Joy in Sorrow

Ender’s Game is possibly my favorite book of all time. Every time I read it I experience something profound, something somehow earth-shattering. It’s not about the outstanding quality of writing and character development (although those don’t hurt, either); it’s the tragedy. The story this book tells is heartbreaking; for it to have happened, even in fiction, leaves you feeling sick in your soul. But it was powerful enough to touch your soul in the first place.

The magic of those tragedies make a story stick with us, get it under our skin so we cannot forget. We seem to be drawn to things like this. Why is that?

Perhaps what is so alluring is the feeling of reckless abandon, of being overpowered by sorrow. A friend of mine once told me that sometimes she just enjoys “wallowing” in it, just allowing herself to feel the sheer force of it. This is something that I can almost understand; we so often shy away from feeling sad to keep up with the expectations of others and ourselves, so that to allow ourselves to freely experience it may be in some way liberating.

But I think it’s more than that. When I was caught up in depression in a bad way, I found a certain thought continuing to crop up in my mind: that I was choosing to be sad all the time. That all of my actions were inexplicably—but deliberately— hurtling into the depressive episodes. It felt like an addiction. Like this thing was damaging my life, but I needed a hit anyway. When we read a sad story or see a sad movie, we are safe from the events that occur. So we are safe to feel sad, so we enjoy it that much more. But, in our own lives and experiences, we are finding ways to enjoy it that are just a little more dangerous.

Why could this be? What pleasure could we find in sorrow? Perhaps It’s the power and intensity of the feeling. Perhaps an emotional low can be just as exciting as an emotional high. The chemicals surge through our brain, eliciting this incredible sensation of misery. How amazing! How enrapturing. How very, inescapably human we are, to feel this emotion that can enfold us in its long arms and carry us into that dark, forbidden place of our own minds. How incredible it is to be alive.


What do you all think? Am I totally off the mark here? Am I just weird and masochistic? Please share your thoughts and experience.

It's Your Funeral

Imagine…

You are dead. Your life is over, there is no more work to be done, and now everything about you is past-tense. There is nothing left to the concept of “You” but what exists in others’ memories. If you have ever left a negative impression on someone, you have no chance to redeem yourself. You have hit “send” on the manuscript of your life, and it has been submitted to the editor for critique.

How would you like to be described at your funeral?

Some funerals have pastors officiating, where they read off a one-size-fits-all description of a generic decent person’s life. Some are sparsely attended, and people struggle for profound things to say about a person who really wasn’t all that profound.

Others (these are the really memorable, awe-inspiring ones) have people crowded, standing-room only in the back, waiting in a line to get up and say what a truly amazing person this was. Stories and tears flow freely as loved ones paint a picture of an individual who will live forever as a saint or a hero.

There are those people who live their whole lives to serve others, and the ones who knew them best will swear up and down that there wasn’t a selfish bone in their body. There are those who touch many, many lives, inspiring them to be the best they can be, demonstrating a life’s full potential. There are those who are the matriarchs or patriarchs of ginormous families, helping bind them together in strength and love, leaving an ongoing legacy that will never die.

It’s a question I’m asking myself these days: how do I want to be remembered?

Remember that memories erode, and eventually all that will be left of you is an abridged version, with just the most important/memorable stuff. So it’s something to ponder as the days flow past us, unceasingly… what are we doing with our time here? What will our Greatest Hits CD sound like? Any given morning you wake up, you could start composing a new song for it. You could do something huge and amazing, or start down some new path that will change things forever. All that it takes is a decision to make it happen.

I think that many (most?) of us tend to live without real purpose or direction, making decisions that are arbitrary or short-sighted. To live deliberately means to live with a big-picture sort of mindset, acting based on long-term reasoning, keeping always in mind what sort of life we want to live.

It’s so easy to just exist. It’s another thing entirely to live a life you’ll want to be remembered by.

Terrified

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself-- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance..."
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"Courage is doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you're scared."
-- Edward Vernon Rickenbacker


Judgment.

Commitment.

Intimacy.

Rejection.

Aloneness.

Inadequacy.

Failure.

I don't believe there is a person alive who does not experience fear. I would go so far as to say that fear is a fundamental, inescapable part of humanity. We all have our own underlying objects of terror that haunt us from the moment we wake up every morning and approach the world.

