Addicted to Unhappiness

I have a book entitled Addicted to Unhappiness. It came as a free gift with Parenting with Love and Logic. Who knows why but that’s besides the point… The general premise of the book was that some people have unhappiness ingrained so deeply into their worldviews that anything that deviates (EG happiness) is abnormal and, thus, stressful. To avoid that stress, they intentionally seek out and dwell on negativity in their lives. It makes sense when you think about it and I know a couple of people like this, who seem to be addicted to unhappiness and find ways to maintain a sense of tragic equilibrium. In contrast, the people in my life who have experiences true tragedy, misfortune, and oppression tend to focus on maintaining a positive worldview and effecting positive change in their lives. Sure, everyone has their moments of negativity, their blue funks, but these people don’t stay there. It’s an interesting dichotomy.

I think I was there for a long time. I have done my fair share of wallowing in the mud and bemoaning my powerlessness of effect positive change. I have sought out people who and activities (and professions, for the love of Pete!) that allowed me to wallow and revel in my negativity and bitterness. My name is Christy and I am addicted to unhappiness. Not only did my negativity affect myself, it bled out into the people around me, to the degree that it sent some people running. After all, emotions are contagious. Daniel Goldman described the concept of emotional contagion in detail if you are inserted in further explanation but, again, I digress...

I eventually discovered that it required way to much energy to keep seeking out negativity to dwell on. I had to divert my attention away from the positive stuff and actively redirect it to the minutia or the stuff that I could not change. I eventually realized that that energy might be better directed to being more proactive in effective positive change. Additionally, it struck me that maybe in my “supporting” others while they wallowed in their own self-pitting and bemoaned their powerlessness and my justification of their bitterness and despair, I was not helping them at all but enabling their own addictions to unhappiness. In retrospect, those people would have been better served had I not facilitated that negativity.

Perhaps this is controversial and perhaps I am pissing some people off. Whatever. I think we need to be pissed off sometimes. And I am not telling people to respond to someone’s unhappiness by telling them to suck it up and look on the bright side. I am not saying that significant obstacles and oppressive conditions to exist for some and not for others. They do and it pisses me off. What I am saying is that we need to redirect the majority of our energy from maintaining a state of being a passive victim of circumstances to becoming more proactive. Sure, it’s hard. It takes A LOT of energy to effective positive change. But isn’t it worth it in the end? Nothing worth doing is ever easy.

I think one of my resolutions for the New Year is to be a better person. It’s a stretch, I know, but humor me. And one of the ways in which I am going to accomplish this is by not enabling addictions to unhappiness. I will offer an ear to listen and a shoulder on which to cry for a while, but there is only so much support you can provide before you hit a point of diminishing returns; or at which point you are no longer helping but hindering. You can only provide so much sympathy and support. At some point, your someone need to recognize the power they DO have to make positive changes and make them rather than focus on the obstacles and become overwhelmed by them. Or nothing is going to change at all.

It's All Relative

I woke up this morning late, with 30 minutes before the kids had to be at school and an hour before I had to be at work. It was a mad, mad rush to get out the door on time, complete with a mini-meltdown from seven-year-old (I asked her to at least BRING a coat… what was I thinking?), an extra dose of smart-aleck-ery from my ten-year-old, missing toothbrushes, a stubbed toe, and breakfast in a baggy to eat in the car for all. Honey Bunches of Oats, no milk.

I got to work 30 minutes late to an in-box full of urgent “update needed” messages on projects that I received on 3:00pm on Friday (I don’t work the weekends and my hours are included in my signature line) and more requests for projects with less than half the information I need to even start them. After replying to everyone in kind, I began working on said projects only to be interrupted at least three times an hour by either my boss asking for project updates or fellow employees dropping their baskets. Apparently my 14x5 foot office is where it’s at when you’re having an emotional breakdown. I honestly don’t usually mind, unless there are people standing at the door with their faces pressed against the glass (yes, it’s a glass door) with a look of manic desperation in their eyes, waiting for me to enter their data or edit their manuscript as if it were a matter of life and death. Which there were today.

My last meeting ran long, so I had to run a half a mile to my car to make sure that I got to the school in time to pick up my children and avoid feeling even more like the Worst Mother Ever. Then I dealt with the Commute from Hell that included an unusually large amount of left-lane-cruisers, tailgaters, and law enforcement officers which put a damper on my initial plan to haul ass. I didn’t flip anyone the bird, though, and I only used one small bit of profanity with regards to the above mentioned fellow motorists (who were experiencing a collective moment of cognitive flatulence), and so I feel good about that. Unfortunately, I had to brave the kiss-and-go line (the most inefficient method of picking up children from school ever) and deal with people who feel that they are all more important and in more of a hurry than everyone else and nearly getting rear ended a total of four times.

