I was going to write about how frustration is the most common emotion I feel these days, but I’m not sure. Exhaustion is right up there. They’re kind of the same.

Here’s a feeling that happens a lot: I’m under little pressure, but I become frustrated because any single move is impossible, and I am rewarded with the sonic and emotional equivalent of intermittent electric shocks.

Here’s a concrete instantiation of that feeling: kid and I go to the playground. It’s 5 blocks away; let’s walk! On the way, the following things happen:

• he refuses to hold my hand, and I have to judge whether it’s worth it to insist; he’s on the sidewalk, he’s not the kind of kid to make a break for the street, and I could catch him if he did, so I decided not to
• he sees a rusty gas meter on someone’s house and just keeps touching it; is that ok? I guess?
• he opens someone’s gate and walks up to their front steps. I tell him not to (idk? I guess if they’ve got a gate they don’t want us to just randomly open it? there’s no dog, but maybe it’s for a dog?) and guide him back out to the street. He fights me a bit but doesn’t melt down.
• he runs his hand along the paint on someone else’s house. It’s old and flaking and probably full of lead. Well, he’s not eating it :shrug:
• he sees a stop sign and goes “a stop sign!” “ooh a stop sign!” about a dozen times
• while we’re crossing a street, he refuses to hold my hand. That’s not an option, I hold tight to his hand, and he yells and cries once we get to the other side.
• he wants to run. He starts running and I walk fast to keep up with him. He says “dada run??” so I kinda half-jog so it looks like I’m running. He seems content with this. After about 30 feet he stops.
• he sees a Little Free Library box. He opens and closes the door 5 times. He points at each book and goes “what’s that?” Each time I tell him, “a book.” He picks one up “ooh a book” and then tries to put it back but it’s hard to fit it back on the shelf (pages facing in; the pages kinda splay out around other books). So I help him a bit. He repeats a few times. He takes the book out and “flips through it”, bending it a little in the process, but at least not ripping it. I suggest “want to put it back and go to the playground?” He ignores me. Eventually he does put it back. We walk away. A couple steps away he runs back to the library box and picks the book out again. A few times I have suggested “want to put the book back and move on?"; he has always ignored me. Eventually it catches, though, and he does so.

A more zen person than me would realize that we are just killing time so who cares if it takes a while? And I am kind of like that; most of these things, I don’t force him to move on, I just let him explore and take his time. But it is exhausting for me. Exhausting because we are changing directions multiple times a minute. I just get started walking this way… and now we’re walking that way. (And if I try to get him to walk this way again, he’ll either ignore me or start screaming and crying.)

I wish there was a word for this. Micro-frustration. Everything’s a yak shave. It feels like if you had allergies, but every so often when you went to wipe your nose, it didn’t work and an airhorn came out of your nose instead, so you had to gently coax your nose back to working.

The frustrating thing is that the answer doesn’t seem to be psychological. It’s not like “I just have to let go of my anxiety around ___” or “realize that I don’t have to control ___.” It feels like being a little bit on fire, and the only solution is to “just get ok with being a little bit on fire.” That feels like a much harder adjustment to make, than to update some thinking patterns.