Archive for July, 2010
Eat-Pray-Love: Gag Me!
I must preface this post by saying that I had never heard of this book until ads for the movie came out, so I don’t know how much Hollywoodizing was done to turn the story into a romantic comedy where maybe there wasn’t one. If this is the case, I apologize to the author in advance for the opinion I am about to express here. But even if I’m wrong about the story, it doesn’t really matter, because I am speaking more to what catches the interest of the American public than I am to the story itself.
That said, if the story is actually about what the advertisements would have us believe, then–gag me! A woman spends a year of her life on a quest for self-awareness and fulfillment. She visits three very different parts of the world and spends her time doing three very different things. The first leg is in Italy, where she eats wonderful food. The second is (I’m assuming) in India, where she goes to an ashram and learns how to meditate. And the third takes place somewhere exotic (I don’t know where), where she has a blazing hot love affair with a sexy hunk of a man.
I can envision the movie executives discussing how to package and market this movie: “It’s a great story, but spirituality is boooring! We can’t sell a movie about spirituality! We have to make it about the sex!” “Yes, couldn’t agree more, Bob. And let’s bring in a smokin’ hot foreign actor to play the love interest!” “Yes! And let’s make the ashram scenes funny so they don’t put the audience to sleep!” “Brilliant! Well, now we’re gettin’ somewhere!”
Again, gag me.
Now, understand that I am not anti-romantic comedy. If you’re in the mood for lighthearted entertainment, without a lot of depth or realism, a romantic comedy can be fun. But this movie’s message–again, judging only by the ads–seems to be that romantic love will solve all your problems and bring you the bliss you so desperately desire.
Well, what’s wrong with that, you might ask. That is the plot of every romantic comedy. Yes, that’s true. So what’s the problem? Well, the problem is that in this one, the woman actually undertakes a spiritual practice, and apparently, finds it less significant than the love affair that comes afterward.
This whole idea that romantic love will bring us bliss and joy beyond our wildest dreams is just so wrong. Not only because it is a total falsehood that sets people up for misery and defeat, but also because of its absurd prevalence and priority in our society. People want to believe it, so they do. They sincerely believe that their sense of completion lies “somewhere out there,” either in the perfect mate, or the children that would result from union with such a mate, or both. This not only keeps people on a fruitless search, it keeps them distracted from the real search, which has far more to do with an internal journey than an external one.
Romantic love has no power to fulfill any needs or desires. It is not a magical fix for our problems, or, in fact, for anything. And the belief that it is is actually completely backward: rather than make you whole or fix what ails you, romantic love brings all your issues to the surface. It stirs up fears and insecurities, it does not subdue them. In doing so, it is an opportunity to become more whole, but in itself does not make you whole. Like everything else in life, it is merely another path. It just happens to be a particularly powerful one, which is why the giddy heights of new love can so quickly plummet into the deepest, dankest depths of misery.
This is not negative or cynical; it’s merely honest. And people who don’t accept this simple truth will forever be searching for fulfillment in all the wrong places.
All romantic comedies ignore this truth. And again, there’s not really anything wrong with that, as long as people understand that what they’re watching is fantasy, simple entertainment. But Eat Pray Love takes it a step further. The message of this movie (again, based on what I gather from the ads) is that romantic love triumphs over even the spiritual search–over the one thing that really can bring true contentment and true happiness, the one thing that really can answer all the important questions, the one thing that will enable us to put romantic love, as well as all other quests we undertake in life, into a more realistic perspective. In short, the one thing that really matters.
In that sense, I find this film–or at least the ads for it–to be not just indifferent to spiritual concerns, as most Hollywood films are, but actually antagonistic toward them.
I’m probably wrong. At least I hope I am. I hope this film goes beyond its marketing to have an important message about the process of self-discovery. But knowing how Hollywood likes to fit the human experience into neat, easily explainable little packages that won’t disturb or surprise anyone, I’m not expecting too much.
What is Happiness?
