“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.” Robert Frost

 

The first house I owned was built in 1760, located on what is today the edge of the Quabbin Reservoir. As someone who had never lived in a home built before World War II, I was enchanted by all the colonial details: the 12-over-12 windows, the enormous block of local rough-hewn granite that sat above the fireplace (rumored to have taken six men to carry and install). I marveled, too, at the wainscoting in the living room—single boards measuring 3’ x 16’—made from King’s Pines, the oldest, tallest New England white pines reserved exclusively for ships’ masts by the Crown in 1691, but frequently nicked by local colonists for their own building purposes.

Discovering the history behind my new home made me curious about the history of the community. Who were these people who inhabited what would have been an isolated area in the years before the “horseless carriage?” How did they manage daily life?

Among the exhibits, artifacts, and papers I perused, it was a collection of women’s journals and letters I remember most, especially the ones dealing with the death of a child. Infant mortality was a serious threat well into the nineteenth century. For 1850, it’s estimated that almost 25% of white babies, and over a third of black babies never saw their first birthday. Virtually no family was left untouched by this kind of tragedy.

The women’s writing bears witness to the deep sadness such loss evoked. Letters filled with poignant reminiscences of a “wee one” asleep in its mother’s arms, a toothless smile on its lips. Heart-rending descriptions of a child’s last moments, gasping for breath or burning from fever. Sorrow, heartache, grief—they were part of the emotional landscape in the 18th century. Openly acknowledged and vividly expressed.

In the intervening years, much has happened to reduce infant death and combat disease. Pasteur formulated germ theory in the 1860s. An effective vaccine for tuberculosis became available in 1921. Penicillin arrived on the scene in 1928, a “miracle cure” for millions. But sadness is not so easily eradicated.

Death, displacement, loss, rejection—these things still dog us, an inescapable part of the human condition, as core to our being as an arm or a lung. Only our acceptance of sadness, our ability to deal with it or even to admit to it, has changed.

Sad Shaming

In a 2013 article for scientificamerican.com , psychotherapist Tori Rodriguez describes how startled she was to hear a patient apologize for talking about his painful experiences. “I’m sorry for being so negative,” the man said.

People who seek therapy presumably do so because they recognize the distress of their situation is greater than they can manage alone. Therapists don’t expect them to “put on a happy face.” But Rodriguez has noticed a definite uptick in the number of patients who feel guilty or embarrassed by what they perceive to be their own negativity. “Such reactions undoubtedly stem from our culture’s overriding bias toward positive thinking,” she says. “Problems arise when people start believing they must be upbeat all the time.”

John Naish, author of Enough: Breaking Free From The World Of More, writes: It’s almost as though we must have a duty to be happy in today’s highly developed Western world.

Conversations you may have heard or had:

“Hey, how it’s going?”

“Good. Great. Everything’s going well.”

I actually knew someone who responded this way though her 15-year-old daughter had recently been arrested for prostitution, her son was in rehab, and her husband was jumping ship.

Are we in denial here or what?

A quick google on the matter reveals that, at best, we are confused about just how happy we can or should be, as the following subject lines attest:

Is Being Happy All the Time Possible?

Are Humans Supposed to be Happy All the Time?

Is it Normal to Feel Happy All the Time?

Why It’s Not Normal to be Happy All the Time

And, my personal favorite: 10 Scientifically Proven Ways to Stay Happy All the Time

So, how did we get from those letters of our foremothers with their unabashed expressions of sadness and grief, to thinking we’re supposed to feel happy all the time? Where did this sad-shaming come from?

I can’t pinpoint the moment it arrived, but the $10 billion-plus (annual) self-help industry might be a good place to start.

The Happiness Industry

In 1952, a Reformed Church (RCA) minister, Norman Vincent Peale, published a book that would remain on The New York Times bestseller list for 186 consecutive weeks. The Power of Positive Thinking, using a blend of what can best be described as glib spirituality and pop psychology promised readers that if they could imagine it, it would come.

“Stand up to an obstacle,” Peale exhorted.  “Just stand up to it, that’s all, and don’t give way under it, and it will finally break. You will break it. Something has to break, and it won’t be you, it will be the obstacle.”

By way of explanation, he offered:  “When you expect the best, you release a magnetic force in your mind which by a law of attraction tends to bring the best to you.”

It’s all a matter, as Peale would explain again and again in his next 45 books, of changing your thoughts. “Change your thoughts and you change your world,” he told a readership hungry to swallow the idea that eternal happiness was theirs for the believing.

(Interesting side note: Peale was a close friend of Richard Nixon and he officiated at Donald Trump’s wedding to Ivana. According to The Washington Post, Trump sings Peale’s praises when asked about his own religious convictions, and Peale described Trump as “kindly and courteous” with “a streak of honest humility,” touting him as “one of America’s top positive thinkers and doers.”)

