"Option B", ("The Lonely City")

[fiefoe]

Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant. A quick read.

• Resilience is the strength and speed of our response to adversity—and we can build it. It isn’t about having a backbone. It’s about strengthening the muscles around our backbone.
• We plant the seeds of resilience in the ways we process negative events... Martin Seligman found that three P’s can stunt recovery: (1) personalization—the belief that we are at fault; (2) pervasiveness—the belief that an event will affect all areas of our life; and (3) permanence—the belief that the aftershocks of the event will last forever.
• Years earlier, I’d noticed that when I got sad or anxious, often the second derivative of those feelings made them doubly upsetting. When I felt down, I also felt down that I was down. When I felt anxious, I felt anxious that I was anxious. “Part of every misery,” C. S. Lewis wrote, is “misery’s shadow…the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer.”
• Leaning in to the suck meant admitting that I could not control when the sadness would come over me. I needed cry breaks too.
• Adam told me the opposite: that it was a good idea to think about how much worse things could be.
• Acknowledging blessings can be a blessing in and of itself.
• “In my experience, survivors want the opportunity to teach and not be shunned because they went through something unknowable,”
• He suggests that “the most powerful thing you can do is acknowledge. To literally say the words: I acknowledge your pain. I’m here with you.”
• But when someone is suffering, instead of following the Golden Rule, we need to follow the Platinum Rule: treat others as they want to be treated. Take a cue from the person in distress and respond with understanding—or better yet, action.
• Author Bruce Feiler believes the problem lies in the offer to “do anything.” He writes that “while well meaning, this gesture unintentionally shifts the obligation to the aggrieved. Instead of offering ‘anything,’ just do something.” ... Specific acts help because instead of trying to fix the problem, they address the damage caused by the problem.
• Wherever you are in the circle, offer comfort in and seek comfort out. That means consoling the people who are closer to the tragedy than you are and reaching out for support from those who are farther removed.
• learned that friendship isn’t only what you can give, it’s what you’re able to receive.
• But now experts realize that these are not five stages. They are five states that don’t progress in a linear fashion but rise and fall. Grief and anger aren’t extinguished like flames doused with water. They can flicker away one moment and burn hot the next.
• As psychologist Mark Leary observes, self-compassion “can be an antidote to the cruelty we sometimes inflict on ourselves.” Self-compassion often coexists with remorse.
• Blaming our actions rather than our character allows us to feel guilt instead of shame. Humorist Erma Bombeck joked that guilt was “the gift that keeps giving.” Although it can be hard to shake, guilt keeps us striving to improve. People become motivated to repair the wrongs of their past and make better choices in the future.
• Labeling negative emotions makes them easier to deal with. The more specific the label, the better.
• Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard said that life can only be understood backward but it must be lived forward. Journaling helped me make sense of the past
• Making gratitude lists has helped me in the past, but this list served a different purpose. Adam and his colleague Jane Dutton found that counting our blessings doesn’t boost our confidence or our effort, but counting our contributions can.
• The One I Become Will Catch Me
• “When we are no longer able to change a situation,” psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl observed, “we are challenged to change ourselves.”
• instead of post-traumatic stress, some of the parents experienced post-traumatic growth... Joe learned that post-traumatic growth could take five different forms: finding personal strength, gaining appreciation, forming deeper relationships, discovering more meaning in life, and seeing new possibilities.
• In Viktor Frankl’s words, “In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.”
• Playing music at the edge of our capabilities is what psychologists call a “just manageable difficulty.”
• We can start by helping children develop four core beliefs: (1) they have some control over their lives; (2) they can learn from failure; (3) they matter as human beings; and (4) they have real strengths to rely on and share.
• Despite my best efforts, I am sometimes one of those parents. When my daughter does well on a test, I still find myself blurting out, “Great job!” rather than, “I’m glad you tried your hardest.” In How to Raise an Adult, former Stanford dean Julie Lythcott-Haims advises parents to teach children that difficulties are how we grow.
• calls this “normalizing struggle.”
• But just as grief crashes into us like a wave, it also rolls back like the tide. We are left not just standing, but in some ways stronger.

--------------------------------------------

Olivia Laing's book is peopled by unhappy artists: Edward Hopper and his unfulfilled artist wife, Andy Wharhol and Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot him. At some point their pain (especially Henry Darger) became too much.

• There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness, of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feeling - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.
• What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I’m trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.
• Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.
• But gauging the levels is tricky. Either you don't communicate enough and remain concealed from other people, or you risk rejection by exposing too much altogether: the minor and major hurts, the tedious obsessions, the abscesses and cataracts of need and shame and longing.
• Sameness, especially for the immigrant, the shy boy agonisingly aware of his failures to fit in, is a profoundly desirable state; an antidote against the pain of being singular, alone, all one, the medieval root from which the work lonely emerges. Difference opens the possibility of wounding; alikeness protects against the smarts and slights of rejection and dismissal.