Six Useful Things I've Learned

Lately I've been feeling not so much like an emotional mess, but more like an emotional garbage heap, left outside some jerk's door in the hallway of your apartment building for no good reason, drawing flies and stinking up the place. One moment I'm pressing a puppy to my cheek, pure joy rushing through every vein, and the next I'm crying in the car because some stupid song on the stupid radio reminds me of some stupid guy from years back. Then I go on Twitter and tweet a bunch of crap about my dad because I feel like I'm super close to finally FIGURING SOME SHIT OUT so I can GET THE FUCK ON WITH MY LIFE, and then I get some unfollows and feel sad and go play with the puppies and feel happy and it all starts over again.

So it's easy for me to forget that I have actually FIGURED SOME SHIT OUT ALREADY. Stumble around blindly bumping your head on things long enough and you'll eventually get the lay of the land. So rather than spend the next hour or two wallowing, I'm going to sit here and type out some of the more useful things I've learned in 29-1/2 years of being weird and emotional and basically just human.

ONE: NEVER SHIFT BLAME

In fact, you should take on as much blame as you honestly can. Strangely enough, this is something my dad taught me. I say "strangely" because I wonder if he didn't contribute to teaching me to shift blame in the first place by punishing me (at times, somewhat harshly) for the smallest or even imagined transgressions. If there's someone in your life who terrifies you with their anger and criticism, you scratch around for any way out of it. But one time when I tried this as a young teen, my dad stopped me and said, "Don't shift the blame, Diana." I was angry at first--it wasn't my fault that whatever had happened had happened--but then I realized that just because it wasn't my fault didn't mean I had to find someone or something else to blame.

People do this a lot. Late to work? Tell a long story about the traffic. And guess what? You just wasted more of your co-workers' time. When you shift blame, you are being cowardly--too cowardly to admit that you messed up, or you failed to step up and take more responsibility, or that you aren't perfect, or that things don't go swimmingly perfectly for you all the time with dollar bills and kisses raining down from the sky all around you. It can actually feel refreshing to own blame for things--finally! The jig is up! I don't have to hide anymore! I can just be me! Make a habit of owning blame, and I promise you will feel more genuine and less stressed.

One time, taking on blame even saved my job--and got the guy who tried to shift blame onto me fired! I won't get into the nitty-gritty, but if you show integrity, other people will come to your defense. If they don't, who needs those people anyway!

TWO: CAUSATION IS LARGELY UNKNOWABLE

You've probably heard the phrase "correlation does not imply causation" used in science or statistics, but I find it applies to pretty much everything. You will reduce stress in your life ENORMOUSLY if you think of this in the context of 1) interpersonal relationships and 2) politics.

1) At some point or another, you've probably tried to blame things on your parents. I rebelled late  (I was eighteen, practically out the door to college, and my "rebellion" consisted mostly of insisting on doing all my college application and payment paperwork myself, plus that one time I drove someone in the car my parents sometimes let me drive even though I wasn't supposed to have passengers), so I'm still in the process of "unblaming" mine for my faults and failings (obviously). I had (have) an over-protective mother who wouldn't let me go out much and almost never let me have friends over (by which I mean--let's be honest--potential friends), so it's easy for me to say that I have a hard time making friends (or even going out and getting a job!) because of her, but harder to admit that I've dropped the ball a lot, or been selfish, or pushed perfectly decent people away for perfectly silly reasons. (Also, I've read recently that social isolation is largely determined by genetics, i.e. maybe it is my mother's fault, but not in a way I can blame her for.)

2) POLITICS!! Omigosh! How often do people blame or praise a single politician for HUGE things? You're talking about the functioning of the ENTIRE HUMAN WORLD and you're trying to pin it on one asshole or another? A single person can be responsible for a considerable amount of good or damage, but they usually need other people to go along with their plans. I did this program called Close Up in high school where a few high schoolers from every state are sent to Washington, D.C. to see the government in "action" "close up," and guess what I learned? Every politician is just a tiny, squeaky cog. NOBODY knows how the whole government works. HARDLY ANYBODY, least of all the guy you voted for, actually reads the bills he votes on. Teenage interns are doing 95% of the actual work, slaving day and night to keep the whole kit-and-kaboodle from falling off the rails, so who's really responsible for what? Even with good intentions, a politician can strive all his life to bring some cherished idea to fruition, only to find that it DOES NOT WORK AT ALL. Or that political opponents blocked some central, essential part of his plan and now everything backfires. It's all too complex. So go ahead and hate on individual acts of corruption, or a personality that rubs you the wrong way, but don't get so obsessed with one particular person or process or law that you believe it's ruining absolutely everything. Maybe it is, but it probably isn't.

THREE: MEASURE THE SALT ANYWHERE BUT OVER YOUR MIXING BOWL

You thought this was all going to be big, heavy stuff? Well here's something quick and easy. If you're baking or cooking, but especially if you're baking, MEASURE THE SALT ANYWHERE BUT OVER YOUR MIXING BOWL. Measure it over the floor. Measure it over the sink. Measure it over the taped-open eyelid of a restrained enemy, but NEVER MEASURE IT OVER THE MIXING BOWL. You may get away with it once, or twice, or seventeen times, but one day, you WILL SPILL THE SALT and you WON'T BE ABLE TO SCOOP IT OUT because you have poured it into sugar, or into some expensive liquid into which it has dissolved immediately. And then you will have to either throw everything out or endure over-salted cookies or pound cake or whatever. It's not worth the heartache/multiple glasses of water. So there.

