Ability & Overwhelm: What Happened to Your Aspirations, Talent, and Dreams?

Overwhelm.

It’s an interesting word.

You might have your own idea of what it means.

Possibly juggling kids and finances and work and your marriage.

The stresses of running your company and all of the employee and client demands.

Those are certainly things that can be trying and stressful.

But that is not overwhelm.

Here is the definition of overwhelm:

“To defeat completely.”  (Merriam-Webster)

Synonyms: trounce, rout, beat, conquer, vanquish, overcome, overthrow, crush.

Your husband is cleaning out the attic.

He walks into the living room staring at some old 8 x 10s of you in one hand and a half dozen faded 1st Place Blue Ribbons in his other hand.

He looks at you and speaks.

“I was going to throw these out until I looked at the ribbons and read the inscription on the picture” he says with a caring tone.

“On the picture is inscribed ‘The next Judy Garland.  See you in Hollywood. Love you girl, Cynthia’,” he says as he looks at you with warm admiration.

You look up from slicing a cucumber for the salad you’re making.

Time has stopped.

Your husband’s expression is bewilderment.

You are suddenly transported to your senior year in high school. You received your first standing ovation in that high school auditorium. An indelible memory of the height of what you dreamed would be a successful singing career.

And then you snap back into present time.

You notice you’re holding a cucumber and a paring knife standing in your kitchen.

You then shrug your shoulders, hold back the grief that is welling up inside and reply.

"Yeah. I had big dreams back then,” you say with tears just back of your eyes, and go back to making your salad.

But your husband is still amazed at what he’s holding in his hand and walks up to you and sets your pictures and ribbons on the kitchen counter. He puts a loving hand on your shoulder and asks, “What happened?”

You look back up at him and reply.

“Mr. Litinger.”

Your husband looks at you still puzzled.

You continue...

“He said I didn’t have range. He said my pitch was off. He told me it would take years to get it perfect.”

“I was so stunned I couldn’t say a word. I never went back to that singing class. I sang my last note that day.”

That is overwhelm.

“...overcome, overthrow, crush.”

You are sitting around a game board with friends on the weekend having a good time.

You pick a card and it says for you to “draw a horse.”

That card might as well have said, “Do a standing backflip in your living room.”

Just about the same thing, right?

Your thought is “I cannot draw.”

No, I’m sorry. That’s just not true.

“I cannot draw” is the idea you adopted at the point of overwhelm when your 1st Grade teacher told you the cat you drew, “Didn’t look anything like a cat.”

If the stick figure cat you drew did not look like a cat, and if you were only able to draw a cat as a stick figure, what is then left?

YOU HAVE NO STICKS.

YOU HAVE NO CAT.

YOU CANNOT DRAW.

Aesthetics, Ability and Overwhelm

Take a cursory inspection of your life and see how much of your ability to create aesthetics has disappeared.

As a kid you would color with crayons.

Paint with finger paints.

Make an ashtray with clay for your Mom.

In school you moved up to water colors.

You wrote an essay for your High School newsletter.

You sang in a talent contest.

And you won a ribbon for heaven’s sake.

Now?

No crayons. No paints. No essays.

Singing?

Maybe in the shower.

Maybe.

And that’s ONLY if you are absolutely the only person home.

Aesthetics have been the creative outlet since you entered the world.

“If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.”

Vincent van Gogh

When I was in high school, the Beatles and the Stones were the rage.

I wanted to play guitar. So I bought myself a guitar and decided to learn how to play.

When I got to learning my first chords, I was like WTF?!!

Anyone who has experienced learning to play a chord knows what I’m talking about.

You see George Harrison or John Lennon strumming their guitars. You think to yourself, “I can do that.”

You look at the chord chart and then swear-to-god while you’re trying to get your fingers to make that G chord, you’re like:

“How-in-the-fuck am I supposed to get my fingers to do that?!

The near impossibility of it creates the feeling of overwhelm.

You think, “Maybe this is not for me.”

So, I thought, “Maybe I don’t have the hands to be a guitar player.”

See?

You question the idea that maybe this is not something you can do.

At the moment of feeling overwhelmed you look at whether or not you can do this.

So, I went and took a close up look at George Harrison’s hands.

