Sputterpub's Blog

She prides herself on a good memory. El thinks she was naturally endowed, but that’s no cause for pride. She can’t understand people who brag about 20/20 vision, or cavity-resistant teeth, or double-jointedness, or a high IQ. As far as she’s concerned, those traits are just cards dealt to an individual’s hand – you can’t brag about fanning your cards to find a full house, and you sure can’t take credit for natural qualities and aptitudes.

No, she’d say. It’s not the cards; it’s how you play them. And the fact is, she’s always done things to enhance her remembering. Like replaying the day’s vignettes before she falls asleep. That’s as effective as reviewing vocabulary cards just before lights-out – you harness your subconscious to file facts where you can retrieve them. Or keeping a journal (called a “diary” when she started the practice in sixth grade, in a vinyl-covered date-labeled book that had a closing strap with a keyed lock). The act of writing her day helped her remember, and then there was the occasional reading of entries to reinforce the recollecting.

She was Penny then. Her parents named her Penelope, which she liked for its musical lilt even after she discovered it was spelled as if it had three syllables. Her parents and brothers called her Penny, and she was on her way to “Pen” in high school when she discovered Greek mythology.

“Discovered” is an understatement. Penny fell deeply in love with the Olympic pantheon, their predecessors and their plots, which love led her of course to Homer and the story of Odysseus’s home life.

So Penny met the original Penelope, and was briefly enchanted. Until she considered how unlike her own character was, to that of the warrior’s patient wife. Penny was no good at waiting. She was a fan of immediate gratification. She aspired to promiscuity and sexual power.

She changed her nickname to “El.” It only took her about a month to alter her friends’ habits. She told her new high school teachers she preferred to be called “El,” she endured three questions and about a week of stuttering jokes, and then most of her peers forgot she was ever Penny. Her family took longer, with her mother resistant and her younger brothers drawling “Pen-EL-o-pee” at her for a few months, but she acted surprisingly patient about her name, at home, and she prevailed.

She’s been El for half a century now. For 43 of those 50 years she has been employed in the same financial services consulting field: first as a clerk-typist, then as a part-time specialist while her kids were young, and mostly as a self-employed owner of a small business.

She never has acquired patience. El learned how much she couldn’t control while she raised her children, of course. She did a lot of pacing, and twitching, and haranguing, but she never managed to talk herself down. She had trouble being in the moment, because if she was awake she was either considering tasks that needed doing or ticking off the items already accomplished to determine if she merited snacks and pot and solitaire.

She doesn’t like surprises. She isn’t into spontaneity. She’ll tell you that’s because she enjoys anticipation as much or more than the actual event, but that’s not true. She makes plans like lists, overconsidered and particular, and she loves the perfectly minutely scripted plans immediately; they ARE the event.

Recently El has begun the process of retiring from her consulting career. She assumed it would be a difficult transition. She feared that she’s a workaholic and that ceasing to leave the house to go to the office to accomplish tasks she’s good at, would turn her inward toward agoraphobia.

Two and a half months ago, she stopped working every day. She cut her office time by 80%. She started forwarding emails and phone messages to her two young colleagues.

As usual, she kept a journal. For accuracy’s sake, that’s a good thing. For recently El started thinking that the shift to retirement was smooth and painless. She was walking home from the market, noting a bit of bounce in her stride, and thought to herself that not-working was much easier than she’d feared. When she got home, she woke up her computer and noted that she’d left the file open after posting a morning journal entry. Before closing it, she paged up, and caught the entry from a month ago, and sank into attentive reading.

She was astounded. She read about herself, one month ago, and it was almost like hearing from a stranger. She took in reports about chronic anxiety, about an edgy inability to relax that didn’t seem to come from her changing circumstances, or worry about her son, or dismay about her own bad habits. None of the above; all of the above. She saw that she’d been considering therapy and/or meditation. Her own words on the computer screen made her remember that, four weeks ago, she was anything but graceful in her transition.

Wow, she thought then. She has read that it takes six weeks to form new pathways in the brain. Which is a comprehensive way of describing the incorporation of a new habit. Reading her own journal entries, El realized that, on the eve of six weeks after making the big change, she was restless and anxious and felt unwell. Kind of like right before giving birth. And then she got better. Relief alone provided ecstasy. And adjustment carried the well-feeling forward so strongly that she had been about to forget the pain of transition, and misreport her own recent experience.

El had been correct about her own impatience. She’s calmer than her mother but she doesn’t endure suffering without complaint. She well knows how antsy and unsettled she is when forced to wait for anything.

But it looks like she was dead wrong about being a workaholic. Or “task-oriented,” as she euphemistically described her need to make lists and her drive to get the necessary done before she allows herself to relax into lovely time-wasting activities. As she’s learning now, it’s easy for her to stop all the working. She never was addicted to it, or to the feeling of accomplishment she enjoyed after doing it. It turns out that El is naturally as indolent as she always wished she were. Apparently, she just has a high responsibility index.