FOUR: NOT FEELING BAD ABOUT BEING DEPRESSED CAN MAKE AS MUCH AS HALF OF THE BAD FEELING GO AWAY, IF NOT MORE

This is a really big deal. Lots of us who are or have been depressed have family members who lay on the guilt. "Therapy is for people with real problems. You don't have any real problems, so stop feeling sorry for yourself." "We've got too much to do for you to be sad right now." I'm not going to try to list any more examples (even though there are plenty) because I don't want to fall back into that pit. You're allowed to feel whatever you feel. You may even have to feel what you feel. Who can control his feelings? A Buddhist monk in a cave somewhere, maybe? What you can control is how you behave, what you do. Cognitive behavioral therapy is a method for identifying and dismantling negative thoughts, and once you get into the habit of doing that, it can be almost like controlling your feelings. But if you've ever done it, you know it's a lot of work precisely because those thoughts and feelings are beyond your control, and will rush back at you when you least expect them (or in greater force than you had anticipated even when you do expect them). That's not your fault. You're doing your work to fight bad thoughts, but feeling guilty about being attacked by them is like blaming yourself for getting mugged. Yeah, maybe you shouldn't have been walking in a dark alley late at night (or, for example, talking to that relative who always pushes your buttons on a day when you were already feeling vulnerable), but the mugger is the one who mugged you--he came out of nowhere, almost like a force of nature. So let go of the guilt and ignore the criticism. If you came whining to someone and sat down in their house and complained and cast a pall over their day, then yeah, you did a selfish thing. But if they said, "Are you sick? What's wrong with you?" and you said, "No, I've just been feeling pretty low lately," and they hit you with a tirade about your selfishness, then just let that tirade wash over--it's another force of nature, just some rain making streaks down the windows of your mind.

FIVE: SLEEP AS MUCH AS YOU NEED TO

What's with everyone trying to take the trophy for "Most Tired?" For a moment, I thought this was on the way out, what with more people getting into yoga and slow food and related hippy-dippy aspirations. But then people started doing "power yoga" and competing over how fancy their rustic country food could be, and the whole thing went, as the Brits say, "tits-up." Someone was tweeting today about how his left eye has started twitching. It was a jokey tweet and the tone was mock-resignation. "I guess this is how I am now," he said, or something to that effect. It was funny, but I went ahead and told him, "My left eye used to twitch all the time. Turns out I need 8 to 9 hours of sleep, not 6 to 7. Folks belittle me, but it's worth it." He gave me a star, no reply, but I hope he takes my advice and gets more sleep and feels better. And people will belittle you. I was about to give an example, but fuck those people. Or forgive them. They're probably just tired.

SIX: PRIORITIZE ENJOYMENT 

This goes along with numbers four and five. Life is not a contest to see who can suffer the most. I don't know what life is, but I know that it is not that. (Unless you're a Catholic or something. Haha. Religious humor.) SPOILER ALERT: Remember in "Shawshank Redemption"when Tim Robbins crawls through the potty pipe and out into the pouring rain and tears off his poopy shirt and howls because he's so happy? (That's how I remember it, anyway. I'm not going to take time to check.) How many times have you come out of school or work and seen that it's pouring down rain and your first thought is, "FUCK MY LIFE FUCK FUCK FUCK!"? Where's your inner Tim Robbins?

Two lessons:

1) you don't have to hate the things that happen to you just because they were beyond your control. Tim Robbins could have crawled out of the pipe and been like, "I went through all that, and now THIS SHIT?! I WANTED SUNSHINE!! I DESERVE SUNSHINE!! FUCK MY LIFE!!" Instead, he realizes that rain is just rain. He's been through hell, and this isn't hell--it's just rain, and in the right frame of mind, it's wonderful. You may have noticed me blogging about some puppies recently (in November I found a dog, my mom asked me to keep her for her, then the dog turned out to be pregnant and, long story short, I ended up taking care of three puppies). I was excited about the puppies, and I loved them from the first moment I saw them, but I still wasted so much energy in the first few months being ashamed of the situation and feeling stupid about it, when, in retrospect, I realize I should have done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING BUT ENJOY IT. They're puppies for goodness sake! How many times will I have brand-new, teeny-tiny puppies in my life? (Hopefully just this once.)

2) you don't have to force yourself to live in the hell of other moments. Tim Robbins could have crawled out of the poop-pipe and into the rain and sat his ass down in the mud and said to himself, "I am SO TRAUMATIZED! Bad things happened to me in prison, and now I'm out of prison and MORE BAD THINGS ARE GOING TO HAPPEN, I CAN JUST FEEL IT!" But nope. He found the joy in the moment. And then he found the money under the tree and went to Mexico and gave Morgan Freeman a hug. Or Morgan Freeman came along later and gave him a hug? Anyway, there was hugging. The present moment is almost never as bad as the pasts we remember and the futures we imagine. In some cases, the present moment is hell, and I don't want to gloss over that or brush it under the rug. And sometimes the futures we face are dark and certain. And sometimes our pasts are brutal and the scars linger. But lots of times people compete over who had the worst day, or who has the most work to do tomorrow. Who gives a crap? What are you doing right now? You're complaining, and it's bringing me down, but even worse, it's bringing you down. Let's do something fun instead. And if you really had the worst day today? Then I hope tomorrow's better. Enjoy the rain.