How I Get Through Bad Days

Well, for a start, I acknowledge that there are bad days. Since I've written about my bad days before, this time I'd like to consider the importance of recognizing that bad days exist.

Early in life I was exposed to Seventh-Day Adventists. 

Seventh-Day Adventists want to be "God's peculiar people," in the sense of the Chosen Few, the Remnant Who Are Not Deceived. In some ways this is good, and in some ways it functions to encourage some behaviors that are very peculiar indeed and would not be encouraged in most social groups. One of these kinds of behavior might be called spiritual one-upsmanship. Adventists just love to find a theological error in anything someone else says. 

For example: Ellen Harmon White achieved fame through what can only be described as a series of dramatic healing visions during which her lungs collapsed and recovered from tuberculosis. If you think being scolded by Greta Thunberg was bad, imagine hearing real fire-and-brimstone sermons coming out of a thirteen-year-old who was sick, anyway, and ought to have been in bed. That she was having healing visions was certainly true--the sickly little girl nobody expected could live to grow up became a remarkably tough, energetic, long-lived woman. That her visions of the Apocalypse, the Resurrection, Heaven, and Hell were also true in some way seems likely; that they were literally true seems, to me, less likely. Anyway, people flocked to learn what a tuberculosis survivor could teach them about health. 

The only way to account for the legacy of Ellen White's writings on this topic does involve some sort of inspiration beyond what a fourth grade dropout could learn from Sylvester Graham, although she was among the first to agree that Graham was right about whole grain being better nourishment than refined flour. She anticipated what it took the AMA another hundred years to learn about immunology. 

And, as a little girl who naturally wanted to live and grow up and study and travel and have children and all that, and was often told that she never could do any of those things, one of the things little Ellen Harmon had found to be true was that "It is a positive duty to resist melancholy." The highs and lows of her adolescent moods interacted biochemically with her heroic immune system. Ellen was not, in fact, the only teenager who ever observed that they have fewer "energy spoons" and are more likely to go down with infections if they give full vent to a mood of adolescent despair, or that some teenagers say "I shall die" or even "I want to die" when what they really mean is "I'm growing fast and fighting an infection at the same time, so I'm exhausted. I need extra sleep." And they can save themselves some pain if they recognize how the feeling that "I shall die" can be cut off at the pass by just saying "I need extra sleep," and taking it. 

But Ellen White wrote down that early insight before Emile Coue and some other true believers in what is actually an antichristian cult made their splash on the American scene. Ellen White wrote about the medical benefits of solving the problem of physical exhaustion rather than aggravating it by staying up and talking about it. Auguste Comte had written about the philosophical idea of "positivism," focussing on what physically exists in the material world. It remained for Coue, Madame Blavatsky, Mary Baker Eddy, and their followers to declare that unpleasant things don't really exist, because there is no external reality shaping what goes on in our minds, but rather in some mystical way our minds create what we encounter in what seems to be external reality, and so nice things could be ruled "positive" and people could be advised to put all their energy into "positive thinking" and trying to believe that what they wanted was true. 

In a series of "Read-Aloud Books" that used to be sold in supermarkets, I remember, one volume contained a story about some children who wanted a pony. So instead of going out to earn the money, clear out the space, and buy the pony, like the much nicer child in Fly by Night, they just went outside and visualized the pony, even visualized riding on it. And one day one of them really thought he felt its mane in his hands! And then one of them thought she heard it whinny! And at the end of the week they went out and saw--a real live pony! 

It might have happened. Someone might have decided to give them a pony, since they wanted one so badly. The pony might have been hidden in someone's shed for a day or two while adults were preparing a home for it; the child might really have heard it whinny. But if children's wishes for ponies caused ponies to exist, a lot of ponies would be living in urban apartments as well as back yards.

For most of us, most of the time, it's quite easy enough to focus on the aspects of anything that we like to think about, see what we want to see, and convince ourselves that we can do what we want. Our self-serving bias leads us into enough difficulties without being aggravated by Positive Thinking. People who advise us to imagine only the best results of any course of action are very popular, and people love the stories of times when that way of thinking led someone to success of any kind. Unfortunately it has also led people to bankruptcy, divorce, and untimely death. 

 It is not always possible to know what the outcomes of different courses of action will be. It is possible to know, however, that the emotions people feel about possible outcomes do not determine the outcomes. Squealing happily, like children trying to bring a pony into existence by fantasizing, er, visualizing, people who thought the force of their emotions could change the market led many American businesses straight into bankruptcy. And some of us had the memorable, miserable experience of watching it happen. 

