FREED VERSE

One of my favorite comedians has a bit about a street near his house he calls “Stuck Truck Hill.” This hill is so steep that when semis ignore the “No Vehicles Over 5 Tons” sign leading up to it, they make it about halfway up before their gas pedal gives and they start rolling right back down. When they reach the bottom, they always end up getting stuck in this deep, bumper-destroying divot, wedged in there like a golf ball in a sand trap. Half the time, they give up on the hill and shamefully back out, lowering their gaze and praying no one saw their lapse in trucker judgment. The other half of the time, they end up gritting their teeth and putting the pedal to the metal again, revving their engines for a few minutes as their tires squeal against the asphalt before finally managing to get out of the rut. 

There’s always pride in these relentless truckers’ eyes, Scotty says: you’d think they just won the Nobel Prize in long-haul trucking. Their cup spilleth over with confidence–you couldn’t measure their smiles with a 39-and-a-half-foot pole. 

It’s inspiring to see, really. Overcoming boundaries, being resilient, kicking ass and taking names. They took the boldface “NO YOU CAN’T” on the sign and made it a self-empowering “YES I CAN!”

It lasts for all of about five minutes. 

Then, about halfway up the hill, Sisyphus strikes again. 

The only outcome is getting stuck. If not in the rut at the bottom of the hill, then in the cycle of going up and falling right back down. 

I get very ‘Stuck Truck’ about a lot of things in my life. No matter how many times I see a ‘Do Not Pass’ sign, I’m reminded of the striking example of someone who did, indeed, pass and lived to tell the story: Kafka wrote through his depression, “Starry Night” came from the walls of Van Gogh’s padded asylum room, and Zuckerberg coded Facebook while getting through finals at Harvard. 

Tenacity gets the best of me, and I forego warning signs that the task at hand may be my Stuck Truck Hill to keep on pushing, even though I know the fall, the burnout, the something’s-gotta-give, is inevitable. Quote-unquote “motivational” stories of people failing and getting back up tempt me into cycles of self-destruction that leave me, just like the truckers, stuck. Tired. Gutted and rutted. 

Failing.

“It’s not about how many times you fail, it’s about how many times you get back up.”

The end-all-be-all of the hard worker: if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. It’s a mantra that provokes images of Steve Jobs going from being fired from Apple to owning it years later, Charles Bukowski coining the phrase “failure is freedom” after getting his manuscripts rejected, and Walt Disney building a cartoon empire despite being told he “lacked creativity.” 

If only my failure could be so productive. 

That word: productive. The beast of productivity rearing its ugly head makes it clear I am not stuck at the bottom of a character-building challenge, but rather in front of an insurmountable wall of others’ expectations. The definition of ‘productivity’ feels sticky: a quick Google search tells me it’s “the state of producing something,” but it seems like more than that. It’s the act of producing something, sure, but it’s also measured by the products of that action. We could talk about how this is all rooted in capitalism and we need to shed our toxic individualist culture and there’s no ethical production in a system of subjugation and commodity fetishism and everything else bundled up in pro-cooperative economics, but productivity culture exists whether we like it or not. It exists, it’s awful, and its pronged definition prompts a couple of real-life situations that are difficult to reckon with:

1. An action doesn’t try to produce anything, yet does so anyway; and
2. An action tries to produce something and turns up empty. 

Both of these scenarios call into question the necessary and sufficient conditions for being productive, but I’d like to deviate from semantics to focus on the emotional valence of each option. When my success is effortless (say, I put together a word-vomit essay that renders the writers’ room speechless when I read it aloud), my god complex flares up. Not only does everything I touch turn to gold, but I have a moral responsibility to wield my Midas touch: effortful labor becomes a gross oversight in favor of ‘authentic expression’ (read that: I stop trying so hard). 

Alternatively, when I give every ounce of effort I have and my actions are still fruitless, I’m guilt-ridden. My identity as a ‘productive member of society’ convinces me that the only reason I’m not able to succeed is that I’m not trying hard enough. That there is always a reason to get back up, there is always another ounce of effort to give, always a tomorrow to prove myself. 

All this, and yet, I still cite my ‘lack of cognitive bandwidth’ as a reason I can’t string together words into poetry that’s supposed to be nonsense, anyways. 

The wave of guilt that rushes over me for knowing it’s time to quit is strong enough to pitch me off my cushy, therapy-talk cruise ship and back into the real world, the one where the going gets tough, the wind gets choppy, and I just have to keep afloat against the waves. Use the storm to my advantage–my sails need wind to move, anyway. 

