F*ck Feelings Read online

  You can’t protect yourself from the immediate pain and helplessness of slander, but you can always win in the end by staying focused on your own goals, controlling what you do with your feelings, and working to restore the balance of your life, energy, and universe.

  Quick Diagnosis

  Here’s what you wish for and can’t have:

  • Quick validation and vindication

  • Protection from loss and damage to your finances, reputation, and family relationships

  • Control over the damage by persuasion, negotiation, or retaliation

  • Relief from outrage and general unbelievable bullshit

  Here’s what you can aim for and actually achieve:

  • Avoid making things worse

  • Limit damage, gather allies, and fight if necessary

  • Stay focused on your life, as opposed to your defense

  • Strengthen your self-control

  • Learn from your mistakes

  Here’s how you can do it:

  • Don’t let your outrage take over

  • Learn how to assert yourself in measured, careful speech

  • Identify what’s worth fighting for and what you can win

  • Don’t get panicked by outrage and fear

  • Educate yourself about relevant laws and legal procedures and get the best help you can afford

  • Take heart in your long-term goals and in your gradual ability to move beyond the reach of the Assholes who are out to get you

  Your Script

  Here’s what to say when you’re slandered.

  Dear [Me/Unjust Accuser/Those Who Believe Said Accuser’s Shit],

  I am aware of allegations stating that I [fool around/am a criminally bad parent/don’t bathe] and can assure you they aren’t true. I don’t intend to discuss them unless it’s necessary to protect my [livelihood/time with my kids/now fragile sense of sanity and reality—and even that, only with my lawyer]. Other than to deny them, I hope to avoid wasting time on old grievances and instead focus on the [insert positive noun describing anything but the rumors].

  Instant Catharsis!

  Unfair scenarios with some fictional justice, so you don’t try to find it on your own.

  Frustrating Situation

  Imagined Justice

  Best-Case Scenario

  After a few blissful months, the man of your dreams suddenly declares that it’s not you, it’s him, and dumps you like a sack of dirty towels. You never hear from him again.

  Soon after his heartless dumping, he contracts a rare virus that attacks his genitals and gives him the first known case of chronic penis farts. He dies not long after, alone and exhausted, kept awake for days by his constant frontal flatulence.

  You spend a couple of weeks sulking in front of Nora Ephron movies, then figure out better criteria for dating, like focusing less on dream guys and more on real-life decent men.

  You have an interview for your dream job, kill it, leave totally satisfied/high-fiving all of your interviewers, but then never hear back. You find out later that they gave the job to a guy who’s less qualified who’s buddies with the boss’s son.

  Turns out the boss’s kid and this new hire are more than buddies, and when they reveal their secret affair to the closed-minded daddy/CEO, he banishes both from the company, which leads to a boycott, which puts the company out of business. The couple marries anyway and opens a successful spa for small dogs in Jersey.

  You remember that even though life is unfair and the job should have been yours, the reason you didn’t get the job had nothing to do with your skills, which are still kick-ass. You go on to work somewhere else less exciting but with fewer dickheads.

  You and your sister have had a tumultuous relationship for as long as you can remember, but after she dies suddenly in a car accident, you realize how much you wish you’d made peace, and how much you’ll suffer knowing you’ll never have the chance.

  While helping to clean up her things, you find a letter from her that says how much she actually loves you, even if she can’t stop bickering, and that letter is wrapped around several hundred thousand dollars. You build a large statue in her honor (after buying a big house and a pony).

  You remind yourself that your sister wasn’t a bad person, and if she had the chance, she’d certainly want the same thing. Instead of focusing on what can’t be, you remember the good times you had and the good sister she could sometimes be.

  Getting Justice and/or Closure

  Sometimes it’s hard to get over a great disappointment or loss because of the longing, not just for what’s been lost, but for what could or should have been. That’s when the pain of mourning isn’t just hard to bear but is prolonged by shock over the unfairness of life and the need to seek closure, that great emotional unicorn.

  You’ve been counting on the power of a shared set of moral beliefs, together with your record of good actions, to keep your life and the life of your family and community moving forward. The yearning for closure happens when your heart and your faith in the way society is supposed to work are both broken.

  So when someone betrays you, or something bad happens and no one sets it straight, it feels like your world is undone and can’t be put back together. It feels like an open wound, which closure would protect from infection by restoring your world to its natural order.

  In reality, of course, even people with the same beliefs often see the world differently, interpret the rules differently, and thus wind up betraying one another while feeling it’s the other guy’s fault. And bystanders and authorities, confused about the facts and having to listen to multiple arguments, can’t act decisively and often do more harm than good.

  So it’s neither surprising nor unusual for things to fall apart in a way that undermines your faith in hard work, sacrifice, justice, and a fair society. What you want is for something to restore your faith, but what you need is a different kind of faith to begin with. You’re the one who forged the connection between doing good and getting good back from others and you’re the one who has to knock that crazy, dangerous idea out of your head, not keep pushing for relief and vindication that will never come.

