Thursday, 5/15/97 What to do when life kicks you as you’re down
FATE: In face of adversity, draw support from all the resources
around you
My father was an avid fan of self-help books. The works of Dale
Carnegie, Werner Erhardt, Maxwell Maltz and the like came and went
throughout his later years, transient, like weekends. Upon
finishing one and before taking up the next, he would invariably
come to me and in his most solemn manner tell me that his most
recent read had changed his life. Of course, it never did. Then he
would implore me to read it. Of course, I never did. Ultimately, I
came to hate self-help books, to some degree for their oxymoronic
nature, but to a greater degree, just because. So I am finding
tremendous irony in the topic I have chosen for today. It’s a
self-help column. If you are disinclined to allow for the possibly
that someone who actually volunteers to write this stuff has
anything meaningful to say about the finer points of survival,
now’s your chance – try the back page. If on the other hand, you
are even a little bit curious as to how a fellow human copes with
adversity, or if you’re just primed for a heaping helping of my
snotty witticisms, read on. T. S. Eliot was only half right when he
wrote "April is the cruelest month." He left out March. The last
couple of months have been really, for lack of a better word,
challenging. I take that back. There is a better word: "brutal."
I’ve gone through some really weird and unexpected turns. While I
have definitely had my ups, some of my downs have been
steel-toed-boot-in-the-gonads, paper-cut-on-the-tip-of-the-tongue
devastating … the kinds of days where you sit around and all you
can think about is if it would be possible to fit your entire fist
into your own mouth. The kinds of days that lead people with 10
years of A.A.-mitigated sobriety to go out on a bender and wipe out
a family of four. Here’s a sampler: * Some lady, a UCLA art major
no less, rams her car into mine car like it’s PT-109. The initial
repair estimate comes in at over $6,000. My neck locks up tighter
than a bank vault door on a three-day weekend. I have to hope that
she paints better than she drives. * The next day, while I’m out
shopping at Cervical Collars-R-Us, a pipe bursts, flooding my house
with untold hundreds of gallons of water. The water gushes through
the ceiling above my bedroom and closet, saturating my clothes,
bed, books, CDs, etc. with a slurry of decomposed paint and
drywall. * A week later, I find out that the IRS has disallowed
three years worth of a certain deduction I was told by my intrepid
accountant I could take. With interest and penalties it adds up to
more than I’ll make this year. * My new boss tells me that my new
job (which I desperately needed because of my new tax liability)
doesn’t really exist because of some asinine bureaucratic
regulation. * I lose the notebook which contains the one and only
copy of my senior thesis. * My newly-wed sister announces that she
is leaving her newly-wed husband. * Some nice person steals some
mail, the most important of which was a pile of bills I have just
paid, out of the local collection box. By the time I figured it
out, my credit report is about as convincing as a Jeffrey
Dahmer-penned tome on the virtues of vegetarianism. * Included in
the mail that gets ripped off: my Spring reg. fee check. So, URSA,
that cold-hearted, condescending bitch, drops all my classes. The
only two English classes still open are "Famous Authors of Simi
Valley," and "The History of the Umlat." Gee, thanks. * Oh yeah,
and there’s one more thing, the biggest kick in the face of all: I
break up with my girlfriend of two years. I find out that she has a
little problem; she’s a chronic ______. (I’ve left this blank out
of common decency and respect for her lying ass. Ooops!) This all
happens in one 30-day period. You’d have to imagine that after the
sixth or seventh disaster I was reeling. I stopped sleeping. I
stopped eating. A friend suggested I find a new church. I told her
I didn’t need a new church, I needed a new religion and a new god,
one who had a tensiometer and knew how to use it on people’s souls.
