Fighting the Feeling of Simultaneous Overwhelm/ Underwhelm

As I write this, there is an ominous energy brewing outside my office windows.

I live on Canada’s Vancouver Island, which is west of Vancouver and north of Seattle, so you can probably envision what our winter is like: lots of rain (though far less than either of those neighbour cities) and very little snow (if any). What you might not know is that, like most islands in and around the Pacific, we get the occasional, super-intense wind storm. Well, it’s midday, and after a forebodingly calm morning, a motley crew of different dark clouds are being pushed in by the invisible hand in the sky, and the trees in the neighbourhood are beginning to flail without rhythm or pattern. Loud whooshes come out of nowhere, the occasional garbage can falls over in the distance, and I can hear the two metal patio chairs on our front step begin their awkward dance back and forth between the railings.

In short: batten down the hatches, because here she comes.

The feeling of unease that underlies a coming storm is the perfect background for talking about a malaise I’ve picked up on lately, particularly amongst my fellow early-30-somethings who are settling into their careers and family lives. And, of course, I’ve witnessed it most acutely in myself: the simultaneous feeling of being overwhelmed and totally underwhelmed.

So first let’s talk about overwhelm – a subject we all know too well, I think. The feeling of the never-going-to-be-done To Do List. The feeling of so many emails you’ll literally never get through them all. The desire to keep up with current events, but the front page of the paper alone is so full of absolutely terrible news that you can’t process everything so you process none of it. Having too many commitments and not enough time. Having so many as-of-yet unaccomplished goals that you’re pretty sure you’re going to hit forty having accomplished none of them. Perfect kids’ birthday parties and money stresses and aging parents and student loans. And the planet is literally on fire and we seem to be on the brink of another major war. Not to mention that we’re drowning in stuff, we’re dealing with chronic illness, and half the world tells us to only eat plants and the other tells us to only eat meat.

Overwhelm.

Now, if you aren’t hyperventilating like I was when I wrote that, let’s talk about a far more insidious foe: underwhelm. The feeling that every day is pretty much the same. That you sit in your cubicle or your kid’s nursery or behind your shop counter every day, and each day blends into the next. That you watch six hours of Netflix in a row and you enjoy it but you’re also not sure why you did it. Where you dress a lot like the people around you and on TV because, hey, it’s easy and safe, and you’ll just keep getting the same haircut because… whatever. Where you’re pretty sure you used to have hobbies and interests, and now you kind of golf once a year, but that’s good enough. Where your life is fine and you have nothing to complain about and people are dying in other countries and you’re not homeless so what have you got to grump around about? Where you’re not depressed but you’re just feeling blah about everything but oh well, I guess that’s what people mean by “adulting.”

That’s underwhelm.

I have 100% felt so simultaneously overwhelmed and underwhelmed that I wasn’t sure what to do or how to move through it.

I was working at a corporate job, trying to have a baby, trying to figure out how to make enough money to buy a bigger house for said baby in our super expensive city, stressing about how stressed I was because my doctor said my cortisol was probably too high to have a baby, wondering why exactly I went to law school, and hating nothing more than making the same cup of coffee in the breakroom every morning at 7am before reading the same emails and facing the same stresses each and every day.

This is also where I’ll remind you that I didn’t start out as a lawyer/MBA corporate type – I started out as an opera singer. Being a singer until well into my 20s was an entirely different kind of stressful. In fact, in many ways, it was cripplingly stressful in a way most jobs just aren’t, because being an artist means equating your self-worth with your artistry, and hoo boy that can be a hard row to hoe. But, one thing I will say for being an artist is this: it is very rarely underwhelming. And even when you have all those societal and family and cultural forces of overwhelm pushing in on you, you can turn to your art. You can rely on it. You can seek solace in it and use it to process what’s happening to you and dig into it in new and profound ways. Practicing or painting or rehearsing is one hell of a balm for overwhelm, let me tell you.

So what’s a non-artist to do? Say you have a lot of those same overwhelm/underwhelm daily feelings I had while I was living my corporate life, but you actually love being an accountant or a teacher or a lawyer or whatever it is you do for a living, and you have no interest in blowing up your life like I did and becoming some kind of crazy entrepreneur-writer-freelancer. How do you battle underwhelm and overwhelm the same way artists do?

