“Do you think life is worth living?”
The on-call doctor posed the question casually, perched on a spinning stool with his long legs sprawled as I stood in the corner of the clinic’s examination room.
For me personally? At this moment, or in the future? For all of humanity, given what we’ve done to the climate and other species?
“That’s a big question,” I said.
I did my best to look relaxed and thoughtful, instead of terrified of being carted away for sounding unacceptably morose.
“In general, yes, I think life is worth living,” I said. “But I’m not sure that’s the issue.”
I’d been hoping he would start with more concrete, routine questions: How was I sleeping? Had my appetite changed? Did things that used to give me pleasure no longer satisfy? And as for support systems: Did I have at least five people I trusted enough to phone in an emergency?
This is why I wouldn’t do well with a therapist, even if I could get one—and probably, given our province’s massive health practitioner shortage, I couldn’t. I’d want to do his or her job for them.
“Let me try something else,” the doctor said. “Is your husband worried you’re not happy?”
“My husband wouldn’t use a term that simple.”
Happy, unhappy. Didn’t it depend on your definition? And the time of day? I could feel hopeless at ten in the morning, and serene at seven p.m., especially if I’d just sat down to dinner, with a glass of wine.
Life is beautiful; life is suffering. Aren’t both true?
And also, I love my husband, but who says he’s the best judge of mood?
“No,” I continued, trying to give the benefit of doubt to this doctor, rather than assume he was a misogynist for asking about my husband’s opinions rather than my own. “I don’t think my husband is worried. I’m a little worried. I already do the right things. I exercise almost every day. That helps. I eat well. I don’t know if I should be taking this medication at all, or if I should be taking more, or trying something different. I am anxious. I think I’ve gotten a lot more anxious since the beginning of COVID.”
Somehow, anxiety was easier to admit than depression, and depression was hard to judge. What constitutes “mild”? What requires intervention? What’s a normal, rational reaction to the ups and downs of life?
Whenever I read a scientific study that confirms my hunches, I’m more likely to give it close attention—so when I read about a study of 11,000 people who reported feeling negative or mixed emotions nearly half the time, I thought, “Yes, see? Normal. Bookmark that sucker.”
(The same study reported positive feelings more than purely negative ones. The larger point may be that we experience many emotions throughout the day, and even simultaneously. Love and anxiety, gratitude and guilt can all co-exist, in other words. Credit to Arthur C. Brooks for mentioning this study, briefly, in an Atlantic article.)
I might have admitted in the occasional email to a friend over the years that I’d been down, or pessimistic about a project or a relationship. But I always got out of bed. I didn’t break down crying in the shower. I wrote my books and hoped they mattered, though I often doubted it, which led to the compulsive habits that many writers indulge, like peeking too often at Goodreads reviews.
I managed to earn a living. I always worked.
Still, at times I had dark thoughts. I worried that someday the elevator of my moods might suddenly plunge below the only seemingly stable floor of my psyche, revealing a dangerous and inescapable cavern of despair.
At other times, I didn’t think this way at all.
Or even remember very clearly that I had thought this way, or for how long.
I hadn’t made a detailed study of myself.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
But the next time moods got seriously out of whack, I wouldn’t trust a doctor like this one, twisting back and forth on his stool, relaxing, with a smile on his face.
“So you live where?” he asked.
I told him—about the peaceful rural island where we’d recently moved, the house we’d bought during the first months of the pandemic, and the work I did, writing fiction.
He got a dreamy, faraway look, seeming to forget my need to make a firm decision about my prescription. “Wow. Sounds like you’ve got quite the life.”
Then he began to talk about his upcoming retirement, and paddleboarding.
When the shit hits the fan, the shit needs to be cleaned up.
Whether or not I could use more help deciding on whether to tinker with my pharmacology, I have a good life. I’m unquestionably grateful. Sometimes, it’s when things are going mostly well that I feel unsure about my mental state, like it’s a rug I’m likely to trip on or have pulled out from underneath me.
