Things That Are Overrated

Marriage – I have come to the conclusion that marriage is the death of romance.
Christmas – this is the ultimate over hyped, under performing holiday on record.
Movie Critics – I have rarely felt a similar level of regard or hatred to a movie as the critics have.
Almost any possession before you own it. The act of wanting and purchasing something inflates its value. Once you own it, it loses something.
New Years Eve Parties. Too much drinking with strangers you don’t really care about.
Talent – I am seriously wondering if its even a necessary ingredient for success. Which is not to say that there aren’t talented successful people, its just that there are so many talentless successful people that it becomes clear that its not a requirement.
Safety – For every safe thing we do, we lose a freedom. We lose options, we lose fun, we lose courage.
Central Heat – This was one of my musing the other day. If you grew up with central heat, you think its necessary for survival. But for hundreds of thousands of years our ancestors lived and survived without it. Its comfort, but its not necessary.

The Insidious Cruelty of Positive Thinking

“Good humor is a tonic for mind and body. It is the best antidote for anxiety and depression. It is a business asset. It attracts and keeps friends. It lightens human burdens. It is the direct route to serenity and contentment. ”
~Grenville Kleiser

I hate this cliched overly simplistic statement with a loathing that seems at odds with its intention. It represents an abysmal lack of understanding of what being seriously and deeply sick with depression and anxiety is all about.

It makes me despair that any of my real life family or friends will ever understand my illness or that they will ever forgive me.

Kleiser is dead but this sentiment keeps dogging us. If I could call up his spirit I would do it just so I could slap the shit out of him. In fact if I could build a field of dreams I would do one just for all the fuckers who built the train tracks to the train station of positivity – I’m looking at you Normal Vincent Peale. And then I would I would just start to rant at them.

Sadly, you will have to do as stand-ins.

I know, I sound like big pile of negativity when I say these things. But idiots spout this crap at people who are struggling with depression and anxiety. Apparently they think its just a switch in our heads. Just turn on the SMILE!

When this is said, there is an implication that because we aren’t turning on that positive switch, this entire illness is just our fault. Its a character flaw. We must actually WANT to depressed/anxious or we would just be good humored!

People think we’re just sad or being downers. ’Just think Positive!’ they say.

Yeah. Thinking isn’t really the problem, is it? Positive, negative, – any thought at all will come and even roost for awhile. But it still doesn’t make any actual movement happen. No motivation is delivered with it. No changes.

No happiness takes root because I think of happy things or funny things. I may laugh, and even smile. I may even feel hope occasionally. But it is fleeting moment and overwhelmed by apathy and despair.

You CANNOT think your way out of Depression and Anxiety. I know. I’ve spent years trying. Depression is a sickness of thinking. Overthinking. Ruminating on things. Cogitating. Sometimes we even have positive thoughts. Shocking, isn’t it?

But these thoughts positive, negative, weird, horrible, funny, insightful… They never actually result in a change in our lives. Because the thoughts live in one place and they never connect to the part of our brain where action happens. Its like there is a big canyon between the idea and the action.

Anxiety will take you into thinking holes that your rational brain can distantly see are NOT issues, but a stronger part of your brain is funneling in an emotional ick with these thoughts and now you are swimming is an sewer of fear and horror. We don’t invite those emotions into the brain, they show up and they don’t go away when we smile. Instead they can start to take over our bodies and then we have REAL physical symptoms of the horror show that is going on in our heads.

Depression comes with an apathy that is so deeply etched into our brains that many people with depression will tell you that it didn’t occur to them that this utter lack of interest was not right. That’s the trick of depression. It makes what it completely abnormal seem like its just normal.

Nor do the random positive thoughts turn all of it into a wave of serenity and contentment.

The longer you struggle against depression and anxiety the more if feels like a monster with endless tentacles that pull you back just when you feel like you might have gotten a foothold to get out.

When you say these sorts of “Smile!” “Be Positive!” things to us, you are showing how utterly invisible our struggle is to you. How our incredible battles with minor things are trivial to you.

But to us, these things, these tiny things that are everyday matters to you – they are HUGE. There are people in the world right now who are proud that they took out the garbage today. That was their triumph. For most people its just one of dozens of everyday tasks they do and so they don’t get it.