You do it exactly the same way they do: by inviting art into your life. I know this sounds so trite if you’re grinding it out at a consulting firm or trying to get tenure as a starting professor or getting a handful of hours of sleep a week while your baby is teething. I know I know I KNOW that me telling you “hey, you know what would help? Listening to classical music!” makes you want to punch me in my artsy face. But just stay with me to the end of this post and see if you want to give it a try. Because if you’re buried in the simultaneous overwhelm/underwhelm conundrum like I was, I bet you’re just desperate enough to try anything right now.

Why Does Art Help Soothe the Underwhelm/Overwhelm Feelings?

So, here’s the thing about Underwhelm/Overwhelm: they’re not feelings you can just think through (you can’t be like “oh my parents are aging and I feel overwhelmed about that, I’ll just make a 5-point plan and then it’ll be good”, nor can you solve the existential crisis of feeling that your life might not have meaning by just brainstorming your way out of it). Likewise, I think neither underwhelm nor overwhelm is purely emotional, since both involve feeling stuck, which often needs some level of action-oriented thinking to move out of. AND, if you want to get really deep (and I know you do!), both feelings have to do with who we are at a soul level – what our mission/purpose in life is, what the point of life is in the first place, and what we’re supposed to be here to learn or experience.

The thing about art (and not just visual art, but all of the fine arts – music, dance, and theatre included) is that art is one of the few things we have made as human beings and that we also get to experience as humans that exists on the plane that merges thinking, feeling, and the profound. Art is so incredible because it is stories and impressions and thoughts about being human, made by humans for other humans. But for centuries we’ve all also known that there is something magical or mystical in art that we can’t fully explain in words using rational thought.

Art is an incredible balm for overwhelm for a few reasons. First, a lot of overwhelm comes from overstimulation (both from our phones/the media/the internet, as well as from other people who all seem to want or need things from us). Retreating into a piece of music or a play or a single painting is an incredible respite from this time in our lives that is inherently very stimulating, and from a world that is positively off-the-rails hyperstimulating in ways that are highly unnatural. Second, we often feel overwhelmed because we don’t have enough time or space for processing what’s happening to us, and something as simple as sitting in a dark concert hall for two hours can be incredibly powerful for both our conscious and subconscious minds to work through whatever we’re dealing with. And third, overwhelm (at least for me) often comes from a feeling of no one understanding you, or of standing alone. Art is a roadmap of how to be a human, made by humans, for other humans. It is filled with every story of the human experience one can imagine, often told through metaphor and obfuscation, making it an amazing way to see your own story played back to you. It’s an incredible medium for knowing that you are not alone in what you’re going through.

As for underwhelm, it’s simpler: art is just the right kind of stimulation to reignite parts of your mind and heart that were just temporarily shut down while you figured out how to be an adult. Most people start out being (and believing themselves to be) really creative and curious. Even into college and the few years after, we’re figuring out who we are and experimenting and being adventurous and crying to love songs and watching weird movies and doodling in our notebooks. Then someone gives us a suit or a baby or a 401K and we’re like, “okay, I guess I’m an adult now.” Well, that kind of (totally unnecessary but culturally engrained) resignation is exactly what leads to underwhelm, and it’s exactly what’s cured by infusing your life with art. For countless generations, people have spent their lives learning about and enjoying and finding their passion in the fine arts. And I don’t mean as an artist – I mean as a fan, as an aficionado, as a patron. Let your curious creative self back out, because she’s suffocating! Go to a play. Start listening to jazz. Buy an actual piece of art that you love for your home. Hell, maybe even make something yourself. Tap back into seeing and hearing and watching in ways that light up your emotions. Build a richer, more beautiful life for yourself. As Lizzo says, “boss up and change your life, you can have it all no sacrifice.” I’m pretty sure she was talking about art.

So that’s my pitch on fighting the simultaneous Overwhelm/Underwhelm feeling that seems to accompany early (real) adulthood, especially in the totally effed-up world in which we’re all coming into our own. I know the arts are a huge, overwhelming mountain to approach if you’re new, but they’re actually so easy to get into. All you need is curiosity and openness to new experiences, and if you’re ready to get out of the Overwhelm/Underwhelm feedback loop, I bet you’re feeling pretty open to just about anything right now.

Here’s to a life with more reflection and less stress, more self-knowledge and less self-doubt, more creative ideas and less stuck-ness. Here’s to a more artful life.