It took me a while to figure out that I wasn’t funny anymore. I was never the class clown, to be sure, but I have always had a quirky, somewhat wry, sense of humor, and I have pretty good timing. I can make people laugh. But at some point during my marriage, I realized that Sean had worn the banner of “funny one” in our family. He was definitely the class clown and somewhere along the way, I decided that we couldn’t both be goofballs, so I ceded that to him.
I remembered my boss, Kathy, calling me irreverent one day and I took it as a great compliment. This was before children, and as we worked together for the state of Washington’s Mental Health Division, there was a lot to be irreverent about, in my opinion. I had a way of calling out things with sarcasm and a verbal eye roll that could cut the tension and make her laugh out loud. I loved that she saw me that way and I really adored her and looked up to her, so her comment gave me more oxygen. Why had I lost that? When had I lost that?
Slowly, like sticking a toe in the water to test the temperature, I began teasing the girls when we moved into our new house after the divorce. I started to play small pranks on them and text them silly responses rather than the ones they expected – the Mom ones. They reacted in surprise and it spurred me on. The first few times I did it, I felt like an imposter. I wondered if they would think I was trying to emulate their dad who was always joking with them. But then I realized, again, that there was enough funny for all of us. I could be my own style of funny.
One day, as I was crafting an art piece out of Erin’s full-leg fiberglass splint to hang as a joke in the stairwell, I realized I had willingly given the role of funny one to Sean as a gift. When the girls were young and he traveled so often, they got used to having just me around as their parent. He would come home from his often week-long trips exhausted and ready for down time, and instead of asking him to pitch in and do housework or childcare, I encouraged him to play with the girls. I continued to do all the meal prep and laundry and grocery shopping so that he could sprawl on the floor and draw, push them on the swing, play hide and seek. I stepped aside so that he could entertain and re-establish his bond with them. As they got older and Erin began to resent her father’s consistent absences, I stepped back even more, wanting her to have nothing but fun with him when he was home so that she would have only happy memories.
bell hooks wrote that patriarchy “encourages men to lie and deceive to manipulate and/or gain power….it encourages women to create a false self as well.” In this case, I was the one who was trying to manipulate things – not to gain power, but to try and solve a problem that wasn’t mine to solve. What I ended up doing was ceding part of my own personality in an attempt to make Sean look better in the eyes of his children. He never asked me to do any of that – create opportunities for him to play with the girls more or defend his travel to them. I did it because I thought that it was what I was supposed to do. I thought I was giving all of them a gift.
“It feels like we’re roommates, not husband and wife. Our relationship has become purely transactional,” he said to me after he moved out. I felt it like an explosion in my chest. He wasn’t wrong. In trying to manage things for each other – him working to counterbalance my emotional state and me laboring to anticipate and solve for any potential frustrations between him and the girls – we had gotten caught up in doing things for each other, rather than doing things for us. I don’t know if he resented not being able to feel and express his own emotions, but I do know that the way we did it disconnected us from each other.
When he was away, I was able to relax a bit into my own skin and make decisions without considering what Sean might have wanted. That’s not to say I made all of the choices unilaterally, but I did feel a lot more freedom to weigh my own opinions and gut feelings. I wonder if he felt the same.
The human brain loves a puzzle, if only as a chance to solve something. Every time we solve a puzzle or hear or tell a coherent story, we get a hit of dopamine. This chemical that is associated with the reward system in our brains reinforces our behaviors, thoughts, and actions. It’s interesting to note that the story we tell or hear doesn’t have to be true in order to get that reward – it simply has to make enough sense that we can reasonably accept it as truth.
This is important because it plays along with our subjective biases to shape the way we see the world and what we accept as “real.” The more a behavior is repeated, the more we believe that our worldview is the correct one. Over time, this becomes the lens through which we see the world and we forget it is even there. We prefer what we’re used to and often have difficulty imagining that there is another way to live.
It all starts with a trigger – a question or an encounter that makes us feel slightly uncomfortable. This leads us to act in a particular way that, if it answers the question or addresses the discomfort, offers us a reward. We do this in a million different ways all day long – eating when we’re hungry, sending an angry email when we’re upset because it worked last time to shut that person up, etc. But without learning to sit with the discomfort and examine whether this particular response is the best one in this specific instance, when we do the same thing every time, we end up skipping the last step (Reward), and simply engaging in Trigger -> Behavior/Belief, even when the behavior or belief is ultimately harmful.
This is the basis for addiction, in short. When someone becomes dependent on a specific substance (such as alcohol) or set of behaviors (gambling or tech addiction), it often ends up making their lives more uncomfortable and unpleasant, but the neural pathway they established by repeating it over and over again in search of that dopamine hit is very strong. It is the superhighway that allows us to get somewhere quickly, without thinking. It makes it easy to do the things we’re used to doing, to believe the things we’ve always believed. It is much harder to challenge old behaviors or beliefs because it requires us to take an off-ramp and navigate lesser-traveled back roads to get to the destination.
