The very fact that you are reading these words suggests that you were not born yesterday. You have a vast storehouse of memories, good and bad, ranging back to early childhood. Whether we do so deliberately or not, a part of everyone’s life is spent poking around in the archives and viewing old memories.
Let’s begin the process of darkening the mind by sitting back with our popcorn and watching the movie screen of the past. The emotional brain won’t know the difference—it reacts whether we are looking at the past, present, or future, and it has a hard time distinguishing between them.
The question, of course, is which reels we should load into the projector. Some elements of almost everyone’s past are quite good, some are unpleasant, and many more are quite neutral in tone. In order to increase your misery, you must be selective about the bits of memory you play back to yourself.
The simplest strategy is to focus on the negative, replaying your distressing clips over and over again. Inventory your losses. Remember past injuries. Recall the times you have felt bereft, alone, alienated, terrified, and despondent. Include examples of random, uncontrollable fate knocking you about like a helpless pinball.
Often the most potent clips are those involving personal humiliation:
The more you play these, the brighter and more vivid they get and the stronger their link to your gut becomes.
Don’t leave them as simple, unconnected memories. Create a narrative of your life to make sense of them. Group them into themes and write a story. Most people easily have enough material for a full-length feature along the lines of: “I am incompetent; my biography is a history of mistakes.” Or “No matter how hard I try, eventually everyone abandons me.” Or “Catastrophe comes without warning, and I lie helpless in its path.”
None of these stories is entirely fictional. Let’s face it: you really are incompetent at many things. People really have abandoned you. Uncontrollable things really have happened. Reassure yourself that you are not making these stories up. You have the receipts, photo albums, and scars to prove them.
The fact that you remain standing despite all of these unwelcome events must be ignored. You must not take your history of adversity as a tale of survival or resilience, but as one of defeat. Snuff any hint of pride at what you have lived through. Dwell instead on the damage—the irreparable damage—that these events have wrought upon your person and your psyche.
To strengthen the narrative, ensure that you focus on events that prove your thesis. Neglect the fact that, despite failing calculus, you are good at car repair. Forget that, despite the distracted absence of your father, you had an aunt who doted upon you. Highlight the car accident that injured you, and leave unrehearsed the memory of the birth of your child.
You need not flush away all of your positive memories, however. Dante suggested, “There is no greater sorrow than recalling your happy days in a time of misery.”5 You can use positive memories to contrast the golden past with the drab present. Dwell on how wonderful that old bohemian apartment of yours was—or that relationship, that job, that city, that sparkling, halcyon time in your life—and remind yourself that it is now over. You have lost it forever. Ignore any positive aspects of your current life—your nicer home, your improved bank balance, the knowledge that you did, in fact, survive past thirty—that were absent in the romanticized past.
You can also disqualify and thereby erase your good memories:
What you thought was happiness was a mistake. Your misery has, all along, been the truth.
Ensure that you do not engage in this reinterpretation process with negative memories. We often discover that events that seemed awful at the time were necessary in order for positive developments that followed. The breakup of that relationship tore your heart out, but you now know that it would never have worked anyway and that you needed to be single to meet, the following year, the person you have been with ever since. Your cycling injury was severe and painful, but without it, you would never have found your calling in the field of traffic safety. Realizing that the disappointments and disasters of the past were necessary for you to be the person you are today serves only to lessen their sting. You want the venom to be as potent as possible.