People think if we would just smile it will get better. It won’t. Please believe me.

Saying those things reiterates the feeling of isolation and self hatred in the mentally ill. It announces that this is my fault, because if I would just think the right thing this will all go away. But it doesn’t go away when I think positive, so I am a failure, I am not trying hard enough, I am not good enough at smiling.

That’s what happens when you tell someone with a mental illness to be positive.

It’s an insidious and well intentioned cruelty.

Sometimes you just need to see something pleasant.

Life can often be frustrating and frightening and overwhelming and rage inducing. Or is that just my life?

Anyway, when it reaches the point where I want to implode I often want to escape to pleasant place.

One of my hidey holes is Frank Capra’s movie – You Can’t Take It With You with Jimmy Stewart. Try it.

Its like being cuddled in a down comforter but with a movie. Its silly and funny and heartwarming and thoroughly entertaining. I want desperately to move into the Sycamore household and just live there forever. 138120753649508557228_you_cant_take_it_1938_12_8133_0

I have a divided mentality

On the one hand is my romantic, imagination driven mind. Its filled with elves, and monsters and heroes and gods and evil doers and magic. I want that world to be real. I want all the possibilities of that world. Because in that world is so much more color and soul and life. But this world isn’t real. It just exists in my imagination.

On the other hand is my logical, critical mind. I look for evidence, I assume the simplest answer to the mystery is probably the correct one, that science, not magic will solve problems. That miracles are just nature unrevealed. I live this life out loud. This mind that makes my decisions and scoffs at myths and magic. But I find this world sad because its all too predictable.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate everything about logic or a critical view of the world. I’m naturally curious and I love that I can know at least partly the why and how of most things that cross my mind.

But in this real world, I will never see a fairy. I will never see a werewolf. I will never find a unicorn. I will never converse with gods. And I will never wish upon a star and get eternal life, or super strength or any other sundry of things.

But in my imagination, those thing are real. And in my daydreams I live and play among the myths and the magic. I like that world better.

Why do we think giving anonymously is best?

Awhile ago, I went to the grocery store and sitting on top the cans of cat food I buy was a VERY good coupon that someone had clipped and left for the next person who was planning to buy this particular brand of cat food.

They gained nothing with the gesture. They weren’t going to get the accolade of doing a kind thing. No one would see me pick it up and use it. No one to thank them for their kindness.

If you do a good thing and no one but you know is it, its an odd feeling. 1st, if you do it truly anonymously – you will not even know whether the generous thing was received or how it was used. So you have no sense of closure.

You won’t get the sense of validation that comes with gratitude. You won’t even have a third party openly or tacitly recognizing your generosity. And humans are heavily dependent on validation. Its a need.

We all do kind things. Studies show that we do them to get a sense of validation from our peers, thereby increasing our status in our group (We want validation that we are good people).

Which feels kind of icky because of social norms – but its just reality and doesn’t actually diminish the greatness of doing a good deed. Because it is a choice. You don’t have to do the generous thing, but you do it. And that generous thing can have untold benefits on others.

You want to be considered kind and good and not selfish and mean. Why is that a bad thing? Is it a bad thing to act the way your want to be? I want to be runner, I run. I want to be a doctor, I go to school and become a doctor. No one tells me that I should do so on the QT.

A truly anonymous gift is often a lauded thing. Religions tout that an anonymous gift is the only true gift, because when you remove any self gratification from the equation you have given purely from your heart.

The science is saying that we may not even be capable of giving without the ulterior motive of self defining as a generous person. (ie – getting validation)

I think we need to reconsider this idea that the best gifts are anonymous ones.

Studies show that generosity is contagious – so acting generously in public leads to more people acting generously. So in a bizarre way – we are acting less generously by keeping it anonymous.

We have so few opportunities to build up our self esteem in positive and real ways. Is it really a bad thing to want validation for doing a good thing, when in so much of our lives we are pounded with reasons to feel shitty about ourselves?