The Power of Positive Thinking sold an impressive 7 million copies, but two decades later, the man John Rogers (AP) called “the pied piper of the self-help movement” crushed those numbers. Wayne Dyer’s Your Erroneous Zones (1976) has sold 35 million copies to date.  Unlike Peale who had no mental health credentials—indeed, the psychology community was annoyed with him—Dyer held an Ed.D. in counseling. This, however, did not prevent him from frequently making equally questionable, facile (and highly profitable) claims such as:

It’s been proven that the thoughts we choose have everything to do with our emotions. I can tell you that a commitment to feeling good can take away a stomach ache, fear, depression, sadness, anxiety—you name it. Any stress signal is a way of alerting you to say the five magic words: I want to feel good.

Different Gurus, Same Message

Indeed, if Peale’s and Dyer’s writings were jotted on scraps of paper and mixed together, it would be hard to distinguish one happiness guru from the other. Try it.

Who said:

1. Our happiness depends on the habit of mind we cultivate. So practice happy thinking every day. Cultivate the merry heart, develop the happiness habit, and life will become a continual feast.  

2. Feelings are not just emotions that happen to you. Feelings are reactions you choose to have.

3. If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

4. When you get up in the morning, you have two choices – either to be happy or to be unhappy. Just choose to be happy.

5. Whatever people can imagine clearly with emotion, by creating a perfect vibrational match, is theirs to be, or do, or have.

6. The essence of greatness is the ability to choose personal fulfillment in circumstances where others choose madness.

(This last reminds me of the parody on Kipling’s “If”:  If you can keep your head while all about are losing theirs … it’s just possible you haven’t grasped the situation.)

Here are the correct attributions: 1 and 4 (Peale); 2,3 and 6 (Dyer).

Number 5 is a quote from Esther Hicks (okay, I wasn’t playing completely fair). Hicks is an inspirational speaker and co-author of nine books, including the popular Law of Attraction series (Abraham Hicks Publications), whose seven titles include Money and the Law of Attraction: Learning to Attract Wealth, Health, and Happiness, and Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires. According to Hicks, the books are “translated from a group of non-physical entities called Abraham.” Hicks says she is simply tapping into “infinite intelligence.”

You betcha.

It’s a very appealing idea that one can be happy all the time—no one seeks pain—but is it true?

What unites Peale, Dyer, Hicks and a zillion other happiness gurus is this: Believing makes it so. But if it’s possible to be happy all the time, and it just depends on your willing it, then it’s a short leap to the conclusion that if you’re not happy all the time, it’s your own damn fault. Indeed, Dyer says as much in what may be the sad-shaming daddy of them all: You didn’t come forth into this world to suffer, to be anxious, fearful or depressed. Remember, your thoughts, not your world, cause you stress.

Tell that to a Syrian child who lost both parents and her home when her village was bombed, a refugee orphan whom no country wants to take in. Tell that child it’s her thoughts not her world that is causing her pain. It’s a mythology that can only exist in absolute privilege and the real twist is that it doesn’t even exist there. The monied classes are full of unhappy people who believed that a 5,000 square-foot McMansion, a bright shiny new car, and a load of the latest high-end digital gadgets and appliances would prove a talisman against sadness and disappointment.

We don’t need more and bigger stuff to insulate us from sorrow and pain. What we need is resilience.

Resilience and the Complications of Happiness

Resilience is “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress” (American Psychological Association). Though some of us seem to be more resilient than others, and all of us can increase our resilience, none of us can render ourselves impervious to emotional shocks and pain. “Being resilient does not mean that a person doesn’t experience difficulty or distress,” the APA explains. “Emotional pain and sadness are common in people who have suffered major adversity or trauma in their lives.”

It’s worth noting here that it’s not only sorrow, disappointment, and grief that prevent us from being on a never-ending happy trip. It’s happiness itself. Happiness, as it turns out, is complicated. Just ask anyone who has killed time waiting for a preschooler to make her choice among the list of possibilities at the ice cream stand.

And though the choices change with maturity, the complications remain as we struggle to juggle work, family, friends, personal pursuits, and the need for solitude—all important contributors to our health and  happiness. As Jennifer Hecht, a history professor who studies among other things the history of happiness, says in her book The Happiness Myth, we all experience many types of happiness, but that doesn’t save us from experiencing conflicts. Putting our energies into one source of happiness, say, landing our dream job, takes time away from another source of happiness, our partner and children. Devoting ourselves to raising our kids means many fewer hours for alone time and our own interests. Alas, we are mere mortals and it’s impossible to stretch the day beyond 24 hours or to be in two places at once.