Now, I am procrastinating entering even more data for at least a couple more hours this evening before I can completely unwind, which I won’t do because it won’t be enough. It never is. Happy Monday, folks! It’s time for a beer… or five.

That said, I just returned from taking one of my furry children to the vet. He has been pooping consistently one of the dinning room chairs. One of the nice dinning room chairs. He was diagnosed with “anal sac-itis”, a chronic inflammation of his anal glands that results in overly thick sebaceous discharge and occasional constipation due to pain. He had to have his anal glands expressed. He was humiliated and in pain. I could tell by the look in his eyes. And he blamed me for it. Can you blame him?

So the take home message here is: when you have a bad day, there is always someone (human or otherwise) who has it much, much worse. I may have had a long and frustrating commute and I may have had encounters with unusually unrealistic coworkers but I do NOT have anal-sac-itis. It's all relative.

Cheers!

25 Obscure Facts About or Related to Women, Mothers, and Mothering That You Never Knew You Wanted to Know...

Dear me, it's been a while since last we posted. We need to start putting out else our followers kick us to the curb! To be fair, the Holidays are upon us and threatening to smother the life out of us. 'Tis the season to be jolly... and jolly doesn't come cheap.

On that note, here is some food for thought. My favorite kind of food... the kind that does not require you breaking out your maternity pants if you over-indulge. Feel free to add your own obscure facts.

1. Women have faster blood flow to the brain than men.

2. Women suffer less hearing loss than men.

3. A Pueblo Indian woman divorces her husband by putting his moccasins outside the front door (The moccasins are made for walkin’...)

4. Wearing high heels can make women better in bed by strengthening their pelvic muscles.

5. Mother's Day accounts for more than one-fifth of the floral purchases made for holidays.

6. An AT&T survey estimated that 122.5 million phone calls to Mom are made on Mother's Day.

7. Other Mother's Day findings revealed that 11 percent never call their mothers, and 3 percent of the 68 percent planning to ring Mom up called her collect.

8. The world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji, was published in Japan around A.D. 1000 by female author Murasaki Shikibu

9. The probability of a woman giving birth to a baby girl instead of a baby boy increases significantly the nearer the mother lives to the equator. While the cause of this gender selection is unknown, scientists believe the constant sunlight hours and abundant food supply in tropical regions may favor female births.

10. 67% of women in Kentucky, ages 15 to 44, are mothers. This is among the highest rates in the nation. The national average is 57 percent.

11. August is the most popular month in which to have a baby, with more than 360,000 births taking place that month in 2001.

12. Tuesday is the most popular day of the week in which to have a baby, with an average of more than 12,000 births taking place on Tuesdays during 2001.

13. In 2002, the 55% of American women with infant children were in the workforce, compared to 31% in 1976, and down from 59% in 1998. In 2002, there were 5.4 million stay-at-home mothers in the US.

14. The average woman in America earns seventy-nine cents for every dollar made by the average male.

15. One-third of the families headed by women live below the poverty line.
By the twenty-first century 99% of the people on welfare will be women and dependent children.

16. Of the brighter high school graduates who do not go on to college, 70% to 90% are girls.

17. As more men have entered the field of elementary education in the past twenty-five years, the pay scale in that profession has risen disproportionately.

18. As more women have entered the field of accounting in the past twenty-five years, the pay scale in that profession has remained static.

19. In a recent pole taken by the "New York Times" 62% of working women interviewed agreed with this statement: "Most men are willing to let women get ahead, but only if women do all the housework at home first."

20. Many of the sweaters worn by Mr. Rogers on the popular television show, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, were actually knitted by his real mother.

21. Monkee Mike Nesmith's mother, Bette Nesmith Graham was the inventor of Liquid Paper correction fluid. She sold the rights to the Gillette Corporation in 1979 for $47.5 million and when she died in 1980, she left half of her fortune to her son Michael.

22. Eric Clapton was born to an unwed mother and to shield him from the shame, Eric grew up believing that his grandparents were his parents and his mother was his sister.

23. The name of Snoopy's mother, which is from the Peanuts cartoon strip, is Missy

24. Singer and songwriter, Cheryl Crow, has been known to sing back up for the Counting Crows.

25. Robert Smith of The Cure has been known to play guitar for Siouxsie and the Banshees.