Tag: self-help

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non-fiction writing Thoughts on writing

Repost: You Better Drive. I Think There’s Something Wrong With Me

“You Better Drive. I Think There is Something Wrong With Me”

This quote is from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson

Reposted with bonus material on March 17, 2021

Updated November 29, 2020

I’ve railed before against the self-righteous, self-help industry of profiteers who assert that we alone control how we feel, that we can be happy if we only want to. (internal link) Greedheads like Werner Erhard and Tony Robbins, along with groups like Scientology, place blame on people who feel poorly, depressed, or lost.

Nobody wants to feel down or depressed or anxious or scared. These are all emotions deeply felt, not intellectual choices. To bring about a change using the intellect is at once at odds with how these problems arose. We don’t choose to lose our parents or suffer from nightmares or get bullied at school. Responding to these deeply anguishing moments by thinking them away is a completely nonsensical idea.

Friends often offer well-intentioned advice that misses the mark. “Snap out of it” or “Don’t think about it” or “Try to relax” are straightforward suggestions that don’t go to the heart of the matter. If we could only snap out of it. If we could only not think about it. If we could only relax. Lord, if we could only relax.

A new interjection:

Let me put this more bluntly, to all you wise men and women. You tell me how to relax. Right now! Tell me! Tell me how to relax. Tell me how to stay asleep. You live with three decades of nightmares and broken sleep and then tell me how to relax. You and your damned professional advice that drives me crazy because it doesn’t work! You’re trying to help. Thank, you, I appreciate the effort. Sort of. If it works! And if you don’t tell me to calm down. Tell me how to do that. Or get the hell out of my way before you make me even madder and more agitated with your stupid advice!

Back to the original post . . . .

Let me go seemingly off-tangent here to comment on a problem with Zen Buddhism and the road to satori or enlightenment. The key tenet is to give up all desires. But that is a desire by itself. At some point, after study and contemplation and years, satori may happen, as a meteorite flashes across the night sky. Or, the sky may remain dark.

We get better over time or we don’t. If a situation continues, we might try talk therapy or medication or we might change our circumstances. Perhaps a new town with new friends if we are lucky to find any. Some situations are chronic like poor eyesight or diabetes. We cope without a cure and sometimes we get depressed about it. If it is true mental illness, no medicine is going to cure.

I’ve tried distraction, living mostly now for my hobbies and interests. I’ve done quite a bit of volunteer work and I try helping answer questions on the internet. I write quite a bit on rocks and minerals and hope some people can learn from what I know. This though, in the end, is really a minor dam against the flood that swept over me when my parents died.

I’m still drowning, still trying to keep my head above water. Still cursed with my nightmares and anxiety, I go about as every other sufferer of every other ailment, living the best I can under the circumstances. But don’t ever think our condition is something we can climb out of with your lesson plan or an appeal to the intellect for a triumph over gravely felt emotion. Sell that crap to somebody else.

 


Drawing from The Trial (Der Prozess) by Franz Kafka

Repost Bonus!

Tik Tok is a low rent hell in which no one is at rest. (internal link) That’s what so many people with mental health feel, never at rest. While Jessica Alba can keep dancing, I wish everybody else would just stop.

 

Categories
non-fiction writing Thoughts on writing Uncategorized Writing by others

“You Better Drive. I Think There is Something Wrong With Me”

“You Better Drive. I Think There is Something Wrong With Me”

The quote above is from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson

Updated November 29, 2020

I’ve railed before against the self-righteous, self-help industry of profiteers who assert that we alone control how we feel, that we can be happy if we only want to. (internal link) Profiters like Werner Erhard and Tony Robbins, along with groups like Scientology, place blame on people who feel poorly, depressed, or lost.

Nobody wants to feel down or depressed or anxious or scared. These are all emotions deeply felt, not intellectual choices. To bring about a change using the intellect is at once at odds with how these problems arose. We don’t choose to lose our parents or suffer from nightmares or get bullied at school. Responding to these deeply anguishing moments by thinking them away is a completely nonsensical idea.

Friends often offer well-intentioned advice that misses the mark. “Snap out of it” or “Don’t think about it” or “Try to relax” are straightforward suggestions that don’t go to the heart of the matter. If we could only snap out of it. If we could only not think about it. If we could only relax. Lord, if we could only relax.