 The High Cost of Faking It

 Okay, so it’s not possible to be happy all the time, but is it even desirable to act as if we are eternally happy, happy, happy?

Consider the following scenarios:

Your house and everything in it burns to the ground.

You are robbed and beaten at gunpoint.

Your best friend betrays you.

You lose your job at age 50 and can’t find another.

Your spouse develops Alzheimer’s.

Your child dies in a car accident. (As a parent, I can hardly bring myself to even write that.)

Can you seriously imagine acting happy in the wake of any of these situations?  Would it even be remotely possible to vanquish all anxiety, heartache, and grief just by “choosing to be happy?”

Our language is awash in words for pain, disappointment, and sorrow because they are part of the human experience. These emotions happen to everyone. There ain’t no way around them. And attempting to suppress them may be the unhealthiest thing we can do. Refusing to deal with something consciously doesn’t stop our subconscious from dwelling on it. And dwelling on it. And dwelling on it some more. It’s only when we allow ourselves to experience and accept difficult emotions that we can open the door to making sense of our feelings and moving on. According to psychologist Jonathan M. Adler, “Acknowledging the complexity of life may be an especially fruitful path to psychological well-being.”

You Can Handle This

 

I shared an apartment with a dear friend in my Boston days. Whenever she was sad or distressed, Terri cleaned like a madwoman. She once painted the entire apartment in a weekend after a break-up. In a painful place at the time myself, I watched her as I downed a tumbler of Jameson’s and played all the sad songs my record collection offered. Not the best of times, but we both got through it.  As my dad used to say, “This too shall pass.”

There are many ways to cope with unhappiness. Like Terri, you can throw yourself into projects while your heart calms. You can call a good friend—and if your friends only want to hear from you when you’re happy, it’s time to find new friends. You can go the gym—the workout will flood you with endorphins and do your heart good. You can write or paint or compose a song about what you’re feeling. Much of the world’s great literature and music has its source in difficult moments. I generally choose to “sit” with my pain. Or more precisely, to let my pain “sit” with me while I go about my day, allowing my distress to float through me, neither indulging it nor suppressing it.

And if you find your sadness continues to overwhelm you, there’s a world full of professional help out there. Seek it, and don’t apologize for “negative feelings.” None of us gets through this life without the aid of others. 

Personally, I have always taken comfort from the fact that the moment the bottom falls out—the punch in the gut when your world is turned upside down a little, or a lot—that’s the worst moment. In the seconds it takes to realize what’s happened, that moment is already in the rearview mirror. You’ve survived it. And from there, everything after is movement away, upward, toward the light.

Toward another chance at happiness.

 

 

“The only time you ever have in which to learn anything or see anything or feel anything, or express any feeling or emotion, or respond to an event, or grow, or heal, is this moment … You’re only here now; you’re only alive in this moment.”   Jon Kabat-Zinn

 

I’m lucky to live in a state that has over 300 miles of rail-trails, so when I’m done with the morning’s writing (and it’s not January), I often go for a bike ride. Lose the tension in my shoulders. Let go of whatever problems my characters have posed for me that day (and those pesky people can cause real trouble when they choose).

My favorite loop, about ten miles out and back, takes me to Look Park, a vast oasis of  green lawn and blue ponds. The trail there mostly goes through wooded areas. At one spot, chickens and ducks waddle along the verge, scouring the long grasses and wildflowers for a snack to supplement their caregiver’s feed. The first time I saw them, I worried for their safety—so many bicyclists whizzing by—but over the years, I’ve come to realize they are proof of Darwin’s law:  Adapt or perish. They are obviously smart fowl.

At another spot, the land falls sharply away from the trail, and I glimpse the skeleton of a 1940s truck, blue in the patches that rust hasn’t eaten. Time. It’s always there, at some moments shouting, at others whispering.

No matter how scorching or muggy the day, a breeze lifts my hair, cools my skin, empties my busy brain, and I tune into the birdsong, tranquil. Which is what makes it all the more jarring when I pass a woman, walking with her toddler and talking into her cell phone. Seconds later, I cycle past another walker, this one with ear buds connecting her to an iPod while she texts on her phone, fingers flying over the keyboard. There’s even a bicyclist—and I’m not making this up—pedaling along while texting two-handed.

It’s lovely that all these folks are out here enjoying the rail-trail, but my question is: Are they actually enjoying the rail-trail?

Selfie Madness

We’ve all seen the absorbed texter (maybe even bumped into them!) walking through the airport, oblivious to others and their luggage or, like an errant pinball, caroming down a crowded city sidewalk only to step off the curb into traffic, unaware.