  It’s not just the lingering malaise that’s a problem; having faith in the commitment of others to your values is also dangerous because it blinds you to reality and makes you too reactive when something goes wrong. Feeling oppressed by whatever went wrong makes you seek out similar situations, looking for a do-over and a chance to make things right. You look for ways to get even or just to straighten things out instead of accepting what’s broken and moving ahead.

  Instead, accept life’s painful lesson that some people you trust will betray you because, from their frame of reference, it’s the right thing to do, or just the only thing they feel they can do. Some people will let bad things happen without doing much to stop or punish them because it’s just so complicated. If anyone promised you otherwise, they were wrong and were just speaking for themselves, not the true powers that be.

  So if you want to do good, make commitments and be part of a community, but don’t expect it to be easy. In fact, given how often your efforts will be undone or treated badly by life—how often your good deeds will get punished—you deserve all the more credit, assuming you do them knowing the shit you’re getting into.

  And when you do get into shit—shit that you can’t help but feel shouldn’t have occurred—focus less on what could and should have been and more on what can happen from here on out. Remember, unfairness is very real, and closure is not.

  Here’s what should happen to people who can’t get over something bad:

  • Intervention by an angel

  • Transformation into a superhero, or Superman using his powers to turn back time and make things right

  • Confession on the part of the wrongdoer, followed by a dramatic making of amends for all unfair actions

  Among the wishes people express are:

  • To get some official
acknowledgment of what really happened in order to achieve catharsis

  • To see some benefit, instead of endless harm

  • To make sense of what went wrong so they can feel peace

  • To see something bad happen to bad people so justice is done

  Here are three examples:

  My last job was almost ideal until the new boss came in; before that I was a happy member of the team. We all respected one another, the work suited me, and everyone knew I was doing a good job. I loved it. Then came the new boss, and it was subtle and unintentional, but he was buddies with the guys and was vaguely creepy with the girls, so he and I had zero chemistry. It was hell, but not in any way I could protest, so I let my contract run out and left. It bothers me though that I had it so good and lost it, and while my current job is okay but boring, I’m haunted by wondering what I could have done differently to hold on to something that was so right for me. My goal is to get over this feeling of not being able to stop thinking about what I had now that it’s gone.

  After almost twenty years of marriage, my husband left me for his gold-digger secretary. It turned my life upside down because I thought we had a good marriage and were getting along well—I felt I worked hard and made big sacrifices for our family, which included both him and the kids, and to get rewarded by having him leave me for that tramp made the shock just too hard to bear. Now that my husband and I have been apart for longer than we were married, I want to hate him less, but can’t figure out how. The kids are fine with families of their own, and I found a career that I really enjoy, but I’ve barely dated since the divorce and still find it painful when my kids mention going to spend time with their dad and his trashy wife. I don’t care about remarrying, but I hate that my ex still has this hold on me after all these years. My goal is to find the closure I need to finally let go.

  It took five years before the guy who killed my brother while driving drunk finally got a trial, but I know they got the right man. Unfortunately, this guy is from a rich family, so he’s got a good lawyer who, as it turns out, has gotten him off the hook several times over the years for everything from DUIs to assaults. I go to the trial every day and glare at this spoiled asshole, because I want the jury to know there won’t be any closure for me or the family until he’s convicted and put away, and there can’t be separate laws for rich people and working people like my brother. My goal is to get peace and know that justice was done for my brother.

  After a loss that you feel shouldn’t have happened, you may well find yourself unable to move beyond grief until you find something to balance out its unfairness, or give it positive meaning. What you actually need, however, is to attack the ingrained assumption that unfair shit doesn’t happen.

  Rationally, you know lots of bad things happen for no reason. On a subconscious level, your mind will tell you the opposite, and it’s your job to talk back instead of getting hung up on closure, which is about as likely as cold fusion or a Cubs World Series win.

  Instead of mourning unfairness, improve your ability to do good in an unfair world. You may have lost a relationship that should have lasted, but you did a good job with your part of it (other than, perhaps, choosing the wrong person). You may have lost a great job, but you did well with it when you had the opportunity, and learned something about the kind of boss you should never work for. Challenge yourself to blot “should have” and “could have” from your vocabulary.

  Whatever was good about what you lost, think about your contribution to that goodness, rather than trying to figure out what you did wrong to lose it. Whether it was a good job, a good relationship, or just a very happy time, focus on the good things you did to appreciate it while you had it, like making the most of a summer’s day, knowing you probably had little to do with the way it ended other than, perhaps, not bringing an umbrella. If someone dumped you when things seemed to be going well, it probably had much more to do with their character than anything you did wrong or had any influence over.

