The Trials of an American Dilettante

Thursday, February 19, 2009

The Barrel

The last thing I was expecting to see last night was a gun barrel staring at me. After the wait for the metro and the transfer and the long walk home, I was only four houses away and ready to fall into bed. Then, a dark sedan pulled up beside me

"Hey, get over here,"

I turned and saw the passenger of the car, not three feet from me, pointing a gun at me. I remembered the shine of the piece, the darkness from inside the barrel and little else. Before I knew it, I was running and screaming. I sped off the sidewalk, jumped down into my neighbor's garden and veered behind a house. The car sped off, but I was worried that the car would see me if it came around the block. I went back up to the street and saw someone standing in front of my house (later, I discovered this was Teddy taking out the trash). Freaked about going home, I ran away from my house until I came across a dog walker who called the police.

This has all happened before; this will all happen again.

Ten years ago, during a winter in Chicago, a very similar thing happened to me. There were three guys in the car back then and they only flashed the piece instead of pointing it, but everything else was the same. They drove up behind me, they said "hey, get over here" while showing the gun and I took off running and screaming. Even the afterwards was the same- me standing panicked and out of breathe in front of a confused bystander followed by a half hour of filling out a useless police report.

"Why did you run?" people always ask, arguing it would probably be safer to hand over ones wallet. The answer is I don't know. When this has happened, there has been no thinking. Everything is completely automatic.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

What About the Unresilient?

My last blog entry was surprisingly met with quite a bit of disagreement. While my friends agreed that many people and perhaps most people get over things, there are others that have trouble doing this and truly remain unhappy. I was presented with numerous examples of individuals stuck in ruts who are miserable.

Fo mentioned her friend, Jamie, a gay man who has been in love with a straight man for 15 years and is currently devastated by the fact that the man is getting married. Soulless Hedonist mentioned his uncle who never got over his divorce and eventually took his own life. And I remembered Taiwan Steve's mom who is still haunted by nightmares of Steve's suicide six years after the fact. If we go back to the study about paralyzed people and their happiness, we see that three of the victims refused to fill out the survey. While the other victims moved on and got better, perhaps it was too painful for these three to even comment on their lives.

What makes one person resilient and another not-so-resilient?

Soulless Hedonist had this to say:

"You're going to hate this answer, but it depends. It depends on the person and the circumstances. Some people are biologically more depressed than others and more prone to dwell and be depressed. Some people are still young and can think about the future and hope while some are old and resigned to their condition Some people have greater opportunities and some people live in a changing world and can move on to new things in their lives. Others are stuck in their town and city with their regular acquaintances and reminders."

Soulless Hedonist's uncle was a biologically depressed man and couldn't move on. Taiwan Steve's mom was an older retired home maker with few distractions or hopes for the future. Jamie is a school teacher in New York with no aspirations of doing anything new. Whether it was biology, circumstance or choice, they just couldn't move on.

But, thankfully, these are still exceptions to the rule. All around us, there are those who have dropped out, in way or another. We have cat ladies who have given up on finding companionship, unemployed who have given up on finding work, and obese who have given up on being healthy. And maybe there are those who have given up on trying to be happy. Maybe it was biology, maybe it was circumstance, maybe it was choice. The unresilient do exist.

For the most part, though, people still try and people still live with hope. Hopefully, we never fall into the unresilient group.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Resilience

Right before I left for Panama, Carol from Chicago e-mailed me and let me know she had been laid off. Another lawyer friend fired, I thought, she must be doing horribly. For the past few years, she had been miserable at her firm. She worked long hours, doing something she hated. On top of that, she felt she wasn't making the money she deserved for the work she was putting in and ability she had. I urged her over and over to find another firm or do something else, but she wanted to stick it out. All her hard work and tenacity was met with a pink slip in the end. She must feel betrayed, anxious, depressed, I thought. After getting home and playing phone tag for a while, we finally spoke. And boy was I wrong.

"I'm doing great!" she said with manic energy, "I sleep in, I do reading, I go to the gym- I'm in the best shape of my life, I'm able to write poetry, I have yoga class. It's great!"

I find it funny that so often movies and books will begin with a tradgedy or traumatic event and then fast forward to characters still suffering from that event. It truth, people are resilient. They get over things, they bounce back and they move on. Sure, events are always with them, but they come to terms with them, learn from them and make the best of things. Unlike a shallow plot thread, life is infinte and rich. Humans have little choice but stop dwelling and to do other things. Who would have guessed that reality was filled with so much more hope than fiction?

Sure, Carol bounced back quickly from a simple job loss and maybe that was relatively easy, but I have friends and loved ones who have survived much worse and are doing well. They have weathered deaths, rapes and physical disabilities. Even Michelle, who has gone through more than anyone I have ever known, appears happy.

Science seems to support this idea as well. Studies show that even after becoming paralyzed, people reported that were weren't as unhappy as one would expect and still found the same joy in every day events as anyone else. They also had just as much hope for future happiness as anyone else.
http://education.ucsb.edu/janeconoley/ed197/documents/brickman_lotterywinnersandaccidentvictims.pdf

Of course, the reverse is also true. The same study shows that the Buddhists are on to something. Happiness is also fleeting. Only six months after winning the lottery, people are just as happy as they were before.

So, I guess Carol should enjoy the thrill of unemployment now, because in a few short weeks, it won't be so enjoyable.

Thursday, February 05, 2009

To Worry

My mother is worried. After all, that's what they do, and, I guess, as mothers should.

"It's only a couple of weeks in Kabul," I told her.

The problem is, she spends the majority of the day watching the news, reading the newspaper and surfing the internet. She knows things are getting worse there. She knows my friend Katherine's brother died there. She knows all about the kidnappings and the bridge bombings and everything else that makes the news.

And I haven't been very good and easing her mind. I try tell her confidently that I'll be fine and that I wont really be outside the embassy. But, in truth I'm nervous myself. It's a military flight in and I will have to go to a camp outside of the embassy. Others who have been said that it's fine. You have armed guards and you wear a vest the whole time, but if that's true, it must mean there is a need to have armed guards and to wear a vest the whole time. Others reiterate that its fine, but then tell some crazy shock story about an M-16 bouncing around freely in a back seat or getting a briefing about how, in a worst case scenario, they will have to provide covering fire. So, I'm left going over things in my mind, as I always do, trying to figure out what it's going to be like.

Though Bobby McFarrin told us not to worry and to be happy, there must be some sort of evolutionary advantage to worrying. I guess worrying makes us rethink situations and makes us sharper. Also, if the experience is unpleasurable enough, we wont put ourselves in dangerous situations to begin with. Then again, worrying can make people lose sleep or be distracted and lose their edge. Not to mention, worry and anxiety make many people become isolationist, thus limiting their ability to spread their genes.

But, sometimes emotions don't help or hinder you, they just are there. Worry can be just worry. It doesn't change actions in any way. It's just an annoyance we wish we could shut off. But, then again, a lot of emotions are like that.