A Conversation With Rainesford Stauffer (Author of An Ordinary Age)

I’ve been thinking a lot about self-care and self-improvement this week. My mind has specifically gone to how we describe our life when it’s at its fullest or we’re at our most cared for. Do we call it complacency or do we see fulfillment? Are we constantly drawn by the promise of “more” simply because it’s deemed the antithesis of “settling” or is more actually what we’re after?

We all have different answers to those questions. If you pick up An Ordinary Age by Rainesford Stauffer you’ll be able to read some of them.

I picked up the book out of a deep-seated interest to see how someone else defined the word “ordinary.” For me, it’s never been a bad word. I’ve always wanted ordinary in my life. I found it synonymous with peace, fulfillment, and joy.

It was therefore really fun and interesting to read how Stauffer, and the handful of young adults she interviewed for the book, also perceived it. Plus, how interconnected the idea of an “ordinary life” was to our current perception of hustle culture, self-care culture, and content creation.

The book reads as part memoir, part research book, and ultimately challenges our need to be extraordinary by asking us why, when, and at what expense we decided we needed to be extraordinary in the first place.

During our conversation there was a moment when we got real about the ebbs and flows of life. Stauffer said:

“Something is not going to go according to plan, something is going to go exactly to plan. And we [could] realize, oh man, this was not the right plan for me at all. We're going to grieve. We're going to fall apart. It's going to be messy.”

I’ll add — it’s going to be life. A life where not everything is cropped to fit in a 4:5 dimension because it wasn’t supposed to in the first place.

“I still think that [life] kind of gets packaged a lot of the times in a way where even the messiness is supposed to be extraordinary. We're supposed to come out eventually with this great lesson. And I think, in a lot of ways, it's more important to give ourselves space to see [moments like those]… as just sort of part of [life], not necessarily something we have to overcome.”

Just re-reading the quote feels like a life full of work. It’s exhausting to aim for perfectionism and extraordinary, particularly when ordinary already manages to be both beautiful and really hard to handle on some days.

Below I ask Stauffer some more questions about her book and the reason why we’re all here — the ordinary.

Let’s start with a very important question — why should people read your book?

Stauffer: My name is Rainesford Stauffer. I'm a freelance writer and reporter, you should read my book if you're tired and exhausted and lonely and feeling like you're never doing enough, you're never enough as a person, and that it's never going to be enough and are interested in hearing what other people have to say about this. Chronic never enoughness. [To add], I think the biggest thing that I learned about “self-care” while reporting the book was that it disenfranchises a lot of people. It leaves a lot of people out. It doesn't give us the resources or the space to talk about things like mental health or grief, or just figuring out what feels good to us personally, without the other version of what we ought to be doing.

Why did you choose the word “ordinary” both for the title and to describe this lifestyle choice throughout the book?

Stauffer: I think that ordinary was a word that when I was first reporting this and trying to figure out like what the word we were going to use was that I kept hearing it from people when they were talking about — when am I just going to be good enough as is, this version of me not the future version, not the more enlightened or further along in their career, or just more optimized and better right now. So, I think for ordinary, it came to represent for me kind of ourselves as is, the self that we have by our own definition. ”Ordinary” is the fundamental who we are, what we value or what we do that sort of exists separate from the noise of what we're supposed to be doing or what we think we're supposed to be doing.

Throughout the book you tie in the concept “self-improvement” and how it’s been whittled down to be synonymous with self-care the business model….

Stauffer: I think the lines have kind of gotten blurred between what it means to continue growing in your knowledge and in your life and in what feels good and in what you want to contribute versus this very buzzwordy self-improvement. I'm going to go, go, go all the time. Eventually I think this is kind of the false promise. Like, “I'm going to reach a point where I'm good enough and then I'll relax,” and what we know from capitalism, from branding, from there always being another product for this is that we're never actually going to reach that threshold because that’s not to [the economy’s] benefit. It's not to the benefit of these structures, brands, and products who want to keep us engaged in this idea that there's always a better self out there.

“Settled” is another word you use a lot throughout the book and I love how you retake its meaning from being something that someone should be ashamed by to being empowering…

Stauffer: Yeah, I think that that's such a great point. I get completely confused by how settling has come to mean anything other than being settled, which to me is like such an incredibly privileged, precious sensation in a lot of ways. I think that sometimes we get so caught up in this idea that if you're not uncomfortable that means you're not growing — and to an extent that's probably true. I think it's good to continue to learn. I think it's good to embrace new lines of thought and grow in that way. But this comfort in your life and in your own skin that is kind of an important thing.

I think that that really underestimates the value of feeling settled, a feeling steady, a feeling like you've got the resources you need to care for yourself in a way that feels good right now, not five years or five months from now. In terms of the sort of social media versus reality, I think we see that all the time. We all know comparison is not good for us and that that's something that happens on social media at such a large scale, but I think what gets talked about a little less often maybe is how social media becomes one more way where we're supposed to illustrate the realist version of ourselves. I think it leads to this thing where now, because everybody's being quote unquote authentic or real all the time, you're kind of sitting there thinking, wait, this is what real and raw looks like, mine still just seems so much messier. It becomes this internalized pressure that if you're not ready to share a part of your life on social media, if you're not ready to navigate identity or grief or loss or whatever it is in that way, that you're kind of buying into this toxic culture of only showing your highlight reel. I think we need a lot more grace for ourselves in regard to who is going to get our truest versions and realizing that that ebbs and flows too.

And so that's one of the things that I really loved of the book in general, but it really underscored this idea that ordinary actually is way more permissible if who you actually are versus the idea of what extraordinary is supposed to be.

Stauffer: “Ordinary” holds space, hopefully for the idea that we're going to change how we feel about ourselves, we’re going to change our identities, or our circumstances. These are things that are not set in stone in a way that I think expectations of living an extraordinary life or a best life [assume they will be]. I've gotten some comments where people are like, well, why wouldn't I want to live my best life? It's like, if I've only got one life here on earth, why wouldn't I want to make the most of it? And I think that that's an important point because the clarifier there is you want to do what is best for you and your health and your community and how you're feeling. I think that it's of course fine to live whatever your best version is, day to day, as long as it's coming from you and not this expectation of, well, this is what a good life has to be.

You can follow Rainesford Stauffer on Twitter and read her book An Ordinary Age: Finding Your Way In A World That Expects Exceptional.