Dejection, a Modern Epidemic

Dejection, is similar to rejection, but comes from within, sort of.  Dejection is a complicated phenomenon.  It is similar in character to despair, but dejection contains a more active or social element than despair does. It is almost like deliberately displaying despair so as to engender a change in your peers' behaviors.  You might think of a Mom saying to an upset teen, "Don't look so dejected....you can go out with your friends next time."  I think the idea of dejection is predicated on this idea of a "next time."  Additionally, its utility depends on a social environment which responds to it.  Which is why I think it is quite different from despair or rejection.  To me, it has quite a bit in common with rebellion.  It is almost like a passive type of rebellion.  (//disclaimer: this is probably not a surprise to anyone who has spent any length of time with me...)

Now that what I mean when I say "dejection" is clear, we can move on.  I had the idea for this post when I was riding bikes with my friend Jake.  We were riding down Westheimer and came to a light.  It was red for the vehicles like us travelling down Westheimer even though there was little to no cross traffic.  I saw it, and saw cars near by and though, I want to change their idea of who biker's are.  We are not a bunch of lawless hooligans.  He rolled through even though right before that we had been talking about cycling and how to better its reputation and popularity.  It is not that it was dangerous that made me think.  It was his disregard for reputation.  Now, I may have been looking too far into things.  But I hope you're getting the idea.  I think it was dejection that motivated his behavior.  Or maybe it was despair.  I think the line is thin between the two.  Maybe he thinks cars are never going to respect us, so fuck 'em.   I'll ride how I want.   I think what was interesting is that we clearly had two very different perspectives.  We come from two very different backgrounds.  Jake from low SES and me from a relatively high SES.  How much of a role that played I'm not sure.  Also, I am fundamentally an optimist, so I would lean more towards the idea that car drivers will come around to love (or at least cooperate with) cyclists and cycling.  Jake's behavior to me is a form of dejection, or at least a reaction to it.  This is not to imply that Jake ever does go or would go around jumping ahead of cars on his bike or running lights or stop signs when cross traffic is there.  Quite the contrary, he is very respectful as far as I have seen.    So one can imagine that this idea did not jump into my head on its own.  Again to the contrary, I have been experiencing dejection quite a bit myself lately.

I think my first idea of it came from my current work.  I won't give the name of my company here, but I will tell you it is a large residential construction company, and I build 500k to 1m semi-custom semi-production homes.  I work mostly with people who are good, well-intentioned people but who sadly have long-since grown weary of the idea that one could do something meaningful in a career or to truly help the people they work for or with.  I can't blame them for growing weary, construction is a wearing industry unless you are the boss.  I do blame them for forgetting there coworkers are people.  It seems that the only time they relate at all is to engage in what could most optimistically be viewed as venting but is most realistically just whining.  They share little about their families or lives.  It would be un-manly.  The most cheery they get is when talking about things like hunting.  Alas, I ramble, but I hope you get the picture of the world.  Well, in come I, a murse-carrying, coffee-drinking metrosexual.  My job, assistant superintendent.  My task, to clean up the tattered relationships and mostly built structures we call customers and houses.  Best yet, I get bitched at by the customers who already hate my company.  Then I get bitched at by my bosses for not cleaning up other peoples' messes fast enough.  But I have literally an entire neighborhood worth of houses to fix.  It is from this frustration that I first came to know dejection.  Dejection, to me, is just frustration made into a habit. Typically for frustration to develop into this it must be compounded by continual disregard to the conflict, abuse of some variety, and isolation.  This is most often then compounded by poor conflict resolution between the frustrated party and those causing the frustration and responsible for resolving their irksome habits.   Needless to say, I have very little motivation to maintain my current position, except that I need the money.  And while I give a good effort to my customers out of principle and follow the reasonable policies, I blatantly and tauntingly violate company policy.  Sometimes because I have to to make a customer happy.  Other times because I just don't like wearing khakis every day.   I categorize this behavior as dejection.  I really am hoping to show them something.  That their oppressive, old-school man's man mentality is dumb.  Or maybe I'm just despairing about a crappy job.  Again the line is thin.  But despair doesn't prompt behavior.  Maybe what I'm calling dejection is my passive social display of my despair.  But why show it.  It would be better for me, if I toted the line and followed the rules.  After all, I start graduate school as the first step to my dream job in August.  Who knows?? But I hope you feel my frustration.  What should one do when faced with such droll policies and bosses?  My answer is dejection...