"The product is good, but the market's not great," we might have warned friends in the 2000s, or even in the 1990s. "Walk before you run. Add a few dozen, or better yet a few hundred, more small retailers before you put every penny you have into the insurance policy the big protectionist stores demand, not because any product needs that much insurance, but most specifically to keep themselves from retailing products like yours--at the behest of the huge corporations whose products they market." And our friends said, "Oh, that's just 'negative thinking'!" as they threw everything, even their own homes, out the window in one foredoomed grab at wealth. A little Positive Thinking may be a safe risk for a student salesman to take in working up the nerve to make a sales pitch to unfamiliar adults, but a little more Positive Thinking has ruined many lives. Including the lives of some relatives of mine. Including one who had accumulated a little wealth she'd always intended to leave to me. And many's the day when, in order to stretch my pathetic income to fit my expenses, all I've had to eat have been the memories of how happily the poor dear cackled as she zeroed out her legacy to me and then let a bank throw her out of her house. She thought, God help her, that fantasizing might make it pay... 

Positive Thinking is not of Christian origin at all. It has a base in Hindu philosophy, though in North America it's metastasized beyond anything Hindus ever imagined. It was brought into the English-speaking countries for the specific purpose of displacing Christian faith and Christian teachings. Like other ideas imported for that purpose, it is not pure unmitigated evil, but it has had evil effects on Christians who probably ought to have recognized and rejected it. 

In real life ordinary middle-class people (and their adorably poor, hardworking, yet still privileged young) don't hear Positive Thinking preached by Bob Schuller or Napoleon Hill or whoever may be taking their places in today's publishing world. Why would they talk to us? Their own doctrine tells them to cultivate friends who have more than they have. They're not interested in us. So we hear Positive Thinking coming from people who may be very proud of having started out with more than we had (I knew one who belonged to one of the "sixty rich families"), but may seem somehow to be earning less, and borrow a lot of our stuff. If they are fun, which most of them are not, they're certainly not our very favorite people to know. 

"Believe in yourself! Admit you like X, and ask X for a date!" they screech, when although the evidence you've seen of X's future bad character is trivial stuff X might outgrow, you're still far from sure that you like X more than Y or Z. 

"If your mind can believe it, then you can achieve it! Go for that Rhodes scholarship!" when, if you focussed on an alumni scholarship that's available at your own school, you might actually get it. 

"You can if you think you can! Oh, do put all your eggs in one basket, and then throw that basket across the river!" Probably anyone who listens to an idea as blatantly bad as that deserves it.

Most of these people are only mildly toxic, but they do fit into the general category of toxic friends. 

Not all or even most of these toxic friends are extroverts, but Positive Thinkers always seem to want to be extroverts. Like the ancient Greeks they think the best temperament to have is obviously the "fire" temperament of a tribal warlord. Waiting and thinking things through, they have let themselves be told, are weak. They want to be bold! They want to be strong! Often they want us to be those things for them. If the bold, "strong" decision turns out to be wrong, they'll let us take the consequences. If it turns out to be right, they'll expect a share of the rewards. 

And part of their notion of strength is a strange belief that we should be too "strong" to acknowledge a bad day. "Why would you want to make it a bad day by calling it one?" They don't want to admit that, regardless of what you want, it is one. They say, "If you get up in the morning and choose to have a good day, you will! You'll visualize good things in your mind, and that will attract them to you!" Most of these toxic friends' sentences seem to end with exclamation marks, at least when they are exhorting someone else to be more schizoid on their behalf. 

During the last year when I still talked to this kind of toxic friend, I think it was 1985, I said, "Two years ago, about this time of year, a high school boy got up in the morning expecting to have a good time with the college crowd at the park. Maybe he did have a nice time on the bus ride out to the park. When we got there, right away he wanted to climb a steep cliff above the river--no gear, just clinging to the rock with his hands. He thought he could do that. He had that picture in his mind. Then he fell down the cliff and broke his neck, and none of us had a good day." 

"Did he survive? With a broken neck?" the Positive Thinker screeched. He did. "Well then he should have felt very 'positive' about that!" 

 All I know about the boy's feelings is that he didn't come to our school, as planned; his brother graduated and nobody I knew stayed in touch with the family. And all I know about the Positive Thinker is that she didn't stay at our school very long, but the reason for her leaving was, perhaps unfortunately, something normal--nobody had pushed her down the cliffs above the  river to see how "positive" she felt about breaking her neck. 

The vast majority of my days stand out in memory as neither good nor bad. Since about age twenty-two I've had few of those adolescent mood swings that color our memories ecstatic or miserable. Most days in my life have contained something to laugh about. Sometimes it was a moment of real comedy; sometimes it was "You might as well laugh as cry." 

