All Your Plates Are Plastic

This first month of sheltering-in-place has done a number on my psyche. I’ve vacillated wildly between feelings of gratitude for the extra family time and feelings of acute claustrophobia & a strong desire to be somewhere—anywhere!!—all by myself. Professionally I’ve swung from feeling energized & open to new creative possibilities to fits of abject terror at my livelihood being almost entirely stripped away, with no clear end in sight.

Mostly, though, I’ve spent my days in a low-to-mid-grade existential funk, feeling the deep fatigue that comes from steady anxiety mixed with boredom mixed with copious amounts of sugar and carbs, and not nearly enough physical activity.

It feels like the last days of my drinking, honestly, which is probably where the dread creeps in. That sense of knowing full well that I should be moving more, eating less and making more productive use of my time, but instead opting to stay up way too late playing mindless games on my iPhone (usually while watching Netflix).

The chronic worry that I am not engaging enough with my family—or not engaging in meaningful, positive ways at any rate—also takes me back to darker days. Once again I am content to isolate in a state of mental and emotional numbness. Well, not exactly content. Sloth and absent-mindedness prey on my mind-- but rather than serving as a motivating force, feelings of disorientation and exhaustion lie on me like a weighted blanket, providing some comfort and enough ballast to embrace my inability— or at the very least my unwillingness—to make a better choice.

Depression works in much the same way, stripping away vitality and replacing it with shame and self-loathing. I have felt the momentum of making healthy choices in recent years, of getting physically fit and spiritually centered. Enough to know that such momentum is real, and that it feels great. But as I find myself back on the wrong side of that door I must admit that slothfulness has its own momentum, and it’s even more powerful. Not the quick, energized momentum of good health, but its depressive equivalent. That of a slow-moving zombie, with a singular focus and all day to get where it’s going.

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What I have to continuously remind myself, especially during these strange days of pandemic, is that feelings aren’t facts. I have zero control over the emotions that flow through my body. I do have control over how I respond to them, though—and that freedom of choice is the greatest gift that comes from authentic spiritual connection to myself & the world.

The counter-intuitive reality is that during times of shame and inactivity I must be gentler with myself, to cut myself even more slack, and to assign myself even more innate value as a human being than I do when things are coming easily.

This is the great spiritual paradox, one that cannot be fully understood without direct experience of it. It’s the foundation of every spiritual awakening—a kinesthetic awareness & acceptance of one’s own worth. And that, in my view, is always a matter of grace. Whether the messenger is Jesus or the Buddha, the message is a simple one that we nearly always get backwards.

I don’t have to make better choices so that I can feel worthy and lovable.

I have to feel worthy and lovable so that I can make better choices.

This struck me hard this week, while I was meeting with some like-minded friends on Zoom. I shared that I’d been really struggling—that trying to maintain the balance of mental & physical health, along with my familial relationships, my creative energy, my professional efforts and my personal commitments made me feel like I was a plate-spinner, a performer whose act must be executed perfectly, on all fronts, in order to succeed.

I felt like I’d dropped a plate on the home front—or more accurately, that I’d had one knocked from my grasp—and the result was it shattering on the ground, which caused me to lose focus and drop the rest of the plates simultaneously. My general feeling that, overall, I’d handled the last few weeks pretty well evaporated on the instant. The scattered shards around my feet exposed me as the failure I always suspect myself of being. There would be no more show, because I'd destroyed all the plates. It was curtains for me.

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This type of catastrophic thinking is pretty common to recovering addicts & alcoholics. The sense that everything is a house of cards, and that one small error will bring the entire structure down takes years to diminish, and it never completely goes away. We tend to be “all or nothing” sort of people. This might be the result of our drinking, or it might be the reason we started drinking in the first place. For those of us who were raised in chaotic or dangerous households the sensation is even more powerful. The feeling that nothing will be okay if I don’t make it okay is a primal response to childhood trauma.

A I shared this view of myself as a hapless plate-spinner doomed to failure, though, I realized it was a distorted perception. When bad things happen, or the bottom drops out of some particular situation in life, I might feel as if every plate has dropped and shattered… but that doesn’t mean it has. I’ve been taught that my feelings aren’t facts. My feelings are real, and deserving of attention, but they don’t define or confine me the way they used to.

While I spoke, telling myself as much as my friends, I had a new visualization. The “plates” of my life aren’t made of fine china, or even ceramic. If I drop one it won’t smash and be gone forever. Even if I drop all of them, it’s just one moment in time.

Because today my spiritual awareness, combined with years of work in recovery, have given me an entirely new set of plates. Or maybe just a true understanding of their composition.

All of my plates are plastic.

I can drop a plate, or even two or three. One might roll away and stay out of my grasp. Maybe I’ll get it back some day, and maybe I won’t. But rarely is it gone forever. When a plastic plate drops it’s still a distraction… but it doesn’t necessarily make all of the plates come crashing down. I can ask a friend or loved one to help me pick it up, or to toss me a new plate, and the act can continue. Even on days where all of the plates do fall, it’s not the end of the show. Because my life Is no longer a show. It’s a practice.

A dropped plate is simply an opportunity to take a deep breath, to laugh at myself, to enjoy a short break and wait patiently for the feelings to pass. Then I can pick up the plates and start practicing again.