So many of the things I was taught as a child fall into this pattern. Capitalism and patriarchy are about competition, control, exploitation, hierarchy, scarcity, exclusivity, and materialism. There is no room for rest, for listening to one’s body or instincts, or finding enjoyment without first “earning” it. Creativity is only valued insofar as it can produce something tangible that is worth money. Relationships are important if they can further one’s ambition. Play is reserved for children. When I am tempted to spend an hour in the middle of a weekday lying on the couch reading a book, my body recoils – that’s lazy, and lazy is wrong. Surely there are a dozen things I could be doing that are useful and productive.
My friend Zoe quit her job in 2020 during the Covid lockdown to move to New York City and build a business writing bespoke poetry. It sounded like an entirely ridiculous move for a 20-something with college debt and somehow, because of the life I was building for myself, it also felt thrilling to imagine for her. Against all odds, she has managed to create a life for herself that includes working when she wants to and playing the rest of the time. Early in the summer of 2022, we were talking about her decision to take a trip to Europe for the first time in five years and she told me, “It was really hard, but I am good with my money. I’ve saved up enough that I feel I have a cushion and I realized that this is what I want – a life where I don’t wait to go do things I want to do. There is no reason for me to feel like I can’t spend my money doing something like this, but the old messages are hard to counter.”
I watched myself waver between yelling, “YES!” and worrying that she might have some unexpected expense soon and regret going, and it made me laugh. This is what I want for my kids – to not have to work 40 hours a week or more if they don’t really want to do that, to feel as though they have the right to go enjoy themselves without having first “earned it” with a certain amount of labor. We should all experience joy every day without feeling as though it’s something we have to pay for, and yet, the conditioning is strong.
We have, as a society, foregone the reward step and simply accepted the message that hard work is its own reward because it is what is expected of us. We have come to believe that work is what we are here to do, that amassing money and material goods is the goal, and that we must compete with each other to do that. We have, throughout hundreds of years of capitalism, created the false notion that we can and should seek safety through control and consumption, and most of us are miserable because of it.
About a month after this conversation with Zoe, I was on a weekly call with a group of people from the Charter for Compassion and the facilitator asked us to connect with our younger self and ask them what they wanted to be when they were at this point in our lives. I first heard that question, as did most of the other callers, through the lens of work, because in this country, in this culture, we conflate identity with paid work (or sometimes, unpaid work if we are “stay-at-home-moms”). But pretty quickly, the anti-capitalist in me rebelled and my inner child spoke loudly:
Play. Make people food. Make them laugh.
Give lots of hugs. Help clean up. Snuggle with animals.
Grow plants and flowers. Sing. Climb trees every once in a while just to see what things look like from up there.
Talk to people. Listen to kids. Try new things. Rest.
Lay in a hammock. Watch and see how things work when they’re left alone.
Maybe it’s because, at almost 55, I know myself well enough to know that I would never have been the kind of person who had a career that spanned most of my adult life. Or maybe it’s because for most of my adult life, the vast amount of labor I did was unpaid and it somehow meant I was less important, less valued by society. Or because my aspirations for myself now revolve around the kind of person I want to be, the way I want to show up in the world, how I want other people to feel when they’re with me. Whatever the reason, the list above feels like a pretty damn good way to focus my efforts.
I don’t honestly believe that any of us exists here on this planet to work, to have a career, to get paid to do labor. Somewhere along the way, we got lost in all of the rhetoric and explanations, the idea of money as a thing that was important enough to lose relationships over, lose time to, lose ourselves in. We began to believe that our purpose and passion align with producing tangible things for other people to purchase instead of learning how to be in relationship with ourselves and others and the natural world. My reason for being has nothing to do with making money and everything to do with using my gifts to enrich and enhance the lives of myself and every living thing around me. My value does not lie in the number of classes I can teach, the income I can generate, how many books I sell. My value lies in my generosity of spirit, my willingness to keep learning, my curiosity and my love for other beings.
Human beings are social creatures. We are designed to be in relationship to one another and to the natural world. Our brains respond to physical touch with oxytocin, a chemical that reminds us how good it feels to be connected to others. When we are feeling anxious, our nervous systems release dopamine and oxytocin as a way to prime us to find our people and see what we can do to solve the predicament we’re in. It isn’t an accident that both of those things work in tandem – we weren’t meant to compete with each other, we were meant to work in harmony.
Toxic masculinity embraces the tenets of capitalism – scarcity, either/or thinking, impatience, perfectionism, independence. When we grow up in an environment that tells us those are the qualities to praise and any other qualities are undesirable, we are encouraged to ignore the very messages our bodies and brains are sending us about how to thrive individually and collectively. Most of us feel anxious and, rather than paying attention to the dopamine/oxytocin mix and reaching out, we isolate because we feel shame. I should be able to fix this on my own and if I’m feeling overwhelmed, it’s because something is wrong with me.
