Based on Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Letters From Love” newsletter

Last week I shared my Letter From Love, based on Elizabeth Gilbert’s practice of writing letters to (and from) Unconditional Love, which she’s been sharing on her Substack newsletter. This is part 2 of that story; I recommend you go back and read my letter before diving in!

Last week I wrote:

I was so comforted and amazed by my first foray into two-way prayer, I just had to share this with you immediately. In Part 2 of this story, next week, I’ll share my thoughts (and pet peeves) on the question of convenience and our cultural conversations around boundaries.

So here we go.

We don’t often think in terms of convenience when thinking about ourselves. We don’t often think, “It would be convenient for me if ____.” It seems we more often think, “It would be convenient for my husband if…I run and grab the dinner stuff now on my way home so he won’t have to go back out later.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with trying to making things convenient for other people. But I lose myself when I set about trying to make everything work for everyone else all the time, even when it means giving up on something I’d wanted that day or week or year. Or when it requires me to do some mental gymnastics, or try — one of America’s favorite pastimes—to magic more hours out of the 24-hour day.

I’m so guilty of this last one.

Ever the optimist, I’ll think to myself, “I can certainly use that half-hour gap between meetings to finish up the monthly budget projections and grab some lunch.”

I’ll plan my day around this cheery yet unrealistic assumption, knowing the budget projections are due immediately after my final call of the day. No buffer anywhere to be seen.

This never works out. In reality I spend 15 minutes of the half-hour gap responding to Microsoft Teams messages that have just popped up, 5 minutes talking to Raja, 5 minutes checking my phone, and then 5 minutes madly searching the fridge for something quick to eat before concluding there isn’t anything and grabbing a banana from the fruit bowl to bring back to my desk and inhale before the next meeting.

I have been thinking a lot about convenience since starting my correspondence with Love. Here is what I have noticed about that: There is no balance in our cultural narratives. Extremes are presented to us.

On the one hand you have the Boundaries Warriors screaming at you from their Instagram thrones. I have written about these ladies before. Perhaps understandably, after women spent all of human history making things easier on everyone around them at great personal cost to themselves, the pendulum swung in the other direction.

That is — for some (privileged, western, and mostly white) women.

Who now want to tell you about it.

In this school of thought, you are supposed to do what you want pretty much all the time. If that doesn’t work well for people in your life, so be it. You are taking back your power.

Sure, I think to myself. But surely we need to do this some, not all of the time? I want to make things work for myself — and also my partner. Things should work for me and my marriage and my friendships and my family members. I want to give and take.

There are opposite and equally extreme narratives being presented to us. Work, for example, expects us to be “on” all the time and is not too concerned with whether that is convenient to our lives, our time, our spouses, our creativity, our attention spans (great podcast on this recently from Ezra Klein), or our abilities to rest and recharge. Give, give, give, more, more, more, whispers the siren song of work.

Sure, I think to myself. But surely we need to do this some, not all of the time? I want to do a good job at my job. I also want to not lose myself in it completely (as I’ve been known to do, many times)!

I just can’t get behind the narratives that scream always and never. If you’re inconveniencing yourself to meet your husband’s or child’s or job’s needs, one narrative implies that something is wrong with you. If you’re not inconveniencing yourself to meet your husband’s or child’s or job’s needs, the other narrative implies that something is wrong with you. You can’t win.

Life is a never-ending dance and sometimes we bend and sometimes we stand firm. Marriage, too, seems to be this way. We can’t always do one or the other, and the trick I suppose is figuring out when to bend and when to stand firm.

How to know?

Today, Love (or God or Source or Universe or my late, beloved great grandmother — hi, Gigi!) was telling me I had bent a little too far. Contorted myself into a tiny space.

As a consequence, she noted gently, I’ve been living a little too small, and I’ve been assuming other people get to decide if I’m good and worthy of love — even though, in all likelihood, these people to whom I’ve entrusted my self-worth are probably not even thinking about me at all.

She wants me to scrap all that and live bigger, breathing into the wide open space I have in front of me.

How would you complete this sentence? “It would be convenient for me if ___ today.” Let me know what you came up with!

If you want to read Elizabeth’s incredible weekly Letters From Love or try this at home, here’s her Substack and here’s one of my favorites of her letters.