Oars are never enough for a hurricane, though. No matter how much time I spend rowing, a couple of sticks won’t suffice for a steam engine. For all my effort, I end up in the same place as those damn truckers: trapped in a cycle of trying and failing before getting stuck at rock bottom with some comedian cracking jokes at my expense. 

The self-awareness can be paralyzing. Then, I remember: Holding guilt for not being productive is an inherently nonproductive act, as is ruminating about that guilt. As is failing to recognize my failure–as is anything but getting unstuck.

What I’ve come to realize is that self-sabotage is green-eyed and white-knuckled. It comes from a place of wanting to do more to prove that you’re not as much of a failure as you look like on paper, and it requires holding on tight to an impossible model of success whose only purpose is to keep you at the bottom. 

A major fallacy in the ‘productive’ mindset is assuming that the opposite of succeeding is stagnating. Passivity, inactivity, abandoning ship, getting the hell out of dodge can all be productive acts if they get you closer to your goals. Sometimes, taking the long way around Stuck Truck Hill is the only way to get over it.  Failure is a part of life, but you can’t try again unless you’re ready to accept success. 

This is especially important to consider when we take the time to consider what lies beyond Stuck Truck. The mountains we climb don’t exist in isolation; even Everest is part of a range. If the peak of Stuck Truck is diamond-studded, then maybe it’s worth changing your tires and giving it the old college try. But if the top of the hill is pyrite pride?

The only way to hit real gold is to dig. 

If you haven’t already surmised, I don’t mean digging in your heels and trying again. I mean dig, as in carving a new path. Finding a new hill to climb–one that’s worth the effort. One with a hump shallow enough to get over. 

A resounding, nearly soul-crushing admission: I need a shallow hump. 

At present, the top of my Stuck Truck is a life where I am thriving but not surviving. One where I don’t have to be human to live; a life where eating, sleeping, and socializing aren’t needed to live a fulfilling life, where the easiest way to happiness is through achievement and hard work. Perhaps a more accurate way of putting it would be not needing to live to live well. 

Not to one-up the truckers on Scotty’s street, but I’ve gotten to the top of the hill a couple of times. There were points in my life when I maintained a 4.0 GPA, had friends (even romantic relationships), held down a job, and was writing pages after pages every day, all without eating more than a protein bar or two and getting no more than six hours of sleep a night. I was great. Golden, even. As tempting as it is to scoff at Stuck Truck, being at the top of it gets you higher than New York stockbrokers on a Friday night. 

What I quickly came to learn as the boulder came to push me down: the things you put before your well-being are the first things failure takes from you. It came all at once. I did not see it coming. I’ll spare you the details of my sob story, but to put it lightly: my bumper bottomed out so hard that it fell off completely. 

The goals I’d set weren’t just lofty, they were illusory. They were a fantasy trying to convince me that I was the problem when it was them all along. It was easy enough to ignore the “DO NOT PASS” sign–if I was the reason I wasn’t reaching my goals, then I could be the solution, too. 

Now, setting realistic goals not only feels boring, but it seems like a failure in itself. To stoop so low as to have needs and take growth day by day–god, what an affront to all the potential that everyone’s seen in me my whole life! What about the grit and fortitude I’ve been trained to develop since learning about survival of the fittest in freshman biology?

As it turns out, fitness is relative. Somewhat counterintuitively, then, the easiest way to boost your fitness is to relocate to a more suitable environment, one that better suits your needs and is able to meet you where you’re at. A shallower hump. 

Not to say that we need to lower our standards if we’re ever going to succeed in life. Lowering the bar isn’t the motivation here–it’s lowering the stakes. Perhaps if I didn’t think I’d be left to die a spinster if I didn’t fit into a size zero or that I’d be stuck in dead-end minimum wage jobs for the rest of my life if I didn’t write a book a year, I wouldn’t have had to admit to an inpatient ward three separate times during the last quarter of my junior year. If I didn’t shoot so high, I wouldn’t have fallen so low. 

Setting the bar lower to achieve more seems like an oxymoron, but it makes sense when we consider the gross amount of resources required to achieve personal and material success. You need time, money, and know-how to coordinate your efforts as well as mental space to translate productive intentions into pragmatic actions. Building a house doesn’t just require wood, hammers, and construction workers; it also takes real estate deals, blueprints, and energy. You need to feed your workers, boost company morale, provide benefits, make sure the architect’s vision matches the renter’s budget matches the engineer’s specs matches–

It’s a lot, to say the least. The foundation is nowhere near the end of the story, and the only constant variable is that more shit will come to hit the fan. The only thing we can rely on to secure our success is ourselves and our capacity to think, adapt, and create. The only catch? 

You can’t do any of that if you’re stuck. 