Which brings me to what I think is the crux of the matter.  I read an article earlier last week about a inner city blacks in America, and what they face.  I strongly advise reading it. 

http://m.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/the-secret-lives-of-inner-city-black-males/284454/

Now, I will not begin to speak about what black people face, especially in inner cities.  I would most assuredly make a fool of myself.  But what I can do is try to understand.  Try to understand why they act the way they do.  And try to understand why I act the way I do.  And to change it to better allow them to pursue what we all agree is good and healthy.   My suspicion is that it is dejection that motivates them to be permissive to most of the behaviors we all agree are not good.  And quite frankly, I can't blame them.  I can see why they don't care, and I can see why they would feel like they are not going to change the perception of them among the public.  It i maddening to be in that position.   And while sure, it is easy to say,  "Pick yourselves up by your bootstraps"  To say that is neither realistic nor helpful.

I have long believed that the key to all problems between people is to understand why people feel the way they do.  I think if we all did that, we could quite quickly solve the dejection epidemic. 

Anxiety as Disruption

I always find traditional descriptions of anxiety as dissatisfying.  Despite this, I do feel that I have a genuine disorder.  I remember clearly not having.  I remember the painful slip into disorder.  It is a weird thing to watch your thoughts degrade into fears repeating themselves over and over again.  It is because of this very clear memory of the falling into anxiety that I have, that I feel so certain that anxiety is a real disorder.  Based on my experience, it is quite clearly thought based, but chemically and neurally sustained.  The process of climbing out is an odd one.  It is the process of modifying thoughts with intentionality so as to reverse the chemical changes that have occurred.  It almost feels as if you are lying to yourself at times.  Fortunately, you have the memory of 24 years of clear thinking to help you recall what truth actually is, and the thing that is lying or dishonest, is your fear-based calculations.  Unfortunately, it is a slow process, but headway is made, bit by bit.  Little bit at a time. 

But I wanted to write today not about my progress but instead about the phenomenology of anxiety, what it feels like to have anxiety.   Most people don't know, except for those who have it.  I am unsure how general this experience is, so I will disclaim this by stating that this is what I feel, and it how anxiety appears to me.  It might have a different appearance and modality in others' minds. 

For me, I experience anxiety as a disruption.  It is like sitting at dinner with your wife at your favorite restaurant, but having a nagging ringing in your ear that prevents you from focusing on her.  Most often when I catch myself in anxiety, I find myself with my eyes focused on nothing in particular, adrift among the scenery as my mind turns inward.  Questioning some aspect of itself mostly.  It is weird to have your eyes not focus on anything.  I sort of clench my teeth too at the same time.  It is a weird feeling.  Generally accompanied by this feeling of crawling emptiness in my stomach.  Usually I sort of find stumble upon myself in this state..... The self analyzing part of my brain catches itself analyzing itself doing it and says,  this is anxiety.... then the rational part says, "stop!".  Then the moral part usually feels slightly guilty for having indulged in this.  This guilt is unnecessary, but it is there.  It is a frustration, or a disappointment, that things aren't all the way better yet, even though I want them to be.  I know the key to making them better is discipline, and to be even more in the moment.