It may not seem so at first glance, but this is true for happiness, as well. Like any worthwhile achievement, happiness is not something we’re born with or something that happens to us. We may be entitled to it, or at least to the freedom to pursue it (at least, I believe that we are), but it is not a natural or automatic state at all. For that matter, neither is unhappiness–we are born with a blank slate. But since happiness requires more effort than unhappiness, it is, I think, more misunderstood than unhappiness.
Both happiness and unhappiness are broad terms with many possible interpretations, so here’s what I mean by these words. By “happiness,” I mean that you have a sense of contentment about who you are, a sense of confidence in your ability to solve most of the problems in your life, and an overall outlook of serenity most of the time. By this definition, happiness isn’t a feeling of glee when things go your way; rather, it is having a basically good relationship with yourself. This means self-acceptance, self-forgiveness, and a decent understanding of your strengths and limitations, as well as an ability to have decent relationships. Of course there are other elements as well, but these cover the basics.
Unhappiness, then, is mostly the opposite. You do not like who you are, you lack confidence in your ability to solve your problems, you have little serenity, and your basic relationship with yourself is shaky: you have trouble with self-acceptance and with self-forgiveness. This lack of grounding causes doubt and insecurity, making you susceptible to approval seeking and basing your sense of worth on other people’s opinions of you. Again, there is more to it, but this is the main gist.
Happiness defined this way is mostly independent of external circumstances. Sure, even the happiest people will sometimes feel sad in the face of adversity and bad luck, or experience bouts of depression at certain times in their lives; that’s just part of the human condition, I think. I am not discounting the role circumstances can play in a person’s life. But it is important to understand that circumstances alone cannot shape a person’s internal attitude. People overcome adversity all the time to triumph over unlucky and unfortunate life situations, while people born with tremendous advantages can also be tremendously unhappy.
This is because happiness is something that must be earned.
Note that I am not talking about the happiness we feel when something good happens. While this could be considered a form of happiness, it is a fleeting one, more accurately called excitement, which is a short-term reaction to a temporary event. Many people mistake excitement for happiness. They try to find happiness in thrill-seeking, living life from one peak to the next. Or, they keep themselves chronically distracted from their internal world with external stimuli, thinking that this is true pleasure. (This is one reason advertising works as well as it does. If people believe happiness has an external source, then this is where they will look for it.)
Romantic love, many people’s ideal of happiness, is not something that simply befalls you, either. The giddy emotion of early romance is situational; that is to say, it is excitement, it is not true happiness. The real happiness of romantic love is the result of two people willing to be vulnerable and honest with each other and assume equal responsibility for the work of doing so. This is not to say there is no pleasure in the early stages of love, because of course, there is. But much heartache could be avoided if people were more clear that the excitement of new love and the long-term satisfaction of a committed partnership are very different things, indeed.
Thus, without a strong sense of who you are, I believe it is impossible to be truly happy; that is, to have happiness as a default view of life. Happiness will simply be a fleeting emotion, dependent upon the people and circumstances in your life at any given moment, without a deeper connection to your deepest values and desires. Is this what people really want? I don’t think so.
So rather than as an emotion, happiness is better defined as the result of sustained effort to live life a certain way: with as much integrity, honor, sincerity, compassion, introspection, and honesty as we are able to practice, with a commitment to internally derived values arrived at through critical analysis and willingness to do the right thing. No one can do all of this perfectly, of course (at least, not outside of an Ayn Rand novel). But it is the effort, not the outcome, that will determine the level of serenity you achieve in life. Seen this way, happiness is more a by-product of “right living” than it is an end in itself.
You may argue that people get “lucky,” being in the right place at the right time. Yes. But what does this really mean? I believe there is one of two things occurring when this happens. First, there is the “luck” of the successful. Successful people often have some good fortune along their path. But they prepare themselves for this. They work hard and study and put themselves in the path of the success, moving to the city of their chosen field, seeking entry level positions and working their way up, getting involved and getting to know people who can help them, and developing a good reputation. When they’re in the right place at the right time, it is usually because they made a concerted effort to be there.
