Meet Montana: Becoming Dishwashable In a World At War With Itself

Part 1 of Story 4

One of the key features of being verdictless - which is the core tenet of my “life as an experiment” period - is letting life live me.

By verdictless, I mean forgoing the assumption that I am seeing reality accurately, and deliberately adding time before collapsing into the conclusion my conditioning offers as “right.”

It’s staying with experience - out of the mind- long enough that I don’t rush to decide who’s right, who’s wrong, or even what something means - especially because I know how easily I could become rigid and certain and convinced I’m right if I don’t.

I spent most of my life consumed by thinking. I lived in my mind, not my body. It was indeed a maladaptation.

Long, long ago, I learned that when life hurt, I could leave my body and enter my mind. There, I would be safe. There, I could think my way into solutions. There, I could use that human-only gift of the frontal lobe, which allows us - unlike other species - the ability to create our own meaning for each and every situation.

Inside that frontal lobe, I could construct a story that inverted my interpretation of reality. I could make my chronic household enemy the good guy and make the trauma I was living through my fault. At least that way, I still had control.

That way, I could manufacture harmony for a nervous system that desperately needed it. If the problem is us and not them, well, that’s easy. We can “fix” ourselves, right? 

Similarly, someone on the other side of that equation can construct their own version of reality, too. Only instead of turning it inward, they turn it outward - using story and hierarchy together to dictate reality for others, and slowly strip sovereignty away.

(Are you picking up what I’m throwing down in the world of foreshadowing with a title like the one I threw at ya?) ;-)

But the thing about story as an escape is that then you have to stay inside of it to keep feeling the harmony it brings you.

And that means limiting your interaction with any reality that could threaten yours.

Or, I suppose as an alternative, you could just war against those realities, if that’s more your thing.

Either way, it means not being in your body as much. Not being in intuition. Not being in sensory experience. Not being in life as a biological creature was intended.

The muscle memory of using story to invert reality as a pain reliever when I was young, turned into my primary way of seeing reality. Eventually, I didn’t even really see malevolence in the world, because this practice had rewired my entire worldview. 

It wasn’t until I wrote the book Age Is Irrelevant - a book about the dangers a woman faces in every decade of life - and did the research required to do it justice, that everything I had come to think about the world finally got challenged.

Oh, so there actually ARE dangers, I realized when reality collided with my inverted lens. Crap.

That was inconvenient timing. I couldn’t write about a topic until I was living fully within its conviction. So the book came with a little unexpected personal excavation of old schtuff to process. That hadn’t been part of the writing timeline.

And once the book was complete in 2022, I had to make sense of the mess created when I essentially detonated my worldview in order to honor the subject matter I had committed to representing. The Ohio to Oregon experiment really kicked off this rebuild period. 

I know I’m not alone in the camp that ended up with wiring like this. And as everyone knows, relationships of every kind play out in really imbalanced ways when you’re living inside this kind of inverted lens. For both those who use inversion to deflect inward, and those who do so outward, life ain’t great. 

So Montana, I committed, would be all about getting back in my body and letting life live me.

And if you’re asking, what does that mean exactly, letting life live you?

To me, it’s the difference between understanding something and being rearranged by something. It’s taking all that I’ve studied on my journey into self-awareness and self-expansion and self-improvement and - let’s be honest - self-survival, and basically saying to life, okay, now live me. Live me in a way that makes these insights come through my body, the people I encounter, the situations that fall into my existence, my nervous system, my solitude, my (evidently) countertop dishwasher. Help me know what the books talk about - but know it viscerally, through lived experience, not just intellect.

And in this beautiful state of Montana where story won’t save you, life will live you, alright - in the most obvious and amazing story-worthy ways, and also in the most mundane, sometimes embarrassingly story-worthy ways.

This one you’re about to join me in, I believe, is of the latter category.

So come with me as I share how I became dishwashable as of a week ago, and how in this process I’ve begun to embody a clear orientation to this time of near civil war in the U.S.

It might sound like a stretch right now. But, stick with me.

