My husband and I planted a garden this year. Oh, but we were industrious. We bought a rototiller and discovered our garden bed was full of rocks, now nicely piled up and still growing weeds next to our deck. We planned out seeds. We planted in rows. We weeded. Then we forgot about the garden for a little while. Then we weeded again, about half of it, laid down cardboard to smother the other weeds, then forgot again. My husband went out and diligently weeded one last time, and now it's September. We forgot to harvest the garlic. We let the lettuce go to seed. The poor peas scaffolded themselves on weeds and grew nicely, and we missed them too. The corn never took off. We have potatoes aplenty, smothering out the strawberries, two sad and scraggly looking raspberry bushes next to 4 or 5 dead sticks that were once "bare root raspberry bushes" purchased for a mere $0.50, and one truly monstrous zucchini. I told my husband not to buy zucchini. I don't like it, and he doesn't really eat it either. and now we have a zucchini that I truly think could win a prize in a county fair. Or maybe it could have, if we'd entered it in one, I'm sure they all happened about 2 weeks ago. My tomatoes all got blossom end rot and despite weeks of hot, sunny weather and nightly waterings, the pepper plants remained small and stunted, the mint stringy and sad. It's quite a pathetic sight out there right now.
You get the gist. The garden remains a big, weedy mess, now full of wasps as the empty rental house next door's only tenants have built themselves a nice nest on the side that faces our house (of course). We spent a lot of money and time building it and we will have an awful lot of root vegetables (and zucchini) to show for it, which isn't bad, but also an awful lot of weeds, including stubbornly persistent thistle.
For weeks this has been a source of tremendous embarrassment to me, and so naturally I've mentioned it constantly in conversation with all my friends and family. "We're just not garden people" I've said, over and over, longing to perhaps cover the whole thing over with paving stones, sell the rototiller to someone who will actually use it, until about two days ago when I realized I was being stupid.
Because like, who cares?
We aren't subsistence farming. We aren't entering a beautiful backyards competition. There's no reward or grade for doing a good job at this, or a punishment for doing badly. The only people who suffer having spent $800 on a rototiller are... the people who spent the $800. Well, what if I just decide it's fine? Is anyone going to stop me? Shockingly, no. It turns out you can just do whatever you want, something I suspect everyone else figured out at around 17 years old and I have been avoiding until now, at the ripe old age of 30.
We tried to have a garden. This is what we got. What we do with that information is up to us. We could definitely just cover the whole thing over, build a couple of raised beds with new, WEED FREE SOIL, and start there. We could just pave it over and have a nice sitting area with a few potted plants. We could lie and say we'll change everything about ourselves next summer and magically get suuuuuper into breaking our backs bending over to rip thistles out of the ground every weekend. We could just... take our lessons learned this year, and try again next year. There's actually infinite possible choices. We could do everything the same as this year, too, can't forget that. Because it's just not that serious. It never was!!
I think this is a symptom of being too chronically online. Maybe it's just my algorithm but everyone posting things seems to be constantly self improving, or criticizing that system of endless optimization. My backyard garden that I grow for personal enjoyment is not a fucking optimization problem. Therefore, I don't need to feel guilty that it kind of flopped in almost every way. But of course then I thought... what else in my life am I treating this way? Is any of it that serious?
It feels like for most of my life I've been gripping onto things with a tight, clenched fist, white knuckles, hand cramping, absolutely refusing to let go. I've taken everything so seriously and done my best to follow the rules. Maybe there are rules to a home garden, maybe there aren't, and maybe it doesn't matter if there are or not. I was gripping onto that idea of "this is how we SHOULD be gardening" so hard and that grip still wasn't strong enough to make it happen. And look what happened! Nothing. Except my emotional response to it and thoughts about it and what it means about me as a person, which are entirely under my control, and our bank account being short about $800 which we quickly earned back. So... why am I still holding on like that?
Well, I'm not. I think I've finally let go. I think that's how you're supposed to have fun. Or maybe it isn't. Maybe I'm gripping too hard onto how to have fun. No more maybe- I think this actually is, just, fine. Any not-fine about it came entirely from me, and I just... don't want to feel that way anymore.
I wonder what else I've been hanging onto like that. My opinions about what it means to have a PhD? Gosh, I've felt for so long like, surely this can't just be it. I get a PhD, don't want to go into research or bench work, and it's what, a golden weight tied to my ankle forever? That can't just be how it is, can it? Well, it can. I'm just... still here. Living. Existing. Figuring it out. Finding joy despite it all. The longer I live and think "well, surely that can't just be how things work out sometimes" and then what do you know, things keep working out like that sometimes. Only I am punishing myself for standards nobody cares if I set in the first place.
If my life is really my own, then here's what I'm moving into next as an adult: just letting go. If I say it's okay to be bad at things, well, here I am, being bad at gardening. And I spent money on it too, the horror. I guess that was me being bad at it too. Almost beautifully, gloriously incompetent. And free.
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