everyone should keep houseplants, pt 2

If there’s anything well-meaning weirdos love to do, it’s spout truisms. Allow me to recite a few that have been thrown in my direction over the years. Each truism gets a 3-emoji commentary from me.

“The right person will come along when you’re not looking for them.”

🙄🤔👹

“Sometimes working towards your goals takes the same faith you have when you water buried seeds. Keep going, your goals and your seeds need your consistency to sprout.”

🌱😓😠

“Life moves in seasons. If everything feels hard right now, that’s just your season. But seasons change, and so will your life circumstances.”

🍁🎄🤬

“Living things are more beautiful for the hardship they suffer.” (see: Kintsugi, anyone calling stretch marks “tiger stripes” or people with cancer “cancer warriors”).

🙅🏽🫠🙃

I am resistant to truisms because I find them oversimplified.

Just stop looking!

Finding a romantic relationship is a complicated mixture of effort, timing, and sheer kismet. Anyone in a stable, happy relationship who doesn’t think that there was dumb luck involved in the finding of said stable, happy relationship is a damn liar. I would describe my own relationship as exactly the mixture above. The maintenance of the stability and happiness in our relationship is due to our effort and care that we put in. But finding each other? Our effort was only a part of it, and the rest was timing and dumb luck.

You can see a little bit of truth in the sentiment that the right person will come along when you’re not looking. Maybe it’s acknowledging the luck and lack of control inherent in dating. But it’s oversimplified. It’s tossed at the lovelorn as a cure for their loneliness, when they will in fact have to put in effort and contend with timing and luck and not just “stop looking”.

Dating is a lonely game. Do we really need to make it worse by tossing empty truisms at people looking for love?

Faith like seeds

Many goals in life, both personal and professional, require huge amounts of patience. Paying off a home and developing visible muscle are two such goals of mine. Both requires years of patience before even minor results can be seen. I am currently paying off a home, and have worked for the better part of a decade to get moderate muscle definition in my arms. I can attest it took several years before I could see any muscle differentiation at all. I also grow plants from seed, and feel certifiably insane watering dirt for weeks before getting over-the-moon excited at the first appearance of seedlings.

I do actually find that growing plants from seed and working towards long term goals are quite a similar experience. But I dislike the truism all the same. It reeks of a puritanical work ethic that shoves down the shittiness of the waiting, and the grind of the consistency before you get any reward.

Would it kill us to allow the shittiness of the waiting some room to breathe? The lack of sunshine on that feeling might be letting it mold and fester. The weeks I spend watering my seeds before they sprout isn’t more fun or ‘redeemed’ because I am rewarded with sprouts eventually. I am motivated to continue the undesirable task because of the reward. The undesirable task will remain undesirable, despite bizarrely Mayflower-era-esque attempts to shine it up.

Everything’s a fucking season

I think this one just triggers me a bit because there is not one thing Evangelicals (and Baptists, in particular!) love more than calling something a “season”. You can’t turn around in Christian circles without hearing about someone’s “Season of Singleness” or “Season of Infertility” or “Season of Loss”. It’s amazing, really. You can take any perfectly normal episode of human suffering and turn it into something less ugly and Valencia-filtered simply by adding the “Season of” prefix.

I asked one of my oldest and dearest friends awhile back how long it took before I started feeling better after my dad passed. They were with me before, during, and after his death—so if anyone would know, it would be them. They didn’t miss a beat, and said,

“Oh, it took awhile. It wasn’t until I visited you on your study abroad year that you started to seem excited about life again, and talking about future plans again.”

Reader—the study abroad trip my friend is referring to happened four years after my dad died. I think that’s a fuckton longer than a damn season.

Those first four years after my dad passed are pretty blurry. Most of what I remember is feeling terrified I’d never be excited about anything again. I also remember fearing that my “Season of grief” would never end. I felt so ugly with grief that I didn’t think anyone wanted to really look at me…so maybe that was why they all said this was just a season. Anything to return to what’s easier to look at, I guess.

Please stop telling me about Kintsugi I already know about it

The year after my dad passed, teachers kept herding broken and lonely students my way. This was my senior year of high school. Any student who had experienced a loss or difficulty got herded towards me, with varying degrees of connection actually established between us. I can’t speak for what these teachers were thinking. But it wasn’t the first time and certainly hasn’t been the last time that someone has intuited, “oh Faith is nice! Send her the new kids, the woe begotten, the forlorn, the bereaved.”

If this pattern wasn’t generally followed by the new kids, woe begotten, forlorn, and bereaved vaulting off of my friendship to someone more charismatic after some time, I might think this was a compliment to my character.

Most charitably, I’d say people who do this generally think I am a kind person, and people need kind friends. If I was really stretching, I might suspect people think I am kind and willing to take in strays because I have suffered a much older woman’s losses.

I do not think this. I am kind in spite of my suffering. I am not so sure suffering is a gift. I am sure many suffering people are not lucky enough to have a support system, much less gold paste to put back together their broken parts.

but, like, the cynicism doesn’t feel right either

I am persistently turned off by truisms and triteness. I generally feel they are spoken by people uncomfortable with suffering, who would prefer not to look at it.

And yet, the cynicism in each section above doesn’t feel right either. It feels more like an echo of who I was ten years ago than who I am now.

Because who I am now treasures the journey from seed to sprout. She takes immense joy in the nurturing of the unseen until they pop up above ground, and stares at the tiny sprouts every day to marvel in their progress.

Who I am now owns a couple of houseplants like this one. Houseplants that are currently thriving, but went through a period of near-death for many months. This one in particular required my close attention for almost a year before it became this lush. I am moved looking at and contemplating this plant’s journey, because there was a point when I believed I had killed her with my ineptitude. But my skill and care brought her back, and a difficult period did not end her. The metaphor isn’t lost on me.

Who I am now keeps a very close watch on the pothos & philodendron in this photo, both of which used to live on my mom’s nursing home room window. Many of my memories of that nursing home are painful, even scary. But the fact that these plants lived with her for many months, and witnessed her suffering and continue to grow brings a singular energy to my home. They remind me of her, and I think her life force propels their improbable growth somehow. Maybe there is a unique, vital, brutal beauty to the the life that emerges out of great suffering.

Who I am now surrounds herself with these living things as a reminder that growth and beauty require effort and care. These plants also remind me that periods of wilting and loss of leaves are not permanent and can be healed with some time and patience. It also doesn’t hurt that the practicality of caring for something other than yourself tends to lift you out of a black mood.

Who I am now is protective of my younger, lonelier self who wanted so desperately to be seen, but felt too ugly with grief, rage, and loneliness in a world seemingly full of aesthetes.

I guess I don’t hate truisms, not really. Still wish they’d exit the lexicon. But keeping houseplants has shown me the grains of truth in the trite. You might find it too, if you build yourself a little indoor jungle.

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