Why learning to do the splits is a bit like writing
(Because apparently for me everything is a bit like writing). Also, why NaNoWriMo is probably a bad idea.
I’m working on doing the splits. Or, to use the internet phrasing, I’m working to ‘get my splits’.
I don’t know where this phrasing comes from but it sounds like in must be American, doesn’t it? The only other use of that phrasing that I can think of is ‘I’m getting my Masters’ or ‘I’m getting my PhD’, but people in the UK don’t say ‘get my PhD’ the way Americans do, or at least they didn’t used to. All bets are off now; English is this inchoate mush with little regional specificity. My students all say ‘gotten’ and ‘high school’ and I haven’t got the heart to correct them any more, because it’s sort of boring and annoying that all English is the same now but they’re not really incorrect. I was trying to think of a simile to how this sort of English makes me feel and the only thing that occurred to me was that texturally this kind of English is like that slurry that you get towards the end of a roast dinner, when your potatoes melt into the gravy. Asserting a specific Englishness even as I’m claiming that there isn’t a specific English any more.
I digress. I’m getting my splits, like people get their PhD, like splits and PhDs are an asset to hold rather than a state to attain, but somehow also like they were always yours and only ever needed you to stake your claim. It’s the front splits I’m going for (as opposed to the side splits), which is the less impressive one apparently but still, most people can’t do it and yet most people are probably physiologically capable of it.
I’m trying to do the splits (I’ve decided to stop now with the getting and the my; I just can’t) for a number of reasons that exist in no particular hierarchy, but in the order that they occur to me they are:
1) I like pointless acts of supposed self-improvement, specifically as incarnated in the thirty-day challenge.
I was about to type that I have a love-hate relationship with those kinds of challenges, but it’s not true. I love those silly, reductive, arbitrary challenges and hate myself for loving them, because it seems to be embracing a value system that I ought to reject, in which all experience is ultra-processed and memeified until it loses any meaning of itself and becomes an act of joyless and (to use a word I’m starting to loathe) performative completionism. Life as listicle.
But the truth is that I like top-ten lists and thirty-day challenges and bullet journalling and all that other stuff, because like literally everyone I find modern life overwhelming and those kinds of little, incremental and (crucially) clearly delineated goals are a way of blocking out most of the anything and focusing instead on a tiny bit of the something. If you can focus on basically anything in a sustained way then you’re very likely to make progress on it, and I like getting better at stuff. This is also why I think that building some sort of sustainable writing practice is a good idea, but not NaNoWriMo, which I suppose is one of the original thirty-day challenges.
The reason I don’t like NaNoWriMo is simply that I think the daily word count is too high for most people, especially if you don’t take any days off. You might hit it or even breeze past it for the first week, but then one day you’ll stall and be furious with yourself because why can’t you be more like you yesterday, the worthy and productive version of you? Why would you let that perfected self slip through your own fingers, you idiot? The self-recriminations don’t help. Don’t do NaNoWriMo.
But stretching to get into the splits, that’s very manageable. It only takes six minutes a day, so in the time you spend deciding whether or not you want to do it you might as well just do it, as long as you’re wearing the right clothes (or, I suppose, no clothes at all would also work, though that would probably make my fear of somehow breaking my crotch even worse). You just stretch each hamstring for a minute, then each hip flexor for a minute, then you practise the splits on each side for a minute. For some reason that makes you feel quite nauseous, but learning to push through a bit of nausea is a mini-superpower. And if you keep doing this, you get better at it, which is to say your crotch gets closer to the ground. It’s not easy, but it is simple.
2) I’ve got a book out. I may have mentioned it once or twice. When you’ve got a book out you have to constantly tell people that you’ve got a book out. It’s like that adage that the only way you know whether a politician’s slogan has ‘cut through’ is if people are sick of hearing it. I suppose I’m trying to browbeat my extended acquaintance and the online books world in general into buying my book, which I hate doing but whatever, we’ve all seen the economy. Being a modest little girl doesn’t get you very much.
So anyway, I’m trying to influence the reception of my book while also being entirely zen about the reception of my book, which is a paradox and doesn’t really work and makes me feel very tense. So I want to do something that I can directly control, which is physical and has nothing to do with my value either as an artist or a commodity. No one benefits from me learning to do the splits, apart from maybe me because my hamstrings might be not tight and that might mean less back pain. Which would be a thing that was a) good for me and b) good for me in a way that has nothing to do with my career.
3) It’s important to keep changing your idea of the sort of person you are. As a teenager I could barely run around the playing field and now I can run for an hour if I want to. For years I thought I’d never learn to drive because I was too anxious and now I actually like driving. I do think that if you can get your head around the fact that you can alter your identity in fairly inconsequential ways, like becoming the sort of person who can cook good Thai food or do the splits or train a dog, it’s probably easier to imagine yourself doing things like writing a novel or changing career or becoming a parent. Massive things. I always say that I wouldn’t have become a novelist if I hadn’t taken up running, because it allowed me to see a direct correlation between commitment and improvement and it allowed me to shift my idea of what I was capable of.
There are lots of little things that I’d like to learn to do. Cryptic crosswords. Waltz. Become a passable chess player. Pick a lock. Crow pose. I’d like to know more about the Cambridge spy ring and Henry James and the history of Syria. There’s literally no reason why I can’t do all of those things, and if I take care of those small things then maybe the big things will take care of themselves. And now I have to do them, because I’ve said on Substack that I want to and now it’ll look really cowardly if I don’t.
And I promise to post a pic once I’ve got my splits.