Half-assing the holiday season

It's beginning to look a lot like an anti-perfectionist Christmas (and also: low expectations, anti-capitalism and tips for a low stakes holiday season.)

Hello friends,

How are you all holding up so far?

This season feels more intense than the average holiday season, and also not much like a holiday season either. Is that just me?

Perhaps it’s because it’s still, by all measures, HOT in Bangkok. Like, going to the pool hot. Like, not going for long walks in the middle of the day hot.

Also, the state of the world feels more dire than usual. I find myself desperately trying to fabricate joy, because I need to to counter-balance the worry and sadness in the news.

I also think the combo of neurodivergence and December can be super tough, even on a good year.

So I’d like to talk a bit about why we could all get on board with low expectations and anti-perfectionism this season. And like, as an on-going, general vibe too.

I wrote a guest post for my friend Kel’s substack

subsomatic

some time ago about low expectations and how they are fundamentally patriarchal, capitalistic and oppressive (not to mention exhausting!).

Why it might be worth lowering your expectations.

While I am a fan of lowering our expectations just as a general way to get through life, I think the holiday period is the perfect time to begin!

It’s also the time of year when many of us set ourselves up for a nice little end of year burnout, which makes this little project even more important!

Here are my main reasons for lowering our expectations around our children and ourselves:

If your expectations are low, you’re much more likely to meet them! Ha! This is a joke but also not a joke, because it’s actually a fact.

As an ND mother to ND kids, high expectations have only done us harm: they’ve actively made us anxious, paralyzed and ashamed when we inevitably don’t fulfill whatever we were supposed to have done. Sometimes the bar is set high by ourselves, but so often it’s actually set up, in an unspoken way, by social norms and systems. Both of those things can be so toxic. And while we can more easily push back on self-imposed expectations, or expectations set by our own family or community, we can also work to disobey social expectations.

And what actually is the point of setting a high bar? Are we more likely to be successful, to do well (whatever those things mean), if we set our sights super high? The answer to this is probably it depends, although we now have quite a bit of compelling research that links low expectations with more enjoyment and less likelihood of disappointment, better childhood and teen mental health (this was a great book about that), increased regulation for our children (and ourselves!), and a better parent-child relationship.

For the sake of honesty, you could probably find studies that link high expectations to All Good Things, like this one from Sweden. That’s just the way with studies - you can literally prove anything because there are studies about many many things. Even scientists and researchers have agendas, it turns out. (And yet there are still not enough studies about children learning without school, go figure.)

In education circles, low expectations = underachievement so it’s kinda frowned upon. This bears mentioning. But I’m going to make a distinction here between thinking highly of who our child, or we, or someone else, IS/ARE AS A PERSON, and expecting them to ACHIEVE GREAT THINGS.

I think as long as we conflate our value as a human with how successful we are and how much we achieve, we will struggle to get behind lowering expectations, because low expectations will always feel like we are telling ourselves, our child, or someone else, THAT THEY ARE NOT CAPABLE of doing great things, and that therefore THEY ARE NOT CAPABLE AND WORTHY as a human.

Please excuse the wild CAPS thing I’m doing. It had to be emphasized!! I’m saying it like that in my head, promise.

To me, low expectations simply mean that we don’t tie our own or our child’s value to what they achieve or do or say or believe. We see their inherent value for just existing. And so we need not have expectations for their actions, because we already know they are worthy. We are worthy.

Does that make sense?

So I suppose I prefer to look at this from a personal lens, and a systems lens (as opposed to looking at studies, that is.)

High expectations are the ways we get roped into propping up systems of oppression. We need to be first, be successful, get the grades, be well-behaved, exceed all the milestones, be the youngest person to ever do a thing, be the fastest, the wittiest, the thinnest, the everything-est.

Even language betrays us here. High is obviously better than low, right? I mean the words tell the entire story! We need to be always working towards a goal, making progress, bettering ourselves, aiming high, going high, looking up, onwards and upwards, and all that.