Often I wish, for people who are still pitching and yawing through a life of emotional moods, the bliss of being able to remember the facts of what happened on a given day without the need to attach emotional feelings to them. Sometimes I remember some part of a day as having an emotional mood, but rarely one that dominated the entire day. Most of the things that happen in the course of the day just are what they are. The morning walk was pleasant, say. I got something done on the computer, which is always nice. An e-friend lost a family member, which is never nice. 

And then there are a few days that just went from bad to worse, in an objective way--days that could not be reframed as good in any emotional mood. The one that will probably stand out in memory is the nineteenth of April, 1995. I went to work while tired and slightly sick, had an unprofitable day working on disagreeable chores, heard very bad news on the way home, then found a family member unexpectedly looking for a fight at home. If you want to dredge a "Positive Thought" out of that, why don't you take a sledgehammer and break your leg so you can be glad it's broken. 

I see no need to blather on about the fact that, at that time, some people were still alive. Some other people weren't yet alive, or I hadn't met them. That's not the point. If we're talking about my experiences on the nineteenth of April, they were bad. I can see no possible benefit in trying to deny that. Being or sounding like a Positive Thinker is not a benefit. 

How do I, how does anyone, handle a day like the nineteenth of April of 1995? As little as possible. Why would one want to handle it? I survived without doing any real harm. That's as much as can be expected. For as much of the day as I had any immediate choice about, I slept. 

I worked my way through most of these writing prompts in advance, while the computer ought to have been connected to the Internet but wasn't. The day on which I wrote the first draft of this post was, emotionally, below average--for me. My Bad Neighbor had sprayed poison on the ground again. The sky was promising to rain the vapors out of the air but hadn't done it yet. My poisoned insides were cramping. That kind of thing might be offset, in my subjective emotional balance, by any small accomplishment, like finishing this post; it is not and will never be good. 

I shared this day, however, with the Queen Cat Serena. Serena chose to spend much of this day indoors, just because the air outside was worse. She probably wanted to stay with the three kittens who were born alive four days before. On this fifth day of their lives, one positively died, one went into a coma from which it never awoke, and one was conscious but not well. They were reacting to the toxic chemical vapors in the air, just as I am.

Serena loves kittens. Her prolactin reactions soften her coat and mellow her personality; only while she's nursing tiny babies does she purr and cuddle. Serena rarely shows a glyphosate reaction herself, but after exposure to "pesticide" vapors she's given birth to kittens who either were born dead, or died during their first direct exposure to "pesticide" vapors. Serena doesn't seem to care about the ones who are born dead but she seems to grieve when kittens come out alive, start to bond with her, and then die. On this day she hovered. She went to the Pet Taxi I call the kitten box, where they were resting on a little crocheted cat blanket, and looked in making the softest, most affectionate-sounding chirrups a cat can make. Newborn kittens' ears are folded in and they are usually imagined to be deaf, but Serena heard words before her ears unfolded and the smallest kitten answered her chirrups. Still alive. She sniffed and licked it. It squeaked peevishly, not digesting milk, not wanting to be fed or washed. Sometimes kittens survive a few days like that, shake off infections or poison, and live. More often they don't. 

Serena left it in the nest box and circulated around the office. Was there anything worth licking in the trash bag? Had I changed my mind about her climbing on computers? She considered curling up beside me for an afternoon nap, twice, and decided against it, before coming back to curl up beside me, holding my toes under her forepaws. When you're losing someone you care about, it can be comforting to be close to another friend who has some idea how you feel. Serena lay beside me, showing what was on her mind by the way she moved while dreaming. Cats often dream of fighting or fleeing. Serena dreamed of her kittens. 

So passed this mild and cloudy afternoon. My glufosinate reaction, currently going on, made excretion difficult and painful, while also urgent; hence the cramps. I couldn't un-imagine the way such a reaction must feel to a kitten who still needs help to excrete. If that was what was wrong with the kittens they probably didn't want to survive. I loved Serena and I would have given a lot, if such bargains were possible, for Death to take the "pesticide" sprayer and leave her kittens. 

For me, this was not a day of emotional havoc like the nineteenth of April of 1995. Neither was it an especially pleasant day. The emotional energy we have to feel about the goodness or badness of days is a physical condition. I had reached the blessed detachment of middle age. What was happening on this day was not good. 

I accepted that, for Serena, this was probably a horrible day. 

I accepted that I could add a hint of pleasure to this day, for myself, just by finishing this blog post (or finishing some other task). Serena probably did not have that option. Letting her nap beside me was probably making it fractionally easier for Serena to get through this terrible, horrible, awful day. I accepted the minor discomfort of holding a position so as not to disturb Serena, not as a peace offering on behalf of the loathsome rest of my species, but as an act of friendship. 

I think, philosophically, that a day that includes an act of friendship is not an altogether bad day.