Eric Clapton too.

Eureka!

I now knew “Why” I could not play chords.

I did not have “guitar hands.”

Ever seen George’s or Eric’s friggin’ fingers? They are like lonnnnggg fucking fingers.

See, THEY could do this. Not I.

At the moment of overwhelm or feeling completely overcome by the finger-gymnastics involved with making a simple chord, I found a way to justify or rationalize why I could not.

It was of course total bullshit.

There is no such thing as “guitar hands.”

And I did learn to play guitar.

But I learned an interesting lesson back then.

When you are so overcome by what appears to be the impossibility of something, you either:

• Give it up (defeat = overwhelm) or

• You make excuses or reasons you cannot, (“I don’t have guitar hands”) or

• You decide you will not be defeated.
  
  

The proof of overwhelm is that now the idea “I cannot sing” “I cannot draw” or “I’m not cut out to play guitar” has become the the sole proprietor of your mindset.

Overwhelm has nothing to do with your ability to do something.

It has everything to do with the convincingness that you are not able to do it.

Ability: What is It?

The word ability comes from the word “able.”

Which in simplicity comes from Latin habilis, which means “easy to handle,” “handy” and “to hold.”

To hold. Handy. Easy to use.

You are able to drive your car.

You are able to ride a bike.

You might be able to ice skate.

Maybe.

That is if you can hold yourself up on those thin-ass skates and keep from falling on your bum.

You remember the very first time you got excited about ice skating?

You saw it on TV. They glided around on that ice like it was just easy-peasy, right?

And then you get out there and you never really skate, at first.

You walk-shuffle on the ice, right?

You’re thinking maybe you were hoodwinked by watching those skaters float across the ice on TV.

But fuck it. You then go for it and “skate.”

Yeah. Your ass got introduced to Mr. Ice Rink real fast.

You try it a few more times and you “skate” and fall.

You “skate” over to the railing and watch others sail around the rink.

You think to yourself:

“I am not cut out for this.”

Overwhelm.

The idea that “I can do this” is supplanted with the idea that “I cannot do this.”

It is the idea you cannot that now takes residence in your skull and is the point of overwhelm.

When the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima it vanquished an entire city and thousands of lives.

Overwhelm.

Are we getting the idea of this?

When you have been crushed or overcome or defeated completely, you seemingly cannot summon the energy necessary to change the inertia of the overwhelm of the idea.

IT IS NOT THAT YOU CANNOT.

IT IS NOT THAT YOU ARE NOT ABLE.

Overwhelm is being so thoroughly overcome by the thing you were attempting to do that the idea you cannot do that thing becomes your new point of view by default.

You may need to read that again.

Somewhere in your pursuit of aesthetics you were so thoroughly invalidated that, by the very definition of the word invalidate itself, “you are no longer valid” as a singer, dancer, etc.

THAT IS NOT A CAT.

YOU DO NOT HAVE THE RANGE.

THERE IS NO CITY.

You see a video online of a couple dancing. You have always wanted to dance like that. Every time you see dancing on TV or in your Facebook Newsfeed you think, “I want to dance like that.”

First is the idea you can DO this.

Then you create the space to BE a dancer.  

You enroll in a dance class.

Then with your excitement you set out to DO what a dancer does to BE a dancer.

When you get to the DO part you now know you need to learn the DOINGNESS. In other words, learn how to move your body and do what a dancer does.

This part is critical.

Your teacher instructs you and your partner how to do simple steps and move your body.

You are a tad shocked at how hard it is to coordinate your body into these simple moves. Your partner seems to grasp it. But you are beginning to introvert because you cannot move your body easily on these simple steps.

You can see the frustration building in your partner. Although your instructor is very patient and encouraging, you can feel her unexpressed concern.

No matter how patient your dancing instructor is, you are not able to move your body like she shows you.

You have so many loses with learning these dance steps you conclude:

“I am not able to do this.”

“I am not able to do this” is the overwhelming idea that you now acknowledge as the way that it is.

In fact when your friend suggests to you, “Come on...let’s go give it another try,” you are not even equivocal about it.

You are resolute that dancing is not for you.

This is overwhelm.

Follow?

