I am busy writing my book, My "BE HAPPY WHEN YOU COULD BE NORMAL?" Part memoir part manifesto I suppose it is the back-story to Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit – but it belongs in its own right. And after this, I wonder if I will have to go near any of that material again?
The thing about our psychic processes is that they are not linear and not interested in the clock at all. We cannot decide what will or won’t surface, or when we are able to address circumstances that we thought we were done with, or when we are able to feel feelings we would rather not feel.
The Happiness Culture doesn’t help. We are so busy believing in ‘my dream’, or being told to ‘move on’ or ‘empower’ ourselves, that any psychic process that brings disquiet and alarm must be put to death as soon as possible, so that we can have ‘closure’.
The inanity - or do I mean insanity – of the self-help cult is worrying me now. I used to think that the slew of "YES YOU CAN" titles, for want of a better way of describing them, couldn’t do anybody any harm and might do some good. Now I am not sure.
Why are we turning ourselves in Stepford Wives?
Do we really want a limited emotional vocabulary with all the sad words and the pain words covered over?
Listen, I am not into pain for its own sake. My favourite chorus when I was an evangelical Christian was "CHEER UP YE SAINTS OF GOD". Very necessary when you locked in the coal-hole or locked out. Very helpful when you really need to believe that there are better days.
And like everyone else, it is easier for one horrid thing in the day to knock me over, rather than for 3 nice things in the day to have the same kind of impact.
But maybe that is because the horrid things act like a sponge for all the pressed down upsets that we can’t look at – and if we could look at them and live with them a little bit more, maybe the knocks of the day wouldn’t be so hard, because they wouldn’t be attracting the other stuff buried in there.
For myself, I hate feeling dreadful feelings. As a solution-based person I am always asking myself ‘What can I do about X?’ But that isn’t the right question – not straight away – not for the real stuff. Sitting with feeling is just awful, but it does help the feeling to form, and then it helps us to understand it.
Later, there will have to be a solution. But a solution too early just seals in the problem at a deeper level.
If your marriage is bad it is a relief to have an affair. But what does it solve? Sure, you may well have to exit that marriage, but to deflect the reality into a seeming- solution doesn’t work. So often the new relationship then founders because the problems from the old relationship come too.
One day they will make an artificial island where we can leave all our shit – but until then…
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But to end more seriously and at the same time more light-heartedly. November will its falling leaves and freezing rain and winter setting in is also a time to get outside in the intense brilliant light, and to walk in the woods and to be glad of all the changes in the natural world – changes that show us that change is normal – welcome, necessary.
If something very surprising happens to you this month – let it be.
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