Fate, on the other hand, requires no preparation. Winning the lottery, for example, or having rich parents, or being born beautiful, or anything else that comes by no personal effort. But what kind of luck is this, really? Does getting something for nothing ever improve your relationship with yourself, or create an opportunity for introspection, or raise the value you put on hard work, honesty, or compassion? In short, does it do anything to help you develop into a more whole human being? If not, you must question whether there are any benefits at all to this kind of luck, and if it has any power at all to bring true happiness. I believe that it does not.
This is not to say that luck plays no role in people’s lives. Sometimes we can do everything right and have nothing to show for it; other times we can do everything wrong and come out in great shape. Life is far from fair. But again, if happiness is based on internal values, then external circumstances can do little to change that. The more centered a person is, the more circumspectly he can deal with all the pain and suffering that life throws at him. Again, such centeredness is an ongoing process, with infinite height and depth, but if held as a value, even the worst possible circumstances can theoretically be faced with dignity, grace, and serenity.
Happiness, then, is not only a by-product of a life well-lived, it’s also kind of a non-issue. It can be achieved only by not trying; only by the effort to make good choices and do the next right thing, and not as end in itself. But this is good news, because it means it is not an elusive, mysterious entity available to a chosen few. The power to attain it is within all of us right now, this very moment. Understand this, and you are well on your way.
You Can’t Have it Both Ways: Man Hating Won’t Bring You Love
One common theme of her posts was man-hating. She made a lot of “funny” posts about how worthless and lowdown men are. She used either straightforward sarcasm or that sort of wiser-than-thou, take-it-from-me-because-I’ve-learned-the-hard-way tone. Her opinion about men was clear: they are no damn good.
Then a few months ago, she started making posts about the new man in her life. She had found Mr. Right (her words), a perfect, wonderful, love-of-her-life, knight-in-shining-armor (also all her words). And it wasn’t just that she had found true love. She also felt sorry for all the women who didn’t have a man like hers, and she began giving out unsolicited romantic advice, which basically consisted of “be more like me, because I have the perfect man so I must have it all figured out.”
I just shook my head at it all, and of course, refrained from commenting. It all sounded really adolescent; such sweeping swings in attitude are emotionally immature; it reminded me of how I approached relationships twenty years ago. We’ll see how long it lasts, I said to myself (less than charitably, perhaps, but more on that in a minute).
Well, it lasted exactly one week. One week! The nauseating lovey-dovey posts ceased, as well as the condescending pity and maudlin advice. A few days after it all came to a crashing halt, Donna satisfied my curiosity. She inadvertently “replied to all” when she meant to reply to only one close friend on a message list. She was talking about the demise of her relationship, how he’d “just quit calling” and she “didn’t know what was going on with him,” as well as some theories as to what it might be, all of which were convoluted and absurd (as they always are when women try to analyze a man’s indifference). To me, it looked like a simple case of an immature man getting what he wanted and moving on. Which isn’t necessarily bad, if both people are honest and agree to such an arrangement, which was definitely not the case here. (In fact, this is a perfect example of what can happen when two immature people get together–they are incapable of seeing, much less caring, what’s really going on with the other person–but that too, is a different topic.)
After a few days of silence, Donna’s posts reverted to man-hating sarcasm, and the whole cycle of events got me thinking: you can’t have it both ways. You can’t be both cynical and expect to have a good relationship. The two are mutually exclusive with no area of overlap. Man-hating humor (and woman-hating, it works both ways) is negative. It puts negative energy out into the world, and it will bring negative energy back to you. You can shrug it off and claim you’re not serious, but it’s still negativity, and it adds nothing of value to the world, much less your own life. Building a good relationship is hard enough without such a tremendous handicap. It just isn’t going to work.
