Years ago, I developed allergies. I had all the classic
symptoms: occasional runny nose and itchy eyes, sneezing and congestion. My
ears often felt plugged up and once in a while, I’d come down with a sinus
infection. I became very preoccupied with eliminating this nuisance from my
life. I tried different allergy medications and decongestants. I used a Neti
pot (when I remembered). Nothing improved; if anything, it got worse. I was
constantly assessing my sinus situation, constantly trying to reach a state of
normal. Finally, I made an appointment with an allergist, to start having the
allergy shots that seemed to help lots of people. She ran a whole panel of
tests, made pinpricks on my back to see what type of allergies we were dealing
with. And she found out that I was allergic to…nothing. Not pollen or grass,
not pet dander or wool. Nothing.
Things continued. I waged my war, unconvinced and still
suffering. I saw an ear-nose-throat doctor. His conclusion: slightly deviated
septum and “sensitive sinuses.” In the same way that just about anybody will
sneeze in a dusty attic, my nose tended to flare up in response to certain
things. It was overactive, that was all. This doctor gave me a prescription for
a very expensive nasal spray, a steroid, and for a while, I tried it. Then
something shifted. I decided to quit trying to eradicate the thing and just
live with it. And all these years later, my ears still crack when I swallow and
I’m usually in some state of congestion. I do use the Neti pot (when I remember),
and I occasionally take something if I feel a bad session coming on, or if I’m
getting on an airplane. But I don’t think about it, hardly at all, and the
symptoms are a mere fraction of what they were when I was attacking and
treating them.
I wrote most of a short story last week, then immediately
hated it. It seemed that my jumping-off point was a bit gimmicky, and I couldn’t
remember the point of it, couldn’t figure out, really, what it was about. There
were some good bits, but so much of it was insipid and it didn’t have the eerie
tone I was hoping for. I beat myself up for it for a few days, then decided to
scrap the whole thing.
Today, I was listening to a podcast while running. It was
about the ways we love and one of the segments featured the author of Mating in Captivity. She was talking
about the enigma of modern marriage, the way we have expanded the requirements
for a partner from simply societal identity and species continuation to the
metaphysical and emotional. We expect our partners to be our best friends, to
fulfill all aspects of our desires, to be adventurous and stable, passionate
and loyal, basically—to be everything to us. And that’s a tall order. The
author talked about this in the context of the American “Can Do” ideology. We
tend to be a culture of problem solvers. And sometimes, she said, we need to
learn to live with paradoxes rather than trying to solve them.
And it occurred to me: this is what I was doing with that
story. In my immediate rush to fix it, to solve it, to make it everything at
once, I wasn’t being realistic. Maybe it was like my non-existent allergies: I
just needed to learn to live with it, accept its imperfections and all of the
ways it pains me. Like a partner, I can’t expect it to be all things. This is a
constant fear for writers, wondering if you’ll know when something should be
salvaged or scrapped, knowing that you’ll never completely cure the ills of any
project. But I think only when you stop and let the thing exist, warts and all,
can you start to look at it with any sort of calm. If you set aside that “Can
Do” mentality and have some patience, then maybe the flaws you’re seeing won’t
be as overwhelming as you think, maybe you can find your way to a path you can
live with. You’ll still want to fix some things of course, only not all at
once. Sometimes it’s good to shut down that problem-solving tendency,
to stop looking for cures or complete fixes. Sometimes it’s okay to let a
paradox be a paradox for a while.
