when you've had enough – how did you get there?
wow, so it's possible to be actively satisfied? how?
Someone on Twitter the other day said: “Holy shit and balls being content/satisfied is a SKILL!??!!??!?!?!?!? I.E. NOT DEPENDENT ON """objective""" CONSUMPTION!?!!?!”
I saved the tweet because it seemed pretty true, but I hadn’t figured out how. I still don’t know if I have exactly, but I think I’m pulling on some strings, so I’m going to write them down sloppily here.
The other day, I was walking around a Seattle market and suddenly saw a treasure trove of Asian plushies and cute-themed paraphernalia in front of me. I admired it for aesthetic reasons — but felt overcome by an uncharacteristic wash of apathy.
“I… don’t want this?” I thought to myself, incredulously. This is unusual. I’d noticed my appetite for plushies had decreased recently, and I found myself hugging the ones I had and not dreaming of others I wanted to acquire. What’s up with that?
I still adore “kawaii” content on IG (I apologize to my story viewers who have to see me post about this once a day). But purely because I’m paying tribute to the kawaii agenda, not feeling overcome with a wash of lust. “I need that” is not a sentence that has crossed my mind in a while.
I don’t feel like a starving dog anymore with regard to certain things I think I ‘need.” It’s interesting to note how appetite comes and goes. That as I once was on a quest to collect as many plushies as possible, that there actually comes a point where you feel you have “enough.” And I don’t think it’s a magic number like “after 40, I’ll feel different.” I could’ve hit this point at any other time, but why did I randomly feel like this is enough?
To give another example — I used to want the validation of every guy I thought was remotely cute when I was younger. I made out with a different guy every week freshman year of college. In 2019, I had slept with a larger ratio of men in one year than any other previous or subsquent year. I became apathetic to sexual attention from 99% of men in the middle of this year as my priorities randomly shifted. I am still a romantic and yearner at heart, but the sheer volume of “acquire satisfaction from a large number of dudes” lessened seemingly overnight. It’s like a switch had flipped.
I also felt finally like I could accept people liked me, and that I am popular, when I spent years in denial of it.
And the biggest thing by far is — I stopped obsessing over how many Twitter followers I had, how many “likes” my tweets got, how many people were reading my writing, and dreaming about being famous.
It honestly feels like I woke up one day and didn’t care anymore. But I’m not satisfied (hah) with the notion that this was legitimately random. Behind the scenes, I was definitely cultivating a skill of some sort. The fruits of that labor came out into the conscious waking world much later, but my unconscious was definitely chewing on things.
Some people say gratitude lead to satisfaction. Which is true, but I don’t think it’s a 1-1 where you can just brute force experience gratitude. In my experience, gratitude never came to me when I “forced” it. It always arrived when it was “allowed.” I reached into myself for long enough to see that my natural state already doesn’t want to do those things I found myself unable to stop. But that natural state is buried under layers and layers of monologue that are virtually muffled into obscurity.
The most I can say is, I know that I’ve spent years philosophizing, meditating, and staring at the life I’m living. I’ve asked myself why I’m making the choices I am, while trying to not shame myself for certain ones. I’ve trusted that when the time comes, I’ll “grow out of” certain propensities, and I guess I have.
I’d say “satisfaction” as a skill comes down to “spacious allowing via inner curiosity” that precedes “an identity shift.”
I internally slowed down my life significantly in 2023 so I could learn to pay attention. Which is funny because from an outsider’s perspective, I was “speeding it up” with the volume of friends I was making, events I was hosting, places I was going. But internally, I was reflecting more, pausing more, wondering more about my impulses. I focused on being more conscious, more curious, about my every move. Soon, it translated to my every thought. I noticed the same kinds of repeated thoughts, and realized how scared and unsafe those parts of me were. In response, they’d act out in some way, letting that energy leak into what I did.
Instead of going to control them, I engaged in more active dialogue with myself. More spaciousness happened, more curiosity, more softness. I processed more with friends who modeled kind curiosity and understanding of my natural learned impulses, rather than judgments. Being around them also made me judge myself less.
I think my plushie collection addiction ending coincides with me accepting that it’s okay for me to have them, because it doesn’t change the fact that I am an adult.
I haven’t ever spoken about it expressly, but I turn to plushies for comfort because part of me feels unworthy of being seen as old enough, as my age. I’ve been called “child-like” so much throughout my life that it began to alter my psychology. I felt like I was “behind” everyone “normal” for years. I shamed myself so hard that I began collecting plushies as a reaction to that. If I’m to be a child forever whether I like it or not, I might as well look like it, I thought.
But ever since I turned 29, and I had gradually begun experiencing an urge to mother my community and host more events and saw the skills I have that few others do (and even need from me), I stopped identifying as a ‘little girl’ like I have my whole life. I’ve always felt I am “stunted”, forever a baby trapped in an adult’s aging body (it doesn’t help that I look very young for my age), and the plushies brought me comfort as well as shame that maybe I don’t deserve to be taken seriously. But as I’ve noticed people depend on me, look to my expertise to help them with very real debacles in their life, I’ve noticed I stopped doubling down on needing to appear young to cope with the fear that I’ll always be immature in everyone’s eyes. I’ve accepted that I am an adult, my version of being one.
This took a lot of discipline of slowing down, seeing, and letting myself accept that maybe I wouldn’t be able to accept it for a while. But seeing it was still important. Allowing myself to have this plushie addiction, accepting it for what it was, all made me loosen my grip on it.
I did the same with my love life and my writing life. I stopped leaning on whether a man committed to me to notice if I feel loved already and worthy of being given adoration and appreciation, and I also stopped leaning on whether I was praised for my writing to see if it was adding value for me simply having written it. But I let myself feel and grieve and not shame and judge myself for needing to lean on these things, for feeling like I “shouldn’t need” that validation.
I don’t believe satisfaction is a skill of restriction. It’s a symptom of refining the narrative. You need to realize you are “enough” already, of something, a thing you think you lack.
I suspect satisfaction is a skill of allowance. INTERNAL spaciousness. By allowing yourself to be dissatisfied, TRULY allowing yourself, you can actually get to the flip side of radical satisfaction.
When you’re unconscious and asleep at the wheel, you’ll find yourself doing the motions you’ve resented yourself for doing — smoking too much weed, buying too many bags, sleeping with too many people, unable to stop scrolling, all the while knowing what’s going on but feeling helpless to stop it. For there is always a part of you furious with yourself, beating yourself over the head, screaming at you to RESTRICT already, as if whipping a horse to get it to behave will beget good consequences.
Maybe you consciously tell yourself, “Why do I need more? Don’t I have enough?” There is judgment laced in your tone. “You shouldn’t need this.” You are restricting your yearning, your capacity to want, when it wants to expand.
I don’t think allowance is the same as permission — I don’t think allowing myself to desire to go on a shopping spree is the same as “permitting” myself to. This is about internal interrogation, holding the instinct to binge for long enough to see what’s behind it. Making small bargains with yourself all the time about not getting carried away, having compassion when you do, and believing slowly but surely you will get there someday even if it doesn’t always “look like” you will.
So far this isn’t my favorite post — it doesn’t have the rhythmic “bang” that many have when it comes to fleshing out my deep feelings. But I do want to leave this reflection here and a Twitter thread didn’t feel sufficient. I’ll probably give this more of a think later on and come out with something more polished later.
If you have any thoughts on satisfaction, would love to hear!