What language tells us is we are incomplete and flawed and we should always, always be trying to be better. Trying to prove we are worthy. We should always be moving (upwards, or forwards) and never stagnate, be still, loiter, fail to launch, stay the same.

And so should our children, of course.

Except - why? Reclaiming expectations means we get to take back this narrative. The same narrative that creates hierarchies, that keeps certain people in power and others struggling (because we all now recognise that the place we start at in our hypothetical trajectory, is not a level playing field).

But what about anti-perfectionism?

Anti-perfectionism is NOT the opposite of perfectionism (that would be flawed, another vague meaningless word). It’s not being imperfect all the time (although that is completely okay and encouraged!). Anti-perfectionism is actively pushing back on perfectionism as an individual aim, and as a toxic culture. It’s related, but different.

For me, it is getting stuff done in whatever way we can. Deciding not to do stuff we cannot. Saying no. Writing an email and ignoring the typos. Not obsessing over how we look or what we said or what person X thinks. Figuring out what really matters to us, so we can work on that and put our energy and efforts into that, and simply doing a mediocre job on what doesn’t matter as much because, well.. it doesn’t matter.

Elizabeth Gilbert

calls this becoming “a deeply disciplined half-ass.” I think she means working hard on what we love, but not attaching perfectionism to it. She sees perfectionism as not really being about us, but about other people - how they see us, what they will think, whether they will like us. It is linked to the male gaze and the white gaze and, for children, to the adult gaze.

Gilbert points out that perfectionism claims to be about goodness, when in fact it is just “fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat, pretending to be elegant when actually it’s just terrified.”

We absolutely live in a culture where perfect is good and imperfect (also known as actually who we are) is bad.

All of this is intentional.

It’s intentional that we actually don’t even know what perfect is, because the bar is always shifting. That is how we end up feeling like we are always aiming for perfection but never reaching it. That is why Margot Robbie, in the Barbie movie, is essentially the epitome of what white supremacist, patriarchal capitalism considers perfect, and yet doesn’t actually FEEL perfect. She IS stereotypical Barbie ie. by definition the ‘perfect’ Barbie, and still she is seeking something. She feels flawed, not good enough, purposeless.

This is not only an individual issue, it’s a systemic one, and those of us who are subject to systems of oppression, will feel it most.

In Me and White Supremacy, Layla Saad speaks to how perfectionism is often used as an excuse for inaction and silence. Because perfectionism is a tool our society uses to paralyze us, to keep us separate, competing and fearful of showing ourselves and of showing up for others or for issues we believe we don’t know enough about.

As an aside: I’m married to a cis white man, and I’m convinced that being perfect was never on his radar. Because frankly, it’s not required of him. He fits in every space. He is seen and heard in every space. He is not even required to be qualified, just to exist. Every single place is for him. A bit like when Ken lands on Venice Beach (sorry, more Barbie references!!) and realizes people are looking at him like he belongs, with plain admiration and no “undertone of violence.”

Our social, political and economic systems lead us to believe we should always be working towards perfection, we should always be setting ourselves big goals (and that in fact both of these things are not only keys to success, but socially acceptable, and arguably sometimes required, ways to exist in the world).

And the truth is that the result of both high expectations and perfectionism is never feeling like enough.

There is no actual highest point and there is no actual perfection - and so you will never, ever reach either of those things. Ever. You will keep striving and questioning whether you’re doing it right and feeling like there is something inherently wrong with you, your parenting, your motherhood, your abilities and your achievements.

High expectations and perfectionism are by definition - and in real life - unachievable.

Some chilling but important words by Toko-pa Turner:

“Perfectionism is a virus, wide-spread in Western culture, which keeps us running on the treadmill of never-enoughness. It is inherently deadening for how it strives and never arrives. Failure is embedded in its very pursuit, because humanity can never be homogenized. And yet, we are constantly being harangued into sameness, the conditions upon which our inclusion hinges.”

