The Only Thing Consistent in My Life is My Inconsistency

my series of rocks in water paintings

My friend calls it the cycle of virtue and the cycle of despair. As in, sometimes she’ll be doing all the “good” things (translated: things that are good for you, like exercise, eating well) and other times, the scales of her life will be weighted towards the “bad” things (like eating out too much, eating too much sugar, not exercising enough, etc.). I hate that these are the dichotomies that float in my—and I’m guessing many people’s heads (good and bad), because usually, in this equation, restraint and “discipline” are good and pleasure-seeking or hedonism is bad. Yeah Yeah, I know. You have to retrain your brain to think of exercise as FUN! Eating fruit instead of ice cream is GOOD FOR YOU and you can LEARN TO ENJOY THE NATURAL TASTES OF FOODS. Yeah yeah. But let’s be honest—often, being “bad” feels good.

And that’s not what I even want to talk about here. I wanted to talk about consistency, and how I beat myself up for not being consistent, but somehow my brain got hijacked into a sidebar about virtue and despair. They are related, I promise.

I want to be able to STICK TO SOMETHING. I want to say: I am a THIS. Or I am a THAT. I do THIS. I do THAT.

I think it was a casual remark that someone made that got to me. Something along the lines of, “Oh, you’ll eventually stop doing that,” in reference to my twice a day meditation routine. Or maybe it was about my relatively short-lived strict no-oil veganism that I swore would be my forever way of eating. Cue the eye roll.

I’ve gone through so many phases: my three-four times a week yoga phase. My running phase (actually, that one lasted most of my childhood and teens, and many years into my adulthood). My iPad art phase. My realistic portrait phase. My abstract art phase. My Landmark Forum phase. My Weight Watchers/yo-yo dieting phase (ugh—what a fucking waste of energy and intellect spent on counting points).

I loved doing the iPad portraits. Was obsessed and thought I’d be doing these colorful portraits forever. But eventually I got sick of them. I got sick of the flatness of digital art and I wanted texture.

You’ve got to brand yourself! You’ve got to be consistent! You’ve got to know yourself! That’s what I glean when I read on Subtack about how to be a successful writer/artist/fill in the blank.

I got sick of fiction, so I turned to poetry. I wrote a bunch of poems in a white-hot heat, waking in the middle of the night to jot down my ideas. I spent a few years focusing on poetry, but then I moved on and I haven’t written poetry since.

My instagram feed is all over the place. Portraits. Abstracts. 70’s stuff. 80’s stuff. 90’s stuff. Rabbit holes I’ve fallen down…

You get the picture.

IS EVERYTHING I’VE EVER DONE JUST A PHASE? CAN I PLEASE STICK TO SOMETHING?

All I want for Christmas and Hanukkah is to be one of those people who can call themselves “a meditator” or “a yogi” or “a gym goer” or “a book club member for 20 years.” I’m envious of people who stick to things. Who weigh the same as they did in high school. Maybe my ever-fluctuating weight is probably a symbol of my mish-mash brain.

But then, somewhere in the distant recesses of my brain, a phrase comes to me: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” It’s from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, “Self-Reliance.” I remember loving his essays (even if it turns out he was sort of a jerk whose mother did his laundry forever—how’s that for self reliance?)

Google reminded me that Oscar Wilde said: “Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

Great! So I have good backup for the virtues of ping-ponging all over the place for the rest of my life.

Which brings me back to the “cycle of virtue” and the “cycle of despair.” My friend reminded me that while you don’t have to be consistent with everything, maybe it’s a good idea to be consistent with a few helpful habits. An obvious one is brushing my teeth. Another one I guess (she says grudgingly) is exercise. I don’t have to go to a stupid gym and stare at 5 TVS simultaneously blasting different shows while I dizzily walk on a treadmill and question the value of life. Instead, I can walk around the neighborhood and listen to Lily Allen’s West End Girl on repeat. That can be good enough.

In the meantime, I actually stuck to one subject to make a series of paintings on paper and canvas: a rock in water.

Maybe I’ll view my life as a series of projects….a series of phases.

P.S. I think I write the same Substack over and over again—hah! Maybe I am consistent, after all!