  Death can be particularly meaningless and unfair, but don’t make it your job to give it significance. For most of us, death is what we have the least control over and it’s not what we want to be remembered for. What gives our lives meaning is what we do with our living days, not how they end, so attend to what was good about the life of someone you lost, and your relationship with him, not to what was horrible about his death and the relationship’s finish.

  If you never stop feeling regret and a yearning for closure, consider it the price of experiencing something wonderful and having the kind of temperament that doesn’t let go. Your brain may hit you with should-haves whenever you have too much time to think. So keep busy, and build a philosophy for fighting regrets and yearnings for fairness in a world that just doesn’t have it.

  Some people will always feel the need for closure, like an itch on a phantom limb, and if you’re one of them, learn how to live with the feeling without paying attention to what it tells you. It will have less power over your life if you remind yourself that even if you can’t have what it wants, other things are more important.

  You haven’t lost your ability to do good things with life, even if it never loses its ability to do bad things to you.

  Quick Diagnosis

  Here’s what you wish for and can’t have:

  • Restoration of your belief that things will eventually work out

  • Faith that everything happens for a reason

  • Justice, fairness, vindication, world peace, etc.

  • Closure, or relief from its opposite, aka waiting for the other bad-luck shoe to drop

  Here’s what you can aim for and actually achieve:

  • To accept the loss of what you thought was yours

  • To accept your lack of control over staying happy and keeping the good times rolling

  • To develop tools for confronting false assumptions about a good person’s right to a good life

  • To live with regret without considering it important

  Here’s how you can do it:

  • Confront negative should-have and could-have thoughts

  • Think about how you demonstrated your ability to do good things and enjoy good times

  • Learn to tolerate regret and need without giving it value or allowing it to control what you do

  • Confront yourself with the inevitability of unfair loss

  • Reassure yourself of your lack of responsibility for losing what’s gone

  Your Script

  Here’s what to say to yourself and others when you yearn for closure.

  Dear [Me/Fellow Closure-Seeker],

  I know I can’t get it out of my mind that I once had a [respectable job/spouse/nice car/unshakable sense of safety] and now I need some way to restore my faith in life and myself. I also know that life [insert extremely negative verb here] and I’ve done nothing to deserve this. If I can’t [move to a better universe/get plastic surgery/find a mystic guru], I will try to accept that I can’t protect myself from major shit and learn to live with whatever bad feeling that leaves in my [head/gut/bones]. If I need closure, I’ll get a zip tie.

  Some people extol the human yearning for a just and fair society; it’s certainly something everyone wishes for and many people adopt as a goal, without stopping to accept the many, many situations in which fairness, justice, etc., are impossible. Ironically, defying that reality is the surest way to increase pain, frustration, and injustice. Accept unfairness and injustice, without ever giving up on trying to be a fair and just human being, even if that acceptance may require you to face your vulnerability, and that of your family, to the chaotic nature of our world. On the other hand, it will also give you more power to deal with that chaos and impose your own (very) small measure of order and justice.

  chapter four

  fuck helpfulness

  Helpfulness is supposed to be a higher form of goodness, but you should know by now that if it feels good (and helpfulness can feel wonderful), it can be da
ngerous (like that other source of wonderful feelings, heroin).

  In fact, altruistic-feeling efforts almost always carry a high risk of making things worse, yet most religious leaders, therapists, politicians, and professional do-gooders talk as if you can never do enough to help your fellow man. Meanwhile, history has too many examples of people with the best intentions—from missionaries to armies to the developers of OxyContin—who end up helping people to death.

  The truth is that helpful feelings are what drive us to try to change others, whether it’s possible or not, and regardless of unintended consequences. The most strongly motivated and dedicated would-be helpers have been known to kill people in order to protect them from spiritual harm, and if you’re taking a life to save a soul, you’re probably doing it wrong.

  Yes, other people need and deserve our help, and we have a special responsibility to help our families. The fact is, however, that many of us have an off/on switch in our brains when it comes to helpfulness. If it’s on, we feel responsible for whatever happens to our helpees and guilty if we neglect to do something that might help; if it’s off, too bad, they’re on their own, and there’s no guilt to worry about.

  We avoid in-between commitments because they make us feel more uncertain about what we’re supposed to do and whether we’ve done enough. Unfortunately, most of life isn’t in the convenient on/off or black/white decision areas; it’s the in-between/gray area where you have to do less and think more. Also known as the place most humans hate the most.

  Helping indiscriminately—reacting reflexively instead of thoughtfully—does harm when it’s misdirected, misappropriates resources, and raises risks. Yes, it’s noble to make sacrifices for the sake of others, but not when the chances of benefit are low and the cost and risk are high. Many helpers, by nature, are not interested in doing cost-benefit analyses; they live to help and despise risk-benefit managers as coldhearted, selfish, and timid. They would readily sacrifice their entire family resources for an incurably sick child, regardless of the impact on the health and welfare of the other kids, whose chances of growing up healthy and safe are diminished with each noble act.