getting over myself, or, how I did not spend my winter vacation (but should have!)

I like to do things for other people, but I often have a really hard time seeing or hearing them over the sturm und drang going on in my head at any given moment. Facebook is actually really awesome for me, since I am more thoughtful and restrained when I write than when I talk (just imagine....)

Anyway, judging from their status updates, it seems that, given the opportunity and resources, most people assemble lives out of things that make them happy. This is a sort of recurrent epiphany for me, but it has probably been the case, if not always and everywhere, at least in those times and places in which almost everyone has all kinds of things at their disposal and the variations between social strata have to do less with whether you have anything and more with the nature of the things you have. When I was working with kids who lived in poverty, I was surprised by how many things they had -- how many phones and Uggs and bags of chips; how many opportunities to play tennis or be tutored or participate in Summer Search. 

(This isn't to minimize the difficulties of poverty: people, particularly children, need specific things at specific times, and many of these things are intangible and non-negotiable. Without them, all the downloaded songs from iTunes and public library access in the world is not going to get the job done, if, by "the job," one means the production of reasonably healthy and satisfied adults.) 

But enough about them, here's my (first world) problem: I've always had a really hard time being made happy by things outside myself. If an item or a hobby or an activity is not sufficient to define and lend Ultimate Meaning to my life, I am at a loss as to how to fit it into my life, other than to stash it on a shelf somewhere and go back to looking for The Answer. When I am at my least manic-depressive, I generally think that this is the thing I'd most like to change about myself, should a genie show up and offer to spare me the inelegant tedium of growing, myself. 

The thing about isolation -- particularly the tenacious kind of isolation that thrives in addicts -- is that it keeps the isolated party from every really confronting how many other, richer, more pleasant ways there are to do things. That is to say, rather than obsessively looking for ways to Fix Global Poverty/ find gainful employment / Effect Meaningful Change / Be Worthwhile, a person might:

sit and listen to a new kind of music, 

learn to knit,

read a book,

cook a meal,

do yoga. 

One might be made happy, not by deriving answers to questions about life and God, but by watching Argo, re-reading Dangerous Angels, writing a poem, learning to paint. 

One might even develop friendships with people who spend their free time learning to make new things (noodles, blankets), or eating cookies and watching TV, or reading about Things That Happened Today and having opinions about them, rather than attempting to force themselves and their lives into the shape of other, more impressive people and lives, as if 1) that were how people were made and 2) one can treat a thirty-year-old identity as raw material to be pounded down and shoved into a better shape. 

There are all these things -- like art, and vacations, and TV, and dancing, and crafts, and book clubs, and games, and singing in choirs -- things that allow one to feel that life is good even when the Big Important Things feel overwhelming or insubstantial or untenable. And I wonder, sometimes, if I struggle so much to know the Big Defining Things about myself, and to live with those things, because I have been so quick to dismiss every little thought and feeling and preference and interest I have had as irrelevant. 

So, since I have already fleshed out the Big Important Parts of my week, here's some stuff I'm committing to do to feed parts of me unrelated to my anxiety disorder and unfortunately contingent sense of self:

1. Buy yarn and needles, or hooks, in order to learn to knit, or crochet. 

2. Return picture books to library; obtain additional picture books to read with my son. 

3. Watch a movie, during which I will not study, troll craigslist for jobs, or attempt to Read Something Meaningful. 

4. Go to sleep when I feel tired. Wake up after 5 am. 

5. Go to yoga. 

While I hope that you are one of those reasonable individuals who strives to enjoy life by identifying and incorporating people, places and things she finds enjoyable, you may find that your balance of Circuitous Mania and Stuff I Like is off-kilter today. If your brain doesn't do that for you on its own, life often will.

If this is the case, take this post as encouragement to go watch reruns of Arrested Development after work today, or to bake brownies or read People or jazzercise (people like that!) I'll feel better if all the cool kids are "wasting their lives" on minutia alongside me.