Yeah, No. Not Happening.

by Karen Karbo

  I’m in full agreement. Can’t we just be who we are and have that be okay? I would literally rather have a minor medical procedure, with its attendant drama and excellent drugs, followed by the satisfaction of watching my wound heal, than get back on track, choose kale over spinach (these days, opting for spinach is like eating a Twinkie), read more literature and fewer cheesy thrillers, listen to jazz or at least something more culturally enriching than the Spotify Workout Twerkout Playlist, get more and better exercise, meditate my face off, be more mindful, learn to love cooking (knowing full well this will never happen), give back to the community (or more to the community: I already volunteered—but not enough!), become a better listener even when he wants to talk about motorcycle parts, or tackle my to-do list (i.e., make a to-do list).

  I have wept more than once at the ridiculousness of it all. At the waste of time. At the endless self-recrimination. And yet, to stop trying to improve myself was synonymous with failure. To be a good woman in the twenty-first century is to be a woman on a continuous quest to be better. To be trash for a while—that is, a woman who doesn’t care to improve herself—is never okay. And somehow, it’s never okay to be never okay.

  The eternal quest for self-improvement is a self-generating self-doubt machine, and yet we are still seduced by the bogus come-on of people like self-described #1 life and business strategist Tony Robbins, who assures his own job security by preaching “constant, never-ending improvement,” confirming that we have as much of a chance of reaching our self-improvement goals as we do of coming to the end of our Facebook newsfeeds.

  Self-improvement is a thriving, multigazillion-dollar-a-year industry. Why is that? If all the programs, plans, systems, treatments, or magical cornerstones transformed your life, fixing whatever you believed was wrong with you, wouldn’t it be a one-and-done sort of thing? Or maybe more like painting the living room, which happens once a decade, instead of an ongoing slog (otherwise known as a sacred daily practice)? If all this stuff worked, wouldn’t self-improvement be a multithousand-dollar-a-year industry? Wouldn’t a new thing come along that we would feel compelled to fix—as I write, the health of our gut flora is causing a lot of insomnia across the land—and we would fix it, and then we could go on and we could turn our gaze outward and enjoy being human beings in a beautiful, endlessly surprising world?

  While we’re on the topic, gut flora is a perfect example of how the knee-jerk compulsion to improve ourselves operates. Until recently, no one but your cousin the gastroenterologist even knew gut flora existed. If we thought about gut flora at all, we assumed she was the lead singer of a punk band.

  Over the past decade microbiologists have discovered that our gastric microbes aren’t just lounging around our GI tract, waiting to digest the next burrito that comes down the chute, but have an active role in our overall health, including our mental health. Gut flora may play a part in our moods, specifically depression. This is fascinating, but notice the word may. Research is pointing to this development, but more studies still need to be done, and those studies take years. Science moves slow. Corporations, hoping to capitalize on a flurry of headlines, move fast. No sooner is #gutflora trending on social media than Whole Foods has devoted an entire aisle to gut flora–health-improving supplements and pricey gut flora–balancing beverages. Chances are, unless you’ve participated in the American Gut Project (where, for $69 and enough chutzpah to poop into a vial and pop it in the mail), you don’t even know what’s in there. And yet, there you are (there I am), doing your bit to improve it.*

  It’s a familiar cycle: we are made to feel uncertain about something to which we’d never given a thought. We madly google it, absorb conflicting and probably dubious information, fret a little more, and narrow our search to “experts” or our most trusted (usually for no good reason other than we like their pictures) social media gurus. To be clear, it’s not as if social media gurus are all peddling snake oil—some may have a good tip or two—it’s believing they know more about you than you do about yourself that trains you to doubt yourself. You stop trusting your own judgment. As if you’ve never learned a life lesson on your own. Our own wisdom comes to seem suspect, as does our ability to decide whether what we’re feeling uncertain about is even a problem.

