I Can’t Do It All: My Self-Identity as a Whiner

Too much of my mental space is always being taken up trying to connect one Internet meme to another, not because they are related but because they happened through my news feed at the same time. If only I would use the same mental capacity to think carefully through the scriptures, but, oh well, maybe next week.

So over the weekend this ghastly buzzfeed video made the rounds, and at the same time, I found myself scrolling through these clever and funny pictures. And also, all weekend, I was enumerating in detail for Matt everything that is wrong with the kind of life “functional” Americans are supposed to live. There has to be some kind of common theme, I said to myself.

Take the pictures, as a starting point. Really, I love the humor and the lighting and the incredible chaos captured scene by scene. If you find yourself living in any situation that looks like this, you will immediately feel better to see it distilled so perfectly and discover that you are not alone. If you live in any way even slightly more orderly, you feel better about yourself as a person. Either way, everyone breathes a sigh of relief. The rooms are beautiful, the people are beautiful, but look at all the food all over the floor and the toys, Look! look! You don’t have to have it all together! And that’s the clever point, nobody can. None of us can achieve the pristine, unhappy hipster Montessori glory of our dreams. We can only arrive at trying to keep the cheerios beat back and the children basically away from the wine.

But this Very True Point, that nobody can have it all together, including me, causes me to fret and chafe. As I carefully examined the one of the woman trying to cross the street with the stroller and the dog and the phone, in the way of dropping most of the stuff she’s trying to carry, I thought, you know, I just don’t want this to be my reality. Sure, I move piles of stuff from one place to another in my house. Sure, I over schedule myself. Sure, I say yes more often than I say no, but was it always this way, in human history? Was it that I, and the other members of a household, were always at the center and everything, absolutely everything depended on each person living out their own personal drama? Each person in each photo has a destiny, probably, and a passion to pursue. Even the baby, even the little kids in capes.

I was wishing over the weekend that I could be a coal scuttling maid in Downton Abby, not one of the main servants who gets to be in the drama, one of the extras, who only comes and sweeps out and relays the fire for one penny a day and an afternoon out. If I was that person, that would be my job. But even if I was a fancy aristocrat, I would only be the fancy aristocrat. I wouldn’t also be having to do the fire. Everyone had A Job, and their identity was enumerated not by who they wanted to be, but by the accident of their birth. Which, obviously, is not that awesome and is contrary to everything America holds dear, but still, think of the rest, the mental rest, the simplicity of just being the fire laying girl.

Whereas I, I must forge my own identity and way. I can’t just be a housewife who does the dishes and the laundry and clothes the children. Who does that anymore? No, I must do all those things, but then I must also be creative in the use of my mind and my incredibly expensive education (that’s not an unreasonable demand, you get an expensive education, you should do something with it, laundry and dishes are not going to cut it, you need to bring some money in, and because it was a good education it should be money earned doing something that fulfills your sense of who you are) but I also need to cater to and allow to blossom the little individual delights awaiting in the soul of each child.

The pictures capture, perfectly, both the outward and the inward chaos. If I am going to fulfill my destiny, I need someone to sweep up the Cheerios, but there isn’t anyone, because all of us have to fulfill our destiny. “Let’s pay for a maid,” said Matt, after I explained this to him. “Oh no,” I said, “we couldn’t do that, because I couldn’t let anyone else see this insanity. I would have to clean the house before she came (assuming it’s a she, I realize this is a sexist and unfair assumption) and then I would be angry that I was paying someone to do what I just did myself.” “Then make the children sweep the cheerios,” he said. “I don’t want to overburden them,” I said. At which point he laughed for a long time. I mean, the children are going to end up sweeping everything, not just Cheerios, because I already swept. In this delicate human drama, my children are getting the short end of the stick because I haven’t given very much thought to the unfolding of their life’s dreams. Nor mine either, but I feel the closing in of a world expecting too much, and also maybe too little.

Really, I think the natural and inevitable result of each person pursuing their own destiny is the buzzfeed video (linked again, because I wouldn’t want to scroll back up to the top either). You can identify yourself however you want. You can form and shape your appearance and beliefs according to your own desires. But look what has happened. These young people look exactly the same as every other young person in America. They have the same way of speech, the same set of priorities, the same world view. They are indistinguishable from everyone around them, save for the self appellation “Christian”. They self identify as “Christian” which I think must mean the term doesn’t mean anything any more. They are filmed in a white, blank space, as if their identity has been forged in isolation, unrelated to anything around them. Where are the Cheerios? The dirt? The broken dreams of all the other people in their lives? It’s too perfect, and too clinical, and therefore weird.

We know, both from history and from the bible, that the total, unhinged, chasing after the self produces chaos but I think it might also produce total cultural uniformity. The chaos just manages to make everyone the same. When everyone looks to himself or herself, the result is not that varied.

Maybe rather than the fire laying girl, I should envy Jesus himself, who did not count equality with God something to be grasped, to took the form of a servant, a slave, who had all the identity in the world wrapped up in his baby finger, but threw it all away to die. Which will be my job today, as I carry on trying to do all the different jobs I’ve gathered to myself to do.