mental health at midlife, "one" more thing

At the end of my last post on midlife mental health (there's another one here), I said there was one more piece I wanted to tell you about but I had run out of room. And then life intervened, as it so persistently does, and I never got around to it.

But that "one more piece" continues to come up, and the first thing to say is that it is laughable that I said there was "one" more piece. There are a million more pieces. But that piece I was thinking about has been important, so here you go.

My family was pretty garden variety dysfunctional. I'm pretty sure my dad was a narcissist, and my mom an experienced enabler, but I've heard a lot of stories over the years from other people, and our particular mess was not out of the ordinary. And I say that with some sadness, because in the sixties, there were a whole lot of family dynamics that were weird and stifling and maiming, but it was just the way things were. My parents had their problems, but they also did a pretty dang good job considering the times and their own histories.

In the eighties, when I was in my twenties and psychotherapy was relatively new (at least to me), I was all about blaming my parents. I was so angry at them. I could tell you inside out how awful they had been, especially my dad. Some of it was necessary stuff that I need to process, but a lot of it was just me being young and self-obsessed. I'm not knocking therapy-- it helped, it helped lots. I'm just rolling my eyes at my youth, and my ability to think that my own pain was the most important thing. Maybe that's what a lot of us do in our twenties.

Anyway. Then I had kids, and once you have kids, it doesn't take long to realize that no parent is able to be the parent they wish they were. I was simultaneously developing the ability to protect myself better from my parents' ability to wound me,  and also becoming willing to cut them a whole lot more slack. They were doing the best they could. So I gradually dumped the whole digging-into-my-family-of-origin schtick because I just couldn't do it anymore.

I spent the next twenty-ish years aware that there had been some difficult issues in my family of origin, but not thinking about them, because I didn't know any way to do that without coming down on my parents with an attitude of self-righteous fury, and I knew that wasn't where I wanted to go. So I stopped (not overnight, but still a pretty thorough stop). And honestly, I had been pretty obsessed with it for awhile, so it was probably a good move at the time.

But recently, some things have resurfaced, and as I've become a student of my own brain and ego through meditation and whatever other tools I can find, I've realized that I still have a lot to learn from looking back and trying to understand some things from my childhood.

Not to sound like I'm overly wise or anything, but just to acknowledge the truth: if you let yourself, you do learn some things as you get older. I am wiser than I used to be, at least on this front. Because now I can look back and do it without blame. I can feel compassion for all of us, my parents, the community we lived in, the world we lived in, and see how we were all trying so hard to do things right, to do the things we thought we were supposed to do. And yet we were wounded, and we did some wounding. We muddled through, just like everybody does.

This is also turning into a muddled mess, and I'm not even sure why I'm writing it, because I don't know if anyone else is going through it, and if you're not, that makes this an exceptionally boring bit of navel-gazing.

But if you are, just this: it can help to let yourself go back and re-experience some old hurts. Sometimes when I'm meditating (my current meditating theme is to let myself feel what I'm feeling), it hurts so bad it's almost overwhelming. But it's not happening right now, it happened a long time ago. And if I can sit for five minutes, one minute, and let the feelings wash through me, it feels awful at that moment, but then later it feels better. It really does. I don't know if this will make any sense, but I feel more clear-eyed than I have in a long time. Maybe ever.

p.s. the book that was helpful in thinking this through is Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb. I had some problems with that book, but I still learned lots. Gottlieb, a therapist, says: "The purpose of inquiring about people's parents isn't to join them in blaming, judging, or criticizing their parents. In fact, it's not about their parents at all. It's about understanding how their early experiences inform who they are as adults so that they can separate the past from the present (and not wear psychological clothing that no longer fits)."

Yup. Have a great weekend.

The Amazon dilemma

I'll admit it, I started out as a huge Amazon fan. When they first opened in 1994, they sold books, every book you could imagine, and that was all they sold for a few years. We did have a local bookstore back then (in fact, we had two, a B. Dalton at our tiny mall and an indie) and I bought books at those places, too. But as a nerd and a night owl, with small children to boot, I was so happy to have a place that was available 24-hours a day where I could browse books, order them at a discount, and read other people's opinions and reviews.