Anti-perfectionism is what Turner describes as the antidote to perfectionism: “not to measure up, but to use a different barometer altogether.”

This is what I am seeking with my entire being. I often fall back into conditioned patterns, but I never fail because I refuse to be perfectionist about being anti-perfectionist!! (more on that below).

Low expectations and anti-perfectionism are literally achievable right now. Like, sitting or standing or wherever you are right now - you’re doing it. You’ve arrived.

Congratulations! You are just where you should be.

And in that spirit, I want to share a few things I’m not aiming for and actively trying to not do (low expectations), or to simply get done, or done to an entirely different set of standards, in which ever way I see fit (anti-perfectionism) this holiday season:

Our countdown to Christmas calendar. We are Christmas-loving secular folk. Some of you may know from IG that we started our countdown in November, so we could get it all done by Dec 12 when we leave for Rome. Our countdown calendar is SUPER low expectations and low demands. It includes things like “Rest” and “Watch a Christmas movie” and “Reach out to a friend” and “Play holiday music.” I don’t think it requires any actual supplies! Which phew, thanks goodness for that. I don’t know about you but I cannot be doing with gathering a million supplies for all the amazing crafts we’ll never do. So far, our only activity that involved concerted effort was making Christmas cards and we are yet to do that.

Low stakes baking. Sometimes that means you buy the supermarket mince pies (I love mince pies!) and re-heat them. Because who has the time or energy to make mince pies?! (Also if you’re confused about what mince pies are, I love these.) Actual baking that we do is sugar cookies. I use this recipe for the actual cookies, and then I make very easy buttercream icing and buy a bunch of christmassy sprinkles to go with.

Low demand decorations. Remember how anti-perfectionism means we go by a completely different measure of what is good and right? Well, your home doesn’t need to look like any other home. You don’t need to cover it with decorations - unless you want to! Like genuinely want to. One Christmas we didn’t even have a tree. Do my children still talk about it because it was so awful? Nope. Nobody even remembers apart from me.

Low expectation presents. My siblings and I are making donations in each other’s name instead of gifts this year. I literally couldn’t be more thrilled. Setting expectations with my children around how many gifts and what sort of thing they want/need, also means there will be less disappointment from them on the day! And they can focus more on all the other stuff.

Anti-perfection is also anti-consumerist (sometimes). There’s probably a lot to say about this but basically - our Christmas will be amazing with our old things from last year. It is if we say it is! I’m hoping to put some stuff on our local Buy Nothing group, or throw some old things out. I’m buying no new decorations. I’m going to try to buy from small businesses where I can, but also I know this isn’t always possible and I’m not going to hold myself to impossibly high standards if I need to order some things from amazon.

Not doing anything holiday-ish. You can just live your life and not do a single festive thing. You don’t have to, but you CAN. The drum is yours - you make your own beat. Nobody will judge you, and even if they do, it’s really a them problem.

Children will remember how it felt rather than the details. They really will. The traditions we do have are ones I introduced once the kids were older. I just couldn’t get my shit together when they were little. Guess what? No-one even remembers. We have few, solid, easy things we have been doing for 4ish years and it literally feels like we’ve been doing them forever. We measure them by an entirely different barometer

Be anti-perfectionist about anti-perfectionism. And no, that does not translate to being a perfectionist! It just means this: we don’t have to try to be perfect at anti-perfectionism. In other words, there might be things that really matter to us that we want to do really well, and we get to define what really well means.

Do it all if it brings you joy. Maybe you love all the things and they make you feel good and your family is super on board with holiday fun. Yay for you!! You absolutely go do all the things, in whichever way suits you. That too, is anti-perfectionist. You get to do it all your way.

I hope some of this resonated with you!

I love to chat in the comments, and I love when people share ideas I haven’t thought of or just say hello!

Thank you for reading, and I’m wishing you a wonderful start to this season.

Fran x