People speak of life passing you by, but our digital addictions are causing us to pass by life without pausing to register its pulse. Texting. Tweeting. And then there’s selfie-madness.

In June, I was at a Yankees-Red Sox game with my husband. Since we only go once a year, we treated ourselves to field level tickets along the first base line. These seats aren’t cheap, so I was surprised at how many people around us spent the entire game taking selfies, their backs to the ball field. They seemed to prefer snapping photos of themselves attending a Yankees-Red Sox game to actually watching the play on the field. And it was a great game. Tense. The lead bouncing back and forth. Close score. But it often felt like my husband and I were the only ones following the action, a task not made easier by the bodies hurtling through our line of sight in search of the perfect location/angle/backdrop for a selfie.

The Digital Invasion

I first glimpsed signs of what would become our digital mania in 2003 while vacationing in Florence, Italy. We were visiting Il Duomo (Santa Maria del Fiore) when I noticed a man walking about with a video camera, filming, his wife and kids doggedly trotting after. Although camcorders still used videotape at this time, they had shrunk considerably in size from their dinosaur predecessors of the mid-1980s. And this man was determined to make use of their newfound mobility.

He continued filming as we strolled about the piazza, admiring Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise—ten dramatic bronze reliefs that depict Old Testament scenes on the doors of the Baptistery—and Giotto’s polychromatic marble-faced campanile with its della Robbia panels.

The camera remained glued to his face when we entered Il Duomo beneath the clock designed by Uccello, and traveled up, up, up the 463 steps to stand amazed beneath Brunelleschi’s architectural miracle of a dome, its interior graced with Vasari’s frescoes of the Last Judgment.

I never saw his face that day. In my mind, he remains a figure ambling about with a large camera where his head should be. I’ve often wondered if he and the family ever got around to watching the hundreds of hours I’m guessing he filmed during his Italian vacation. Or did he just move on to the next destination, camera at the ready, missing more moments of his life amid the wonders of the world? Perhaps he morphed into the guy I saw a decade later during another trip to Florence, a selfie stick strapped to his forehead, a camcorder suspended from its top, dutifully recording everything he was walking away from in the Piazza della Signoria, his face in the foreground.

Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing

With smartphones, the capture of every moment is only a click away. On the same trip that took us to Yankee Stadium, we spent a morning in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We were hanging out in European Paintings 1250-1800, soaking up the dark mysteries of Rembrandt, the pink fulsome flesh of Rubens, the broad Flemish landscapes of Bruegel. Darting all about us, like a gnat you can’t seem to lose, was a woman snapping photos of every painting. And not only the paintings, but the little description cards that accompanied each work. Snap. Snap. Snap. She paused only a nanosecond to capture Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Pitcher before buzzing off to give Franz Hals’s Portrait of a Bearded Man with a Ruff the same blink of her camera.

I can report she missed not a single painting, but in another, more significant way she missed them all. If that seems an exaggeration, pick up a postcard of Van Gogh’s extraordinary painting of a chair, called reasonably enough Van Gogh’s Chair, and compare it to the original that hangs in London’s National Gallery. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but an amateur photo of a major artwork is… squat.

Patti LuPone Takes On The Texters

And when we’re not filming, we’re texting. Two years ago, while starring in Shows for Days, actress Patti LuPone grabbed the cell phone of an audience member in the front row who had been texting through the entire first act. The cast and audience had already endured four separate cell phone rings during that day’s show, so tempers were somewhat frayed.

“She was sitting in the light, so everyone could see her texting. It’s ridiculous,” LuPone said.

Lupone returned the phone after the performance was over, but gave vent to her distress. “I’m defeated by this. It’s not changing, it’s only getting worse … If something isn’t done, I will think twice before I get back on a stage again.

“It’s not [about] theater etiquette,” she explained. “It’s human etiquette. We’re living in an isolated society, the phone controls our every move, and we’ve lost sight of our neighbor, the people surrounding us.”

One of the great ironies of our cell phone addiction is that it was preceded by an innovation that freed us from our phones: the answering machine. They were a revelation, a revolution. No longer did you have to worry about missing an important call. It would be there on the little cassette when you got home. You were free to go about your day, or travel the world, without once thinking of your phone. It was a golden time, however short-lived.

Surprise: Pop Quiz!

Okay, I’ve had my moment on the soapbox. Now it’s time for you to play along.

When did you last:

1. Take an evening off Facebook and Twitter to hang out with friends and neighbors?

2. Visit an art gallery or museum using only your eyes, no camera (photos of you and loved ones in front of the museum don’t count here)?

3. Pick a dining spot in a city not your own by walking along the streets “window shopping” restaurants and cafes rather than googling TripAdvisor or Yelp?

