One of Carolyn's letter writers hasn't learned to stand up to her parents and another is concerned about a granddaughter's eschewing of frilly dresses.
Two movies (and a few articles in Elle and Marie Claire, most of which are not yet available online) have me rambling about expectations and happiness. In someways, it's an extension of yesterday's ramble, which addressed, among other things, the fraught territory of assigning severity ratings to people's problems. I've touched on this issue in my guide to first-world problems, and probably elsewhere on this blog. Part of what I wanted to get across in yesterday's post was that, notwithstanding the gynormous substantive extremes of the problems that upset people--from 'I have so many houses, I can never remember where I left my book' to losing one's entire family to the Indian Ocean tsunami--one has some choice about one's response to events.
The woman in the latter case-- Sonali Deraniyagala--saw a psychiatrist called Mark Epstein, who wrote "The Trauma of Everyday Life." In which, apparently (I haven't read the book myself), he writes of trauma as a continuum; minor events can hit you just as strongly as very significant ones, or at least hit you in similar ways. In other words--and these are my words now--your brain knows that, say, losing your wallet or losing a budding romance is not a tragedy of epic proportions, but your soul may process it that way nonetheless. Just as your stress response to being late for work is biologically identical to your hypothetical stress response to being chased by a lion--handed down to you by your ancestors--your grief response to small losses isn't all that different, biologically, from your grief response to big losses. Big losses hit in other ways: for example, they may be sustained--a person, or an animal, that you'll never get back--and so they come with natural reminders; but on the level of a one-time response, the feeling is similar in nature if not in intensity. With stress and anxiety, it behooves our brains to talk to our souls: "calm the f* down, there is no lion chasing you; if you're late for work, you're late for work." That goes even for people for whom "late for work" spells more serious danger: leverage the stress response only insofar as it gets you to work in time; if it doesn't help, it's just optional stress. Grief is a little different, and Mark Epstein makes the point that we should just let ourselves feel it. And we needn't feel bad about grieving about things that are lesser in proportion (although--and this is just me again--we should be self-aware about sharing our grief with people to whom that sharing may be triggering). Laurie Abraham has every right to grieve the relationship that didn't work out after two days; the fact that she has regular access to clean drinking water, among other things, doesn't alleviate that loss. In fact, the "other people have bigger problems" retort just makes you a bad listener.
By the way/before I forget, there was also a good article in Elle about fallibility and forgiveness, and how apologies matter. And another article that I only skimmed, about yoga and spirituality. It was skeptical but tolerant, and my takeaway was, "sigh, this is the wrong question." The right answer is that yoga and meditation are not cure-alls for everything--no, diseases aren't rooted in "energetic imbalances"--but they are sure good for what they're good for. Why do we have this tendency to dismiss anything that's not a panacea? And I know that sometimes proponents of the thing--yoga, meditation, plant-based food, etc.--are a part of the problem by trying to present it as a panacea, but the truth remains that yoga may not cure diseases, but it'll probably make you feel better, if you're doing it right.
But back to the topic of happiness by choice: I read the Express review (kind of) of "Baggage Claim" (and loved, loved this):
The film is less about finding happiness in a relationship, Patton says, than about Montana's efforts to find happiness alone.
"She is losing sigh of her own happiness," Patton says. "She just wants to fit in; her decisions aren't based on making herself happy... Through this journey, she finds herself and finds confidence in saying, 'I don't need a man to complete me.' Men should be a dessert, frankly."There was another movie article in Express, about "Don Jon," that emphasized how the film was a departure from your typical romantic comedy. It was in the context of the article--Kristen Page-Kirby talks about the film's central message: that our pornification (essentially, airbrushing) of everything makes us ill-suited to reality--that I thought about the Marie Claire article on how 'normal' weight is situational (remember how Lena Dunham told Howard Stern that she was "thin, for, like, Detroit"?).
So, "Don Jon" doesn't limit its critique of airbrushing to just bodies, but bodies are a great example. As I flipped through Elle, past the underwear ads, I found myself thinking, "I don't look like that." And I never will. See, we differ not only in body size but also in body shape. I'm thin--for DC, for the country, etc. I'm as thin as I need or want to be. You would be disappointed, however, if you expected to find an underwear model's body on me. And if you're not going to find it on me, you're not going to find it on most women. So if the expectation is that a woman does look like an underwear model, and the reality is that very, very few women do, whom does that expectation hurt more? The person with the body, or the person with the absurd expectations? We often talk about the prevalence of idealized body imagery as harmful to women's body images, but shouldn't we also talk about the effect on men?
But back to the topic of happiness, happiness for others, and happiness while single; I wanted to relate a conversation I had (at a party last weekend). For whatever reason, Prague came up, and it led to my telling the story of my crazy trip there last summer. I have to admit that I love telling that story, and I don't mind admitting that people love hearing it. One friend told me recently that she still thinks about it, independently of any specific reminders. I pretty much have to frame the story in the context of the breakup that preceded the trip, because it matters: (1) the logistical challenges of the trip emerged because I was traveling alone after having planned on traveling with another; (2) I was still somewhat emotionally raw, and my emotional responses were more intense than my usually detached self tends to experience; and (3) the fact that my friends had rallied around me afterward, so that I was hardly alone for a second for the six weeks between the breakup and the trip, made the alone time on the trip all the more stark--and the love that flowed in from expected and unexpected places to fill the void--all the more powerful.
Anyway, I started the story and mentioned the breakup as context for my emotional state at the time. Someone said that it must have been so painful to be at a wedding so soon after a breakup, but it wasn't. (And keep in mind that others, in the past, expressed surprise that I went at all.) My lingering pain wasn't was just there; it wasn't exacerbated by the wedding. That other people were getting married in no way made me feel worse that I was single, or even about being out of that relationship. It didn't occur to me, consciously or otherwise, to see the wedding as anything else than a wedding--a celebration of other people's relationship. That doesn't make me a better person than someone who does go to a wedding only to whine about how she's single; it just makes me happier. It's a different way of processing the same situation--and you have a choice in how you process a situation. Another example: I was having fun at the pool with my friends a couple of months ago when one complained that she was at the pool with her friends, at her age, i.e., not with a partner. I said I was happy to be at the pool, on a beautiful day, with my friends; it really made no difference whom I was with, as long as we were having fun, which we were. She looked at me like I was from Mars and, perhaps snarkily, said that that was a creatively positive "spin" on the situation. Shrug. It's really just the way I saw the situation, no spin required. If you can't be happy on a beautiful day, surrounded by friends, can you be happy at all?
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