Melancholy Part ll

I used to be a prolific reader. I still read regularly, but not nearly as much as I used to. It’s too easy to turn on a show on my laptop or scroll through dumb shit on my phone; I waste time that could be spent reading. I keep a library of books that I’ve read over the years. I hold onto almost everything but especially the books that really move me.

During COVID I found comfort in rereading some of those books. I’m a fast reader so sometimes I remember snippets of books I’ve read but can’t grasp the full story in my memory so rereading often yields surprises. Though I don’t remember the exact story of the books I’ve loved, there’s a feeling I remember and I want to go back and experience that feeling again. 

There was one book, a novel I read close to ten years ago, that I have thought about thousands of times that I could not go back to during the peak of COVID. I knew it would be too upsetting so, though I thought about the story often, I left the book on the shelf.

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker, is about eleven-year-old Julia and her family. They live in California in current times when a rare phenomenon strikes the planet. The Earth’s rotation inexplicably starts to slow. The book follows the course of the Earth’s slowing alongside the adolescent development of the narrator Julia.

Last week I finally felt like I could stomach The Age of Miracles again. COVID feels mildly under control. We have a functioning human as president and my daughter is in actual school. The Age of Miracles was everything I remembered. The story filled my brain for days. I thought about it all the time and I could see parallels in the world we live in now — rising temperatures, fires, and the extinction of certain flora and fauna. For me, the book was then, and is now, viscerally relatable.

The Age of Miracles compels me in the same way the 2008 Disney movie Wall-E did. I recently rewatched that film and loved it as much as I had the first time.

I wonder why certain topics stick in our brains and others move through like water through a sieve. Both Wall-E and The Age of Miracles are about the utter collapse of our environment, the total devastation of our planet. I wonder if these stories are so stuck in my mind because they hold a deep-rooted truth about the world or because the topic is the one that scares me the most. 

When I read about Julia persevering in a planet ruled by days of cold darkness followed by days of sun that’s become dangerous and radioactive, I take a pause to grieve for my daughter’s future; I pray that she dies before we get to that point. I am terrified of her living in a world like that.

But in The Age of Miracles, Julia and millions of other people on the planet adapt. They find ways to survive while understanding very clearly that their time on Earth is limited, that they will probably witness the demise of their planet and of themselves. Despite this imminent destruction, they have an enduring hope that keeps them going day after day. 

In Wall-E, the humans abandon the Earth and wait out planetary destruction somewhere in Outerspace on a giant spaceship. After signs of life on the formerly dead planet become evident, the Earthlings come back and try to rebuild what was destroyed. Starting from nothing they trust that they can recreate a habitable world.

In both the book and the movie there is a sense of utter despair and surprising hope that totally pulls me in. It is not unlike the feeling of melancholy. The feeling of welcoming both the tragedy and the possibility, of existing in that opposite land is strangely comforting. 

I know we’re not the first generation to fear the future. Humans from the beginning of time have faced peril— vicious predators, famine, world war, nuclear arms. And they have carried on. Their perseverance has gotten us to this point and now we will keep going, enduring, and hoping.

I will read The Age of Miracles again and I will watch Wall-E again. As hard as it is to recognize how close we are to the planetary destruction of those stories, I take great comfort from the undeniable presence of hope that runs through them.

Melancholy: My Perfect Emotion

I’ve always liked sad music, heartbreaking books, and movies about love and loss. Last week when I was writing, listening to a classical playlist, a tragically sad song came on, one that made my pen slow down;  a wash of warmth moved through me. I felt simultaneously somber and content. I could feel my heart rate slow down and my breath become more shallow. I felt a deep sense of calm and okayness.

As I wrote I recognized that I loved this feeling I was having. If the music coming from my phone had been the soundtrack from a scene in a movie I would have been sitting on a beautiful horse on a vast prairie remembering a great love lost. 

The deep sorrow of loss does indeed create an opening for memories, images, and feelings related to that mourning. I often feel it when I read a poem or look at photos of my late father — melancholy — great sadness merged with nostalgia. 

Melancholy is the quintessential welcoming of opposites to create a sense of peaceful presence. For me, melancholy invites me to slow down. To welcome all that comes with melancholy, my overly active physical body and always busy brain have to downshift to experience the complexity of the emotion.

It’s why I love to read heartbreaking memoirs. It’s why I gravitate towards slow, storytelling music like country and folk. It’s why I’ll always choose the tragic family dramas on Netflix. When I enter those spaces I invite in melancholy.

We learn early in life to steer clear of sadness. We learn that it will bring us down, keep us from living our best lives. And it’s true. Wallowing is not the same thing as melancholy. When my grandmother died and then her son, my father, a few months later, I experienced deep sadness, grief, and mourning.

But twenty years later when I think of my father, when I write a poem and his humor comes through me, or when I share with my brother how alike they look, I feel melancholy. I miss him and wish her were still here. And at the same time, memories of him run through me like a warm stream. I am happy-sad all at once. It is a feeling of fullness and complete presence.

