The Curated coat (similar)
Zara sweater (similar)
Sezane skirt
Gucci loafers
Chanel handbag
Celine sunglasses
Linjer ring (c/o) (similar)
Mejuri earrings (similar)
Location: Earlsfort Apartments – Dublin, Ireland
For someone who both openly loathes math (or at least claims to) and truly does not feel confident in their mathematical skills (despite the fact that they aren’t completely lacking), I’ve treated a surprising amount of my life like a problem, or equation, that I need to solve. Except in very specific settings, I’m an agonisingly slow decision maker. I overthink and overwork everything. And maybe, I’m starting to realise, that’s because I move through the world as if the events around me, happening to me, are a series of problems to which I must find a solution.
The thing is, I think I’ve always been this way. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want, and didn’t think I could, fix or solve everything if I could just figure out how. The language I learned in algebra lessons in junior high gave me a new way to express what I was already doing. And I’ve used it ever since. More than once this week at work, I caught myself saying, “We just need to solve for X.” It’s not that this doesn’t make sense. It does, and since almost everyone learned algebra in school, it’s a way of formulating ideas that is easily comprehensible to most people. But it’s more effective in a professional setting than it is when, for example, trying to work my way through holiday plans. Or confront past events so I can move forward from them.
Math is practical, but it isn’t applicable to every single situation. Every scenario we encounter is not a problem in need of resolution. And it’s not possible to solve, or fix, people. Trust me, I’ve learned that from experience. No amount of effort, no force of will, no matter how powerful, makes that realistic or doable. That doesn’t stop me, however, from indulging one of my worst habits, developed over a lifetime: trying to, anyway.
It surprises me, looking back, knowing how little confidence I have in my ability to do math, that it ever seemed to me that this strategy would work. Or that I kept employing it when I discovered, over and over again, that it didn’t. When I was a teenager, I thought it was a personal failing. I couldn’t solve problems, not because they weren’t solvable but because I wasn’t doing it right. I spent years writing journal entries that echo the same thoughts repeatedly – I just need to figure out how to fix this. The situations were different, but what I believed I needed to do wasn’t. And when I failed, as I inevitably did, it was my fault.
All of this to say that I’m finally starting to learn that life isn’t just a series of problems to which I need to find solutions. And that there will be some problems that, no matter my effort or intention, I will not be able to solve. Next, I need to learn to be okay with that, to let myself off the hook. That bit is still a work in progress, but I think I’m getting there. Sometimes, we all need a change of perspective. And sometimes, we need a change of strategy. That’s normal – it means we’re still learning, and being able to do that as adults is, in fact, a very powerful thing.