  Before I started saying yeah, no, not happening, I came across something about the rise of social anxiety. At the time, I was deeply into avoiding parties. I did that annoying thing where I would optimistically accept an Evite, hoping that in six weeks’ time I would somehow be miraculously transformed into a person who would enjoy a costume karaoke party and pig roast. That has never happened once. Yet every time I clicked on YES, followed by the writing of a gushy, insincere note (“We are so looking forward to sushi ’n charades at your place with your in-laws! Can’t wait! This is going to be soooo much fun!!!”), I tried to believe it would be fun because clearly other people, other women, thought these parties were a blast. Then I came upon the social anxiety piece and felt relieved. If I suffered from social anxiety, I could fix it. I could improve myself rather than do the hard work of accepting that I was a slightly introverted curmudgeon with a low tolerance for kicky gatherings.

  It would be one thing if our self-doubt was limited to managing our gut flora health and excruciating social gatherings, but self-doubt is a virus that also infects every part of our lives—how we raise our kids, connect to our spouses and partners, do our work, and engage in the world. Thus, we learn to coexist with it, chronically disappointed in failing to get with the program du jour. Low-grade self-loathing becomes part of our interior landscape, a noxious weed we whack at with affirmations and empowerment T-shirts, but never quite eradicate. We believe that one day, in the future, we will be our best self, but that day never arrives. Our lives become Groundhog Day, only instead of February 2 and Bill Murray, it’s always the second week in January, when New Year’s resolutions are in shambles and the self-hatred flows like the red wine you vowed to stop drinking, despite its antioxidant properties.

  I swore off self-improvement on April 8, 2017. It was during a week when I was tracking every inhale and exhale with one of those fancy planners advertised to change your life. I have no clue why it was this particular bit of lunacy that led me to say fuck it all, but on the morning of April 8, moments after the alarm went off, I was already in a state. I’d read a thing about how you’re supposed to awaken naturally. If you need to set an alarm, it was a sign you hadn’t gotten enough sleep. Not getting enough sleep leads to elevated cortisol levels, which leads to a bunch of diseases and not being able to lose weight, and that day was the second day of my new whole clean-eating mindfulness challenge, which included awakening naturally, so I experienced the clear sense that I already wasn’t doing it right. I hadn’t actually set the alarm the night before. It was already set. On my phone. Which wasn’t supposed to be on my bedside table in the first place, as dictated by some other digital detox protocol that I was also following half-heartedly.

  It was 7:02 a.m. and I was angry at myself. I was aware of not feeling grateful—something else you’re supposed to do upon waking—for living in a house with locking doors and a working furnace, plus the luxury of being able to do the whole clean-eating mindfulness challenge in the first place. Also, having a good man who loves me, snoring away next to me. I hadn’t even gotten out of bed, and I was already depressed by my inadequacies, by the never-ending ambient noise in my head that I needed to do better. It was all so boring.

  The whole point of what I was trying and failing to do was to live in a way that would make me happy, according to the current thinking on the need for fancy planners to improve your quality of life. But here’s the thing: I’m already happy in the mornings. When I close my eyes at night, I’m a little excited by the thought of my first cup of coffee, dark roast with a splash of half-and-half, and a good game of Dead Hand with my dog, Rita.* The absurdity of laboring so mightily to achieve what I already had finally registered.

  I decide
d to swear off self-improvement. Aside from the regular shoring up of the ruins that had become habit (dyeing my hair, a facial when I thought about it, steering clear of plaid), I was done. I was quitting. I was never going to get up earlier than I had to. I was never going to end my relationship with chips and guacamole. I was never going to be cool or hip or free from a certain degree of agita. I was never going to love card games or New Year’s Eve. I was never going to stop taking online personality tests and then barking “what a load of crap!” out loud to the empty room or swear off astrology, which is also a load of crap, but I like thinking of myself as a Pisces Queen. I was never going to be a mysterious beauty. Serenity: not my bag. Neither is running a marathon (or a 10K, 5K, or any other “K”). I was done with programs, action plans, strategies, schemes, regimens, and ginormous planners that have you brainstorming the side dishes for Thanksgiving four years from now; I was always going to be a woman who embraced ideas that took her fancy with the slavering enthusiasm of a Labrador retriever, ate candy, lolled around reading a novel when she should be working, and had a bit of a muffin top.

