I'm Just a Girl Looking Downstairs at a Party
How I interrupt my brain when it’s spiraling
Two quick housekeeping notes:
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I’ve made two podcast episodes since we last spoke! One is about feeling excluded in friendships, and the other is about how to deepen connections with new friends. These are both available to watch on YouTube (which is where I’m focusing my video creation these days) and to listen wherever you get your pods. Thanks for your consideration!
Onto the newsletter…
Morning loves!
Today’s story begins in my therapist’s office and ends in George Lucas’s living room. One of George’s living rooms.
So, in January I started seeing a therapist for the first time since college. It’d been eight years since I sat in the chair and did the thing, and so far, it’s going pretty well.
One thing we’re working on are my spiraling thoughts. My brain has always been a little chaotic (how ‘bout “special,” Hayes), but this year it’s been particularly challenging to manage.
For me a spiral goes like this: I could be unwinding on the couch, laughing at Schitt’s Creek reruns with Brian, when suddenly I’ll realize that it’s June, and I “haven’t accomplished any of my goals” that I set last June. Instead of correcting myself to say that that’s factually incorrect or reminding myself that many of my goals have changed to be more aligned with what I actually want and what’s in my control, I indulge the negative fantasy and identify all of the things I haven’t done that specific week to achieve my past goals. From there it’s a Choose Your Own Adventure Spectacular!!!! I assign catastrophic cause/effect realities to each thing I haven’t done, which always lead me to some dismal future. Usually I lose my opportunities or never reach my potential. I could be stuck in that domino effect for several minutes without realizing it. Real pleasant stuff.
I never paid much attention to what happens during these spirals until my therapist started asking me questions about them, so one week in between sessions, I took notes when it happened. After I described it to her, she introduced a new skill that “might be helpful” for me.
It’s called “cognitive defusion,” which I had heard of before and is a lot like mindfulness (in fact, it might be straight lifted from eastern origins, as I think many western psychological practices are? To study more!). In layperson's (and overly simplified) terms, it’s when you kind of step outside your mind to observe your thoughts as they occur, rather than being your thoughts, which is what many of us do. It’s the act of separating yourself from your mind.
To describe it, my therapist said, “Picture yourself sitting by a stream. There’s lots of stuff flowing down the stream: Ducks, sticks, sediment.”
I wondered where this was going.
“Now, if you notice the current gets heavy, are you going to jump in the stream?” she asked. Rhetorical question. “No, you’d get wiped out by a bunch of rocks.”
That restraint is what you can practice with your thoughts, she said to me. Observing them from the outside, like they’re rocks flowing down a stream, and you will not get in the stream to get cratered by them. Make sense?
I understood but was skeptical that it would work for me. Too whimsical.
Still, desperate for new tools, I tried. Couple times. Didn’t work! (So, as one does, I wrote it off as useless.)
Then one night, browsing on Pinterest, a painting stopped me in my scroll.
I thought, THIS is my version of the stream analogy!!!! I’ve never felt such recognition when looking at art before, and as an artist and art lover, this fact stunned me.
It’s a 1964 oil painting by Norman Rockwell titled Little Girl Looking Downstairs at Christmas Party.
It’s painted from an almost aerial perspective, with a little girl perched at the top of her stairs, looking down at a raucous party. It’s past her bedtime, but the grown ups are loud and woke her up, and given her curiosity and naughtiness and invisibility cloak, she snuck out of her bedroom.
Downstairs, the adults are out of their minds, with stupid smiles trading stupid stories and holding stupid tiny glasses of champagne or something. She’s curious about them, unbothered by their noise. It's actually kind of exciting to observe people from this outside layer, they’ll become characters for her to expand upon in bed, inside her mind. But not inside inside. They won’t invade and torment her brain, they’re just creative fodder. Juice. She feels sorry for some of these people, who are red in the face and trying so hard to impress the other guys. It’s all so silly, she thinks. Why do you care about such stupid stuff??? She delights in the fact that no one knows she’s watching them. The party will go on, and she can get up and walk away any time she’d like to. She wasn’t invited anyway.
The stream analogy did not work for me as a tool to practice cognitive defusion, but the little girl at the party does. This is how I think of my spirals now. I am the girl, perched on the stair, observing as my thoughts have a grand ‘ol time making up stories about all of the things that could happen. I can get up and walk away any time I’d like to. I am the girl on the steps. I am not downstairs at the party. Honest to god, this helps me.
Later, when I searched for more information about the painting on Reddit, I learned that there are actually two versions. The version I saw, and then this one, which is currently at Sotheboys and is considered to be the “original” or the “final” piece.
I prefer the one I found, presumed to be one of Rockwell’s early sketches for the image. It’s loose and wild and descendant of a dream. Apparently George Lucas preferred it too. On Reddit, someone wrote, “From what I can gather, [this early vision] is one of several studies for the painting that are or were owned by George Lucas.”
I imagine he loved it for the same reasons I do.
Yours,
Hayes
A message to my free subscribers: You might have noticed there is a paywall on the voiceover of this post! I’m excited about this functionality, but disappointed to learn that Substack does not allow comments on posts from free subscribers when I have some form of paywall up. This means that only paid subscribers can comment on my posts. I’m really sorry about that. I will try and think of a work around for this, but in the meantime, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
On the podcast this week, we spoke about how to deepen connections with friends. May I recommend the video version! I suggest throwing it up on your TV and letting it play in the background while you prep dinner or make coffee or get ready for bed or something. (That’s how I watch/listen to my video podcasts!)