Before we begin, though, I need a favor from you.

I need you to prepare yourself to be the most judgmental you can possibly be. You may not end up experiencing judgment, and that’s okay. But if you do, that’s great. The important thing is that you’re gearing yourself up to judge the ever-loving heck out of me.

And with that, let me take you to the moment three weeks ago, when life began playing out the conclusion of an insight I had no idea had been in the making for the last thirteen months.

Here goes. 

The scene: Friday night. Montana. Jenn sitting on her velvet couch, her tv playing Man on the Inside, heat warming the space. She has just ceased her efforts to fix the countertop dishwasher that had died earlier that evening. She texts her friend John who has known her for 15 years, and who somehow loves even her ugliest insides: 

“John - what. am. I going. to. do? My countertop dishwasher is toast. I’ve been trying to fix it and it’s just toast. It was $210 and I got a year and four weeks out of it. I’m throwing a total hissy fit. I just needed three more months out of this thing until I move. And I don’t think I can justify getting a new one for just three more months. I was having such a good day. Now I’m so frustrated. I don’t know how to live without a dishwasher.”

K. So, I mean, ewwwww. Amiright?

Did you bring your best judgement?

Did your insides feel repulsed and serve up words like privileged, first world problems, or something worse?

Let me tell you, I had a pretty gnarly judge inside of me. A few of them, actually.

There was 

1. The part of me who chose to leave behind things for nature.

2. The part of me who built a skincare strategy business in part as a place of refuge for those who just want to honor biology and age gracefully instead of chasing a standard that is completely arbitrary and designed to make you feel less sovereign in your own skin.

And let’s not forget 

3. The part of me who remembers being made fun of as a teenager for being too high maintenance.

There were plenty of parts of me judging me.

And then there was the defense team.

1. The part of me who knows we’re all born into this life in some way, shape, or form-into a community, a culture, a home, a socio-economic status - where there are things you’re exposed to that build one by one into what becomes normal and your baseline.

2. The part of me that is so tired of always trying to be verdictless, the part that wants to say, hey, how about you just, for once, say yes to what you freaking want or believe or react to instead of always waiting to conclude.

3. The part of me that has learned to love all parts of me, even the parts I want to change.

These advocates are pretty powerful at this phase in my life, having left the self-abandonment years in the past.

But before I tell you how that internal debate resolved, let me share something that at a minimum can offer a smile, because it showcases such genuine love that people have for each other.

Within a minute or two of sending that hissy fit text, John sent a Venmo.

“Buy the dishwasher. Stop the fight, Jenn. I don’t want you to have to worry about this.”

He knew that if it became a gift, all the internal warring would subside. He wanted peace for me.

And let me tell you, I proceeded to order that countertop dishwasher faster than anyone in the history of online ordering has ever placed an order.

It would take seven days for shipping. Seven days of surviving doing my dishes with the “dirty” Columbia Falls water that I’ve yet to fully make peace with in the sixteen months since landing here.

But admittedly, behind the immense relief of having purchased the replacement countertop dishwasher, I felt dissonance. Slight, but present. That was my first clue that there was more to this story.

To understand why this dishwasher could send me straight into a spiral, I have to take you back to when I first arrived here in September of 2024.

That way, you’ll have context to add to your judgement or non judgment. I wonder if this will change anything within you as you learn more about my hissy fit ugly? 

When I moved into this little guest house, I knew there wasn’t a dishwasher. I believe I thought I’d suddenly transform into Montana Jenn upon arrival. I thought the things I’d grown accustomed to would become irrelevant in a new environment. Historically, that had been true.

When I rented the little bungalow in Charlevoix, Michigan, I adjusted. In the little green house in the Upper Peninsula, I did the same. 

But here’s the difference I hadn’t considered: 

Michigan Jenn was pretty much vacation Jenn. She still had her house and life back in Ohio. Everyone can tolerate a shift in comforts when it’s temporary.

Montana wasn’t vacation. Montana was the container I stepped into after having left every prior identity behind. Intentionally. Curiously. Excitedly. And, as it turns out, unrealistically when it came to living comforts.