4. Enjoy a cup of coffee or a glass of wine at a café with your significant other and no cell phones in sight?

5. Browse a brick-and-mortar bookstore—with actual shelves and real books you can open and read—rather than surf Goodreads for recommendations, then order from Amazon?

6. Go for a hike or a bicycle ride naked—no iPod, no earbuds, no smartphone?

If you can’t recall the last time for any or (yikes!) all of the above, I suggest you get out into the world immediately. Talk to real people. Listen to the sounds of summer—the buzz of bees, kids laughing, birds trilling, the lap of water at the beach. Literally, stop and smell the roses.

And give your texting thumbs a rest. For there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your mobile apps.

“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.”  (Sir John Lubbock)

[Author’s note: I think of this as the ultimate summer post, which is my way of saying it first appeared on May 31, 2016. Even writers need to pry themselves loose from their laptops and kick back once in a while. If you see me on my deck, give a wave. Enjoy the fine weather.]

Some years ago, after a day of rambling through the 300+ booths of the Paradise City Arts Festival, I suggested to my husband Ed that we sit and be for a while. This was one of our early excursions together, and he had yet to master the lingo of his beloved. “Sit and be?” he echoed. “What’s that?” Somewhat taken aback—how do you reduce the irreducible?—I stammered, “Well, you just sit … and you be.”

Most of us feel keenly the press of time. Deadlines lurk around every corner. The rent is due. Taxes are due. Biological clocks are ticking. Careers must be launched and once launched, must be advanced. Running through it all, like a Greek chorus whose role it is to underscore the message, are advertisements exhorting us to Act Now. Don’t Waste Another Minute. Hurry! Be The First To …

The MO of modern life is constant motion. There must be something to show for every moment. Like some throwback to the 16^th century, we have an almost Calvinistic need to justify our existence through keeping busy. What were you accomplishing on the night of June 6? Woe to the person without an answer. When did you last hear someone confess to doing nothing?

Sleep Bah, Humbug!

As a kid, I was horrified when I learned that fish lack eyelids and so cannot sleep in the sense that mammals do. I walked about for weeks trying to imagine what it would be like to be awake 24/7, unable to take a break from the demands of the onrushing world.

Yet, by an extension of logic, if no moment of life must be “wasted,” then we waste 6-8 good hours every night sleeping. Totally unconscious. Not producing one damn thing. (Note: I just googled “guilt about wasting time sleeping” and a whole slew of forums on the topic popped up. People worrying they are wasting their lives by sleeping. People worrying they are wasting their lives over worrying about sleeping. Even one insomniac who confessed to suffering guilt about trying and failing to sleep. People, get a grip.)

But we know we need sleep. Without it, the systems that power all that frantic waking activity break down. Our brains turn sludgy and after a while, we know not what we do. So, we accept (some of us grudgingly) that some portion of every 24 hours will be sacrificed to catching ZZZs. 

We have a harder time with the concept of resting when we’re awake. And yet, there is a powerful body of research that suggests we accomplish more when we take frequent breaks. Barreling through our to-do list like automatons on speed stresses virtually every system in our bodies, lowering our mental capacity and performance.

We pretty much know this, that our brains are in danger of frying from the endless rush and craziness, so we seek various compromises. We meditate while jogging. Strap music to our heads while raking leaves or cleaning the kitchen. Keep up with Facebook and Twitter while (ostensibly) vegging with a movie.

But stopping, truly coming to a FULL STOP—we hardly know what to do with ourselves. How can we sit and be? Wouldn’t we go nuts with the boredom?

What’s So Great About Doing Nothing

Calvinist hustle aside, history offers us some compelling examples of the riches to be mined from sitting and being:

Newton was not “busy” searching for gravity when he first got the idea of it. No, he was just sitting under an apple tree, doing nothing in particular, when the notion of gravity hit him on the head, so to speak.

In the summer of 1916, Mary Gordon and her future husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley were just hanging out watching a thunderstorm with their friends, the poet Lord Byron and author John Polidori, in Geneva, Switzerland, when one of them proposed a contest to see who could write the best horror story. Mary Gordon Shelley won with her little gothic tale Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus.

I would argue that just sitting and being has inspired more discoveries and literature than any outburst of manic energy. It simply opens up your head once you shut off the distractions.

But what if you plunk your derrière down and nothing genius comes to mind? The workable design for a teletransporter is not revealed to you, nor the plot for a sequel to War and Peace. That’s okay. In fact, that’s really the point of sitting and being. It doesn’t require you to do anything.

We used to be a nation of porch sitters. People would hang out on their stoop or veranda and just be. If there were two of them on the same porch, the conversation might go like this:

Person #1: Stars are out tonight.