My psychologist said she couldn’t see me any more because I was
bringing her down. The tension was so thick, you couldn’t cut it
with a knife, or a hack-saw, or even an atom splitter. If you
tried, it would cut you back. I started asking my friends if they
knew anything about Prozac. My telephone, modem and mailbox became
my nemeses. I stopped wearing my seat belt. In short, I was coming
unglued. I don’t know how many of you out there have ever had to
grapple with an unhealthy dose of clinical depression, but those of
you who have will know what I mean when I tell you that it was
gaining on me and my biggest fear was that it would catch me out in
the open. Let’s say your heart is broken, your soul is fractured,
your car is wrecked, your house is swamped, your clothes are
moldering, your education is at risk, your family is suffering,
your neck is frozen, your job is gone, your credit is non-existent,
your debts are exponentially higher than your net worth, your
dignity is blown, your significant other is gone and your body is
wracked with pain So, what do you do, what do you do? Ask Michael!
The answer: I saw one of those electronic freeway signs on the 10
with the message "Panic braking costs lives." Yeah? Well so does
rear-ending someone at 88 feet per second. Sometimes panic breaking
is a really good idea. In other words: Panic! The epinephrine rush
will get enough oxygen to your head to realize that you need help.
Get help! Big time help. Real help. Real fast. Wave a white flag.
Stand in the middle of the street in your underwear and yell:
"Mayday! Mayday!" Pray. Chant. Invoke the muses. If you ask for it,
it will come. That’s more or less what I did. I called friends and
family, therapists and mechanics, chiropractors and accountants. I
told my neighbors: "Hey, I’m getting kicked in the ass here." All
of the sudden everyone I knew was wearing a cape. It was really
weird. People I barely knew were calling just to say hi, just
checking in. Sometimes their advice was less than compelling. Bon
mots like "every cloud has a silver lining" are about as soothing
as a flight attendant screaming her lungs out "Don’t panic! Don’t
panic!" while you’re 30,000 feet above the North Sea and the cabin
is filling up with carcinogenic smoke. It’s not like you can pop a
window or go out for a walk. But, their kind support was
empowering. For every one of the disasters I listed above, I asked
someone, somewhere for help. And in every case, I got it. One of
the great things about being on this university campus is that we
have access to literally thousands of professionals who have made
it their life’s endeavor to figure out fairly complicated stuff,
like how to kill retroviruses or parse Proust. Really. You’ve heard
the phrase "He wrote the book on (insert topic)" Around here it
might not necessarily be a figurative statement. Once someone
pointed out a particular professor to me and said "She wrote the
book on the schwa." The schwa isn’t a critical issue in my life,
but I will admit I felt somehow, and quite oddly, empowered in
knowing that if I ever had a question about the schwa, I was
covered. If you have a question about your health: there’s Student
Health Services (x54703). If you have a question about your sanity,
there’s Student Psychological Services (x50768). If you need legal
assistance, you guessed it, Student Legal Services (x59894). If
you’re having trouble with school, there are dozens of groups that
can assist you. Professor hitting on you? Ombuds (x57627). Bogus
parking ticket? Citation Review Office (x52029). Maniac roommate?
Office of Residential Life (x53401). Obnoxious Viewpoint columnist?
(deal with it). The list goes on and on. If, at the present, you’re
not suffering from any particularly debilitating stressful event,
this information may seem obvious. But when life is about as subtle
as an eight-ball hemorrhage, we tend to forget that we have
options. Sometimes we just want to crawl into our beds and gnaw
away at our cuticles until they bleed, hoping all along that our
troubles will expire like a coupon. They don’t. When I find myself
in times of trouble, I refer to a few favorite quotes: "This, too,
shall pass." "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." "Yea,
though I walk through the valley of blah, blah, blah." Sometimes,
though, they just don’t do the trick. They bounce off my depression
like 9 mm rounds did off those wacky bank-robbers, like the Titanic
did off that hypertrophic ice cube. When that happens, I get help.
When I discover that the light at the end of the tunnel is actually
a hundred car freight train coming my way at full speed, I get
help. When that silver lining is really just a distortion caused by
the dirty contact lenses I haven’t had the energy to clean. I get
help. If you can’t take it for another second, if the capillaries
in your brain are bursting, if you feel like nothing will help, get
help. Daugherty is a fourth-year English student. He knows a great
chiropractor, if you’re looking for one. Michael Daugherty