Freud writes of the difference between melancholia and mourning. Mourning, he posits, is finite and external, related to immediate loss. Mourning, he says, eventually ends in acceptance. Melancholia, on the other hand, is more complex. The pain of loss is relegated to the unconscious so is not obvious, even to the griever. 

From my cursory review of Freud’s analysis, what I can gather is that melancholia exists when a grieving person has not had the opportunity to fully move through loss to acceptance. And I wonder if any of us ever fully moves through deep loss or if there is always some residue of melancholia.

This makes sense to me. Sometimes I reminisce about days when my daughter let me hug her and snuggle her. I remember the times when she needed me to guide her. And I miss that. I miss that version of her that is gone now that she is a young adult. Sometimes my iPhone will send me a video of images of her, of my family with sad music playing in the background. It comes at random times, a delightful surprise where I can take a break from whatever I am doing to pause and welcome that perfect sense of melancholy.

Maturing into Humility

My therapist is 81 years old. A few months ago when I was weeping over the news that a ten-year-old had shot and killed her mother’s friend accidentally, she cried with me. After a few minutes of sitting together in our sorrow, she said, “and there is so much good.”

In another time, a different era of my life, I would have found this type of comment glib and annoying. But that day I took comfort. I believed her. I trusted her wisdom and her experience. 

That six-word statement, heard at the right moment, from a trusted guide and elder opened up a tiny portal for me. Like a rainbow milky-way encircling me, I felt it, all the good things that walk with me every day of my life — my family, my community, my health, the trees, the lake, the birds. And, along with the despair I felt for that ten-year-old girl, I felt grateful. 

Today is September 11th, the 21st anniversary of one our country’s greatest disasters. I remember the day. I was set to fly to Los Angeles on September 14th for a three-month yoga training but at the last minute, afraid to fly, I decided to drive. I spent months after 9–11 frightened, unmoored, waiting for another bomb to drop.

I was thirty-two years old then and I thought I had more control than I did. I thought that worrying, fretting, and listening to more news, would keep me in charge of the situation. I believed that keeping my mind on the matter would prepare me for whatever else was to come.

Today there is a thick layer of smoke blanketing the sky, alerting us to the devastation that is happening to forest land to the north of us. We cannot see the bridge to the north or the mountain to the south. We’ve closed all of our windows and altered our outside plans. I can’t help but think about the birds. What are they doing? Where are they hiding out?

As I look at the sky I wonder how far in every direction this smoke goes. At what point does the sky turn blue again? I remember when I first learned about brackish water. How do the freshwater fish and the saltwater fish figure out where to live? Have they adapted special abilities over time so that they can live in fresh, salt, or brackish waters?

The birds are adapting to the smokey sky. I don’t know how, but they are. Some of them will learn to manage the smoke, others will retreat to the sky that is clear and some will manage to live in the brackish sky.

Last night I went to an outdoor cafe with a friend. The sky was brown. It felt like we were in some kind of a smoke-induced solar eclipse, but we decided to sit outside anyway, accepting the possibility of being in unhealthy air quality in exchange for a few hours of much needed time to catch up with each others’ lives.

My daughter’s school district is on strike, a galling and appalling situation after two years of half-cooked school. Trump is up to his familiar manipulation tactics, reminding us of the utter and pervasive corruption in our country. There is smoke in my sky and skies all over our region. Women are being denied rights to their own bodies. Russia and Ukraine are at war. Guns are more valued than books. Loved ones of those killed in 9–11 are remembering and grieving those they tragically lost twenty-one years ago. People are suffering all over the world. 

And, there is so much good. I go back to that moment with my therapist all the time, “and there is so much good.” In my mind’s eye, I can see her face — kind, loving, and earnest. When she spoke those words to me she really believed them. And I can feel, as I get older and more mature, that I am starting to believe them more too. I am entering a phase of acceptance. And with acceptance comes the ability to feel grateful for the things I missed when I was younger, hunkered down in my suffering.

I think about the birds right now, about how they are managing in this smokey sky. They aren’t like humans. They aren’t processing how fucked up this is. They aren’t getting angry at the trees for igniting or at the humans for creating this tortured planet. They are just figuring out how to live in the brackish sky, accepting and adapting.

There is so much to be outraged about in this world. And there are things we can change with our anger, with our votes, and with our financial support. As I get older I see that suffering does not have to accompany anger and outrage. We do our work, we fight our battles, and we accept that this is what it looks like now. We accept so that we can experience the things that bring us joy and happiness.

The birds, even the crows, are nowhere to be seen this morning. Maybe they found a haven somewhere to wait out this smoke. I hope so. As I sit here on my couch, all the windows sealed tight to prevent the smoke from coming in, I feel humbled by the earth. I am no more or less important than the birds who are out there finding their way through the smokey skies. 

Every year, we experience more challenges, tragedies, and disasters, and with each one, we adapt and get through. It’s what the birds do. It’s what my therapist, in her age and wisdom, has learned to do. I can see the future and it doesn’t look so bright. Environmental, social, and political issues are somersaulting their way across the news media every day. I live in this world where there is so much to fear and despair. It is scary and unmooring and infuriating. And, there is so much good. 