Back then it was a brand new thing that people could post honest reviews about what they were reading, and they did. A quite fervent bookish community built up--it was as if all of us introvert nerds had been waiting for Amazon. And then they came out with the kindle, and even though it took years, eventually I became a kindle convert (I've written about that before).

Our B.Dalton closed in the 90s at some point, and the indie soon after (I'm terrible at remembering dates, so that may not be exactly right). A lot of indies closed around that time, and although that gets blamed on Amazon, in my personal experience, a lot of them were on the verge of closing anyway, and they just used Amazon as the big bad guy excuse. I never got the sense that Amazon was purposely undermining local retailers. They offered a service, and made it convenient, and I used it.

But gradually that started to change. First there started to be fake reviews. Amazon changed the rules so that you had to admit it in the review if the review had been solicited, but still. There was no real effort on Amazon's part to stop people from gaming the review system, and as far as I can tell, there still isn't.

Then there occasionally started to be small "mistakes," like recently when the rating for a book in a popular author's catalog was incorrectly linked to a highly rated unrelated product. Oops! It was obviously a "mistake," but if you saw the 4.8 star rating and didn't click on the link and scroll down to read the reviews, you'd have never known. You'd just assume the book had a 4.8 (out of five) rating. Maybe it was an honest mistake. Maybe it wasn't.

And then last fall, Amazon "accidentally" shipped Margaret Atwood's new book a week early. Oops!! they said. Blush!! We screwed up! Technical error! But come on. They shipped thousands of copies of a highly anticipated book--possibly the most highly anticipated book of last year-- and nobody noticed that they were shipping it a week early? I don't believe it.

And they didn't stop shipping it, either, once it became clear what had happened. People who were anxious to get their hands on it canceled their local indie order and got it early. I know that happened at least once because I heard a woman sheepishly admit on a podcast that she had done it. (It was a podcast that I was trying out for the first time, and it was one of the hosts, and between that and the constant fake laughing, I've never listened to it again.)

Finally, I'm done giving them the benefit of the doubt. That was clearly an attempt by Amazon to undermine local independent booksellers. It made me a little sick to my stomach.

So what to do. I still live in a town without a bookstore. We have a wonderful local library, and I use it, but it's a small town library and their selection isn't always the greatest. I make my semi-annual trek to the bookstore in the next town over, and even though they rarely have what I want, I buy stuff to help keep them in business. I also buy books from indie bookstores when we're traveling.

But I read a lot. My current solution has been to order from other retailers. Powell's is good, and they ship promptly. Like Amazon, they stock both new and used books. I also paid the annual membership at Barnes&Noble so I could get free shipping from them. (How crazy is it that buying books from Barnes & Noble now seems like a subversive act? I seriously do not want Barnes & Noble to go out of business.)

When I use up my current Audible credits, I'm probably going to switch to Libro.fm, an audiobook site that allows you to buy through your favorite independent bookstore. (Audible is owned by Amazon.) Since I don't store audiobooks on my phone the way I store ebooks on my kindle, that won't be a difficult switch to make. And over a year ago, I stopped buying anything else (besides books, I mean) from Amazon unless it was something I couldn't get locally.

But I still buy kindle books from Amazon, mostly when they're on sale. I've got too much invested in my kindle to stop doing that, and I've never seen another e-reader that I like as well.  And honestly, I still sometimes buy other non-book things from them, too. It's convenient when you live in northwest Montana.

I guess I've reluctantly, imperfectly joined the #notAmazon crowd. I'm so disappointed in them. They used to be the shining beacon of what an internet retailer could be, but they've turned out to be just as coldly money-hungry and profit-maximizing as everybody else. Maybe they were always that way and I was just naive, but I'm telling myself that it's only been the last half-dozen years or so and I've just been slow to realize it. Good-bye, Amazon. I loved you while it lasted.

Instead of seven things, just one.

Years ago-- I'm getting to the age where all my stories start with years ago-- I took a year of Chinese language classes at our community college. The professor was here for a year on a Fulbright scholarship from a university in northern China.

The class was interesting, but sadly I was in the midst of peri-menopause and I have almost zero memory of the Chinese I spent a year learning. At least that's my excuse. Xie xie is about the extent of my Chinese. (I can say thank you in five languages. woot!)