(Minutes tick by.)

Person #2: Yep.

What I recall most clearly from that crafts fair with Ed is nothing about the fair itself—not the sprawling warehouses crammed with hundreds of booths, nor the vast selection of foods, not even the band. My memory of that day centers on the 15 or 20 minutes (we weren’t checking our watches) we sat together on a bench outside the exhibition buildings, relishing the early October sunshine, letting the hum of a busy world pass us by. Maybe we exchanged a few words. Laughed at something.

What I know for sure is this: We were completely at peace.

“So let it out and let it in, hey Jude, begin
You’re waiting for someone to perform with
And don’t you know that it’s just you, hey Jude, you’ll do
The movement you need is on your shoulder.”

                                           (Lennon/McCartney)

A few months back, I was watching an episode from the first televised season of This American Life. In one part, Dr. Brad Blanton, a psychotherapist, talked about his self-improvement program “Radical Honesty.” He mentioned a group workshop where participants disrobe and discuss how they feel about their bodies. It struck me that stripping down before an audience of our peers is the perfect analogy for being one’s true self in the world.

While most of us would not relish going the “full monty” in a roomful of strangers, it can be just as intimidating to bare our soul to the unsparing judgment of others. What if they don’t approve of us or reject us? Find us foolish, or unsophisticated, or just too weird?

Well, sometimes, some people will. But trying to psyche out what others want or expect of us, and then act that role is draining. It’s like living in permanent interview mode. The part when you’re asked where you see yourself in five years, and though your honest answer might be Sitting in Barbados, sipping rum and having sex on the beach (the activity, not the cocktail), you spout some corporate-babble about rising through the ranks, assuming ever more responsibility, and increasing company profits.

It’s a great recipe for depression and self-loathing, but not for happiness and health.

So Why Do We Do It?

Why do we hide who we are when the most natural thing in the world is to be exactly ourself?

As a species, we’re not innately, purposefully self-destructive. A considerable number of theories argue that we do things—even seemingly outlandish things—because we perceive a benefit. So, what are the perceived benefits of traveling in disguise?

1. Popularity. We all want to be liked. By aping the opinions and values of people we aspire to connect with, we hope to win their approval and friendship. Ironic though it is in this context, imitation is often thought the sincerest form of flattery.

2. Validation of our own worth. Some people look no further than themselves for confirmation of their own worth. Others look to a partner, a parent, or a few close friends for the occasional ego boost. But many people allow a wide array of strangers to adjudge their value.

3. Enhanced economic status. Money. Power. Fame. These siren songs of our material culture lure us to ditch who we are in order to pursue the acclaim of the high and mighty. Look at me. Look at me. I must be important. I’m a hedge fund manager.

4. Safety. To be our true selves is to risk others discovering our weaknesses and flaws. To be laughed or jeered at for our choices: clothing, pursuits, opinions, music. By adopting what is popular, we hope to escape the censure of others.

 The High Cost of Faking It

If everything comes with a price, the highest price may be the one we pay to win the approval of others.

1. Relentless suppression of own feelings, ideas, likes and dislikes. Not all of us are extroverts or leaders by nature, but each of us knows whether she’d rather eat Chinese or pizza tonight, watch La La Land or the latest episode of Black Mirror, go dancing or read a book. When we always defer to other people’s opinions or preferences, we lose touch with how we really feel. We fade. Compromise may be the bedrock of all good relationships and world peace, but true compromise is both give-and-take, and eternal compromise is never being who you are or doing what you love.

2. Misery of being self-conscious. When we’re faking it for others, we never get to relax; we’re always on high alert. It’s exhausting. And self-defeating, in every sense. Self-conscious people make everyone uncomfortable.

3. Wind up chained to a job, social network, or lifestyle that feels like a straitjacket. Years ago, I was struck by the fact that I have the skills to be an accountant. I’m good with numbers, organized, detail-oriented, responsible to a fault. But I have no love for the job. In fact, there are few things I can imagine loathing more. My temperament’s all wrong for it. I’d make more money but I’d be thoroughly miserable.

Just because we can do something, or act a part, doesn’t mean we should, whatever it gets us.

4. Danger of becoming someone the real you would actually loathe. It happens.

Who Has The Power?

The cost/benefit analysis of concealing our true self begs two questions: Who are these people we’re performing for? And why do we give them so much power?

The answer, in part, is found in our hardwiring. Acceptance by the group meant life or death in the ancient nomadic world where humans were prey as often as predators. Survival rather than happiness trumped all considerations.