The biggest difficulty with this negativity (changing it, I mean) is that it usually comes from a very deep place. It may have been our earliest model of a relationship if our parents weren’t happy. It may have been our own unsuccessful struggle for attention from an emotionally distant father (or mother). It may have been downright abuse, or a trauma suffered at the hands of a pedophile, rapist, or other violent criminal. Likely it was some combination of a few of these. In any case, negativity is something we come by honestly, the remnants of a coping skill that helped us deal with some painful experience. In The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle says that we identify with this “pain body” to such a degree that we’re afraid if we lose it, we lose our selves. This identification is so powerful and so much a part of who we are that it unconsciously compels us to repeat patterns that we know make us miserable. While I’m not sure I agree with all of Mr. Tolle’s assumptions, it’s certainly true that, until we hit some sort of bottom with emotionally distant relationships, we do seem to repeat them over and over and over, even when we know we’re doing it, and seem utterly powerless to stop. I wrote about my own struggle with this here.
If you struggle with relationships, look at your attitude towards the opposite sex. Do you express a lot of cynicism toward them? Does what you’ve always passed off as humor have an edge to it? And if so, have you looked deeper inside yourself to discover the sources of this edge, this negativity? A satisfying relationship is a complex thing, and there’s more to a successful one than changing your own negativity, but if you have these issues and don’t look at them, you are not likely to make it to the next steps.
The good news is that, even if the introspection is hard, the behavioral changes are easy. Stop telling man-hating (or woman-hating) jokes. Stop painting the opposite sex with a broad brush and making fun of stereotypical gender shortcomings. Stop bonding with other women (or men) around the inadequacies of men (or women). Notice when you’re being cynical, and stop. Just stop. Such a change in behavior will feel good immediately. More importantly, it will start an upward spiral of more positive energy in your life. Of course, acting differently won’t solve the underlying issues, those require a bit more effort, but it’s a good start toward change nevertheless.
The truth is, some men are poor raw material, as are some women. But many are decent, kind, and willing to do the hard work of having a good relationship. The far more difficult–and far more pertinent–question to answer is, are you?
Sadly, the same thing happened again just this week, with Donna going from man-hating posts to love-of-my-life posts back to silence in the span of about four days. She hasn’t started the man-hating posts up again yet, but I suspect she will, as she seems oblivious about the role of her own choices in these ongoing dramas. While I have no doubt the man is immature, Donna’s attitude of blame makes it improbable that any lasting change will occur for her. This is very sad, and sadder still that so very many people are stuck in similar unhappy cycles of behavior. You can’t have it both ways, but that rarely seems to stop people from trying.
As always, the inner journey is the only one that really matters.
A final note: I felt bad that I felt so good about Donna’s breakup. But in questioning my pettiness, I came to realize that my glee had less to do with dislike for this woman than with her experience being validation of all the hard work and analysis I’ve done to understand myself, relationships, and what it takes to have a good one. Her tale was a data point that I’m on the right track and maybe have a few things figured out. And that felt good. I should also add that none of this is at her expense, as she has no idea who Brave New Kitty is or even that it exists.
Stop Swimming Upstream
The part of you trying to be heard is insistent, and it will keep making demands until it gets your attention. Even if you don’t consider yourself “depressed” but still have issues with fatigue or sadness that are not tied to your life circumstances, it may be because you expend a lot of energy avoiding parts of yourself that you don’t want to deal with. We all do this to some extent; we all have a shadow, and it’s natural to shy away from pain, especially as children. But sometimes–usually, in fact–doing so makes life more difficult than it has to be. We swim upstream pointlessly, as what we are avoiding either:
- won’t go away until it’s dealt with, or
- is too minor an issue to have avoided in the first place.
Often, both turn out to be true.
As I’ve said many times in many places, scary feelings don’t go away just because we prefer not to deal with them. Rather, they get pushed out of our awareness and live in our subconscious, manifesting as bursts of temper, unexplained sadness, and other strong emotions that feel like they’re not part of us, like they’re coming from “somewhere else.” Such repression is a normal way children deal with issues that would otherwise overwhelm them. Depending on how frighting those feelings are, however, this process can go askew quickly. Abuse and other trauma can cause children to disown healthy fear and anger, and if they don’t un-learn this by adulthood (and few do, as they have no way to do so and few resources to help them), it can harden into an unhealthy way of dealing with feelings, sometimes the good ones as well as the bad. This sets people up not only for depression, but also resentment, addiction, emotionally distant relationships, and all the other distractions that so conveniently help us avoid the dark side of ourselves. Sadly, not owning these feelings is also likely to perpetuate them–that is, pass them on to our children.