When things are truly awful—as when my mother was dying of brain cancer, five years ago—I can feel (paradoxically) solid and stable, for two possible reasons. One is that my orientation turns outward—less rumination and reflection, more action, purpose, and direction. There is no question, when the shit hits the fan, that the shit needs to get cleaned up.
When my mother was her losing ability to speak, followed by her entire sense of self, I thought mostly about her, and about the tasks my sisters and I needed to do, whether that meant attending a chemotherapy appointment, in the beginning, or emptying an entire house full of mostly sad memories, at the end.
Those tasks, in turn, became a structure. I am a great fan of structure, having had very little of it in my early years, while my divorced mother went back to school and my sisters and I essentially raised ourselves.
Only from my thirties on did I learn about things like “deliberate practice” and “personal analytics.” I’ve managed to create some structures—not nearly enough—to help with learning projects, upping my productivity, tracking my health, and finding my way into various sports despite no athletic predisposition.
Each time I’ve discovered a new app, information source, or method that has suddenly made it possible to do something I’d never been able to do before—like learning a foreign language, or actually improving my running or swimming—it has felt like a gift to that mostly unparented latchkey kid who couldn’t even figure out how to time her morning schedule so that she caught the school bus. (I missed a lot of school as a kid. A lot. In today’s world, I wouldn’t have been allowed to move up grades.)
For someone who has always yearned for structure, being a writer can be difficult. There is no clock to punch except the one you create, no office cooler or lunch room to make sure you talk to others a few times each day. There are also few metrics for success, especially for creative work. Sales don’t tell the whole story; nor do reviews or awards. When I’ve gone for four runs during the week, finishing my planned mileage—and boosting my mood in the process—I am sure I’ve achieved my goals. I can easily note my speed per mile. If I want, I can compare to other runners my gender and age, and chart a definite, achievable plan to tackle bigger running challenges, like a marathon or triathlon.
The differences between endurance sport and my life as a writer are why I need sport for balance. But the similarities are important, too.
A novel can only be written one page at a time. Showing up, and persisting despite the things you can’t control, whether it’s a knee injury or a bad book review, is nearly the entire game. In the end, you do it alone, for yourself—it isn’t a competition, even if it seems to be. Whether at the typewriter or on a road or trail, you are simply putting one foot forward, discovering what it is your body and mind can do, and what it is you want to do. No one else cares, frankly. You are your own master—which is both terrifying and exhilarating.
Whatever I have learned from writing helps my sports, and even more, whatever I learn from sports, helps my writing.
There is some of the “why” behind my adulthood love for running and occasional, very brief flings with cycling, as well as my sudden, deeper passion for triathlon.
It isn’t a glamorous, movie- or memoir-quality “why.”
I am not a Spanish man with multiple sclerosis who can barely walk, yet manages to recover and train for an Ironman. (See my top recommendation: 100 Meters, a great movie.)
I’m not even a BBC announcer who is challenged to try velodrome cycling and discovers that she loves it, and discovers with just a bit of training, thanks to a natural talent for swimming, that she can qualify for the Great Britain triathlon team. (See, Dare to Tri by Louise Minchin).
I love those stories of exceptional people, and I’m constantly searching for more of them. But in my unquenchable thirst for Ironman information, I’m also desperately curious about normal people who didn’t have a recent, major life tragedy (we all have minor ones), and who don’t have serious health problems (most of us have a long list of less-serious albeit still vexing ones), yet still decided to commit to something almost beyond their imagining. Because that’s what a long-distance triathlon is: a feat so great your mind can’t take it all in at once.
And maybe that’s what we love about it. It’s bigger than us.
Like a tragedy, it puts us back in our place, aware of both our power and our fragility, our weakness and our immense potential, our need for freedom and structure, all at the same time.
That’s some of my “Why.”
What’s yours?
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