Better Than Yeast: How My Epic Fantasy Life Tried To Rescue 2020

Last night, I was watching the Great British Baking Show with my kids. The challenge on this particular episode was to bake ciabatta bread, and the instructions said to let the dough rise at room temperature and to be patient.  Yet, many of the contestants, under the pressure of a deadline, put the dough in the proofing oven, a warm, dark place where many rising breads are happy.  Not so much the ciabatta, though.  This bread, our baking pros explained, gets overactivated by the heat, rises too fast, and then collapses under its own weight when it bakes.

Why, you and I are both asking, would this possibly have struck me so loudly?

I may be the first person ever to lose sleep over the Great British Baking Show.  But I’m here to tell you that at 3 a.m., I was reviewing the year: how many times did my strong pull toward the familiar warmth, the metaphoric proofing oven, end up in a quick rise and a collapse? Where have I overactivated and gotten ahead of myself in the Doldrums of 2020?

Well, there are many examples. I over-wanted new people: business and friends and community. I got overactivated by Netflix and binge watching, and read less than ever before. Every time something new or promising entertainment or distraction peeked through the window of the four walls I’ve spent most of the last 8,760 hours within, I sat up. Hard.  I wanted to feel “normal” – with my normal being defined as those days when there was a predictable procession of stimulation that would ease the very hard task of sitting still with myself.

I wanted normal for my holidays SO BADLY that I stepped over some common sense and thought it was a good plan to get traditional – even though the reality of my family landscape couldn’t handle it.

But my most egregious example: I met someone who was cute and funny and, for a hot minute, paid me a whole bunch of attention. Was there mutual romantic interest? Here’s the point: it didn’t matter. In the soup that was my life: someone going through a divorce and managing all the grief and fear in that, trying to build a new business, living alone for the first time in my life, an extrovert in my panicky isolation of Covid – I went someplace out of reality. I let the attention plunk me into a champagne bubble bath in the sky – I ran with it.  I gave full rein to my imagination and fantasy and let it pull me out of my grief-punctuated life.  I was in a romantic movie, a bodice-ripper of a novel, a sexy and sweaty brain movie. My body responded with all the lovely chemicals it had, all the serotonin and dopamine that felt SO WELCOME and SO ADDICTIVELY seductive.  I wanted to live in that oven forever.

But like those flat and too-hard loaves on the show, I collapsed under the weight of my overactivation. And the learning has been sharp and relentless, about trauma and patterns and nervous systems. And about the places fantasy is lovely – and where it pulls us into darker neighborhoods.

So, in these dwindling days of this epically weird and challenging year, I find myself, like many, aching for it to end – aching for what gets to be different in the new year. And while I am hopeful that 2021 will feel different ultimately, that we will emerge into new spaces, literally, politically and figuratively, I think this ship is gonna be slow to turn. I don’t expect anything instant on Jan. 1.

Given that, what’s my work around patience? How can I challenge myself to patiently rise at room temperature as we open the new book for 2021?

What are ciabatta’s lessons for you?

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