These systems we were taught to spend our lives toiling to uphold will not support us, cradle us, nurture us when we fall. They have shown that over and over again, never more than during and after the Covid lockdown. Unhooking from them and creating new ways of being is one way to free ourselves to spend our time and energy doing the things that we are truly designed to do together so that we can hold each other up.
A friend who is also a therapist once asked me if I think I was “mentally ill” when I was suicidally depressed. On its face, that might seem like an absurd question, but I understand what she was trying to get at. At the time, I didn’t know it – nor was it diagnosed this way – but I believe I was suffering from postpartum depression. That, combined with the overwhelming, unpredictable, and undiagnosed illness Sean was fighting, created a sense of hopelessness in me. I was so exhausted simply trying to keep our family afloat that I had no ability to look forward and imagine a time when things might be better; when I might get to rest and then spend my energy building something new rather than plugging holes in the dyke.
My depression did start to lift almost immediately with medication (although the side effects were hideous) and I am tremendously grateful for that. Within about 18 months, I began weaning myself off of the Cymbalta (a process that was scary and horrible and made me vow never to start it again), and in the 15 years or so since that time, I have never felt the need to go back on any anti-depressant medication. But, as much as I believe the medication and therapy helped me – along with Sean finally getting a diagnosis such that the imminent threat of his death was lifted – I think that my continued ability to weather equally difficult and challenging times is rooted in one thing: my connections to loving people.
The thing about what we learn from our dominant culture is that if we are struggling with depression or anxiety or any other mental health challenge, we ought to isolate ourselves from others like a wounded animal. It won’t do to let people see our pain, our fear, our sadness – that’s a problem for us to solve with a doctor or a therapist on our own, and others would prefer not to witness it. There is so much shame around something that is a natural physiological process and, often, a perfectly rational response to the circumstances of our lives. It would have been absolutely absurd, in retrospect, had I NOT felt overwhelmed and frightened and anxious in my situation, and yet, I felt ashamed that I wasn’t able to “handle” it on my own because that’s what I’d been taught. I had been told that it was my job as a mother and wife to solve problems that arose in my family, that I was smart and capable, and freaking out wouldn’t fix anything.
But anxiety and depression are about more than fear – they are about uncertainty; uncertainty about whether or not we will be okay in the end, and when we isolate from each other out of shame and buy into the idea that it is our job to fix ourselves in isolation, we don’t feel safer. When our brains and bodies are distressed and panicky, why on Earth would we trust them to come up with a solution? The lack of a loving, supportive community means that we can’t be certain we will survive no matter what. For people who have a loving, supportive community that is willing to witness pain and grief and overwhelm – the situation I find myself in now – that uncertainty still happens, but it doesn’t feel as threatening when we know there are folks who can help us hold it.
There is this idea that we equate mental health with the absence of unpleasant feelings, but that is altogether unrealistic. Human beings are supposed to feel all the things – the entire range of emotions. People who respond normally to the destructive systems and structures in which we live are not mentally ill. They are simply overwhelmed, sad, frustrated, angry, and often alone. Those things are expected human responses. So, no, I don’t think I was “mentally ill” when I was suicidally depressed (shhh, don’t tell the insurance company or they might ask for their money back). I believe that I was reacting in a very predictable way to the events in my life, to hormonal changes in my body, and to feeling incredibly alone and adrift. While the medication absolutely kept me from killing myself (and for that, I am grateful beyond words), ultimately, it was finding a network of people who were willing to support me, love me, accept me, and witness all of the things I am and I feel that have given me the strength to keep from descending into that place of despair again.
Since that time, my life has not been perfect. I have experienced my father dying in my arms, my mom succumbing to early onset Alzheimer’s disease, my children struggling with different things that felt scary and overwhelming, and a sudden, unexpected divorce. Any of those things could have – might have – tipped me back into that dark space, but I have learned to surround myself with people who love me, who show up again and again to remind me that I am important and beloved. They keep helping me remember that even when I am uncertain of the future, I am held.
When we think we are “Right,” we feel safe. When we feel stressed, we seek safety by looking for people who will tell us we are right, or at least people who agree with us, or who will tell us what to do. The world we have been brought up in is one that reinforces the idea that there is such a thing as Right and Wrong, that there is a binary and we should always seek to be on the correct end of it. It tells us that the information is there if we only knew how to find it and believe it strongly enough. So it isn’t a stretch to see that when we are confused by change, unfamiliarity, or information overload, we feel anxiety. And if we cannot immediately correct the circumstances, we begin feeling helpless and, often, depressed.
The problem with this is that nothing is ever all Right or all Wrong, so what we are chasing is ethereal. Even if we find it this time, it’s only a matter of time before something shifts and we’re left feeling uncertain again. Think about how much energy it takes to chase that answer over and over again, to be constantly in a state of reactivity to our external circumstances. Of course we are all exhausted. Of course many of us are anxious and depressed. Of course we feel lost.
What if the antidote to this is to seek connection and learn how to feel safe in the unknowing? What if our bodies are absolutely right when they secrete dopamine and oxytocin to encourage us to find security in the company of others, even and especially when we are feeling lost?