You are Not the Stack
Chase your life, not the stack of crap you need to manage in order to stay living.
In case you haven’t noticed, things around here have gotten a bit difficult to manage. We are living in the midst of deep economic hardship, that is materially different from past downturns in that our economic woes are being willfully inflicted on us by an Administration that doesn’t care if we survive or not. We are in a time where our communities are deeply divided, and people feel isolated. Staying healthy is harder than its ever been, because it is more expensive than it has ever been. And whether it’s your Netflix queue or your Instagram feed, nothing you’re watching or reading or listening to seems to be making anything any better. If anything, it’s stressing you out more.
Our kids (if we have them) are staring down the barrel of a future filled with war, poor job prospects, accelerating climate catastrophes and creeping fascism and technofeudalism.
The stack of crap that your average adult needs to contend with on a day to day basis is large, and feels like it is growing larger. If you’re wondering why you’re feeling overwhelmed, look no further.
I’m not saying anything new here. And that’s part of the problem. It’s the same crap over and over again. And the solutions? You’ve heard them all before. Some of them are great -- get outside, touch some grass, exercise, hang out with a friend and put away the phones. Some of them are ridiculous. There is no gummy or green drink in existence that is going to fix your life. Crypto is a worse bet than a roulette wheel in Atlantic City. And Chat GPT doesn’t know what it’s talking about more than half the time, but it’s happy to feed you bullshit while it steals from human creators, sucks up all the usable investment capital and pillages our clean air and our clean water.
The challenge of adulthood has always been the same. Being a whole grown person is figuring out how to manage that stack of crap that’s necessary to your continued survival and occupying your time, and still find love and joy and space for you to be you.
Lately, however, this has gotten harder, because the stack of crap has grown larger, the crap is way more foul than it used to be, and managing it feels so much harder than it should. And the imperative to manage the stack of crap feels so insurmountable and so all-encompassing that we’ve forgotten an important truth:
The stack of crap isn’t you, and your success as a human being is not reliant on beating the stack of crap.
Now, that sounds like a direct contradiction of what I said before -- that being an adult means managing the stack of crap. But it’s not. Managing the stack of crap and beating it are two different things.
Management of a thing implies its continued existence. A thing that is being managed is being regularly addressed, and is being corralled into a state where it is controlled, where you know what it will do, where it will go, and most importantly, what it will require to stay in that controlled state.
Beating a thing, on the other hand, suggests that it is a thing that may be vanquished, and in so doing you can be in the position of never having to address that thing again. When you “beat” an infection for instance, it’s gone. You did what was needed and the infection is gone .
Diabetes, on the other hand, is never “beaten.” It is a chronic condition that requires routine actions to manage it, to keep blood sugar controlled within acceptable levels. Those actions can be small, like a once a week injection, or might involve a full on insulin pump that you wear 24-7. Diabetes can be managed to the point where it does not pose an active threat to your future. But it’s never gone, and that management activity will be necessary forever.
That stack of crap that is your adult obligations in this world. You will never beat them. You will only ever manage them.
And that is why you need to understand this, so I will say it again:
The stack of crap isn’t you, and your success as a human being is not reliant on beating the stack of crap.
If you are waiting for the day when you wake up and the stack of crap is gone, never to return, when you have successfully done all the things you need to do, and done them so well you will never have to do them ever again, you will be waiting forever. You will never “beat” the day to day obligations of your adult life. At best you will manage them. And that is all you ever need do.
So is my success as a human being therefore reliant on managing the stack of crap?
A little. But mostly no.
The stack of crap is the noise you have to get through in order to live your one and only life. If you don’t manage the stack of crap, it will grow, and ultimately overwhelm your life until there is nothing else but the crap. Endless upon endless demands from the stack of crap. So, the stack of crap is not irrelevant and you can’t ignore it.
But being able to manage the stack of crap isn’t really what makes you you. It’s what happens beyond the stack of crap -- the relationships you cultivate, the things you make and do that are for you and for the people you love. That’s your real life as a human. And how you do those things is what’s going to make or break your life as a human being on planet Earth.
I’m putting this all out here because I think a lot of times we forget that. We forget that we are not the stack of crap, so we judge ourselves based on the size and nature of the stack of crap. We think that somehow, if our stack of crap is higher and more stinky than someone else’s that means we are not as successful, not as good as the person who seems to have a smaller stack of crap than ours.
How big your stack of crap is honestly only has partly to do with what you do. The accident of your birth will have a lot to do with the size of your stack. Chronic illness or disability, race, economic circumstances will all impact the size of your stack and how easy it is to manage. Your family circumstances will also have a role to play. Have an autistic kid? That will affect the size of your stack as it compares to someone without kids. Are you caring for a parent with dementia? That will also impact your stack size.
You are not your stack of crap. And the size of your stack isn’t entirely in your control.
But the even bigger fallacy we live under is the belief that we must postpone living our one and only life until we make the stack of crap go away. We think that only when it is fully gone or at the very least very small and manageable are we permitted to do and be the things that we really love. That’s unmitigated bullshit.
The stack of crap is never going to be gone. You will never fully defeat it. It’s going to be a part of your existence for as long as you live. The goal is to grab as much life for yourself as you can in spite of that stack of crap.
So don’t wait to live your life. It’s okay to sometimes ignore the stack of crap if you can in order to grab time with the people you love, or grab time to do the things you really love to do. If you can fix it so that doing what you love helps you manage the stack of crap (by providing income or other resources), then do it.
Organize your time and your resources so that insofar as it is possible, you are prioritizing your life ahead of your stack. It’s okay to leave the laundry unfolded for an afternoon if it means you get to enjoy a sunny day in the park with your kids. It’s okay to occasionally splurge on supplies for your favorite hobby.
The trick is balancing that against the fact that if you ignore the stack entirely, you’ll quickly be at its mercy. Your life is waiting for you beyond the stack, but you can never forget the stack or leave it behind. That is the conundrum of life on Earth.
And this is where magic comes in. As a witch you have an arsenal of tools at your disposal to help you tip the balance in your favor in the endless struggle against the stack of crap in your life. And it has the added benefit of being one of those things that expresses who you really are beyond the stack. The time spent at your altar, meditating and preparing to meet the day not only sets you up to better engage with the stack of crap that day, but it’s also part of your witch life, which is part of that life beyond the stack. Likewise with participation in that holiday Sabbat ritual. Those few hours can supply some great energy and insight to help power the next few months as you grapple with the latest developments at your job.
Sometimes, magic can help you reduce the size of your stack. It can be that extra push that helps you land that better job with the bigger salary, or it can remove that obstacle in your way, the one that’s been preventing you from having time to volunteer at the pet shelter. That tarot reading you did last week can give you the confidence you need to pursue the audition for the community theater production that you have been thinking about.
Too often, we put the cart before the horse. We think that we don’t have time to pursue a magical practice because our “mundane” life -- that stack of crap -- is too busy or complicated. I would urge you to remember that your magical life isn’t less real or less important simply because it is not part of that “stack” we live with and manage on a day to day basis. In fact, what lies beyond that stack is what makes life really worth living, and the more we orient ourselves to experiencing and engaging that part of our lives, (which includes our magic) the better. There will be days when we can devote hours, maybe even a whole day to the things beyond the stack. And there will be days when we can only steal a few moments.
But however much we can get, we need to chase it with vigor and without apology. And when we get those moments, we need to inhabit them fully and not feel guilty for them. What we need to do is not get lost in the mechanics of life so much that we actually stop living. Now more than ever, magic can help us to do that.
Blessed be, y’all.
This is one of my favorites of yours, and for me, so timely. Thank you!