Overwhelm is the condition whereby you now occupy the space occasioned by defeat.

You are now NOT A DANCER.

A year later you are out to dinner on a date and they have live music and a dance floor. Your date gets up from his chair, extends his hand and asks, “Dance with me?”

You look up at him with your heart pounding and your dream to dance fleets across your mind and you reply: 

“Sorry, I can’t dance.”

When Overwhelm Co-Opts Your Mind and You Sound Like Your Mom or Dad

Raise your hand if you’ve ever caught yourself saying something emotional and sounding like your Mom or Dad.

When I go over this in my seminar I always get a full seminar room of raised hands.

You know, maybe you’ve yelled at your kid and thought to yourself in horror:

“OMG, I sound like my mother!”  or

“OMG, I sound just like my Dad!”

Or possibly your partner or spouse says something critical about you and you fire back, “You sound just like your Dad when you raise your voice like that. I’m not going to talk to you until you knock that shit off.”

Or, “Whenever your Mother visits you sound just like her. I don’t need both of you criticizing me. I’m going out for awhile.”

You know. Some drama like this.

What is this, really?

I will tell you exactly what it is.

It is the exact point where you as a being feel you are no longer able to confront and handle the person in front of you and feel overcome or feel defeated.

Your teenager or husband or wife is “being impossible” or incorrigible or stubborn or whatever.

You feel completely overwhelmed by the fact that the conversation or argument is escalating irrationally and you have to do something.

So in the time it takes to throw the switch you drop the bomb on your daughter with your overwhelming Wicked Witch of the West, much like your mother let loose her fury on you.

And in a space of time that seems like no time at all you witness the fury of your blast that you wish with every fiber of your soul you could take it all back in an instant.

Exactly.

What is this overwhelm by the identity or persona of another?

It is the viewpoint you assumed in that infinitesimally small fraction of time where you were hoping your emotional communication was a “solution” to the irrationality of the person you were confronting and trying to handle.

And to make matters worse, your teen or spouse ratched-up their “solution” to you, by going all Wrath of Khan on you.

At the point where either party or both feel crushed, defeated or overcome and ARE NOT BEING UNDERSTOOD, overwhelm enters and so do the bizarre words and mannerisms coming out of both of you.

And really, all it did was convince you or them to either back down, back off, or internalize your feelings because who the hell wants to face that again, right?

A Different Perspective: You Can Dance

If you were told you cannot sing you were told a lie.

Of course you can sing.

How well is a matter of practice as in any skill or ability.

But to feel you cannot sing or draw or dance?

It is simply that The Big Bad Wolf terrorized Little Red Riding Hood such that she no longer Little Red Rides.

My purpose in writing this is to give you a different look at what happened to your crayons and insouciance and belting out your favorite song in your underwear like a young Tom Cruise in Risky Business.

And that your ability to do those things today is there just like it always was.

Ability is resident in everyone.

Expression of ability is tempered only by those points in your life when you were met with a viewpoint that was overwhelming.

Period.

You will not get up and sing at Thanksgiving or dance at a party although you envision yourself being able to do so, but the viewpoint of doing it restimulates the overwhelm and defeat.

So your ability is shut down like blowing a fuse in your house.

You will let your paints or drawing pencils sit in your closet. You will let your piano collect dust, and you dare not get rid of the lot because they are a hyperlink to your heart and soul. They are a forever reminder of a time when you felt you were a free being.

You had the freedom to BE.

The freedom to DO.

And it’s the freedom you long for.

It’s the freedom of expression.

It is not the paints, canvas, dance move, or chord progression.

It’s the desire to be free to do it and make a mistake and do it again and again like riding your bike without training wheels.

And when you are able to “hold and handle easily” the riding of your bike there was a freedom and elation so big there simply was not enough room on your seven-year-old face for your smile to fully express itself.

And when there is no criticism or evaluation or admonishment for how you sing or how long it took you to learn that dance move, you have progress.

And with progress you have taken all of the tarps and camouflage off what was creating the illusion that your ability was non-existent when it was actually very much alive.

And once you are able to hold and handle that two-step, that G-chord and that high octave note with ease, well...you have arrived.

You have not succumbed to the idea you cannot.

You are truly free to move around the cabin.

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