On a beautiful weekend morning in autumn, I am contemplating the utter bleakness of my current life. A friend’s enthusiastic text – “How is your sadness or lack of feeling?!” – reminds me that a few weeks ago we’d had tea and spoken about mood and lack of therapeutic progress. All week I have seen the word “DYSPHORIA!” flash across my brain in dramatic large font. Antonym of euphoria, my condition is associated with “malaise, discomfort, vexation” and, from the original Greek, “hard to bear, grievous”. Everything these days points to grief. I’ve been slowing circling around a project I want to do when I’m not, you know, “feeling very unhappy, uneasy, or dissatisfied,” when I can get up in the morning and stomach being a real human being and not just a shadow wraith that haunts my kitchen cabinets looking for a better breakfast than the available options.
I have become my seven year old: can’t tell you what I want to eat, only that nothing we have pleases me.
Yesterday when my youngest was deep in a fever dream and the older was being entertained by dad, I had time – unexpected time! – for myself, to do what I wanted. What activity did I choose? I tried to sleep, read, write. Then I looked at what I could watch on Netflix. Did I actually choose anything to watch? I did not.
Later I flopped down on our weirdly textured foam mattress – the mattress cover and sheets still in the dryer after being barfed and tinkled on – and cried out to my husband, “How can I be too bored even to watch tv??” This is the crux of my fear, that I am permanently and staggeringly bored with my life. I have always had a goal, a project, an unattainable dream, and right now my future stretches before me as flat and dry as the Oklahoma countryside in August. This landscape is a place I do not want to inhabit. A malaise so thick that it is unnumbable by Netflix? What does this mean??
Growing up, I ingested the belief that boredom was a character flaw. If you were bored, you weren’t trying hard enough – there were books to read, people to serve, prayers and devotions to make, creative pursuits. But I’ve been reading some homeschool sages who think of boredom as a gateway. When my kids are bored, they are in mental transition to some new idea or developmental state, and generally, if I can bear the tedium of their vocalizations about it and hold up under the pressure to turn on some screen time, they tend to end up in a state of deep play or creative flow.
When I fear my children’s boredom, I try to trust their ability to stimulate themselves out of it. I believe it’s not my job to entertain them every minute but to shepherd them through uncomfortable places, wastelands in their journeys. The question, then, is where the heck is my shepherd, and is S/he bringing snacks?!
In an episode of On Being, Sharon Saltzberg explains the Buddhist tenet of Visiting Forces. She describes a peaceful response to our inevitable visitors – fear, shame, anxiety, dread, comparison – that inevitably arrive. When these visitors knock on my door, I can go into fight or flight, panic, slam the door, run and hide under the bed, have a meltdown. I can fling it wide in resignation and say, well, since you’re here, I guess you can have the run of the whole place, “forgetting” as she puts it “who owns the house!” The other options is that Visiting Forces can be invited in to share a meal, or a cup of tea, and then firmly escorted back out the door.
If I could cultivate a gentle response to the feelings inside of me that so often send me into spasms of terror, imagine how that practiced response might change my emotional reactivity to the people/conversations/life situations that serve me up a whopping dose of shock or discomfort. Brené Brown’s research has found that the happiest people are not indicated by markers we might expect – financial security, health, religious commitment, family happiness. The happiest people are those with the healthiest boundaries.
They are probably setting boundaries for their Visiting Forces.
My porch is awfully crowded with visitors right now, all of them bearing flashing marquees: MALAISE MALAISE MALAISE! A LACKLUSTER MEANINGLESS LIFE!! THE VOID IS NEAR! YOU WILL ACCOMPLISH NOTHING! Can I will muster the strength to get out the teapot, and the timer – I hear what you have to say, do you take cream with that, thanks for coming goodbye goodbye goodbye!