What we don’t own owns us.
Such ownership demands a heavy price. These feelings are the invisible elephant in the room that we have to always pretend isn’t there even as we feed, water, and tend to him (not to mention work our way around him). And he needs a lot of tending! After all, he is an elephant. And he might be invisible, but he’s always there, demanding attention and using up resources like it is natural for an elephant to do. And he will continue to do so until his presence is acknowledged.
Sometimes, this process can go on for decades, or sadly even a lifetime, as people remain unaware of what they’re doing. This is particularly true if the invalidation they suffered as children was traumatic (and the worse the trauma, the scarier it can be to face it). Disowned feelings of this nature are terrifying. To a child, it can literally feel like the choice between survival and annihilation. So they push down the terror of annihilation–and rightfully so!–then tell themselves less threatening stories about their circumstances. But because the terror doesn’t get a voice, it lives in the unconscious, stuck and ignored, and in many cases retains its power to terrify, which explains why so many adults work soooo hard to avoid facing these feelings!
I know I did. When I started this process of healing, fear was a way of life for me. It was so ingrained that I was unable to identify it as such; I just knew I wanted to feel better. I was fortunate to have had a bad experience with antidepressants and to have lots of supportive people telling me things like “the only way out is through” and “own your feelings or they own you.” The process of owning the feelings was not fun, and at several points I felt like if I proceeded any further, I would indeed literally die. But this in itself was a revelation, as I survived repeated forays into the abyss and my rational mind assured me that these feelings could not kill me–and what was I so afraid of, anyway?
After an intense couple of years, I emerged on the other side of the brunt of these big feelings (some will always remain a part of me), and I was left feeling more whole, more wise–and sadder. For as the process wound down, I realized that most of what I was avoiding was, simply, grief. Grief about many things, but mostly, grief that I was not more loved by my parents. And as sad as that was, and as hard as it was to accept, it was also a huge relief. I had uncovered a great personal mystery, come to terms with a great personal truth, and despite the grief, it felt wonderful to have stepped out of the cave of delusion and into the sunshine of radiant honesty. One day I woke up and my elephant was gone. All that was left was a big empty space–but a space I could fill with thoughts and feelings of my own choosing.
And it wasn’t that the issue was minor, exactly, but what I had once believed would kill me turned out to be far less lethal than I would ever have imagined. Everything I was so vehemently avoiding was more like a pimple than a tumor, with no real power to hurt me other than what I, in my ignorance, gave it.
If you have:
- depression;
- fatigue or sadness without a visible source;
- bursts of temper or other lack of control over your feelings;
- issues with addiction;
- unsatisfying personal relationships;
- numbness or flatness where feelings should be–particularly around your relatives; or
- a general sense of disconnection (either from yourself of from other people)
then you may be avoiding some scary old feelings. To look into it more deeply, you could read some books (here’s a list of my favorites), seek therapy, or join a self-help group (particularly if addiction is a concern). But please, please, please do something, because this is your life we’re talking about!
The upshot: Grief and fear feed on avoidance, but once faced they have little power. The energy we use avoiding our pain would be better spent accepting what is and dealing with it as honestly as possible. It can be painful, but so can surgery. A little pain now (or even a lot) is worth the healing it will bring. Avoiding this process is like swimming upstream, when happiness lies in the other direction.
The World is Too Much With Us
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. -Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
-William Wordsworth
If Wordsworth had caught a glimpse of the modern world, with its television, Internet, cell phones, and all its other insistent attention-grabbers, he probably would have given up on our species on the spot. Everybody is so distracted these days! We are so bombarded with stimuli that we feel naked, lost, even agitated without it. The world is so much with us now that we’ve largely forgotten what it means to be without it.
