human nature!
I’m no Jungian scholar, but a theme I’ve picked up in Carl Jung’s work is that human psychology functions around tension between opposites. Figuring out balancing our individual needs with the needs of the group, for example, is part of being human. It’s not a problem that we struggle with this! It’s simply part of being alive in a world with other alive beings.
We all live a conflict between wanting to stay safe and wanting to push our limits. We all live a conflict between predictability and novelty. How we navigate these conflicts makes us unique–our creativity is always somewhere inside this tension.
We expend a lot of energy trying to resolve the tension that is unresolvable.
What if you could just not try to?
The invitation here is this: can you stop expecting yourself to “just” be courageous and creative, as if it’s not supposed to be hard? Can you consider that struggling to allow the messiness of creative exploration might not be an indication that it’s not for you? As if mess and exploration are supposed to fit neatly into your life?
What if these things are supposed to create a little tension?
If playing it safe made you happy, you wouldn’t still be reading this. If stepping out into courageous creativity was easy, you wouldn’t still be reading, either. I see you there in the middle of wanting both stability and forward motion. And judging yourself for feeling challenges by the tension is keeping you stuck.
One of my magic powers is helping people stop judging themselves, so they can redirect energy into making cool, creative stuff happen. If that sounds like something that would help you, a chat about how that works is just a few clicks away–I promise large talk, not small talk.