Reinvention
Getting Out of a Rut
Mario Valento
1. Change your hair. Cut it, braid it, dye it—do anything that signifies a new beginning. There’s a reason we’re so inclined to shave our heads after breakups: I did so in the midst of a summertime bout with paralyzing self-consciousness. And the good thing is, if you regret it, it’ll grow back.
2. Talk to a stranger. At the Fresh Thyme deli, I watched a man scoop a fly into a soup cup. He saw me looking, and carefully lifted his hand to allow me to peek inside the cup; one fly seemed to be carrying another fly whose wing was injured. He released them outside and we marveled at this apparent show of empathy by a creature so tiny and with such a brief lifespan. That encounter, for the next couple of days, acted as something of a windfall for me. It’s good to know there are good strangers. Thankfully, there are a lot of strangers out there, more of which are born every day.
3. Blink hard. Some health guru of dubious qualifications, in an article I hardly read, wrote that you can relieve stress by taking both hands and slowly, firmly “wiping” them down your face, as if trying vainly to rub off a sticky resin. This doesn’t work for me at least, but I wonder if a long, deliberate blink can’t have a similar effect in an acute rut. Hold your eyes shut until those writhing neon amoebas go away, then open them and look freshly at familiar sights. Try it out. Has anything else been working?
4. Pick up a new skill. I’m a voracious collector of sourcebooks, manuals, and encyclopedias. My latest victim is “Clandestine Photography” by Raymond P. Siljander and Lance W. Juusola. I can hardly take clear, well-composed photos of a still subject, let alone a jittery human from a ways off as part of some skullduggery; I might be wasting my time on this one, but sifting through a book whose contents I hardly understand (and for no purpose other than self-satisfaction) has made me more inclined to chew on the obscure texts that actually matter, i.e., those my professors are begging me to read.
INTERMISSION ON MIDNIGHT MOTIVATION: Have you ever laid awake in bed with an unquenchable thirst to do something? I have. Other symptoms include boundless creativity, steadfast ambition, and tachycardia. Onset is sudden, but duration is brief: the illness is usually upon waking or at the moment, having said “fuck sleep” and deciding to get to work, one’s feet leave the covers and strike the cold, hard floor.
5. Set a deadline. I’d be a terrible anarchist/hippie. The most industrious stretches of my life are those filled with a busy succession of deadlines, whereas the majority of my ruts are times of directionless opportunity. Real freedom scares me. People like me need someone to tell them what to do. Any volunteers?
6. Consume. No, I do not mean doomscroll for three hours or spend $14 at the coffee shop you’ve convinced yourself you only visit on “special occasions,” (isn’t it special to wake up every morning?). I mean read an impenetrable novel, gobble up the entire discography of a musician whom you aren’t sure you truly like. I use “consume” here, instead of its more neutral cousins “read” or “listen,” to underline both the toilsomeness the object demands of the subject and the reciprocal consumption of the subject by that object: of those rare books, movies, albums that I’ve used to haul myself into the light, each has devoured me in the same sweaty, panting, biting way that I devoured it.
7. Try. The best option is the one you came up with yourself and the one you adhere to as dogma. Change whatever you haven’t changed in a while; talk to whomever you haven’t talked with recently; be whoever you find you haven’t been. Imagine yourself as an actor playing a role—not as the bundle of battered nerves that you may be.
8. Delude yourself. The most robust truths are merely adventitious lies repeated ad infinitum. Say you are not in a rut. Laugh at how silly that affirmation sounds passing over your lips. Then laugh, a thousand sayings later, at how wide the gaps between the bars of your cage truly were.