Human nature hasn’t changed so much, which is why the poem is still so fitting. But technology has enabled us to move away from Nature, and thus that deepest part of ourselves, with increasing ease and efficiency. People can’t do anything anymore without a cell phone attached to their ear. And god forbid we miss an email or Facebook update because we’re on vacation. We can’t “get away from it all” anymore because now we can take it all with us. And we call this progress!
Few people even question this anymore. We take for granted that driving, shopping, and going for walks are now opportunities to talk on our phones. I’ve seen people answer their cell phones in restaurants and carry on a conversation while their companion idly waits, neither of them questioning the practice. I’ve seen people on their phones while walking their dogs, on hiking trails, while working out at the gym, and riding their bicycles. I once saw a person talking on his phone while riding a unicycle! At one time, these were activities we did to be alone with ourselves, recharge our batteries, and get grounded. Now, they are all opportunities for further distraction.
Why is an activity no longer enough in itself? Why, when we drive, can we not just be driving? Why, when we walk, can we not just be walking? Why do activities have to be an excuse to do something else? Why do we feel like one simple activity is not enough?
What is it we’re trying so hard to distract ourselves from?
I wrote about this awhile back in Multitasking: Its Real Appeal, and I think the problem has gotten worse just in the two years that have passed. Rather than learning how to use technology to serve us and improve our quality of life, instead we’ve allowed its place in our lives to be even larger and even more insistent than ever. Sigh.
Take time to just drive. To just walk. To just sit. To just be. For it is in these spaces, the quiet ones, the ones that come in-between the demands of the world, where we find the magic, the gold, the joy. They are the secret to unlocking the essence of who we are.
It is really that simple.
Beauty Is An Inside Job
I spent last week in Las Vegas on a short poker vacation. From what I’ve heard, Los Angeles is worse, but even so I have never seen so vast a concentration of plastic-surgeried women in all my life as I have in Vegas. We get out there about once a year, and I swear, every time it seems a little worse. Besides all the synthetic breasts, enhanced lips, and face lifts, women clunk around in ridiculously uncomfortable shoes with as many of their parts hanging as they can get away with. Many hang on the arms of much older men with tanned complexions and Rolex watches. Some have it down and look good; some don’t and just look pained and awkward.
Vegas is a city where superficiality rules. Everybody wants to appear rich and successful to everybody else, and since nobody knows each other, it’s possible to get away with it. I can understand the appeal in that; the fantasy is part of the fun. But even so, I find it incredibly sad that this is what passes for the ideal of feminine beauty in our culture: looking hot, but to the complete neglect of common sense and, more importantly, inner radiance.
Oh, I know that with all the movie stars, models, and otherwise skewed images of ideal femininity the media inundates us with, women have struggled for a long time with beauty issues. I’m not desciribing anything new. But as I was walking through the Bellagio, surrounded by lovely yet plasticized women, I had this weird, visceral awareness that plastic surgery is a subtle (or maybe not so subtle) form of self-loathing. Imagine disliking your looks so much that you’re willing to pay thousands of dollars to have them permanently altered! Imagine the first time you look in the mirror and the face you’ve lived with all your life is no longer there! And it occurred to me that this current ideal not only misses the point about true beauty, it is the complete opposite of it.
Nobody seems to understand anymore that true beauty is an inside job. The feminine archetype–the ideal feminine–is about radiance. The woman is the vessel of life, the nourisher, the provider of love and comfort. Her beauty comes from her warmth, her capacity to love. She is literally “attractive” in that she draws the masculine to her with promises of care and respite from his work and worries-and yes, sexual desirability. When a woman has these traits, her radiance shines through and she is beautiful all the way to her core. When she doesn’t, no amount of changing the outside is going to make a difference. Sure, she might be briefly lusted after by men for her physical appearance, but this in itself, divorced from inner traits, is ultimately hollow and unsatisfying; what will she have when she reaches middle age?
