In the movie (and book) ‘Fight Club’ the main character has terrible insomnia, works a mundane job he doesn’t find motivating but keeps him busy, and leads a fairly lonely life with little friends or satisfaction. To break up his day he starts wishing for something to happen, anything. He wishes his plane would crash, the world would end, anything to end the routine of his unsatisfying life. Of course, he could do something about changing his life (couldn’t we all?), but it’s all so ego-dystonic that many of us would rather wish that things would just change.
Lately I’ve been thinking about this incongruence we have with acknowledging that we are dissatisfied and acting in accordance to enhance our satisfaction. I think one of our main problems is prioritising.
I am someone who is very prone to becoming overwhelmed. As with many people, when I become overwhelmed I often enter this phase of what others might call depression. Sometimes people who find themselves in this state start to wish things would change, for better or for worse but just change. Recently I noticed how I had all these deadlines, things to do, money to pay, people to please, and I started to feel so low. Physiologically there was probably little wrong with me, but I started feeling so down. And so I started to wish again that something would happen. And I wanted something to happen so I wouldn’t have to deal with all these things I had pending. I’d heard Tony Robbins (the motivational speaker) before refer to this persistently low mood as overwhelment rather than depression – and I start to see now how true this may be. But what exactly about wishing for negative outcomes is it that seems so appealing when you’re feeling overwhelmed? I think it has something to do with putting things back in perspective.
Say something bad happens, maybe you’re in a serious car accident or a family member becomes really sick. Suddenly you notice that you can (and should) take the day off work, that that document can be handed in late, that that person won’t hate you forever if you fail to make the party, and that if all these things that were overwhelming you don’t get fulfilled the world won’t end. That’s right, these things aren’t essential! It’s incredibly liberating to realise this. And you realise that all these things have been prioritised incorrectly – or not at all. At the end of the day, the things that keep us alive and satisfied are always the really basic things, things that rarely have deadlines, people who won’t judge you, and things that you probably already have. When life forces us into a place that perhaps physically impedes you from completing the tasks of life that were overwhelming you, only then do we start seeing what our priorities really need to be.
The Story About The Breast Clinic
Yesterday I saw a woman at the breast screening clinic who had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. She seemed like the kind of person you’d usually expect to be the one cheering up other people. Yesterday, though, she was just human like the rest of us. The thing that stuck with me most is that she said she was actually happy (even though she was crying profusely) that she was going to die. In her mind she’d already made up her mind that cancer equals death, no other alternative but death. And she was happy that she was going to die because she had wanted to die for some time, before the breast scan had ever been an issue. She wanted to die because her life, she felt, was out of control and she wanted an escape or a change.
Gosh, gosh, gosh. I remember having felt like this before. My life felt remote from what I felt I had been—and I felt powerless, cowardly, and like my life was out of control and without a purpose. And because I wanted to die and at the same time too weak and cowardly to do it, I just wanted something, anything, to happen to me. I fantasized about road accidents, strokes, cancer—anything fatal. At one point I didn’t even mind if it happened to me or to someone else, just something needed to happen to change the direction of my life because I had no direction or purpose to my life. And I felt too weak to bring about change myself. I was so low.
This, I imagine, is how this woman at the breast clinic had been feeling, and how unfortunate that something like this did happen for her. I’m not even sure that it is also what happened to me (or similar) or if it is the opposite.
— 5/05/2007
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