We are afraid of each other. We are afraid of ourselves. We are afraid of the world, of the future, of the past, of the present. We are afraid of misery, and we are afraid of joy.

I have this hunch that we are motivated by fear in almost everything that we do. Underlying our logical, unembarrassing reasons for the decisions we make, is a deep and pervasive terror. We choose a well-paying, soul-sucking profession because we are afraid of poverty. We stay in an unhappy relationship because we are afraid of dying alone. We present ourselves as being confident and together because we are afraid of letting others see the flawed beings we truly are.

I began this post with the FDR quote because I think it basically represents the common opinion of fear as weakness, as something to be avoided at all costs. However, as I recently started reflecting on my own intense fears, and consciously thinking about how they are motivating me to act-- or not to act-- I started wondering if fear really is the enemy.

In some cases, fear can drive us towards unconscionable acts, for instance if one is threatened or blackmailed. Other times, fear can make us cowards, keeping us from doing the hard stuff that we have to. So you won't hear me arguing that fear doesn't have the potential to hold us back.

But if you think about it from a different perspective, fear can motivate us towards incredible growth. Fear can inspire us to jump-start our lives or careers, to avoid the misery or futility of the future. Fear can clue us in to our sources of weakness and anxiety, so we can strive to conquer them.

Let me give an example: I accepted an internship for this fall working at a Residential Care Facility, where the main population will be schizophrenic patients who are unable to care for themselves. This idea terrifies me. And that is precisely why I chose it-- if I am interested in clinical psychology (which I am), the discomfort I have with working with the mentally ill is going to be a major obstacle, to say the least. So I first had to acknowledge that I was afraid. Knowing this gave me the chance to reflect and realize that I didn't have to let my fear control my actions. So I took the plunge (reactions to actually working in this internship forthcoming).

Fear, like pain and sorrow, lets us know that we are human. By analyzing what we're afraid of, we can come closer to understanding why we are the way we are, which is, I believe, one of the greatest mysteries an individual can face. Moreover, if we can pinpoint our deepest fears and determine whether they're prompting us for good or for ill, it can allow us to be more conscious agents, which is crucial.

One of the most empowering things we can come to believe is that there's nothing wrong with feeling afraid. Fear does not make you a coward. On the contrary; it gives you the opportunity to have courage.

The Paradox of "Knowing"

In my exploration of different therapies to treat depression, right away, I figured out the main problem. We live based on what our brains tell us. This is usually adaptive, as we receive input from stimuli, and act according to our brain's interpretation. But what happens when our brain is just wrong? How can we know the difference? Wandering through a library crammed with untapped knowledge, looking up at an incomprehensibly vast starry sky, hearing tales of lives completely unlike our own... it's not difficult to see evidence of how little we really know. Besides which, as little as 10 weeks of studying Intro Cognitive Psych will tell you that our brains are disturbingly fallible, even if you DON'T have a mental disorder. Predictably, it's much worse when your neural chemicals are going haywire and you're believing all sorts of awful things. But it goes against our most basic instincts to operate outside of what our brain tells us. We are not built to do this. If we can't trust our own brains, we may become basically incapacitated. But I think too much trust in our brains can lead to just as much trouble.

I observed at some point that when we were children, we were significantly less settled in our worldview, meaning we were more likely to believe what we were told. However, as we grow, we develop a repertoire of what we think we know, and orient our brains around it. As an example, when I was a young child, some kid tried to convince me that you could summon a ghoul called Bloody Mary by saying her name three times in front of a mirror. Although even at that age, I knew it was unlikely, part of me still thought it could be true, and I was super freaked out. But now, I look back with a bizarre fondness for a time when I could believe something so fantastical, when I could be frightened by something so silly. It makes me wonder, what other amazing, incredible things were we able to believe back then, but no longer can today? We dismiss things like that out of hand as being unrealistic, but we do so mostly because it doesn't fit into our worldview. What if we're limiting ourselves by trusting our imperfect knowledge?

We assimilate information based on what we already believe. And if you think about this, it really is kind of a broken system. How can we increase our awareness and understanding about the world if we're only retaining the information that makes sense with what we already know-- which is incomplete-- and dismissing the rest? This explains why people are often so resistant to accepting new ideas. We are utterly disempowered without our reservoir of knowledge, and yet, on the other hand, I'm thinking we rely on it too heavily. With imperfect knowledge from which we refuse to deviate, how can we grow? As they say, the wisest thing you can realize is that you know nothing. So perhaps it is only when we find the ability to reject what we once believed to be true-- a mighty feat unto itself-- that we can actually gain new and innovative insight.