Now, this might sound like I’m saying that women’s roles should go back to their traditional roots of running the family, but I’m not saying that at all. Liberation of both sexes to do what they want is a positive thing. But I think this skewed desire for external beauty at all costs is a shadow aspect of the sea change that’s taken place for women in the last century. The great irony of feminism is that it has denied what makes us female and what makes us beautiful, as well as strong and whole. We see femininity as something to be pushed away, battled and defeated. But, as with any fundamental aspect of self, it hasn’t gone away, it is merely hiding in the unconscious–in this case the collective unconscious–manifesting as a distorted, misunderstood caricature of itself as it tries to be heard and integrated. When feminists scoff at women who strive for the external beauty ideal, they are really scoffing at this disowned part of themselves–sadly, a part integral to our sense of wholeness. And I think the degree to which this disowning occurs is the degree to which a woman can loathe herself enough to surgically change how she looks.
Such fragmentation is a normal part of growth and change. First the change happens, then we integrate all the various aspects that were affected by the change. Ken Wilber calls it transcend and include, and it is one of the most eloquent theories of human development I’ve ever read. The point here is that I am not criticizing the feminists, or the women who express the disowned aspects of our new-found liberation. Rather, I am offering an explanation.
Anyway, as we collectively work toward embracing all the aspects of our femininity as one glorious whole meant to complement, not compete with, the masculine, we’ll make some errors along the way. And this exclusive focus on external appearance is one of the saddest, because it draws us further and further away from ourselves and from the possibility of finding our true beauty–our inner radiance. Changing the outside won’t make you feel better about yourself on the inside, or help you grow in wisdom and knowledge, or help one whit with self-actualization. And it is a particularly insidious form of stuckness, because it’s so easy to believe you’re not stuck, that you’re on top of the world because men want you and women want to be you. But if along the way you’ve lost yourself, then you are being wanted and envied for the wrong reasons, by people who are also lost, and searching in all the wrong places for that elusive sense of wholeness which we all intuitively strive toward.
Like all other diversions, it works for awhile, but the day will come when you wake up with the sense that something is terribly wrong and you’ve somehow missed the point of it all. And that is a day to be rejoiced, because on that day, real beauty becomes possible.
What is Depression?
In Dead Kittens and Prozac, I use the word sadness to describe the condition for which doctors prescribe antidepressant medication. I did this deliberately, as a way to de-medicalize the reasons people seek out these drugs, all of which fall under the broad category of depression. I did this not because I don’t believe depression is real, because I definitely do. I just think that seeing it as a medically treatable condition has grave limitations. It considers only one aspect of depression (brain chemistry), and one that solves none of the underlying issues (and in many cases, does a poor job with the chemistry, as well). I think that if people want to overcome depression, they have to understand it a little more deeply than that.
So what is depression then? First of all, by depression I don’t mean sadness as the result of difficult life circumstances; feeling sad or overwhelmed in the face of stress, trauma, or loss is normal. Depression is more of an existential sadness with mysterious roots–and it has many, many definitions. Here are just a few from a Google search for “definition of depression,” which yielded more than 21 million results:
- a mental state characterized by a pessimistic sense of inadequacy and a despondent lack of activity
- sad feelings of gloom and inadequacy
- depressive disorder: a state of depression and anhedonia so severe as to require clinical intervention
- Depression is a state of low mood and aversion to activity. Some consider it a dysfunction, while others see it as an adaptive defense mechanism.
- An illness that involves the body, mood, and thoughts, that affects the way a person eats and sleeps, the way one feels about oneself, and the way one thinks about things. A depressive disorder is not the same as a passing blue mood. It is not a sign of personal weakness or a condition that can be wished away. People with a depressive disease cannot merely “pull themselves together” and get better. Without treatment, symptoms can last for weeks, months, or years. Appropriate treatment, however, can help most people with depression.
I think all of these are more or less accurate. But one of the best definitions I’ve heard (I forget where) is that depression is anger turned inward. This is quite vague, and, as it turns out, has a lot of different interpretations itself. Some consider it a distinctly feminine form of depression that stems from internalizing rather than expressing anger. Others consider it a problem with “anger management,” whatever that means. The Freudian view, and perhaps the original source of the term, is that children who grow up with emotionally distant parents learn not to express their unappealing feelings in an effort to gain approval, which results in self-loathing and, eventually, depression.