When I first moved in, I just about lost my mind.

Maybe I could have handled no dishwasher if not for everything else that made me feel dirty. And the water - the thing that facilitates cleanliness - felt dirty.

It smelled like a penny and made my body smell like one too.

It made my face swell. 

It turned my hair (and anything else it comes in contact with) orange and brittle and somehow thick and thin and dry and oily at the same time.

And then there were the dishes. Dishes that never felt clean. With water that felt dirty.

Where could I go to feel clean?

It was rough. For weeks I wrestled between what felt reasonable to expect of myself, what I wished would be different about my conditioning, and how I could solve the problems one by one.

I ordered a gravity-fed water purifier. Faucet filters. A shower filter.

But I refused to solve the dishwasher problem, because judgment had entered the room.

Here’s what was actually happening in my kitchen.

There were two opposing perspectives, both screaming.

One was my conditioning. I needed that dishwasher with a capital N. I needed it for nervous system regulation. Deep familiarity. Safety in cleanliness. This perspective was very convicted in its truth. It demanded the world yield to its emotion.

The other was ideology. Rooted in a “leave things for nature” orientation. Moralized. Hierarchical. You’re wrong for needing this. You’re privileged. You’re a city girl. You don’t belong here.

Side note on ideologies: as well-intentioned as they aim to be, their catalyzing force is often denigration. They leverage righteousness while quietly diminishing the opposite polarity in order to motivate movement away from what’s familiar. Even when polite on the surface, the energetics underneath can be polarized.

So those two sides went to war inside of me.
And guess what didn’t happen?

I didn’t change.

There’s a line in John Mayer’s song Belief that kept looping in my head:

"Is there anyone who ever remembers changing their mind from the paint on a sign?"

And I would picture myself driving I-71 South in Ohio, passing billboard after billboard telling me I would go to hell if I wasn’t saved.

And I wondered if those ever actually inspired change in anyone. Because they didn’t in me.

And neither did trying to shame myself into not needing a dishwasher.

Yelling at yourself doesn’t work.

Fighting conditioning doesn’t dissolve it.

Force doesn’t create freedom.

And thanks to my ‘we no longer self abandon’ defense team, after 2 months of trying the way of war that looked like stacked dishes and a sink full of resentment, I surrendered.

I bought the countertop dishwasher.

And for 13 glorious months, I used the absolute heck out of that thing. 

The countertop dishwasher. This $212 cube that sits on the counter looking lovely and sleek, needing only an outlet and a human to pour 3 liters of water into it before each cycle. It’ll heat water so fiercely that no germs can survive. And it’ll finish each cycle with blue light sanitization for good measure and complete nervous system regulation. 

The swish of the water in its rhythmic manner for 59 exceptional minutes would provide the perfect background noise that lulled the cats to sleep after dinner each night. I too, found comfort in the swishing sound as it merged with my memories from years gone by in all the houses I’ve lived in when the dishwasher running signaled a clean kitchen, a great dinner, the end of a day, and dim lights as evening set in. 

And the smell. It smelled clean. This little guest house would fill with the smell of what I imagined was ozone from that blue light sanitizing cycle that finished each load. It was all so glorious. So peace-making. So indulging. It was the thing that brought me such conscious joy every single day. I told everyone about it. It was the greatest thing ever. My little countertop dishwasher. 

And then, as we all now know, it broke. 

That fateful Friday a few weeks ago now, I had run a load just before taking Finn out for our hour-ish walk later in the afternoon. When we returned, from just inside the door down the full flight of stairs, I heard a pulsing beep. One I had never heard before, but one that I knew was my dishwasher. I felt it in my gut. This was the end. I had actually had concerns about it dying lately, for some reason.

I ran upstairs in yes - that slow motion kind of urgency - to see a beeping E6 on the screen. I looked it up. It was the heating element. Chat gpt indicated it was almost guaranteed to be caused by the minerals leftover in the water after being filtered. Twice filtered. 

