Mental health and meta-cognition/how-to-think-about-thinking is health too!
The internetz is weird, and sometimes you find your ways to places you never thought you would. So here I was, googling for something specific and ended up reading Kate Hanley's blog post from 2013.
I never heard of Kate and have no interest in her life, but I read her 12-year-old blog musings nonetheless.
In this piece, she reflects on her anger at having to do the dishes. She made the dinner, and so her husband should do the dishes. But he usually doesn't, and the dishes in the sink annoy her more than it annoy him, so she ends up doing them.
So I started accepting that sometimes I did the dishes. I wasn’t enthused about it, at all, and while I was doing the dishes with this mindset, I’d spend a lot of my mental energy thinking things like “Scott is working like crazy at the moment to support us,” or, “He doesn’t value cleanliness in the same way I do, but since it’s more important to me, so I’ll just do it.” It was an improvement, but I was still spending a lot of energy on rationalizing why it was OK that I was doing the dishes.
Over time, she realized that she got some mental down-time as well, and not directing anger at her husband or unleashing fights was better for everyone, herself included; and the cost for peace and a moment of solitude was doing the dishes.
It reminded me of a thing I wrote yeeeears ago, in another life and another house, with very different things on my mind than today: "Why Am I Always Taking Out the Trash?." I wrote it as an October writing challenge (to post something on Medium—back when Medium was still cool—every single day for a month... think I lasted like 20 days or something before it was game over... my pre-Stacker days, with no commitment, zapping/rewards/feedback/positive comments, and no community to be beholden to.). Here's the relevant bit:
in my house it feels like I’m the only one taking out the garbage, getting more coffee when it runs out, or emptying the dishwasher when it has finished its cleaning cycle. Rationally, I know perfectly well that others do it too: with my own (deceitful?) eyes, I have seen my housemates empty the dishwasher. But every time I stand there, unloading one piece of ungrateful china, mug, glass, or cutlery after another, I mutter aggressively to myself and wondering why I’m the only one doing this! How can it really be that I’m doing this frustratingly slow chore every time? Of course, it’s not every time — but I don’t see those other times, and I don’t feel the pain, anger, and frustration that others likely feel whenever it’s their unfortunate turn to empty the stupid dishwasher.
We can really get in our own ways by getting worked up by absolutely inconsequential things like this.
I know that feeling of pure anger; and I also know that, in perspective, it's so ridiculous. It had to be done; you did it; and not it was fixed. Would the world have been better if my housemates at the time (or Kate's husband) did some of the chores too? Yeah, probably. But you can't get there.
All you can do is your own part; all you can control and influence is your own thoughts and behavior.
Peace out.
(Guess I should/could have posted this in Fireside phil, but I'm definitely slacking in my H&F posts recently.)