So, to recap. The options when you fall down Stuck Truck are as follows:

1. Settle at the bottom 
2. Try, try again
3. Get better hardware
4. Find a new hill

All of these options exist, but the only viable one is also the hardest: finding a new hill. Bottoming out and futily trying to achieve an unattainable goal that will just knock you back down again is the same thing as giving in to hitting rock bottom. The things we need to change about ourselves to break this cycle (financial resources, physical ability, more time in the day) is usually out of our control. Just as you can’t magically spawn a new set of tires without going to the repair shop, you also can’t generate more brainpower when you’re already burnt out (no matter how you try to will it into existence). Strength takes work, and that work doesn’t involve getting stuck–it’s about growth.

Only one option remains: changing the goalpost. Admittedly, this is the option I like the least. Pivoting is so difficult not only because it’s an admission that I wasn’t good enough to accomplish the task at hand, but also because I don’t know where else to turn when I’ve been staring at the same hill for so long. Choosing another option requires admitting I failed and letting myself be lost for a while. 

Uncertainty, misplacement, dismooring–they’re uncomfortable, shaky feelings. This is in part because they’re ones we rarely have to experience in modern-day life: we commit to colleges before graduating high school, see if we connect with first dates over text before meeting them in person, Google how to get our dream job instead of trying to get the dream job.

There are few things we go into blind anymore, so placing yourself in a condition you’re forced to go into without knowing what to expect is daunting, to say the least. Paralyzing, even. No matter how necessary change is, uncertainty makes being stuck seem like a pretty rosy option.

The solution to all this is to make it easier to identify when you need to change and what that change needs to be–in other words, having a “DETOUR” arrow next to the “NOT A THRU STREET” sign. Our lives are not so neatly labeled, but we can work on making those signs clearer by identifying the minimal conditions of change for both current and future goals. It’s time to abandon ship if the current goal is either not worth achieving, impossible to achieve at the present moment, or both; if any one of these conditions are met, it’s nearly certain you’re going to end up either dissatisfied or stuck. The barrier of entry for future goals is harder to meet since the future goal must be both worth achieving and possible to achieve with the resources currently at your disposal, and the conjunctive conditions of new commitment are more demanding than the disjunctive ones of abandonment. This is true, this is brutal, this is bullshit; and yet, we still must change. 

Sony’s first product was a rice cooker that burned every batch it touched. Mark Cuban lost millions investing in powdered milk and a smartphone breathalyzer app. The founder of Liquid Death only started tactfully branding sparkling water because he couldn’t make it in the punk rock sphere. 

This, compared to the Trump administration’s continual failure to dispel the polarization running through its constituents. Elon Musk stuck on becoming the most powerful man in the world but approaching his responsibilities with petty personal disputes, hard drugs, and nazi salutes. Law enforcement failing to enforce due process in the face of a country protecting its people.

Change is scary, but stagnation is just plain sad. Change isn’t just a ‘should’; it’s our responsibility to ourselves and the world we live in. 

On one hand, reconceptualizing change in this way helps me stay motivated, but on the other, attaching the word ‘responsibility’ to change raises the stakes in a way that terrifies the shit out of me. Adding a moral imperative to change brings up a fear that I will do change ‘the wrong way,’ even though there is no ‘wrong’ way to change; even though I just spent all of five pages arguing against pursuing lofty goals with limited means, there are still some people who manage to make progress in their lives and achieve personal fulfillment in this way. These people are far and few between and often have privileged access to resources far beyond that of the average Joe, but, hey, bully for them. They’re still making progress, and that is enough.

As for the rest of us, the trick is to rebrand the rebrand. The way around the fear that comes from thinking about self-driven change as a necessary condition of being human is to emphasize the last part of that statement: being human. Even though we need to change, labeling and poking fun at our unproductive behaviors is empowering. Calling years of self-destruction and cyclic depression my personal “Stuck Truck Hill” makes it easier to manage, as does saying “I’m just a girl” help me cope with my urges to procrastinate that imposter syndrome-inducing project I’ve been putting off. As long as we don’t use these labels as excuses to stay stagnant, they help us laugh at our discomfort instead of wallowing in guilt; bond over our shared inadequacy while still moving forward; acknowledge the simultaneous banality and value of failure. Letting your dimples show when you make mistakes is the only real way to move on from them. 

The “Stuck Truck” bit ends with Scotty replacing the official “DO NOT PASS” sign with one reading “NOW APPROACHING STUCK TRUCK HILL.” Trucks still go up it, but Scotty’s noticed that fewer and fewer semis end up at the bottom of his street. He thinks it’s because they’ve finally learned their lesson. I think it’s because they’re too busy laughing at the new sign to notice that they’ve missed the turn, at all.