Throughout the years I’ve run my life through numerous filters. I think we all have. And most of mine have ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous.
After a nasty break-up, my filter informed me that ‘all men cheat‘. If things went south for me in business, the filter which I ran my life through convinced me that I ‘couldn’t catch a break’. For a short period of time it even told me that leaving the house without lipstick was ‘bad luck’.
It has become my practice, as of late, to run everything I do through the most recent filter—the shit to value ratio—which is exactly like The Law of Diminishing Returns, except it has to do with shit, and how much we take to get what we want.
It’s not very scientific, and in fact, it flies in the face of most societal norms. But it makes life so much easier, which makes me happy, and at this stage of the game I’ll choose happiness over almost anything else.
If you’ve never heard of it, it goes something like this: How much shit must I endure to get value?
Here are a few examples from my life. I think you’ll see what I mean.
For instance, how long is the drive (i.e. how many hours of my life will I lose sitting in traffic) for that thing I absolutely need to do? (The answer for me is: if it goes beyond 30-40 minutes—I rethink it. But there are some exceptions, I’m not an asshole.)
How much mindless chit-chat is required to get to the authentic, substantive, issues that I’d rather discuss? (My endurance time is getting shorter and shorter. Soon, I’m afraid I’ll stick a fork in my eye at dinner parties after only ten minutes.)
How many horrible, unreadable first drafts come before I can cobble together one good sentence? (The answer is nine.)
How long do you stay in a loveless relationship just for the security, or because you’re too lazy to leave? (The answer for me was seven. And that was four years too many.)
How many hours and dollars will you spend to battle the effects of aging? (I stopped dying my hair blonde which turned out to be the best money I haven’t spent in years!)
How many years will you suffer the whims of a terrible boss? (Twenty. And he wasn’t all bad. Said the woman who stayed too long.)
And how much pain will you endure? THAT is a biggie for me and the answers these days is… NONE.
I won’t suck it up and suffer for anyone anymore.
I won’t continue to hike with oozing blisters.
I won’t get the lip injections on a whim because I met you at the dermo before lunch.
I won’t get micro needling, dermabrasion, or that Hannibal Lector looking peel to promote collagen. Fuck collagen. It’s highly overrated. (But just in case I’ll drink some collagen protein.)
I won’t starve myself to be a size six.
I won’t let the highly recommended, sadistic woman with the indiscernible accent, burn skin tags off my body with a glorified cigarette lighter. (I got up and left when she wanted to look for them around my ass.)
I won’t try to keep my uterus inside my body. I won’t lalalala my way around that fact that it’s let it’s true feelings be known to me FOR OVER A DECADE. It protested in the only way it knew how—pain and bleeding. After I ignored that, it enlisted my bladder as an unwitting accomplice. Apparently, my uterus was going to ride it like a manatee low enough into my body that if I had a good laugh, or a sneezing fit, they could just slide out of me. No big deal.
Last year, I finally ran my loudly protesting lady-bits through this new filter—and had the damn surgery!
I recently read that Lena Dunham relinquished her uterus and while I know she is so much younger than me, it’s the perfect example of shit to value—and it had to go.
Too much shit for not enough value.
I’ve also recently begun running “the revisiting of old emotional wounds” through this filter. Listen, It was all the rage to do this back in the day. I did it. We all did it. We dove head-first into our pain, writhing around in it like pigs in shit.
But now I see my younger friends wanting to go down that road and I’m not sure I think it’s a good idea to go back in time and dig up all the buried bodies. Why?
YOU’RE DIGGING UP SO MUCH SHIT.
SO MUCH! The wounds are old—and they’re DEEP!
And looking back, if one dollar is the highest return on that emotional investment, I may have gotten, in the end, maybe, forty cents on the dollar of value.
All I’m saying is that perhaps there is another way? A better way? A less painful way?
I suggest that first you run your life though this shit to value filter. I wish someone would have suggested it to me when I was thirty.
Or forty.
Or fifty.
Carry on,
xox