But that world is far behind us. The depression, anxiety, and emotional stress that can zap us when we suppress our real self are far greater threats to our well-being than a saber-tooth tiger. As for chopping and changing oneself to fit in, the greatest loneliness often occurs in a crowd. If you’ve ever found yourself in a group wondering who are these people and what am I doing here, you know what I’m talking about.

And those people we think we have to impress, we’re the ones giving them power. A casual acquaintance of some years recently gave me the brush-off at a social event. Although this person had never struck me as a soul sister, her warmth and regard had seemed genuine on the occasions we met. So when she curtly cut me dead in public, it was not only a shock but a sting in that first moment, and then an anger, and finally a shrug. I had given her too much credit. Obviously, she was far less secure than I’d guessed if she felt her social stock would rise or fall on talking to me.

A good rule for us all: Anyone who doesn’t respect me for who I am gets zero power in my life.

Toward More Genuine Interactions

Of course, it’s difficult to be our true self with people who are false with us, and there’s a lot of pretense out there. But someone has to take the risk, break the chain. Be the change we wish to see.

If we want a culture that is more accepting, we can start by refusing to boost our own egos or cement group bonds by making fun of or excluding others based on their appearance, occupation, education, economic status, or preferences in films, books, and music. And we can refuse to “go along” when others do so.

Many years ago, I saw a video of an assisted living community. People in their 70s, 80s, 90s at a dance. They were having a great time talking and laughing. No one was sitting on the sidelines. No one seemed worried about their clothes or their dance moves. One of the beauties of old people is that they are DONE with all that. The posturing. The pretense. They just are.

How wonderful it would be not to waste all those decades before, hiding, worrying.

On a planet of more than 7,000,000,000 people, none of us needs to abandon our true self to find acceptance. There are many people who will share our passions, appreciate our strengths, value our love. How will we find them? By pursuing the things we honestly care about, and living in a way that speaks to who we are. If we do that, one by one those kindred souls will appear.

 

 

 

 

“There is only one you for all time. Fearlessly be yourself.”  

(Anthony Rapp)

Recently, I was having lunch with my husband at Uno Pizzeria. As we exited the restaurant, a large wall poster caught my eye. A bright, stylized train in a bucolic setting, the bulbous nose of its engine speeding toward the viewer, promising at any moment to break past the frame and emerge in real life: The City of New Orleans. Illinois Central Railroad.

Decades dropped as I stood, transfixed, gazing at the embodiment of this thing that had changed my life. That moment when I understood what I could never be, would never be, and said yes to everything that I am.

Turning points. We all have them. They are the revelations that open our eyes to a truth right before us, the moments when the road forks, and trusting solely in our gut, we plunge forward and never look back.

I’ve had my share of revelations and forked roads, but I would choose two above the rest as life-defining moments—all the past on one side, all the future ahead, only awaiting which way I would leap. The first occurred at the beginning of 8^th grade.

A Fool for Cool

Is there anyone alive who would wish to be back in middle school? Thirteen. It’s not just an unlucky number. It’s an abominable age, and I was no exception. Painfully shy and self-conscious (and at 5’8”, taller than all the boys), I was, to boot, a good student in an era when girls were advised to play dumb because “boys don’t date girls who are smarter than them.”

Mine was not an auspicious résumé for someone who longed to be popular. And I did yearn to be one of the chosen few. All through 7^th grade, I rolled my (uncool) wavy hair on Coke cans to straighten it like The Mod Squad’s Peggy Lipton. I bought my clothes at Terri’s, the local teen shop where the cool kids bought their clothes. Finally, in desperation, I cut my long hair super short after they all bobbed theirs.

This last effort (regretted immediately) actually won me my trial spot. On a warm October afternoon, one of the golden girls, Julie, took notice of my slavish devotion to all things cool, and invited me to go to the 8^th grade football game with her and three other Cools. As we trooped across autumn fields on our way to the game, they babbled on about some “cute” clothes they’d seen and the “cute” things Doug (class hottie, captain of the football team, 5’2”) said at lunch, and the “cute” shade of lipstick Donna was wearing.

Halfway there, I knew: I HAD NEVER BEEN SO BORED IN MY LIFE. Imagine the worst cocktail party you’ve ever endured, multiply it by a power of 1000, and you’ve got the picture.

I never saw the game. I left them before we even got to the football grounds, mumbling something about suddenly feeling unwell. But as I ran back across the fields, I’d never felt looser, freer, happier. A light bulb had come on: I didn’t need to win these people. There were better people for me out there. And I began to find them. I also began to say what I thought, to laugh out loud when something struck me as funny. To write my own stories. Sing my own songs. I grew my hair long again and let the curls fall where they would.

