I Don't Know

A complete and accurate sentence

Here’s the kind of week I’ve been having: I felt so resistant and empty-headed contemplating writing to you all this week that I paid my monthly credit card bills, emptied and filled the dishwasher, and cleaned all four cat litter trays before I could get myself to sit down in my chair. Generally, I would do almost anything to avoid those tasks.

Once I was finally there, my laptop staring back at me, I still had nothing. So, I began reading through some of my old newsletters from this time last year in a desperate attempt to find something to write about.

I came across a piece I did on the Dunning-Kruger effect which contained this line:

“I don’t know”, in fact, is a complete and reasonable answer as often as not to any number of questions.

I was writing about the necessity of intellectual humility, but that sentence also summed up why I felt so stymied trying to write this week. I come here to say something useful, something that helps you feel like you can make some sense of your life but instead the tape that’s been running in my head keeps insisting, I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING and I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO TELL THESE PEOPLE.

These two have brought me the deep clarity about who I am and simultaneously utter confusion about what the hell I’m doing for two decades now.

Part of me wanted to just defiantly entitle the newsletter “I Don’t Know” and not include any other text. It’s a complete and accurate statement, right? It certainly would have been emotionally satisfying for a moment, but it also would have been outside of my integrity. Dammit.

So, instead, let me just write into what’s happening over here. First, my son had surgery on Tuesday for a congenital bone fusion called a tarsal coalition. I wasn’t particularly anxious about the procedure despite my irrational fear of general anesthesia, but there are always other things on my list of fears. So, I awoke after only four hours, my mind spinning fruitlessly. And that made a day at the hospital which would have been interminable anyway— with its delays, endless waiting, and coordination with my ex-husband (just for that extra cherry of unpleasantness on top)— extra painful.

The surgery went well, luckily, according to his doctor. In two weeks he’ll get his stitches out and begin the long process of regaining range of motion. I don’t know exactly how long it will take, how his historically low frustration threshold will come into play, how much mobility he’ll regain, or if once he heals up he’ll need to do have the whole thing done again on the left side. I just don’t know.

Meanwhile, my youngest is less than a month into their junior year in high school and already overwhelmed and bitter about the state of things in their barely post-pandemic educational reality. Pressure crowds out all other feelings, and my attempts to help feel floundering. I don’t know if they’ll be able to do what they want to after graduation, if they’ll need to recalibrate their expectations, and what role, if any, I should play in helping them make decisions. I don’t know if we’ll get through the next two years with their mental health and self-confidence intact, or how well I’ll be able to manage my own susceptibility to their emotional storms. I just don’t know.

What else don’t I know? So very many things. I don’t know what the fate of my relationship with my partner will be, how much longer my mom will be with us, or if perimenopause will signal the death knell of my ability to sleep through the night. Will my kids find satisfying paths in life? Will my plants survive the winter? Will I ever find the balance between solitude and connection, or will I exist in perpetual yearning for where I am not? Will I find the time to write the things I want to write, and will I have the skill to match my ambitions? Am I screwing up constantly and no one is telling me? Am I my own worst enemy?

Probably. But I just don’t know.

The good news, I guess, is that admitting everything I don’t know is a safer bet than telling myself I have any answers at all. That I can predict outcomes and attach myself to them. As I wrote in that same post from last year:

Interestingly, according to multiple follow-up studies, those who are most competent tend to underestimate their performance because 1) they know how much they don’t know, and 2) their competence has become so innate that they begin to believe it must be more commonplace than it is, and thus less impressive. Their underestimations are less divergent from their actual performance, however. It’s those folks who really don’t even know enough of what they’re doing to know what they don’t know who tend to grossly overestimate their likelihood of success.

So, could the fact that I’m flooded this week with everything I don’t know be a sign I’m actually doing great…? It doesn’t feel that way.

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Following a phone conversation with my youngest Wednesday night, I lay in bed for hours, my mind spinning with worry, falling in and out of dreams where I couldn’t find my baby and didn’t know who was taking care of them. Attempting to interrupt the endless looping of What do I do? What do I do?, I kept repeating to myself, Be kind. Be loving. Be kind. Be loving. Be kind. Be loving.

The list of things I don’t, can’t, and will never know is long, but I know this at least. That in the face of everything, my best choice is always Be kind. Be loving.

Daytime reminders have also appeared this week, calling me out of the spin and back down into my body. Including this quote:

Be kind. Be loving. Be kind. Be loving.

Also this poem, by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer:

Be kind. Be loving. How easily, sometimes, we are saved.

XO, Asha

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Another bright spot this week was the Oldster questionnaire with poet and professor Robert Blumenthal. As I commented on the post, I don’t know that I would have cared for Blumenthal in his youth— all that vanity and rakish determination to fuck and conquer. But now he’s 74 and writing poetry that makes me love him for concurrently maintaining such irony and wonder. Click through and read his poem It’s Fantastic. And subscribe to Oldster while you’re at it if you haven’t yet. You won’t regret it.

This is 74: Poet Michael Blumenthal Responds to The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire