One Little Thing
Something truly miraculous happened to me the other day. With the help of a wise and dedicated assistant, I reduced the number of unread emails in my inbox from 114 (which is about where it usually hovers) to SWEET F**K-ALL!!!!! It had been literally decades since I’d had no unread emails. I celebrated wildly, dancing around naked (under my clothes) and, yes, imbibing the fruit of the vine.
The next morning I had fifty unread emails.
Everyone I’d finally responded to during my marathon internet cleanup had written back again instantaneously. (How, how, how do people do this? Is everyone except me on crystal meth?) So I toppled from the jaunty perch of All Caught Up into the Abyss of Overwhelm.
I’m still here.
Overwhelm is as familiar to me as my eyelids. For one thing, I have ADD, which means…
Sorry, what were we talking about? I had to go download images of cherry blossoms for a painting I’m going to do. Let me just re-read what I’ve written…oh, yeah. Having ADD means that ten seconds into starting any task, I become obsessed with another task, and then….
What? Oh, yes. As I was saying, my touch of the old ADD makes me particularly overwhelmable, but hey, we’re all staring straight into an information firehose; that’s just life in the 21st century. We all have this thing in our brains called an “attention bottleneck,” which makes us freeze when we have too many options. (This is why grazing animals travel in herds. When a predator sees too many targets, its attention bottleneck jams. It just stands there, hungry and immobilized, overwhelmed by excessive potential.)
Right now, as usual, my brain is simultaneously spinning, rocketing forward, and threatening to explode, like a hand grenade hurled by a major-league pitcher. My initial impulse is to work frantically, trying to DO ALL THE THINGS right now, right now, right freaking now! I followed this impulse for about forty years. I got a lot done. I got even more half-done, and you would not believe how many things I did not get done at all. Plus, I ended up with about a million autoimmune diseases, from all the franticking. Franticking, my friends, is no cure for overwhelm.
What is the cure — or at least the best way I’ve learned to approach it — is this: One little thing. Just do one little thing. The first one little thing is to get a piece of paper and write down ALL THE THINGS. Then eat ice cream or pie, for purposes of recovery. Then decide on the most pressing one of ALL THE THINGS, and do one little thing about it.
For example, say I’ve just gotten home from a trip, and I want to unpack my bag. This is more than enough to overwhelm me (I am truly a lightweight when it comes to organization). So I open the bag, and I put one thing where it belongs. Then I wander away to birdwatch, or nap, or whatever. Later I walk past the bag and put away one more thing. Sure, it takes a week to unpack, BUT IT HAPPENS. Without overwhelm.
When my fibromyalgia made it impossible for me to use my hands, I would tape pencils between my stiff, useless fingers, eraser end down. I’d use the erasers to tap out one little word at a time, plugging away at my PhD dissertation. It got finished. Three hundred-plus pages of it. And I was only overwhelmed when I thought about the whole thing. Never when I stuck to one little word, one little sentence at a time. With pie in between.
It’s so weird to me that the things I’ve done this way look big to others. Just planning what to do during a day takes me, like, ten different tiny steps (get a piece of paper and a pen. Write “To Do.” List a thing. Then another thing. Etc.). I just chug forward doing tiny things and eating pie, and then someone shows up and says, “I wish I could do that thing you did, but I’m so overwhelmed….” And I think, oh, sweetie, I know. I could never do that thing…that I…actually…did? Because looking behind me, I see that yes, some pretty big things got done. And then I’m overwhelmed all over again, but this time by gratitude. And that is a very big thing.
