I’m not always aware of my own anxiety. To myself, I generally seem calm, cool, and collected. I am good at describing my emotions, which gives me the impression that I am embracing whatever is arising. But I, too, have anxious habits. These habits indicate to me when I might actually be feeling anxiety about something.
One common one is picking at my cuticles. I don’t bite my nails. I am simply getting rid of the extra, unnecessary skin around them. I don’t know why this feels like such an accomplishment. But it does. I am shedding unnecessary things. I am cleaning my body of dead cells. The problem is that I usually go too far. I take more than what’s unnecessary, and then I need to spend days waiting for my sore nails to heal.
The other day, I was ruminating on an unpaid bill from a Capacitor performance. What do you do when someone doesn’t pay, after you’ve already spent a bunch of money producing the performance? I don’t want to escalate the situation yet. Ugh… I hate this.
I found myself engaging in another dirty little habit.
I didn’t grow up with a lawn. I grew up the daughter of a visual artist in the middle of the woods. My mom didn’t believe in landscaping. Many small creatures lived in those rotting logs. She much preferred nature’s rough and ragged way of organizing itself over the simplifying approach of human landscape design.
I put myself through college by gardening at the neighboring houses and estates in Connecticut, so I had an appreciation for a well-managed visual scape.
Now I have a small lawn in Berkeley, where I rehearse and display my motion sculptures. The Bay Area is one of the hardest places to maintain a lawn. Lawns burn every summer if you want to conserve water, and they are always being overtaken by clover.
For the last ten years, it has been me against the clover. My friend finds this effort unnecessary. She plants clover in her lawn. It is my gallery though. I just don’t like the look. I am committed to getting my mow-free California native grass to be a thick, uninterrupted carpet.
I wasn’t sure what to do about the unpaid bill. I found myself picking at my lawn. It was obsessive. I was getting really good at it. I was making progress. I could stop thinking about anything that was making me anxious and focus on these runners. If I pulled just right, I could grab seven or ten clovers at once by extracting one tendril. My dirty little habit was productive!
I think you can understand why this process is so addictive. While I was doing it, though, I had to question myself — is there something I am neglecting here? Is there anything I should do in reality to get this bit of business off my plate and out of my mind?
What dirty little habits do you have? What do they reveal to you about the state of your consciousness?
*Cross-Pollination in the garden shot by Raja Antony. Performed by Anna Gichan, Caitlin Hicks, Fabiana Santiago, Emily Hansel, and Jodi Lomask.