Chapter 16
I Am Just Like You,
Only I Am Me
Like you, I sometimes awaken in despair and filled with suicidal thoughts. Well, maybe that's not like you, only it is like me.
Usually, this happens when one of two things is happening: Either I am coming down with a cold and/or flu, or the stock market is tanking. Actually, let's be honest. It could also be just because I have not gotten enough sleep. I am a maniac for sufficient sleep––as you should be—and if I don't get enough, I am in a bad, bad place.
I have been to enough meetings in which people have been talking about their moods to know that many of my fellow humans get up in the same mood. Despair and thoughts of gloom and doom are part of the general mood inventory for us humans.
Nevertheless, they hurt like the dickens. It actually is painful to awaken feeling that way. It is almost like awakening and having a headache or a stomachache––and I have had plenty of those, too.
The pain––psychic and physical––doesn't just have to come when you awake. It can come after a tiring day of work. It can come after a tiring and frustrating day of shopping. It can come at any old time, and when it does, it hurts.
In fact, I have sometimes found myself looking for ways to eternity after a day of just doing a lick of work and then thinking about absent friends and missing them and longing for them. I actually find myself contemplating suicide more often than is even remotely sensible.
However, in my long life, I have found ways to defeat these feelings, and I am now going to share them with you, my kind readers.
First, if you can, go back to sleep. There is nothing, absolutely nothing on this earth more restorative than sleep. The human body and brain need sleep. I do not know how sleep works, but somehow when you are unconscious, it's as if a major repair shop in your brain opens up. Microscopic repairmen go to work and start fixing whatever was wrong, and suddenly, you feel one heck of a lot better.
My late father's late professor, the genius free marketeer, Frank Knight, used to tell his students, “Never waste any time you could spend sleeping.” When my Pop told me that, many years ago, I thought it was a joke.
But how right the brilliant Professor Knight was! There is nothing––not sex, not drugs (well, maybe some sex and some drugs) that makes you feel as good as sleep. “Sleep, that knits up the raveled sleave of care,” as Shakespeare wrote.
Sleep puts the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of your brain and your personality into the correct picture. You ignore your body's desperate need for sleep at your peril.
Those among us who claim they can get by with minimal amounts of sleep are just plain lying. They think they are getting by on five or six hours, but they are not. They are really sleep deprived and they would be doing their whole selves a big favor by adding a few more hours to their night's sleep.
(In particular, I observe certain failings or failures of judgment in the behavior of those who think they are getting by on just a few hours of sleep. If I may say so, I particularly observe failures of moral judgment on the part of those who think they are getting by on a small amount of sleep.)
But some of us cannot just go back to sleep. We have work to do. So what do we do when we awaken feeling down or when that feeling hits us in any part of the day?
Here I refer you to the single most important saying I have ever heard about the human personality. Long years ago (my favorite phrase) I was at a 12-step meeting. I was feeling despair about my career. A middle-aged woman with a sweet face said to me and the group, “Well, I feel really bad this morning, but I have learned that feelings come, and feelings go, and feelings are not facts.”
Feelings Come, and Feelings Go, and Feelings Are Not Facts!
If I say this over and over again, it is because it's vital.
However you feel at any given moment. . .it's going to change soon. It will change as you rest. It will change as you eat. It will change as you get some work done.
Get it into your head: Feelings come, and feelings go. My experience is that even when I have felt the absolutely lowest I have ever felt in my life, those feelings come and go. A good meal, a compliment, passing by a lovely landscape feature, a joke, a feeling that I have accomplished a little something, getting some solid work done (see above), all of these events can and will change your mood.
I find that exercise in particular changes my mood. So does being in water. “Rock me on the water,” said the gifted songster, Jackson Browne. He was referring to sex on a waterbed, but he was right about the water part. If I can drag myself out of bed and swim for a little while, I feel enormously better than I did before.
But the point is not really exactly what I do to change my mood. The point is that if I know my mood is going to change, I will not feel as if I am permanently locked into that down mood.
Then I will not feel suicidal. I hate blood tests. I hate and fear needles of any kind. But if I know that the needle will only be in there for a short time, I can laugh my way through it. . .usually.
Just so with despairing moods. If you know they will not last long, you can get through them.
I am not a physician. There may be some people whose sad, despairing moods are so long lasting and painful that they cannot see any light at the end of the tunnel. I do not pretend to be an expert in that situation. I do know that the people in my 12-step meetings almost always can see that their bad moods will not last forever and can therefore get through them without medication.
I also find it very helpful to make lists of good things.
My first list is usually about what I am grateful for: living in and having been born in America. Having loving, supportive parents; having a great sister; having a super-fantastic wife; having a sweet, handsome son and a sweet, almost unimaginably beautiful daughter-in-law; having my dogs; having a swimming pool; never having been seriously ill so far—although it will happen for sure; having great friends like Phil DeMuth, Barron Thomas, Russ Ferguson, John Coyne, Aram Bakshian, Tim Farmer, Bob Noah, and above all, Al and Sally Burton; and many, infinitely more gifts, all of these go on my list, and by the time I have done this for a few minutes, I am almost always feeling a lot better.
This insight, offered to me for free by a woman who I had never met before, has changed my life permanently.
Feelings come, and feelings go. This is well worth remembering.