In The Garden of Stubborn

Discerning what to weed out and what to nurture

In early December I got a cold. A actual old fashioned sniffly nose and cough sort of thing, that wasn’t Covid. About a week into this “common” cold (that felt very foreign after nearly three years of obsessing over one specific virus) I started to feel better. The cough stuck around and I was a little congested, but generally I felt okay.

Until I didn’t.

After a weekend of feeling mostly good, I was surprised when Monday evening found me completely drained, with that cough back in full force and a slight fever (but still not Covid). I’d been working from home lots anyway on account of the germ-y cold, but took Tuesday and Wednesday off completely. I slept. I watched Christmas movies on Netflix. I tried to drink plenty of water. Even had some orange juice. I wasn’t hungry but ate some toast, anyway. (Remember that movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, where the father claims Windex is a cure-all? Toast is my Windex.) All the things that typically make me feel better, but Thursday morning rolled around and I still didn’t.

Tuesday my husband, who was travelling for work, asked if I was thinking about going to the doctor when we were catching up over the phone. I told him I just needed to rest. Wednesday I was chatting with my Mom and she wondered if I might be going to get the situation checked out. (Apparently I sounded ROUGH over the phone). I said maybe, but I probably just needed a good night’s sleep— which was proving hard to get with all the coughing.

Thursday afternoon, after my lunch of, you guessed it— toast (+ peanut butter, you know, for nutrition) and still feeling basically the same as I had all week, I finally acquiesced and went to urgent care. Where I fully expected to be told that I had a cold and needed to continue to rest. At least they could give me something for the cough, which would be nice. I could finally get that rest I needed. One Covid and flu test, one chest x-ray, and one blood panel later the doctor came to deliver the diagnosis.

Pneumonia.

Not a bad cold.

An actual infection in my lungs.

One that required a pretty strong antibiotic to clear up. That I probably could have started treating way earlier than I did. Which means I would have spent less of the month of December feeling far from my best. But I’m not offering my tale of woe up for sympathy (I am so much better, thank you!), but instead as a cautionary tale. And not even a cautionary tale about putting off going to the doctor. I

Nope. It’s deeper than that.

This is a cautionary tale about being stubborn.

Except maybe more correctly it’s about learning when to set down stubborn-ness that doesn’t serve us. Because, here’s the thing, stubbornness at its root isn’t a bad thing. Stubborn’s less vilified cousins are Tenacity and Persistence, both which are absolutely key to pursuing creative and entrepreneurial work. It’s important to acknowledge that the same trait that made me delay medical attention also helps me be resilient to critique of my work or pivot to a new direction when that first thing I tried didn’t work. It’s what makes me open my computer and write words never knowing exactly how they will be received by others.

But lest we fall into a trap of thinking there are simple classifications in the world of stubbornness: medical stubborn equals bad stubborn; creative stubborn equal good stubborn— rest assured that there are plenty of times in our creative lives that stubbornness might not serve us all that well either. Like clinging too tightly to one way of doing things. Being resistant to helpful critique from editors, teachers or mentors. Holding too strongly to one way of marketing our work and not being willing to experiment with something new. Or even beating ourselves up about not writing entire books over winter break. And there’s also a case for stubbornness serving us well on the medical front. It’s likely what pushes us to pursue second opinions or continue to seek answers when we know something just feels off.

Like most things in life, there isn’t an easy, clear distinction— so how do we weed out the unhelpful stubborn and hold on that which serves us.

The key lies in learning to dig up the root of the stubbornness and determine if this is a helpful or un-helpful varietal. Clearly, my pneumonia example above is unhelpful-stubborn. I have skepticism around what I perceive to be our western society’s general quick-fix medical culture and a belief that if I give my body time to rest it will heal, but I also have a fair helping of anxiety around going to the doctor (specifically around having bloodwork done). It becomes awfully easy to hide behind those skeptical ideals when often what I’m really doing is stubbornly avoiding the possibly I need to have a needle stuck in one of my sometimes non-cooperative veins. The root here is fear. And in this case, fear of something that might not even happen.

Similarly, if you’re holding to an ideal about your creative work, or resisting the feedback from a trusted peer— what is at the root of that? Is it that trying something new feels scary because it’s new and different? Or is it an actual misalignment with your values and vision. Does the feedback feel inherently wrong in your soul? Or does it actually resonate, it’s just that making the changes suggested are SO much additional work. While these are sticker things to discern than the “I didn’t go to the doctor because I don’t like needles in my veins” I do think they are discernible.

It’s not about irradiating our stubbornness— tenacity and persistence are tools to be honed, not tossed out. It’s about noticing the stubbornness and then pausing before we allow it to make decisions for us. It’s pulling up those prickly, weedy feelings and really look at their roots from a place of objective reflection. Taking a deep breath, getting quiet and asking, does this serve me? Is it helpful? Is this stubbornness worth nestling back into the ground and nurturing or should it be left uprooted?

Maybe it’s hard to distinguish sometimes. And maybe we get it wrong sometimes. But I have to think the more we practice examining those roots against our own inner guidebook the more right we’ll get it.

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Beautiful Thing of the Week

Just one little something I found inspiring this week. (Read last week’s longer list of tiny, lovely things here.)

The poem Beannacht by John O’Donohue was shared in the newsletter I get from Yoga with Adriene as a blessing for the new year. This was my favorite part, but the whole thing is a good read:

And when your eyes
freeze behind
the grey window
and the ghost of loss
gets into you,
may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green
and azure blue,
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

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Do you struggle with being stubborn? Have any tricks for weeding the good out from the bad? Read any good poems lately? Would love to hear about any and all of this (or you know, that squirrel you saw eating a bagel, lol).