Static

PreScript: So I know I have a habit of way-over-prefacing things without getting to the point so you have no clue what you’re reading or why until the second or third paragraph. I wish I could say that was going to change, or that I was going to come back and edit this paragraph out of here. But it’s my blog. No, wait, I don’t really believe that, or I do, but I also believe that it’s your time, and I am grateful you’re spending some of it reading this. But still I’ll argue that I sometimes have to write in the way thought spools out rather than in a punch-y, following the rules for getting and holding attention way, because the way thoughts spool out and develop over time is sometimes more interesting than the thought itself.

Take the way fantasy has been popping into my life. My friend Jenny had this lovely blog post she wrote after an ultrasound showed that she might have to have a cesaerean or at least a hospital birth because of where the placenta is with this pregnancy, and I had talked to her on the phone right after the ultrasound, crying and laughing with her, and was so in awe of her ability to talk about the fantasy she had been holding about the homebirth they were going to have, and her acknowledgement of it as a fantasy and her own need to grieve the loss of the fantasy instead of having to jump straight to being happy that the baby is healthy and so on. And somehow talking to her made me understand how fantasy is very useful for motivating us and keeping us moving through difficult stuff, like morning sickness, but in the end we have to let go of fantasies, as much as it hurts, to make room for reality, which is messy and uncomfortable, but, you know, real.

Then there’s the whole set of thoughts that went with the Shapely Prose blog entry on the Fantasy of Being Thin. Initially I thought the problem with that fantasy was this whole postponement of happiness for something that might never happen. But I’d still have a problem with the fantasy, even if magically every person had the body they had fantasized about. There was on Studio 360 this week, a story told by Elna Baker about the childhood fantasy she had of being a grown-up going on a date with the most popular boy, wearing a dress of her grandmother’s that she tried on when she was seven and, obese, didn’t fit into. So, many years later, after much dieting and much compensatory personality development because the dieting wasn’t working, she developed the mantra “I am what I am” and started liking herself anyway, and liking herself, caring about what she eats and how she treats herself, visiting a nutritionist and learning to eat and exercise better until she is thin and her grandmother gifts her with the dress, and she even gets the date with the popular boy she wants a date with. Only he says, on the date “I cannot tolerate fate people” which just pops the whole fantasy. And I loved the way she told the story but hate the little myth inside it “Accept yourself and you will have the strength to change (because you really need to change, don’t you hate yourself?)” And worse, I wonder about a woman in her 20′s still trying to live out a fantasy she had as a first grader. But worst, I guess, is how we can carry fantasies that are worse than unworthy of us, they are damaging to us, with their hidden message of “My worth is dependent on my appearance.”

Which made me contemplate how fantasies are really static things. You have an image in your head of a magazine lay-out house or a perfect plump-fisted baby and forget that the baby may fuss and keep you up all night, grow into a child who colors on the walls of your dream house, leaving toys and crumbs and stickiness everywhere — not part of the fantasy. And it isn’t that you picked the wrong fantasy, or that you can’t form another fantasy to get through that moment’s discomforts, swinging from from one point of suspended hope to another like a child crossing monkey bars, but if you think that the fulfillment of fantasy is where happiness lies, then happiness becomes an every other day, a jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never jam today kind of thing.

Of course the way my brain works I have to draw giant columns labeled static and dynamic:

Static Dynamic
Fantasy Living
Wedding Marriage
Birth Child
Clean house Livable house
Book tour Writing
Popularity Friendship

And I continue reading about the nature of happiness — generally happiness is one of those subjects I will pick up any book about, from Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness to Eric Wiener’s Atlas of Bliss, and it runs as a minor theme in Mary Pipher’s Letters to a Young Therapist, I am especially fascinated by our misconceptions about happiness, and all of these books bring up the studies showing that people who have experienced either great good fortune or terrible misfortune generally end up back at their baseline level of happiness before too long.

I think the first time I started to really understand that happiness is not about circumstances was when I was twenty and getting a divorce from the man I had married at nineteen, and I went from blaming him for my unhappiness to thinking nothing could ever make me happy again to being happy despite pretty miserable circumstances. But the happiness-is-not-a-circumstance epiphany was not one I could have once and then walk around blissful the rest of my life, I have needed to be reminded of it again and again.

So this morning I was back journalling about happiness not being the fulfillment of fantasy, to thinking about envy, how envy is like fantasy, can motivate you in a way that could be useful. And, honestly, please forgive me, it came out as a little Socratic dialogue:
Mara’s Intellect: What do you envy?
Mara’s Emotions: Her appearance, his lifestyle, that possession, the respect everyone gives her.
MI: Why do you envy?
ME: Because I feel like someone has something missing from my life.
MI: What does this missing from your life mean?
ME: Duh. That with these missing things my life would be better.
MI: And what is your definition of a better life, if attractiveness, relationships, ease, status are means to a better life?
ME: A happier life.
MI: So you think that a change in circumstance would make you happy, despite the evidence of all those studies?

At which point my emotional self punched my intellectual self in the mouth.

The experience of knowing something rationally and intellectually and that not changing how I FEEL happens often enough to make me think. Instinctively I have this making-fun-of-Spock response that being rational/logical all the time would be
1) not conducive to my happiness
2) irritating to everyone around me
3) not true to my own nature and thus impossible.

So scrub the lopsided Socratic dialogue. Maybe, my emotional self would say, if given more than a straw man, wimpy voice, envy does serve a purpose, much like fantasy, for helping clarify goals (break into some sort of musical Gotta Have a Dream number here).

And I don’t like feeling like emotional and rational are this divided thing, my nature at odds with itself. I suspect, that really, it’s more like having binocular vision, each reaction can give me information about my circumstance if I can get enough into balance to listen to both. But I am working on not letting one side express contempt for the other.

So, long and rambling. I warned you in the first paragraph, right?