Limbo Book Club Time!

If you’ve had a chance to read the local Toronto papers recently, you might have found out that  Toronto City Councillor Doug Ford doesn’t know who Margaret Atwood is. Say WHAT? Margaret ATWOOD? Egregious displays of ignorance aside, it took me back to my deep love for her famous book The Handmaid’s Tale. From there I swanned right on over to some Alice Munro, and before long I found myself revisiting long winter days when the messy and emotionally charged lives of D.H. Lawrence’s characters got me through many a dark spell in limbo. When I was living with my parents and feeling cut off from the world, books with richly drawn protagonists helped me to feel as if my own, swirling emotions weren’t so strange and kept me from sinking into depression on many occasions. Sometimes the stories ended well; sometimes they didn’t, but ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ wasn’t the point. The point was that I was able to emotionally connect to the characters, and in doing so, managed to alleviate some of the loneliness that I was going through. So, for those book-loving limbo dwellers out there, what are some books that you have really identified with? I’m no English lit major, so bear with me, but here are a few of mine....

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. This book came to mean more to me as I became more of a feminist, but even my initial reading of it had me in tears.

House of Spirits, by Isabel Allende. For the longest time, I couldn’t understand why my mother’s hispanic family was the way they were. Reading this book, as well as books by other Latin authors such as Gabriel García Márquez and Junot Diaz shed a lot of light onto that subject.

Anything in the gothic horror section. A lot of gothic horror relied not upon guts and gore, but psychological paranoia and terrifying suspense. As a result, it delved far more deeply into emotional turmoil. Go for the classics, such as Poe and Lovecraft.

The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri. Having moved countries in my childhood (even if it was from one Western nation to another) has meant a little bit of culture shock. Reading about characters that were torn between the expectations of their families and norms of the culture around them felt as if I was reading about myself.

The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy. Remember those downward spirals we’ve talked about before? Yeah, the titular character goes on one. Big time.

The Sickness unto Death, by Søren Kierkegaard. I had to read this for a class on early existentialism. No, I do not normally pick up books like this on my own, although after reading it, I wish I had, and much sooner! Kierkegaard talks about the different kinds of despair so accurately that nearly every page of my copy is covered with notes to the effect of ‘So that’s what I’ve been feeling!’.

Any more? Tell in the comments!

Recovery vs Discovery

Ignoring the fact that this video is a promo for a book about quitting your boring day job to do your dream job, the author, Jonathan Acuff, raises an interesting point: "Instead of asking 'What do I want to do with my life?' you ask, 'what have I done that I loved'"

Ok, remember when I wrote about waiting for lightning to strike? Well, lately I've been trying to think about it a different way. Rather than waiting around for inspiration to give me a smack in the face, I've been trying to actively find my passion by thinking of the things I'm good at and the things that interest me.

For example: I've always loved English. I love writing and reading, and I love studying and analyzing works of literature. Some people absolutely hate that (like my mom for instance - she'd rather be doing equations), but to me there's nothing better. I took four English classes in my last year of high school and that was the year I achieved the highest marks of my high school career. So when I went to college, I immediately signed up as an English major.

I didn't last very long though. I started to panic and think, what am I going to do with an English major? Teach? I don't want to teach! Part of the problem was that I hadn't done my research and I didn't realize that with a first degree in English I could have gone on to do virtually anything at the Masters level. Anyways, I panicked and switched majors, and I've regretted it ever since.

I realize now that I have always known exactly what I wanted to do in life. I want to write. Ever since I became literate, I've been writing or thinking about writing. I write when I'm happy and I write when I'm sad and I write when I'm bored. All I've ever wanted to do was to be a writer, but when it came time to make a decision about my future, I never seriously considered it as a career. "I could never make money at that," I thought to myself, "either I would be an amazing author or a starving mediocre author." I thought that I had to be J.K. Rowling or nothing.

But four years and a first degree later, my passion for writing hasn't changed. Like Acuff says, the process of finding my passion was more about recovery than discovery.
It's really a relief to let go of dreams that are not my own, dreams that have been imposed upon me by the expectations of society, or worming their way into my head on the wings of my parents loving encouragement. I know this is the right path because as soon as I made the decision to pursue it, I felt an abrupt dissipation of anxiety and doubt.