Thoughts?

Capturing the Now

I've been thinking recently about a certain irony: we spend so much of our time capturing memories that, in some cases, we may fail to create those memories. Take vacations or parties for example. Many of us spend the entire time with a camera in hand, catching each moment as it comes. Sometimes we manufacture moments for the camera, contrived situations that do not reflect reality, but make for pleasant memories. But most importantly, rather than relishing the moment itself, and throwing ourselves with wild abandon into happiness, we constantly concern ourselves with making sure that it can be recorded properly. Why do we do this?

Personally, I fall into that category of those who are more or less obsessed with documenting everything. I find that, without keeping records of what happened, I can forget entire days, weeks, periods of my life. I can forget entire vacations, entire relationships, entire epiphanies, entire moments of pure bliss. And once they are forgotten, they are lost forever to the erosion of time. But I can't help but wonder, is this focus on record-keeping counter-productive? It's really very similar to the old debate of whether to live for the present or the future. Do we invest our time and money so as to enjoy their fruits later? Or do we not put off joy, choosing instead to pour ourselves into the here and now? What if all the effort we put into preserving for the future was put instead into living each moment to its fullest potential? Would we be happier? Would we have more moments to look back on fondly, adding color and light to the story of our past?

We have such an intense desire to preserve the present so we can enjoy it in the future. But what does it mean if we're trying so hard to capture it, that we end up letting it pass us by?

Maybe We Can Cure Depression All By Ourselves

The Medical Model and Why We Should Question It
Antidepressants. They're prescribed all over the place. They can even be prescribed by your local General Practitioner (i.e. someone not trained in psychiatry or psychology). They're basically what this generation is hailing as the "solution" to this rising epidemic. And this conclusion rides on the Medical Model of Depression: the premise that depression is the result of a chemical imbalance in the brain (a serotonin deficiency).

Most of us out there are just kind of assuming this to be correct. As I've mentioned, I take a Zoloft every morning myself. But recently a dangerous question has been posed: what if chemicals aren't really the culprit?

It's the question that plagued me in the throes of my depression: can I chalk this up to something that's out of my control, or... could it be my own fault? As you may predict, the notion that I was to blame for my disorder was frightening, demoralizing, and exhausting. For a long time, I clung to the belief that it was a chemical problem, suggesting an easy fix. "Magic pill = feel better".

New research is actually indicating that the Medical Model of Depression-- which we have thrown ourselves into headfirst-- is not as well substantiated as previously supposed. It turns out that these magic pills aren't significantly more effective than placebos. You've heard of the placebo effect: it's the notion that if we believe that something will work, it will work. It looks like that might be what's happening here: these pills designed to increase the serotonin in our brain-- thereby supposedly reducing the depressive symptoms-- are not working much better than sugar pills.

(Please visit this article for more information on this particular placebo effect, and this book review to sum up some of the arguments against the Medical Model.)

Could it be that simply believing we have the power to pull ourselves out of our sadness could be all we need?

As I described in my previous blog post on the subject of depression, part of the biggest problem is that we feel weak and helpless to make any changes. But it's a case of the chicken or the egg-- we are assuming that we feel powerless because we are depressed. But isn't it just as plausible that we are depressed because we feel powerless?

I have pondered this and come up with my own take on what exactly this process looks like. Much in the style of Aaron Beck (all around important guy in depression research), I have crafted my take on this in the form of a triad, which I am calling the Efficacy Triad.

Here's how I define efficacy: our ability to accomplish what we set out to do. It is regulated by our relationship with ourselves.



What we require to possess efficacy is 1.) Self Discipline, or the ability to prioritize our needs and our wants in a healthy way, and then direct our behavior accordingly, 2.) Self Esteem, a true love and appreciation for ourselves, as well as a healthy understanding of our strengths (weaknesses too, but that is really a given in depressed people), and 3.) Self Confidence, or the belief that we can accomplish what we set out to do. It's the perception that we are strong, capable agents in our own lives. These three areas all affect one another, and so lacking one will often lead to a lack the others as well. When these deficits become severe enough, they may result in depression.

