From: anderson@macc.wisc.edu (Jess Anderson)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Sufficiency (was Getting Something off My Chest)
Date: 23 Jul 92 11:54:50 GMT
Organization: Madison Academic Computing Center, UW-Madison


In article <vanyel.710698730@camelot>
vanyel@camelot.bradley.edu (Alan Williams) writes:

I've plucked this from a much longer post and after thinking
about some of the issues it raises for a while, have some
questions and comments.

>Discovering my sexuality is easily the one of the worst
>things that's happened to me.

Alan somewhat softens this statement below, but it still
strikes me as standing in fairly stark contrast to the more
common kind of "finally coming out was, whatever the
difficulties, one of the best things that every happened to
me" testimonial.

Emotional states are such matters of degree that it's
usually pretty hard to tell what mix of things is going on
for Alan or any other similarly situated person.  But it
certainly reads, to my ear, as being in not the best place,
overall.

For me, two questions immediately arise.  One is, is there
anything I can say that will help this person or others in
the like circumstances?  The other is, what's the mix of
"it's the best" and "it's the worst" feelings in the larger
cohort?

Especially wrt the latter thrust, though relating to both,
there seems to me to be a set of issues running through
the topic domain.

>For the past several years, I've been miserable as I keep
>meeting all these people who are either happy with someone
>else or who've had their fill of relationships for a while
>and are taking a break.

One of the issues seems to me to be one's age.  I take it as
a given that there is a special intensity to the feelings
one has when younger.  Over time, some of that intensity gets
muted in part by falling into an expanding context.  

Another issue is ego strength, by which I don't mean the
usually negative senses we associate with that; rather, the
idea that we underestimate what we are or what we have or
what we do while overestimating what others are or what they
have or what they do.

Closely allied with the latter point, especially wrt
relationships, until we have a fair amount of experience in
such matters, it's very hard for us to properly assess what
we think is happening in others' lives in comparison to what
we think is happening in our own.

I guess there's a kind of bootstrap process to living, or
perhaps an ongoing series of bootstrap processes, each
little collection of feelings, impression, thoughts,
experiences, or whatever, all expanding our imagery for the
next thing coming toward us down the road.

All roads seem long at the outset, so to speak.  But as time
goes along, the image becomes not so much the long road as
lots of roads, going every which way, and intersecting at
all manner of places on the emotional terrain.  Having
actually been at this or that crossroad, we begin to build
up an idea of that terrain, imagining in our mind's eye
what the other crossroads might be like.

And this brings us to yearning, which is something like
supposing that a crossroad somewhere other than the ones you
know directly has all sorts of highly desirable virtues, and
wanting, wanting, wanting to be in that magical, mysterious
place.

Yearning unsatisfied would be my candidate for one of the
worst things going, like a black hole among the emotions,
pulling everything into itself.  It's not hard to see what a
trap this is, *unless* you're the one it's happening to --
in that case, it asserts itself more and more into the
emotional foreground, and pretty soon you're just what Alan
called it: miserable.

>I've *never* had that, and I freely admit I envy you all,
>because it's starting to look like I never will.

One of the worst things about such misery is that we so
easily convince ourselves there's no end to it.  Worse yet,
it's not difficult -- for some people it's hard to imagine
it being otherwise -- to think that *we* are "the problem,"
that if only <whatever it is about *us*> were not the case,
life would not be so awful.  The combination of hopelessness
and a devalued self, of course, is a key ingredient in
suicide.

I suppose the lynchpin of hopelessness is the (quite
erroneous, most of the time) tendency we have to forecast
the future, Alan's "it's starting to look like I never
will."  And envy is the _sine qua non_ of the denial of
self.

However much it may seem like it's impossible at times,
there is indeed a solution to all this.  It's even a simple
solution: we create our own affects.  But the apparent
simplicity of it makes it hard to believe, almost as though
it were too abstract to apply to the flesh and blood of our
battered psyches.

There's a solution to that too, I think, and I'd say
Alan has hit upon it: it's acceptance, getting your
focus off perceived deficiencies and onto perceived
assets:

>But I don't envy you much; as these past couple years at
>graduate school have gone by, I've become more satisfied
>with just "being" and less angry at not "being
>something/someone." I've started to channel the kind of love
>I get from my friends into the void created by a lack of the
>kind of love people get from romantic relationships.

This process starts redefining what one is and what one has,
I think, all to the good.  But I think it's also important
not to get acceptance mixed up with resignation, because
resignation too easily veers back toward hopelessness.

It looks to me like Alan has also found the key to that
door: the idea of having survived, to have gotten through
...

>And I've started to take notice of the fact that I've
>survived this long, which probably means that surviving a
>little longer without a "special someone" isn't as difficult
>as it seems.

... which generates hope.

>Maybe that's why some GLB teens commit suicide: The aching
>loneliness you feel when it seems there's no one in the
>world who will care for you the way you need it, coupled
>with the fear that no one will ever show up.

Yes, I think so.  But not just teens.  I never considered
suicide as a teen -- I was well into my 20s, and it was
a battle off and on for more than 20 years after that.

Nor was it a matter of love and affection or the absence of
romantic fulfillment, for me.  Indeed, I was always very
fortunate in those regards.  One thing I never lacked was
love and someone to care for me or to care about.  It was
deeper than that: the idea that despite everything, there
was still a fatal flaw associated with *me* and it was going
to be forever, unbearably forever.

Well, now that's behind me, and apart from the occasional
reminders like this posting, I seldom think of it.  If I
find my affects need to be realigned -- that still happens
-- I recite a few thousand times the mantra of sufficiency:

I do enough, I have enough, I am enough.

Does wonders for the soul, at least for me.  Perhaps it's a
good thing to keep in mind if you find yourself in trouble,
especially the troubles of envy, regret, hopelessness,
resentment, or any of those many other downward-cycling
vortexes lurking about on the sea of life.

-- 
Jess Anderson <> Madison Academic Computing Center <> University of Wisconsin
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