Which brings us to what I, and what many others, think the core of anxiety is.  Anxiety IS that time spent drifting off.  It is the time spent out of the moment.  It was hard at first to catch the beginnings of this. I found myself just there, with no clue of how the thought got started.   With discipline and training, I began to see what the beginnings of this were.  I began to catch it earlier and earlier.  It is almost always a dark, self-doubting thought that begins it.  Though this is actually the easiest type of beginning for me to deal with.  It is much scarier when the mind begins from a question which to me seems reasonable..... Like will I find a job that satisfies my needs and fulfills me?  Why should I enjoy this?  What do I like about my family?  It is these reasonable questions which prompt the gnarliest twists of my stomach, that sick hunger for an answer that won't come.  Usually, these deep sorts of questions don't have answers anyway, but the mind, prompted by the feeling of the body prompted by the mind, plunges into the dark answers that fear submits as truth.  From there the mind drifts into the dark sea of self-diagnosis and self-prognosing.  A dark sea it is indeed.  This darkness catches the focus of the mind and pulls it away from others, from the present moment.  Into this analysis of what is and what isn't rather than just looking at what simply is right in front of you.   You think to yourself, when the hell did life get so complicated.  (Aside, this lends these thoughts a bit of credibility in the world of complicatedness we live in.  I feel like nowadays, the more complicated something is, the more likely it is to be true).  But in that very thinking is the problem itself, for you are almost definitionally not living in the moment.  What is so special about the moment?   I'm not sure, but it seems that for me anxiety is a separation from it.   I guess the specialness lies not so much in the moment in itself, but in the joy that it has to offer.  It might not seem like all that much, but in comparison to the dark seas of the mind, it has ALOT to offer, lol. 

So for me, this is why I say anxiety is disruption.  It is that questions which caused you to leave the moment.  It is that question that is so scary that you feel as if you MUST turn your focus from how good your coffee tastes, or how soft your dog feels, to some irrelevant, probably unanswerable question.  This is what anxiety is to me.  I hope that it helps someone that I shared it.  I really love most of the people I know, and I hope that it might help them figure something out about themselves. 

The Chik-fil-a debacle

What surprises me most...

Is certainty.  Specifically, the certainty that many of the entrenched camps have on the issue of homosexuality and this Chik-fil-a debacle.

All too often has history rebuked the views we once held.  This certainty that we pretend only inhibits productive discussion on the matter.  I am not sure what to think about homosexuals and their right to be united in the eyes of our society.  My inclination is to grant it special category, while preserving and respecting historical definitions.  However, I hope to never speak in such a way that it attempts to silence the voice of my dissidents, for they are my true source of growth and development.   Gay marriage is a new idea and like all new ideas, it NEEDS criticism and analysis.  It is not necessarily beneficial to our society, nor is it necessarily harmful.  It is unclear if at this point we will look back in 50 years and say wow, we were dumb.  We may, but such is the nature of our culture, that is to say that it is temporal.  Every development, is just that, a development.  It must be viewed as such.  The development might result in nothing, but it also might result in dramatic change.  Any inhibitor of development, such as staunch ideaology, should be chastised.
This has implications for the anti-homosexual party as well.  It must view the rise of homosexuality (at least in secular arena) as a development as well.  One which could and probably will have sweeping affects on the cultural conceptions of union, morals, and mental health.

Moreover, I wish everyone would stop pretending that they knew the answer and that both parties would start respecting the other's right to voice their opinions and put them into practice in a manner and fashion consistent with modern laws.  Dan Cathy, I give you the thumbs up.  But to many of my friends on both sides of the isle, I chide you for your insolence and intellectual arrogance.  I wish those who berate gay people as immoral  publicly while themselves being immoral (as we all are) would stop. And I wish those gay people or straight people who would admit that their own movement like all movements needs skepticism.  For it, like ALL positions, oversteps the line at times. We should all note that time has yet to test almost any of our views and the cultural organizations which manifest those views.  And we should welcome any chance for debate because debate is the means by which we rid ourselves of the ignorance which our temporality necessarily brings.