I woke up with a slab of dark chocolate stuck to my back, and the brown smear of wasted cocoa on my sheets.
Necessary laundry and chocolate heartbreak aside, what this experience has taught me is that, when left to my own devices, I am a toddler. A baby with eyes bigger than his stomach and short attention span, yes. But also one who functions poorly without structure and motivations.
The motivations are all there, and actually so is the structure. But toddlers get away with ignoring those things! Tell them they shouldn’t eat chocolate right before bed while playing too late into the evening when they have to be up early, and then their little baby faces scrunch up and they’re like “respectfully, sir, I decline.”
I like things that feel good. I like comfort and ease and just flowing through the world. I like entering a childlike state where all is open, curious wonderment. But if you give a toddler chocolate and freedom, they will burn society down with an adorable fucking giggle. That genocidal baby lives in the warm soma-like fuzz where little to no effort is expended for all vital needs to be met, with few consequences if things stagnate or go wrong.
Self-imposed structure has never been easy for me. In fact, I delight in tearing down structures. With the gleeful abandon of a 2-year-old wielding a flamethrower and an ice cream, I love to incinerate the very idea of something holding me down.
But I think that small child might need a bit of supervision. He’s got cake remnants splattered across his face like war paint, eyes glazed in utter contentment, and right in front of him are the nuclear launch codes.
There’s nothing interesting about that life though. Nothing fulfilling. Nothing that propels and excites and casts me into quantum realms of freefall and sturdiness, cosmic joy and profound fear, ecstasy and entropy. Just a toddler. A sweet, sugar-high, psychotic maniac toddler smashing lego towers.
Putting that toddler to bed is a process of trial and error, and mistakes. I will likely cause something diagnosable from the DSM 5. But for all the sweet gods’ sakes, haven’t we been told since we actually were those toddlers that learning from mistakes is the cornerstone of growing into a better person?
Well, that involves first being capable of admitting to those mistakes. For some people, the first step is admitting that you even can make mistakes. Blind pride. Unjustified pride. That is also an infuriatingly cute quality present in most toddlers. Less cute on adults. Once I opened the door to my own likely fallacy in any given situation, I began training myself to reflexively probe, without judgment, my own moment-to-moment experience.
“A bit of basic metacognition,” the toddler says, now smoking a cigar and swilling a tumbler of chocolate milk, straight, while stroking a hairless cat.
Now, I can see, ah, yes, the toddler should not have those things. I, as his loving progenitor, in all honesty did not see the harm in this. He has been a toddler for many years at this point, and on deeper reflection that doesn’t seem biologically sound. And his vocabulary is pushing the limit of reasonable. I did make a mistake with him, but gosh darn it, I’m gonna raise him right!
Ahem.
I woke up with chocolate on my back, and it was a mistake. Not the sleeping on chocolate part, though that was a mistake, but the fact that I allowed myself to become the toddler and it got away from me. And what a successful mistake it was! It got me to write this.
The path to lasting change is strewn with chocolate and love and fear, and mistakes, and the primal desire for the safety and comfort of the womb. Among other things. But like good parents, we need to give our toddlers the tools and the habits that we ourselves value, even if we know we’re not perfect at them.
And sometimes, on a day off, you can give them a treat, and potentially, an apocalypse1.
(No babies or civilizations were harmed in the making of this newsletter.)