  My younger-man husband has long said that all he cared about, vis-à-vis the state of my naked bod, is that I’m “naked and smiling,” and I’ve decided to take him at his word. I would make sure I ate my vegetables, did my walk/run around the neighborhood without my phone (and its library of podcasts) while admiring the beauty of nature, pet the dog, read books, and spent time with my daughter—now a young adult—and my friends. To lunging after the ever-receding mirage of the perfect me, I would say yeah, no, not happening.

  This should be the part where I tell you how freeing it is to say fuck it all, but it wasn’t that easy. I’d spent decades not feeling good enough and feeling guilty for not being able to do what I needed to do to improve myself. Before I could truly free myself, I had to confront the foundational emotion that fueled my need for never-ending self-improvement: shame.

  The Voldemort of emotions, shame is so icky and intense no one wants to think about it, much less acknowledge it. In her early academic work, University of Houston research professor Brené Brown specialized exclusively on shame and its effect on women’s lives. She tells a story in I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn’t) about how when she would mention that her primary academic interest was shame, people wrinkled their noses, as if the toilet had backed up. Once, on a flight to give a talk, she struck up a conversation with her seatmate. Over the roar of the engine, the seatmate thought Brown said she was giving a speech on “women in chains.” The seatmate was intrigued—how fascinating! When Brown said no, it’s women and shame, the conversation abruptly ended, and the seatmate professed a sudden need to take a nap. People feel shame just thinking about all the things they feel ashamed about. I feel a little ashamed bringing shame up, especially when it’s much more entertaining to riff on all the stupid stuff marketed to women that we can laugh at and roll our eyes about, then secretly google in the wee hours of a sleepless night.

  Brown interviewed three hundred subjects over the course of six years, and the scope and depth of shame experienced by perfectly lovely women blew her mind. We feel the most shame around our appearance (90 percent of the women Brown spoke to felt shame about their bodies) and motherhood. Followed by: family, money and work, mental and physical health, sex, aging, religion, being stereotyped and labeled, and speaking out about and surviving trauma. The only thing women don’t feel shame about, or so it appears, is the inability to throw a curveball or play “Bohemian Rhapsody” on the ukulele.

  Shame, as Brown defines it, is “. . . the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing we are flawed and therefore unworthy of acceptance and belonging.” That innocuous-seeming therefore connecting the two parts of the definition is a heartbreaker. Humans are hardwired to yearn to belong. Otherwise we wouldn’t survive. Humans are also flawed, every one of us. We feel intense pain because we believe we are flawed—and we are—which leads to feeling unworthy of fulfilling the hardwired need to be accepted, to belong, and to be loved.

  Shame is so noxious, most of us go to great lengths to try to develop coping mechanisms. We devote our lives to attempting to dig ourselves out of our shame prison with a teaspoon. Brown calls these behaviors shame screens. We move against our shame by becoming aggressive or trying to gain and maintain control over others; we move away from shame by withdrawing into ourselves and staying silent; we move toward our shame by doing what we can to gain approval. For competent, resourceful, can-do women, it’s something of a Goldilocks situation. Aggression and domination is too hard; putting up and shutting up is too soft; but engaging in approval-seeking behavior is just right.

  “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better,” or so went the mantra Girl Scout Troop 203 recited at the end of each meeting, guided by our exuberant troop leader. Early twentieth-century French pharmacist and self-styled psychotherapist Émile Coué founded the Coué Method of “unconscious autosuggestion” based on this very mantra. It was popular in Europe and also, apparently, Whittier, California: long after I’d quit Girl Scouts and became a cheerleader in high school, we closed every practice with this affirmation. Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.