Basically, we become depressed when we have this poor relationship with ourselves, leading to a lack in efficacy, meaning we are no longer effective individuals in our lives. And isn't this, in a nutshell, what depression is? The inevitable despondence that comes with a poor self-image, resulting in no longer being able to function well, leading to further lowering of our self image.

That's my theory. So why does it happen? I have a few answers.

I think-- particularly in America-- there exists a sense of entitlement. Written into the core of the "American Dream" is the notion that we can accomplish anything, and, moreover, that we deserve to accomplish everything. If we are thoroughly enough imbued with this philosophy, imagine the existential crisis we face when we fail. Not only will we feel profoundly disempowered, but worthless on top of that, because obviously if we can't have the exact kind of life we want, we must not be deserving of it. There's a host of philosophical implications in this progression that I won't get into now, but it's well worth some pondering.

Another way of conceptualizing it is actually rather Freudian: consider the expectations we have regarding what we "should" be like. Now picture what we tend to actually be like. When an individual is forced to internalize both of these concepts, they may be faced with a terrible psychological conflict. We have to struggle to reconcile the disparity, because it creates a dissonance that is psychologically uncomfortable. When we fail to reconcile it, however, we may be faced with depression.

So, how on earth can we treat this?

I believe that, since the depression was caused by a lack of efficacy, it can be reduced by bolstering the efficacy one possesses. Makes sense, right? So what does this look like? Well, predictably enough, each of the three parts of the triad need to be addressed to ensure a strong sense of efficacy.

Self Discipline has been often conceptualized as a muscle-- it can be trained. In practicing control over our negative thoughts and impulses, we can build up the power to have control in other areas of our life.

We can increase our Self Esteem by making a daily emphasis in our minds of our strengths, rather than our weaknesses. We can spend time developing our existing skills. We can interact with loved ones who will love and support us, and help remind us of what's good about ourselves.

Finally, we can increase our Self Confidence by putting all of these things into practice and starting to see change wrought in our lives. As we watch ourselves progress and move beyond our disorder, we will most likely begin to feel as though we have power over our lives, and the ability to change our own emotional fate.


This is why I believe embracing a model of depression which emphasizes our own responsibility for our difficulties is actually the perfect way of addressing the problem. While it acknowledges how our failings can cause trouble, it also highlights and power to bring about real, tangible improvements for ourselves, which is exactly what we need to get better. We need faith in ourselves as people and as free agents, not slaves to our imperfect minds and bodies.

So I never got to some of the things I wanted to address-- notably, depression as addiction. But honestly, I think the little dissertation I've composed here is more than enough for one blog post. If you have the patience to conquer this monster of a post, please tell me what you think! My experience is rather limited, and I am curious to know whether anybody else sees truth in these theories. What do you think?

Thoughts for a Monday Morning

Here’s my question on this Monday morning: why do so many of us hate our jobs? Is it an element of discontentment inherent to humanity? Or is it that the jobs are truly miserable—in which case, why aren’t we more inclined to pursue a career we really want?

Which is it: are humans disposed towards misery, or disposed towards willful slavery? So many people drag themselves out of bed every morning to go sit behind a desk, or cater to rude customers, or in some other way undermine their own dignity.

We seem to be choosing jobs on the basis of necessity and obligation. But could it be possible to rewire the way we approach our day-jobs, so that rather than a miserable chore we had to complete every day, it was an honorable responsibility through which we find inherent satisfaction? What kind of world would it be where people wanted to be tax lawyers? Or wanted to be custodians? Or wanted to be waitresses? I’m not sure whether a world like that would look socialist, Buddhist, or like a Borg collective. Or none of the above. But the point is, what if each of us really loved our careers—and, by some miracle, the world still turned?

“Don’t confuse your career with your life”.

I read that quote earlier this week. Although it’s an important mantra in a world where we are struggling to retain a sense of dignity in undignified jobs, I wish it weren’t necessary. If we could feel as though we had, fully conscious and purposefully, entered our line of work, and we did it because we wanted to—would we feel fulfilled by the same careers that are now making us miserable?

Just some random thoughts. This is a prelude to my (hopefully) upcoming blog posts on the subjects of depression and efficacy… could we escape chronic sadness and discontentment if we felt more powerful in our lives? I say yes.

In the meantime, if you have any insight to share, I'd be interested to get some of these questions answered!