Graduation Daze

Nearly a decade later, after a heady semester abroad studying Shakespeare and contemporary British theatre in London, I returned to college with two trimesters left. I loved college. My crazy, wonderful friends. The all-night confabs about life. Discussing Borges or Faulkner in seminar on spring afternoons, a lazy breeze wafting through the open windows (yes, I was a lit geek, still am). But as the days dwindled to graduation, I wondered: What would happen next?

I couldn’t really picture a life “after.” For the better part of four years, I’d read literature and history. Studied psychology and comparative religions. Written reams of short fiction, essays, analyses. Even a few one-act plays. Once again, I found myself with a CV that wasn’t quite what the moment demanded, the moment being one where I turned my 180 college credits into a rent-paying job that would launch me on some sort of brilliant career.

I sat up late into the night, every night, and scribbled reams of poetry. I offer sample verses from two here to give you a flavor of that time:

(1)

3 ayem, the suicide hour

You can’t go back to yesterday

Can’t hang on until tomorrow

The bars are all closed

And the cupboard is bare  

(2)

So that you will know my face

The next time we meet

I was the one with the epic visions

And a few loose nickels in my worn jacket pocket

WHAT was I going to do with my life? All around me, it seemed, were people who had majored in marketing or advertising or some other field where you line up for interviews with the big companies who visit campus to fill their work cubicles.

I could write mighty anything (distress-poetry excerpts aside). I had a good sense of humor. And I knew the lyrics to virtually every song written since 1964.

It seemed highly unlikely that any enterprise cutting paychecks would beat a path to my door in the immediate future.

Besides, the thought of “suiting up” made me cringe. I loathed the idea of making widgets, of becoming a widget.

So there I was, full circle back to the beginning: What was I going to do?

Moment of Truth

There are moments you don’t expect. You didn’t see them coming. Didn’t set them up. But they arrive anyway.

Days before graduation, I went to my neighborhood pizza pub with my roommate Lorna. Weekend nights, they had folk singers, and I knew most of the musicians. There was a group of us who hung out after hours, along with the bartenders, just talking and laughing.

On that Saturday, my friend Dennis was playing, Lorna and I were sharing a pizza, and I was hoping a beer or two would take the edge off my near-paralyzing fear of the future.

And then Dennis played City of New Orleans, a song made famous by Arlo Guthrie but actually written by Steve Goodman. That song, that night, changed my life.

Riding on the city of New Orleans
Illinois Central Monday morning rail
There are fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders
Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail

There all out on this southbound odyssey
And the train pulls out of Kankakee
Rolls past the houses, farms and fields
Passin’ towns that have no names
And freight yards full of old black men
And the graveyards of rusted automobiles

Singin’ good morning America, how are ya
Saying don’t ya know me I’m your native son
Yes I’m the train they call the City of New Orleans
And I’ll be gone 500 miles when day is done…

I can’t point to a line or a verse. There’s no one thing that explains the moment I knew, but I did know. That I would never be a suit, never climb “the ladder.” That, faced with the choice, I would always choose freedom over security. And that, one way or another, I would land on my feet.

Maybe it’s like tea leaves. We see clearly at some crossroads the blunt truth in our gut, and give ourselves permission to go with that truth. It seemed to me in that moment that if I didn’t follow my heart, I would silence it. That what I loved most in myself would be lost forever. So I followed.

The Shape of a Life

To pay the rent, I got a job waiting tables. I began writing articles for a local political/arts rag The Lansing Star. No money, just a bunch of young writers enthusiastic about reporting on what was happening in the world and eager to get their words down in print. The editor soon gave me a weekly column and I started writing theatre reviews for the arts section. I also volunteered as a counselor at the women’s shelter, helping women who’d suffered domestic violence to break free of their abusers and build a new, independent life. Everything I was doing felt like me.

There was some blowback. My parents thought I was throwing my education away: “If we’d known you wanted to be a waitress, we wouldn’t have wasted the money sending you to college.”  But you can’t throw a thing like education away. You can’t make what has enriched you un-enrich you.

In the years since then, I’ve cobbled together a living, writing and editing and teaching. Not a grandiose living, but I have a roof and food and more consumer junk than I really need. I travel widely, rummage through used bookstores, and root for the Yankees, all with a husband I love dearly. I have a son and a daughter I cherish. I write novels.

What City of New Orleans gave me on that long ago night, when I really needed it, was courage. What I made of it is a life.

John Prine called City of New Orleans “the best damn train song I ever heard.” When Arlo Guthrie recorded it in 1972, its popularity made songwriter Steve Goodman enough money to fulfill his dream—a fulltime career in music. Goodman died at age 36 after a long struggle with leukemia. He left behind something like a dozen albums.

I wish I could have thanked him for … everything.