Task Conflict vs. Relationship Conflict

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Last week I was in a meeting with two men and two women. The focus of the meeting was to address some work conflicts that one of the men and I were having. The other two parties were there to facilitate this potentially difficult discussion. This issue I have with this particular colleague is a long-standing issue. I’ve been frustrated, irritated, angry, and complacent at different times during our time working on this project together.

This meeting had been called to bring things to the surface, to put it all on the table. And so, as the meeting unfolded I didn’t hold back. I leaned into this opportunity and said everything (almost) I thought. When my colleague started spewing revisionist history I barked back with the real version, citing emails, and calendar clarifications. When he told me that we hadn’t had the required meetings I snapped that I wasn’t his secretary and he could make the meetings as well as I could. I was pissed, and I did not shrink in that room.

A few days later, the other man at the meeting and I were debriefing and he said to me, “I’m so glad you two (me and the other woman present) were direct with X.” I knew he meant that as a compliment but I what I heard was his sense of surprise. He wasn’t used to women standing up like this and that made my heart sink.

Expressing anger, outrage, and injustice are all natural reactions in the face of conflict, but from the time we are girls, we are subtly (and not so subtly) coached to tone it down, to steer clear of conflict. We’re taught to see things relationally, to take care of people, to not create unrest. 

And at what cost? Minimizing or avoiding conflict does not solve anything long-term. It simply covers things up until they fester, get bigger, and show up again. I see it in my marriage, in my friends’ marriages, at work, and with my daughter. Last week on the Hidden Brain with Shakar Vedantam I heard an interview with psychologist Adam Grant. Grant shared the following:

I think the mistake that a lot of people make is they assume that less conflict is better. That if you want to build a successful collaboration or a great team then you’ll want to minimize the amount of tension you have. But as some researchers have argued based on a lot of evidence, the absence of conflict is not harmony, it’s apathy. If you’re in a group where people never disagree, the only way that could really happen is if people don’t care enough to speak their minds.

Grant differentiates between “task conflict” and “relationship conflict”. Task conflict involves debating about different perspectives and ideas and can potentially be constructive because parties on both sides can learn something. They are focusing on the content of the conflict and can move through it. 

Relationship conflict, on the other hand, is personal, so when there is an issue up for discussion or debate, it becomes emotional. Feelings are hurt. Productivity is thwarted, and the possibility for future communication is further ruptured.

When I left that work meeting last week I felt better. More clear. We’d looked the conflict dead in the eyes and each said our piece. I don’t know what will happen with our working relationship moving forward. Fortunately, we work for different organizations and my tenure on this project is limited. The worst-case scenario is I grit my teeth and endure. In the best-case scenario, we focus on the task conflicts moving forward and strengthen our working relationship.

Recently my daughter and a few of her friends found themselves in the middle of a conflict. An issue between two of the group of friends emerged. Sides were taken and factions were quickly formed. My daughter stood staunchly on one side, firm in her beliefs about the story. She was ready for conflict. Invested. Engaged. Energized. 

And I could see that the kids who stood on the other side were equally invested and energized in their story. As I watched this teenage drama unfold, I was aware that I was witnessing a full-blown relationship conflict. The actual story, or difference in the story was buried beneath the raging emotions.

And what I also understood was that I have had similar experiences in my adult life. In lieu of learning a different perspective, I have fueled my conflict coffers with emotion, basically blocking any possibility for movement in the disagreement or misunderstanding.

The title of Grant’s recent book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing what You Don’t Know says a lot. There is power in stepping outside of the emotion to hear the other side. 

Last night one of the parents of one of the kids on the “other side” of the conflict my daughter is embroiled in called me and left a message that she wanted to talk. Feeling roped into this teenage soap opera I felt panicked about what I would say to this mom. I didn’t have the facts. I just knew the emotion, and mostly from my daughter’s perspective. How would I communicate with this representative from the other camp?

My partner and my daughter and I talked about what I might say to this mother. My partner is a mediator and had great advice. “Even if there is one truth,” she said, “even if the event did happen, everyone has a perspective, an experience.”

“The conversation with this mom,” my partner said, “is not about who is right and who is wrong. It is about the lesson for the kids in making room for all perspectives. It is about each party taking accountability for their part, whatever that is.”

It’s true. My daughter and her faction digging their heels in and saying, “This is the only truth” only makes the kids on the other side plant their feet more firmly and shout, “No. this is the only truth.” No movement is made. It’s a tug-of-war without relief.

We talked more about how my daughter can navigate this conflict, how she can make room for all of the different perspectives. It’s not easy to take the emotion out of hard conversations. It takes maturity, perspective, and basically removing any ego involvement. This is hard for adults and nearly impossible for teenagers. 

I can’t help but go back to my own relationship history (both friendship and romantic), to my own past conflicts. And there are many. I can see that I have limited myself by leading with my emotions and taking different perspectives personally. In blinding myself from other ideas I never learned what I didn’t know. 

I plan to talk to that mom today. I’m gearing myself up to hear a different perspective, to make room for it, and find the power that comes from that process. I know I alone cannot solve this conflict for my daughter and her friends but maybe I can learn something by trying.