But that's not the story I wanted to tell you. The class met five days a week for two hours, so we had a lot of time to get to know our professor. His English name was Eric. Part of the way we learned about Chinese culture was by observing his culture shock during his first extended stay in the US. He had been to California on vacation, but rural Montana is not exactly the same.

Interesting(?) aside: the locals here don't consider our area to be rural. For Montana, this is a crowded city. And we now have Costco, Walmart, TJMaxx, and three Starbucks, so maybe they're right.

So one day after months of mini-discussions about cultural differences, we (somewhat naively) asked Eric how/why the Chinese people put up with living under an oppressive government. And he responded (I'm paraphrasing): the Chinese people are ancient. We will outlast any government. We just wait them out.

I've thought about that a lot, especially recently. There's quite a bit to unpack there, including the idea that in his mind, "we" includes future generations, since the change in government might not occur during his lifetime-- it certainly didn't look like it was going to at the time when we were talking to him.

But even more interesting to me: Americans (including me) are all about being upset about what's going on at the top of our government power structure. ALL ABOUT IT. But in some ways, that makes us more a victim of an authoritarian power structure than the people who are genuinely living in an oppressive power structure, but view it as merely a passing phase.

We Americans grant those people at the top all the importance by focusing so intensely on what they're doing, and pretending that what's going on in our country is all about them. Which mindset is truly oppressed?  Watching my own mind these days, I'm thinking it might be us.

Thought for the day.

Out with the old year (decade!), in with the new. Hello, 2020.

I have a life-long cycle of getting overloaded with commitments (especially around the holidays, of course) and then getting so stressed that I get through everything by shutting down, gritting my teeth, and surviving. Then when it's over, it takes a couple of weeks to recover.

In the past, I've tried to manage this by cutting back on commitments, but then I get bored and depressed. This year was definitely not a bored and depressed year. I think we had two evenings at home during the two weeks before Christmas. I was completely brain dead by Christmas day. I'm starting to think that I just need to accept that this is my normal cycle, and I should figure out how to manage it instead of trying to change it. It's not like this is a surprise--the holidays are busy and stressful for everyone.

For me, managing holiday stress for sure means scheduling time off after Christmas, and this year we were able to do that. I was totally on auto-pilot by the time Christmas rolled around, but during our week of vacation I could feel myself coming back to life. We had a great time with our kids and their partners, played a lot of cards, watched a lot of football/golf/movies, and walked on the beach. Can't ask for much more from a vacation.

I also got some reading done-- wouldn't be a good vacation without a stack of books-- including one more five-star read for 2019, Tuesday Mooney Talks to Ghosts. The title makes complete sense once you've read the book, but I think it's also misleading.

There is a ghost, sort of, but it's not really a ghost story, and it's certainly not a horror book. The blurb also mentions a treasure hunt, and although there is a treasure hunt, it's not the focus of the story and really it only has two steps. A lot of the negative reviews are about people's disappointment on those two fronts. But if you want a story of a bunch of misfits who are dealing with grief and not fitting in with a major dose of snarkiness, it delivers in spades. I loved it.

So now it's 2020. I've told you before I don't do New Year's resolutions (because I always fail at them), but I do usually have a theme, and this year it is pay attention. I've done this before, and it's always just something that pops into my head during the first week of the new year. I don't bother defining it any more than the phrase, because part of the whole thing is figuring out what it means as the year goes by.

The other intention I set for myself this year is to start investigating how we can cut down on single-use plastic. I gave up on paper towels in one moment when I walked into the restroom at our local movie theater and noticed that there were more paper towels stuffed in the trash for that one night than we would use at our house in a couple of months. Maybe the whole year.

Cutting down on plastic is probably more important anyway. I quit buying bottled water three (four?) years ago (partly because PellMel lectured me about it--I love learning from my kids). I quit buying apples at Costo, where they come in a large, molded plastic clamshell. But I've never done much more than that.  Up until last year, we could recycle plastic, so it didn't seem too horrible. But last year our county stopped taking plastic for recycling, and there are no other options for recycling in our community. So, will be working on this. Please share if you have any ideas.

Hope you survived the holidays with your sanity intact. My third intention for the year (start writing shorter blog posts) is apparently already shot to hell. Have a great day.