Let me go seemingly off-tangent here to comment on a problem with Zen Buddhism and the road to satori or enlightenment. The key tenet is to give up all desires. But that is a desire by itself. At some point, after study and contemplation and years, satori may happen, as a meteorite flashes across the night sky. Or, the sky may remain dark.

We get better over time or we don’t. If a situation continues, we might try talk therapy or medication or we might change our circumstances. Perhaps a new town with new friends if we are lucky to find any. Some situations are chronic like poor eyesight or diabetes. We cope without a cure and sometimes we get depressed about it. If it is true mental illness, no medicine is going to cure.

I’ve tried distraction, living mostly now for my hobbies and interests. I’ve done quite a bit of volunteer work and I try helping answer questions on the internet. I write quite a bit on rocks and minerals and hope some people can learn from what I know. This though, in the end, is really a minor dam against the flood that swept over me when my parents died.

I’m still drowning, still trying to keep my head above water. Still cursed with my nightmares and anxiety, I go about as every other sufferer of every other ailment, living the best I can under the circumstances. But don’t ever think our condition is something we can climb out of with your lesson plan or an appeal to the intellect for a triumph over gravely felt emotion. Sell that crap to somebody else.

 


Drawing from The Trial (Der Prozess) by Franz Kafka

Categories
non-fiction writing Uncategorized

The Self-Righteous Self-Help Industry

“We are truly the sum of our own choices, nothing more.”

That’s the distillation of every self-righteous self-help advocate who has never had a loved one suffer or die from mental illness. Or had a loved one killed when someone blew through a red light. Or had a friend or loved one brought down by a crippling disease like cancer. To these zealots, life is simple. Problem is, life ain’t simple.

My mother and grandfather didn’t choose to have dementia. They didn’t ask to die from it. They didn’t choose how they felt, which was probably anxiety and confusion and feeling lost. The sum of our choices?

I have a 60 year old friend in Folsom who is still tending to her child, now a fully grown adult in his thirties. It would break your heart to see him as he approaches you, with his staggering, clomping, limping gait. His head swivels in an aimless manner while he walks, looking at everything, looking at nothing. His face wears a constant smile, but it’s vacant and punctuated by random grunts and other other unidentifiable sounds of disease. The sum of our choices? Damn you!

John Lennon said that life happens when you are making other plans. Exactly. Life happens. We control what we can but life makes its own plans, too. Too many self-help advocates make money off of misery as they blame people for things they would desperately like to change but can’t.

I didn’t choose to have my nightmares. I don’t choose to have them now. But I can’t count how many totally clueless people nearly drove me to suicide with suggestions that I was responsible for the way I felt. That I could control how I felt by simply thinking better. Making a choice to feel better. Perhaps these people are more mentally ill than I am.

You try to act normal after you wake up from a nightmare in which you just smashed in a baby’s head with a baseball bat. Live with that! I feel tremendously for vets and anyone else who suffers from PTSD or whatever caused their problems. Whatever caused their problems. You see, you might understand what started something but finding the off switch may prove impossible, no matter what you try. That’s life.

Finding the off switch is like trying to find a light switch panel in a huge, dark room whose floor is littered with painful tripping obstacles you can’t see. These self-help experts seem to know where that light switch is, you just need to listen to their advice. Their life is undoubtedly a mess. But they know how to get your life straight.

According to them, you could find that switch with more talk therapy, less talk therapy, more medicines, less medicines, meditation, Scientology, organized religion, exercise, hypnosis, or whatever seems in at the time. Oh, and most importantly, buy their book. As if that would do any good. Because their outlook is based on blaming you. You’re the one making bad choices, so suffer from that until you listen to them. And if you did listen to them and their advice didn’t work, well, it’s because you didn’t try hard enough. You’re still to blame.

This self-determination mantra might work for mentally healthy people, whatever healthy means. But while they peddle their self-serving, self-righteous shtick, they drive anyone tortured by mental illness further into madness by saying that one can control the often uncontrollable. They debase people depressed over losing a loved one or those fighting the blackness that comes from having a miserable, crippling disease. Isn’t a little charity in order?

In the Inferno, Dante is allowed to move through Hell and eventually return, leaving the condemned to the Pit. As Eliot translates it, a wretched soul cries out to Dante upon seeing him start back. “Now, I pray you, by that virtue which leads you to the top of the stair, think of me in my time of pain.”