We all know someone who has a job they hate, a job that pays the bills but makes them miserable. You might be working at a job like that right now. Is it really worth doing something you don't love just to secure a steady paycheck? Don't get me wrong; I don't particularly want to starve for my craft, but don't you find that when you love something you tend to be successful at it? There are ways to make money while following your passion. In fact, I suspect that if you’re doing something you love, you are more likely to succeed.

Stickies and Gratitude

The other day, I read that most people experience a large amount of insecurity in their early twenties. Mind you, it was just one of many tidbits on a rather unscholarly ‘advice’ website for the college set, but it immediately made sense to me. After all, the first few years of your third decade are when you are supposed to start figuring it all out. You should, according to general wisdom, be landing your first job, first apartment, first mortgage - and so it goes. But for many of us, this means navigating a world that our run-of-the-mill post-secondary education never really prepared us for, leaving us unsure as to whether or not we are on the right path. Worse yet, insecurity tends to breed more insecurity. You start out with something along the lines of “No-one wants to give me a job!” and before you know it, you’re on a feel-sorry-for-yourself-spiral, starting with the aforementioned lack of a job and all the way down onto ‘I have no money, no friends, no life, nothing.”

When you’re a limbo dweller, it’s par for the course to feel you have little to offer, and I think that it’s pretty much a given that at some point or another you will feel this way. Acknowledging our dissatisfaction with our lives is vital to changing the things that make us so dissatisfied in the first place. But equally important, however, is to recognize what you still have in your life. I mean, let’s be painfully honest with ourselves. You know that it is a ridiculous, arrogant thing to say that you have nothing. If you’re reading this, you have access to the internet, presumably your own computer - and more likely than not you’re not worrying about where your next meal is going to come from. And despite what your insecurities are telling you, you know that you do still have friends in your life. You (may) have family in your life. You have some sort of higher education, a privilege which I am extremely embarrassed to admit I thought was more common than it actually is. You have a lot of good, no, great things going for you, even if they aren’t the particular goals that you want to end up with. You are extremely, extremely lucky when compared to the vast majority of people who live on this planet. Your life, quite frankly, is pretty  amazing. You already have all the tools you need to be successful.

Don’t I sound just like your parents? You know, when they used to tell you that plenty of children didn’t have anything to eat so you’d better be grateful for your broccoli even though you had asked over and over again for mac and cheese? Ha! No, I’m not saying that you should be ashamed of yourself for feeling depressed about your life. I completely understand that when you’re in the midst of that insecurity spiral, it’s hard to remember those great things, or assign much value to them. However, I know that for me, dipping further and further down the insecurity spiral without focussing on the myriad of wonderful things in my life has led to many of my murkiest, darkest moments in limbo. What has helped me is saying, out loud, all of the things I am grateful for, even if I don’t quite believe myself at that moment in time. So, here’s a quick exercise that has helped me when I wasn’t feeling so great. Grab a pack of sticky notes, and start writing. Write down things as they occur to you, whether they be little things or big things, but write down everything that you are grateful for, and put them up on a place (or places) where you can see them often. And I can promise you this much; that no matter how upset you are with the way things have turned out for you, you’ll soon run out of places to put those stickies.

Shall I get us started? Here are a few of my own, in no particular order.

I have enough money to pay my own bills.
I have parents that encouraged me to save, rather than spend, allowing me to pay for the important things even when I was no longer working.
I have an extremely loving and supportive family that don’t let me get away with not keeping in touch!
I have three of the most wonderful best friends anyone could ask for.
I am a university educated young woman in a stable country where I can practice the religion of my choice, vote for the candidate of my choice and marry whom I please.
I have lots and lots of shoes. (I said the little things as well!)
I can walk to a local farmer’s market to buy organic vegetables.

And so on! This can go on forever - but isn’t that the point?

P.S. Yeah, my privilege is showing. So think of a great side-effect of this exercise as helping you to realize all the numerous ways in which sheer luck, not how wonderfully special and precious you intrinsically are(n’t), has contributed to the circumstances of your life. It certainly makes me think about our society’s current ‘meritocracy’. But that’s another post entirely.