This. freaking. water. 

First it killed my skin. 

Then my hair. 

Now my dishwasher? 

Have you no mercy, Columbia Falls water?

With the replacement countertop dishwasher having been ordered, I only had to survive 7 days of handwashing. This was not going to be fun. But I could survive, I thought.

The first day of dishwashing was awful. The second? A little better. And by the 3rd? I had a whole system down that had been inspired somehow into expression. 

It involved several tea kettles worth of boiling water, a nice set up with fresh towels to my left for the drying holding station,  fresh dishwashing towels to my right for the washing, bright lighting, and my phone propped up on the window sill with my absolute can't miss daily podcast playing. 

It became a ritual. Glasses first, then silverware, then plates, then the rest of the stuff. I won't bore you with more details. Let's just say I got it down to a science.

And guys I swear I can't make this stuff up - after day 3, while drying my plates, I felt the perfect squeak and saw the shine of a dish cleaned at par with the countertop dishwasher.

And the same with my glasses. And silverware. I never once felt grossed out. Or disgusted. All of the old responses from the conditioning I came to Montana with were gone.

I had a complete breakthrough moment where I realized I absolutely did not need that dishwasher. It was otherworldly. It was spiritual. It was unifying inside.

I had reclaimed just a bit more of my sovereignty.

I recovered a bit more of my freedom.

I was no longer within the capture of an idea - a story - that I had been conditioned to believe - to the point of nervous system dysregulation - to be TRUE.

Real.

A total NEED.

I cannot survive without a dishwasher.

But oh, how I can. (this is such my new lowkey flex now)

I cancelled the shipment. I got a refund. And every day since - I have hand washed my dishes with the most magnificent gratitude and appreciation.

Now I don't need a dishwasher. But notice: I'm also not against them.

The end result isn't that I proved one side right. The triumph is that I'm sovereign. I'm free. I'm adaptable. I can live happily with or without a dishwasher.

I have now lived fully inside both truths. I remember what it felt like to NEED that dishwasher with every cell in my body. It was real. And now I live inside the truth of not needing it, and this is equally real.

Both are true.

And because I've been inside both, I can never assign moral value to either position again. I have neutralized charge for or against either side, and in this space, both can exist. 

And life is showing me: Dishwashergate is the micro of the macro.

The goal isn't to get everyone to one side. The goal is to stop fighting.

The beauty of neutrality is that in this place, you can see reality as it is. It's not at all mere detachment or head in the sand living - it's knowing it as if it was you.

Seeing it for what it is. And understanding that it is indeed just a perspective. Not objective truth. Not right, not wrong. Just one of many ways to go about handling your kitchen.

Where in nature do we see evidence of right or wrong? I don’t see it in ecosystems. I see balance. I see contrast. I see opposing forces that create harmony, not enemies that must be eliminated. What I see is checks and balances. Tension that creates equilibrium.

Polarity is actually a gift as part of this nature, this universe, this planet. Polarity is what keeps this planet in balance.

But we've inserted a humanness that's completely detached us from an origin of truth. And so we're just playing out this weird game that's guaranteed to lose. And we're just all convinced that we're right.

Our brains filter reality through conditioning and bias, and then convince us that what we’re seeing is objective truth.

And yet, we've never in the history of humanity solved the problem through fight and argument.

I did not become someone who suddenly didn't need a dishwasher by fighting the version of me that did.

That's not how this worked. I did not get anywhere by fighting the polarity within. 

The change didn’t come from brute force, and it also didn’t come from intellectualized virtue signaling. Regardless of the tactic, war was ineffective. 

We gotta figure this stuff out, my friends, because there’s so much evidence of our love for one another when we’re outside of these stories.

And while I’m just a gal who turned her life into an experiment, hands in warm water, plates stacked beside me, I can’t help but feel that if we each learned to pause just long enough to step back from story – even for a moment – we’d find ourselves standing on the same starting line again.

Now, about this water...(click for Part 2 - What's Your Problem, C Falls Water?)

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