  The pot of gold at the end of every self-improvement program is a sense of accomplishment (at the end of the day the most important pat on the back is the one you give yourself) and happiness, comprised of gaining approval and a sense of belonging, knowing that you’re one step closer to being a perfect, unimpeachable female according to the demands of the times. The always-improving female is doing the correct work of her gender. She is tending to her knitting and staying in her lane. She is cheerful, selfless, accommodating, and smoking hot, regardless of whether the sociological trend du jour has her attachment parenting at home or taking a pink sledgehammer to the glass ceiling in the office, or a combo of both. And she is doing it all effortlessly, or so she works to make it appear, because to seem too focused on ourselves is selfish, and thus unacceptable.

  It’s an elegant trap, fashioned by a consumeristic society that benefits from keeping women in shame and obsessed with self-improvement. We are taught to believe that if we can just improve ourselves, we can escape the terrible, shame-induced feelings of humiliation and alienation. It’s shame that drives us to seek self-improvement, but shame is also the result when we fail to attain the impossible goal that is supposed to free us from the shame that drove us to seek the improvement in the first place.

  Shame is so potent, in part because it operates on many levels, sometimes all at once. As children, the scolding we receive from our parents or caregivers is often internalized as shame. As we move into the world, peers and teachers join the chorus. We feel shame when we get our periods and, depending on the culture in which we’re raised, spend our lives ashamed of occupying a female body.

  The experience of shame generally involves another voice in our head, whether it’s one we’ve manufactured in the form of self-admonishment (we’ve let ourselves down again—by eating the chocolate cake on day five of the diet, by relapsing, by being too weak or lazy to stick to whatever plan we set on Monday) or literally one we’ve heard in the past or present telling us we’re not good enough (our mother, our teacher, our boss, our partner). It’s always a voice/an “other” that we permit to pass judgment on us, causing us to feel shame.

  This internal chatter accompanies us as we move through our days, encountering situations that cause us shame in the here and now. But here is where we have a chance to lighten our shame load a bit, and when it comes to reducing our sense of shame, every little bit helps.

  During Brown’s investigation, when she asked her subjects what sorts of experiences caused their sense of shame to spike, she noticed that many women began their sentences with “I don’t want people to see me as . . .” or “I don’t want to be seen as . . .”

  We lose weight for our health and to feel good, but also so people don’t think we’re fat. (More
than mere vanity, during the last decade weight discrimination against women in the workplace has increased by 66 percent.) We work out with the rigor of an Olympic gymnast for sleeveless dress season, so people won’t make jokes about bat wings behind our backs. We spend a fortune at the hair stylist every six weeks so that people will think we are younger. We volunteer for a pointless task at work so that people will think we’re a team player. We exhaust ourselves throwing the best birthday parties for our kids, aware of what other moms might be saying. We fret over whether our children are fitting in, and what we can do to help them avoid being harshly judged. On and on it goes. Perhaps it would be worth the tedium of living a life in which we felt like our own jailers if it achieved what we hoped, if it freed us from the shame of being judged. But it doesn’t, and it never will, and not for the reasons we might expect.

  If you’re engaged in a version of the above for the validation you seek from others, you can quit now. It turns out, no one is thinking about you. No one is seeing you in a way you don’t want to be seen, because everyone is thinking about themselves and how they want to be seen. If we’re all hardwired to seek acceptance and belonging, the person you’re worried about judging you is also worried about how you are judging them.

  A groundbreaking piece of research published in 2018 by neurologists Meghan L. Meyer and Matthew D. Lieberman suggests the reason we tend to always think about ourselves. By studying the activity of the medial prefrontal cortex, they determined that the part of our brain responsible for self-reflection kicks into gear whenever our attention is not captured by an external demand. If, for example, you’re driving down the street and you suddenly need to brake to avoid hitting a pedestrian, in the split second when you realize you need to put your foot on the brake, you are not thinking about yourself. But every moment leading up to that reaction, and every moment leading from it, your brain is occupied with a variety of thoughts about yourself.