Thunder Thighs: Those Open Loops Can Swallow You Whole
How unresolved and unfinished business can drive you out of your goddamn mind
me juggling all the open loops
I first read about open loops in Jessica Abel’s Growing Gills: How to Find Creative Focus When You’re Drowning in Your Daily Life. The psychological concept—about those to-dos and in-progress items we carry around in our brains—resonated with me. After all, as a freelancer, I’m always juggling multiple projects, coordinating multiple deadlines for multiple clients, keeping track of multiple ideas for essays, articles, and Guerrilla Sex Ed. And I do this on top of my responsibilities as the parent of a 9-year-old with a very busy schedule. And as a person who also likes to make time for her own extracurriculars.
In a metaphor that seems especially apt, the founder of Habitgrowth writes that open loops are like open tabs in your browser. "If you have too many open tabs," he writes, "your browser starts to slow down and eventually crashes."
Yup. That tracks.
All those open loops tug at our attention, leaving us anxious and uneasy. They drain our energy. As they pile up, we become paralyzed, overwhelmed by everything there is to do.
I feel as if I spent this entire summer in a state of massive open loopage. Thanks to a home renovation, I’m still living in my basement, my daughter snoring in my face, her Squishmallows rolling onto my head in the middle of the night. We went through a span of time during which our Wifi was accidentally cut off, disrupting our ability to work. A dumpster has been squatting in my driveway for two months, forcing us to find alternate parking because we live in a town that does not allow overnight street parking. I have cooked with a coffee table in the middle of my kitchen. I have battled swarms of flies. I have grappled with my inability to find a goddamn thing I need. It’s an excruciating state of limbo, and I don’t yet know when it’s going to end.
At the same time, I had a big presentation hanging over my head for three months. I don’t do presentations often, as they are a huge source of anxiety for me. I may look and sound confident while they’re happening (I hope) but, inside, I’m screaming, assuming that everyone present is judging me and finding me wanting / boring / incompetent. This particular presentation inspired full-on panic attacks, as it wasn’t for my typical audience. My biggest worry was that attendees would view me as underqualified, and that their main reaction to my lecture would be: “DUH.”
(Yes. I know. It is so much fun in this brain of mine.)
I carried this anxiety around with me as I continued to do work for my regular clients and slow motion put together my presentation and berate myself for not writing creatively in my free time.
ALL THE OPEN LOOPS! ALL THE THINGS I SHOULD BE DOING!
Long story short (too late?), I survived. And while I couldn’t close the loop of my home renovation (sigh), I managed to close the big-ass loop of my presentation by breaking the project up into smaller parts and doing them one by one by one. One week, I drew up an outline for how my presentation would play out. One week, I drew up surveys for both educators and caregivers so I could bolster my presentation with outside information and wisdom. One week, I conducted follow-up interviews with some of the survey respondents. One week, I conducted additional research and wrote up my script. One week, I put together my PowerPoint slides. One week, I practiced and timed and futzed and made all the last-minute adjustments required. Bit by bit by bit, slow and steady, I tightened that loop until it was down to almost nothing. And then, it was behind me. (Cue the choirs of angels.)
Do you have any open loops hanging over your head, action items that keep you from being in the moment or getting some much-needed rest? I can’t imagine that I will ever be entirely bereft of loops, but I do have some tactics I use when I start to collect so many open loops that I begin to buckle beneath the weight, eye twitchy, head headachy, stomach perpetually in turmoil. In addition to breaking larger tasks up into smaller tasks, I organize my to-do lists in priority order, I take care of small tasks immediately (so they don’t add to the overload), and I schedule out my week so I have only 1-2 larger goals per day. I also make time for those just-for-fun activities like yoga, water aerobics, and needlework, stuff that gives my brain a break. These are permanent and nonnegotiable items on my schedule.
This won’t work for everyone, but it works for me.
How do you keep those open loops to a minimum?
On the Internets
I loved this guide from Virginia Sole-Smith on how we talk to our kids about fatness and anti-fat bias.
She also did a feature for InStyle Australia on the paradox of body positivity in an anti-fat culture.
Here’s an interesting read on those running a hotline for folks navigating at-home abortions.
I adore Jessica DeFino’s coverage of the anti-aging industry. This interview she did about whether anti-aging products can ever be ethical was a fascinating read.
Nedra Glover Tawwab’s Set Boundaries, Find Peace remains one of my favorite books. I subscribe to her email newsletter and really dug this recent one on what to remember about boundaries.
This is probably due to the fact that I’ve fallen in love with water aerobics, but I really enjoyed this essay by Diane Mehta on learning to swim later in life.
Now this is interesting… from science journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer, why food sensitivity tests are dangerous for kids.
Finally, I never tire of reading more about long COVID and other chronic, difficult-to-diagnose, easily dismissed illnesses.
Everything I Accomplished Despite Life
I survived two presentations! One for the Sex Ed Lecture Series on cultivating sex-positive parents and one for the Hippocampus community on surviving that angsty first year after your book’s publication.
I had a couple pieces go live on the Pure Romance site: one on how your yoga practice might have a positive impact on your sex life, and one on how sex only gets better with age.
Over at Book Riot, I shared an appreciation for coming-of-age books that take place in adulthood. (I actually had a few posts come out this month, but this one was my fave.)
And I found an excuse to write about water aerobics for the Feminist Book Club blog in this post about my evolving relationship with exercise and joyful movement.
And this last bullet point isn’t an accomplishment, but it is an observation that I’m feeling antsy and am thinking of adding new clients to my roster. I haven’t done so in a while because I’ve been feeling comfortable with my work/life balance but, I don’t know… I like to add new things to the mix every so often. So if you have any writing or editing opportunities you think might be a good fit for me, let me know!
Necessary for My Sanity This Past Month
My home office is slowly morphing into a craft room, thanks especially to this sewing machine I got for my birthday and this hand-me-down table that unfolds when I need more surface area to work with. I even took a beginner sewing machine class earlier this week!
I also finally finished a big piece of my cosplay for NYCC.
David Lebovitz’s The Perfect Scoop continues to delight. This month, I made green tea ice cream and candied maple bacon and bourbon ice cream, both of which were divine.
Pedro Martín’s graphic memoir, Mexikid, came out, and reading it was like enjoying a warm hug.
Hot Takes
My Mood at This Very Moment
I first heard the term open loops from David Allen, who developed the Getting Things Done methodology. His take is “your brain is for having ideas, not holding them,” because if you don’t offload those ideas/open loops/unfinished actions into a trusted system, your brain thinks it should be working on all of them *now.* I’ve been using some variant of the GTD system since 2011 and it helps me a lot.
Now I have a term for these things causing so much anxiety in my life 🤣. I think I do the same thing with the open loops and try to break them into manageable chunks. Thank you for sharing!