Mammoths out of Molehills

My brain serves elephants daily—turning emails into expeditions, repairs into renovations. After forty years, I’ve finally realized the problem isn’t how to eat them, but why I keep ordering them.

The to-do list sprawls before me—digital checkboxes multiplying like cells in some petri dish of obligation. Each item seems to pulse with its own desperate urgency, none willing to recede into the background. And inevitably, someone well-meaning will offer that worn platitude: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”

I’ve always hated this metaphor.

First, who’s eating elephants? Magnificent creatures, endangered and intelligent. The imagery is disturbing, and more importantly—utterly useless. All food is eaten one bite at a time, unless you’ve somehow evolved multiple mouths or developed telekinetic digestive powers. Have you ever seen someone consume a sandwich in four simultaneous bites? A pizza absorbed through osmosis? Even something as mundane as a grape requires at least one bite. The profundity collapses under the slightest scrutiny.

The elephant saying skips over the essential question: why do I keep ordering elephant-sized tasks in the first place?

Perhaps the wiser question isn’t how to eat the elephant, but why I keep inviting these metaphorical pachyderms into my life. I have a talent for it—transforming manageable morsels into mammoth feasts of complexity.

A simple email becomes a research project. The loose doorknob spirals into redoing all the hardware in the house. A blog post expands into a manifesto on the human condition. My brain refuses the modest meal, always setting a banquet table instead.

This morning I needed to schedule a dentist appointment. Three hours later, I’ve researched dental school rankings, the history of orthodontia, and whether fluoride is actually a government conspiracy. The appointment remains unscheduled, and my to-do list has somehow grown by seven items.

My ADHD brain doesn’t recognize hierarchy among tasks. Everything feels equally weighted, equally urgent. The trivial and the crucial battle for attention with identical intensity. There is no elephant and mouse—only a safari of equally imposing beasts stampeding through my consciousness.

Maybe the real wisdom isn’t about consumption techniques. Maybe it’s about portion control.

What if, instead of learning to eat elephants, I practiced not acquiring them? What if the skill I need is recognizing when I’m needlessly supersizing a task? Perhaps mastery lies in maintaining appropriate scale, not developing strategies for impossible feasts.

I’m trying to learn this—to set boundaries around tasks, to recognize when something can remain small and manageable. To accept that sometimes “good enough” isn’t settling, it’s sanity.

Still, I know myself. Tomorrow, I’ll likely turn a simple task into another behemoth. Some habits run too deep to break entirely. But awareness creates possibility. The space between stimulus and response grows wider with practice.

So I return to my to-do list, eyeing it warily. Today, I won’t worry about eating elephants. I’ll focus instead on keeping mice from growing tusks. And if someone offers that tired metaphor again, I’ll smile politely and think: I’m not interested in eating elephants. I’d rather just check off my list, one reasonable task at a time.

My to do list looms over me, patient and judgmental all at once. Like a metronome for thoughts I haven’t yet organized. Like the steady tap of a finger waiting for an answer to that infuriating question:

“How do you eat an elephant?”

The first time I heard it, I was maybe seven. Cross-legged on a scratchy carpet square during what was probably a school assembly about perseverance or goal-setting or whatever adults think kids need explained to them through food metaphors.

“You can eat elephant?” I blurted, my mind immediately conjuring the image of Fred and Barney tipping their car over from the weight of prehistoric ribs at the drive-up window.

“BBQ’d?” I added hopefully.

The adult—some visiting speaker whose face has long since blurred into the generic composite of All Adults Who Tried To Teach Me Things—sighed with the specific brand of disappointment reserved for children who ruin perfectly good motivational zingers.

“One bite at a time,” they announced, voice rising with triumphant finality. “You eat an elephant one bite at a time.”

Even at seven, I recognized the profound stupidity of this revelation. “Well, you eat everything one bite at a time,” I countered. “I literally don’t know any other way you can eat anything but one bite at a time.”

In theory, I suppose you could take a bite of two things simultaneously. Stack a taco on a donut and chomp down—congratulations, you’ve taken a bite of two distinct food items. But technically, it’s still just one actual bite from you. I’m right about this, aren’t I?

The memory fades here, but I imagine my small self continuing this pedantic dissection while the poor speaker mentally calculated how many minutes remained in their presentation. But here’s the thing about eating elephants that’s stuck with me for three decades: nobody talks about the absurdity of having an elephant to eat in the first place.

No one asks, “Why do you have an elephant? Who gave you this elephant? Did you order the elephant? How do you know you even like elephant?”

I get what you’re going for. There’s a lot of elephant. You wouldn’t eat an elephant the same way you’d eat a jellybean or a clam. No one says, “How do you eat a clam?” One bite. Done.

Even if you could—or had to—eat an elephant, there would never be a scenario where you’d stare at that mountain of gray flesh and think, “Well, hell, I guess I gotta eat this all in one sitting.” The challenge would demand more strategy than that. You’d have questions. Do you start with the trunk or the tail? Do you fillet it? And we haven’t even discussed preparation, because I assume we aren’t eating raw elephant. (Though really, what’s the protocol there? Is elephant best served medium-rare? Is there an elephant tartare? These are the questions that keep me from attempting to sleep before 3 a.m.)

From Meatloaf to Mammoths

This year—this winding, excavating journey through therapy and self-rediscovery—I’ve had a revelation that hit me with the subtlety of a cartoon mammoth rib flipping a stone-age foot-powered car.

I am the one who keeps serving myself elephant.

All my life, I’ve taken something that should be—and is, in fact—a simple, easy task of a few focused items, and turned it into an elephant-sized buffet of things I don’t remember ordering. A simple email becomes a research project. A quick home repair spirals into three simultaneous renovation efforts, none of which get completed. A casual creative project metastasizes into a portfolio-defining opus that collapses under the weight of its own expectations. And then I stand there, overwhelmed, fork in hand, no idea where to begin other than to pick up something—anything—and take a bite. And another. And another.

My brain doesn’t create to-do lists; it creates to-do buffets with no clear starting point, no strategic approach, just an endless spread of tasks that all seem equally urgent and equally appealing (or equally dreaded).

So it took me almost forty years to realize the point isn’t “How do you eat an elephant?” The point is: stop putting elephants on your own damn plate. The point is: learn to recognize when you’re transforming a reasonable portion into an impossible feast. The point is: maybe order the chicken.

Or at least invite some friends to share the elephant. Bring Tupperware. Maybe some Rhino. Make it a potluck.

I can’t promise I’ll stop self-serving elephants entirely. Old habits and neurominority tendencies make for persistent dinner companions. But at least now I recognize the pattern—the way I transform meatloaf into mastodons, sushi into sauropods. The to-do list coughs subtly, reminding me it’s there, looming but patient in a way I’m still learning to be with myself. One word at a time. One thought at a time. One bite at a time. But preferably of something smaller than an elephant.