Anger turned inward, at least from the Freudian view, starts to get at the root causes of depression better than any of the more clinical definitons. But I think there is a simpler and more all-encompassing way to state the core problem: more than anything else, depression is about stuck feelings.
Stuck feelings are the crux of the issue. What we learn to believe is unacceptable we push away, and often these are feelings that scare or annoy other people; particularly our parents when we were small. If you were shamed for expressing your more volatile feelings or were even just expected to not “disappoint” your parents by having such feelings, then what you essentially learned was to repress your “unacceptable” feelings. All parents expect this from their children to some degree, out of the normal demands of teaching a young person how to behave and function. But for myriad different reasons in myriad different degrees, some parents get it wrong more than others. They make demands of a child that she cannot meet without denying some crucial part of her self. The greater the invalidation, the greater the chances that she will struggle with depression as an adult, as well as addiction, emotionally distant relationships, and all the other symptoms of disconnectedness from self that result when a child learns to dislike, censor, and ignore her emotions.
Emotional repression is not something a child has any control over. We are biologically wired to need our parent’s approval, and we will do whatever we have to to get it. Anything else is too threatening to contemplate, even if a child does have the mental capacity to do so, which few do. So we repress feelings our parents don’t like. This is not a conscious process, but rather a knee jerk response to a threatening environment. In this sense, it’s kind of a double whammy: not only do we repress our natural flow of emotions, but we are unaware we are doing it. This is why, when we reach adulthood, depression doesn’t feel like anger, or for that matter, any other “dark” emotion. In a very real sense, we don’t know what anger–normal, healthy anger, anyway–feels like. We experience it only as a vague, amorphous feeling of impending doom or all-encompassing sadness that we can’t identify, can’t shake free of, and feel totally helpless to change. (Is it any wonder people turn to pills to deal with such pain?)
Feelings are a gauge of how well we’re fulfilling our needs. When that gauge doesn’t function properly, it’s like trying to drive a car with a flat tire: you may get to where you’re going, but you expend far more energy to do so. This is why depressed people are so often fatigued and listless. They are operating at a constant deficit, their systems working overtime just to stay even with life’s everyday challenges. Furthermore, the repression itself requires a great amount of effort, like the effort required to maintain a lie rather tell the truth; actually, it’s not “like” at all. It is the effort of maintaining a lie rather then telling the truth–only not to other people, but to ourselves. And as long as we would rather maintain the lie rather than deal with the painful truth, we remain in a vicious cycle of energy-sapping, soul-wrenching, feeling-denying flatness.
Simply put, our stuck feelings keep us stuck. What may once have protected you now functions like a weight around your ankle. And that is the source of depression.
“But what about the brain chemistry?” you may ask. “Depressed people have different brain chemistry!” Yes, this is absolutely true. But you can’t blame your brain chemistry for having depression any more than you can blame REM sleep for the kind of dreams you have. Altered brain chemistry is a result, not a cause, of stuck feelings. Un-cork the feelings, reconnect with the disowned parts of your self, and the brain chemistry will change (and your dreams probably will, too). If medication helps you do this, then by all means use it. But if you think medication is a substitute for this work, you will only get further and further away from true healing.
Depression is far from being as simple as stuck feelings might sound. But it is also far from being so simple that a pill can “cure” it. Like all aspects of the human condition, it is a messy and complex issue. The important thing to remember, I think, is that like all painful experiences, depression is paradoxically an opportunity. It is our inner self trying to tell us that there’s something wrong. To continue with the car analogy, it is the check engine light of our soul, telling us that something needs attention. I’m not saying it’s something to be grateful for, or that the work of reconnecting with those disowned parts is easy, because neither of these is true. But when life puts us between the rock and the hard place that is staying stuck or coming to terms with our personal darkness, I see no real choice. And accepting this is, in itself, the beginning trickle that will eventually break the dam.