There is this expression I first encountered in playing Magic The Gathering (which is probably used in a lot of card games, but I don’t really play many card games so I’ve got no idea) that I wish more people were familiar with so I could actually use it as much, and in as wide a variety of situations, as it pops into my mind. Sure, the explicit meaning of “top-decking” is that you’re using whatever you draw from your deck as you draw it, but the actual meaning behind that says a lot more. You see, when you’re playing one of these card games, you are generally using a deck built around a specific function or theme. You’ve assembled cards to enable types of play to help you win and the rest of your deck is usually built to get those cards into your hands or to respond to other types of play so you have the time you need to get a winning combination in place. So, when you’re top-decking, what that usually means is that you’re out of options, you’ve done everything within your power at the moment, and all you can do is respond in the moment with whatever comes into your hand. You have no ability to respond to other players’ actions and all you can do for the future is hope that you eventually draw something you need or that will get you what you need. Which is how living my life feels a lot of the time.

I lack the power to really make any kind of useful change in my life in any kind of immediate sense. Job hunting takes time and is largely dependent on the whims and desires of prospective employers. Finding a new apartment is the same, except you substitute “landlords” for “employers.” Trying to make plans with other people is similar, though I tend to find my friends and social associates much more reliable and predictable than most landlords and employers. All I’ve really got control over is how I think about myself. Hell, even at work, where I’ve got the most control in any aspect of my life, I routinely get left in a position where I have no way of knowing what’s going on and have to just work on whatever comes up or with whatever I can cobble together last-minute since so much of my team seems to be allergic to any kind of longer-term thinking than “when’s our next meeting.” My entire life feels like I’m out of cards to play and just have to hope that I’ve got things set up well enough that I can act effectively whenever I finally get any ability to act, no matter what my options are or what that entails. I wish more people outside of my circles of friends knew what “top decking” meant so I could use it as widely as it feels applicable in my life. I’d use it constantly at work, since it’s a nice encapsulation of what my week-to-week life is like, but literally none of my coworkers would understand what it means at any level without an explanation of every bit of nuance to the phrase.

I’ve only ever said it out loud once, entirely by accident, on a day I was sleep-deprived and seven hours in to what I knew was going to be a twelve-hour work day. I was in the middle of setting up a test with one of the mechanical engineers I was working with and, to counter his dour attitude about our likely failure, I was telling him that at least we were in a position of having done everything else we could, so now all we could do keep top-decking variations until we found something that worked. In my defense, beyond being tired and worn out, we’ve been in a position of waiting for new gear to test for weeks at this point, just slapping together whatever we can when something new comes in and testing that as much as possible before settling back in to wait, all while occasionally getting pressure and information from outside sources. I had to explain what I meant and he agreed with my assessment, but it was still a weird moment since the phrase had just slipped out because I was rambling while focused on actually doing the work. It’s just such a precise representation of how we were operating, of how most of my life functions, that I really want to use it more widely than I can.

I wish I had more cards to play most of the time. I wish I wasn’t in a situation where every option I had has been played already and all I can do is hope that it all works out before something else happens that causes my entire setup to come crashing down around me. I wish I had more control and less precarity. I wish a stupid phrase that grew out of a card game wasn’t an appropriate phrase/metaphor for me entire life. I wish I hadn’t been so worn out from everything going on in my life–job hunting, apartment hunting, confronting my landlord, figuring out how to balance my life, plans falling through, insomnia, and every other damn thing–that I hadn’t needed two days off of work just to get back to being able to function. I wish I’d written this yesterday when the thought occurred to me instead of today, the day it was supposed to post, but I just didn’t have the energy to engage with this between dealing with work stuff leaking into my life and working for part of the day. I wish I wasn’t going into the future, top-decking blog posts as I go, because I’ve just been too worn out to engage the active, creative part of my brain until I was out of blog posts. But that’s what the buffer is for. That’s what my plans are for. So far, I’ve been able to keep myself going without anything failing on me. I’ve been able to anticipate most pitfalls and, over time, adjust to avoid them. My process is working so that, even as I’m top-decking most of my life, I am keeping things on track for a slow, painful, but likely success. It just sucks that all of this is true, even if I’m managing to make it work.