We live in a world where beauty is an airbrushed illusion that marks everyone with a pre-stamped fail. We have made music into something that only “professionals” can do – no one else can sing well enough. Only the tiniest percentage of people who play sports can be good enough to be a professional, so everyone who plays a sport is already a failure. We are judged daily in our jobs by standards that are subjective on most counts, in areas where our bosses see less than 2% of our actual work. And those are just a few areas where we struggle to see ourselves positively.

We should embrace those opportunities to feel that we are good, we are kind, we are generous. We should not feel like we are somehow being less good if we publicly helped someone.

I am left feeling a little bit sad for the person who left me a coupon. A generous gesture that made me a little bit happy inside. But they didn’t get that boost of happy from my gratitude, from being recognized a generous giver.

The Great Disappointment of Farting.

I like to sneeze. I like the release of the pressure. Its very satisfying.

I like to burp for similar reasons.

I don’t like to fart. No sense of satisfaction for farts, which makes no sense. Its the same idea – a sudden emission of gas that relieves pressure.

I don’t like coughing either – but coughing is occasionally painful, and usually not relieving a pressure so much as a tickle. So it makes more sense that it’s not satisfying.

But the fart. The fart should be satisfying, but I just don’t get any satisfaction.

Farts are the popular underdog of human gas expelling. They are funny and intrusive and embarrassing and annoying and smelly. But they just don’t leave me wanting to do it again.

Holy Starving Yourself…

Have you ever heard of Proana? Its someone who promotes and supports anorexia as a good thing.

I’m a woman who is the antithesis of starvation. I will eat, even when eating makes me very literally, not in any way metaphorically, sick. Curled up in a ball, sick. I do it to myself at least once a quarter. I deliberately eat things that I am consciously aware will make me sick as a dog.

Yet despite all the pain that eating gives me, I have no desire to starve myself.

Still, in a weird bizzaro world way, I understand the person who decides to embrace the horror of what is killing you.

Under the premise “If you are being run out of town, grab a baton and lead the parade”, I have often redefined my problems as strengths. That is what the proana person does, of course. They don’t want everyone to say they have a problem, so they make the problem into a badge of honor. A trait that is enjoyed and giving them happiness.

We are often told to reframe our problems as opportunities or a natural part of our psyche, to be loved and accepted.

Its a dangerous thread to walk. It takes a huge amount of self awareness and wisdom to weed out whether you are being self destructive or self defining. And larger amounts of courage to face your deepest most self defining issue and choose to change.

The level of self awareness needed and the character strength needed are not traits of very young people. And that is when we are often forming our self definition. When we are forging those frames that keep us from recognizing whether we are deceiving our self or whether we are accepting our self.

Proana, perhaps, is the flip side of the heavy person who chooses to embrace their size and eating choices, despite all evidence that its not healthy.

Its a weird world we live in.

Thoughts While Cutting my Toenails:

The big toe nail could easily have evolved into a weapon. Like the horn on a narwhale.

I have cut the back of my ankle with it twice in my life, when I haven’t cut it down properly

Just walking along barefoot, and BAM- I’m bleeding.

20,000 years ago I think I could have used it while fighting over an animal carcass.

These are the thoughts I have while cutting my toe nails. I knew you’d want to know. You’re welcome.

Where is the Republicans Outrage about their candidates?

Liberals tend to paint a picture of The Republican as a white man with quietly or not so quietly held racist views, desperately and obliviously holding on to his white privilege like it’s a childhood blankie.

But the reality is surely otherwise. We all know at least one perfectly reasonable Republican who is not a racist. I know quite a few and I tend to believe there are a whole lot of them.

My biggest issue with them is that they are NOT screaming in outrage at what GOP candidates are saying and doing in the name of their party.

Why isn’t Donald Trump being kicked out the GOP for being a flagrantly misogynistic racist candidate?

Why isn’t anyone even demanding that?

If they don’t want their party to devolve into hellish caricatures of candidates, they need to defend it from the cretins who would make it that way.

Saying they will vote Trump out on the primary isn’t good enough. The tacit endorsement of the Republican Party is all over him. He represents their party.

I’m unaware that there is an effort on the part of everyday GOP voters to stop the disintegration of their party into a place where scared white racists go to bathe their fears.

Where is the GOP outrage?