by Désirée Zamorano
How do you deal with your emotional wounds? For me, as a writer, telling what I hope are emotionally engaging stories, doesn’t that mean the wounds need to be examined from all angles? Prodded, to see where the most tender parts are, and returned to, over and over again, even if the wound has healed?
Towards the end of 2019 a close friend of mine for over decades stopped talking to me. She and I had gone through the child-raising years, health crises, family struggles. I had ignored the distancing hints, even as I hid parts of myself from her. I had for the last few times set up our coffee dates. The last time we met, I gave her a copy of my daughter’s zine.
A month later I didn’t hear from her. I emailed, got thanks for the zine, then silence. My birthday passed, unremarked. Christmas passed, with no traditional photograph of four smiling faces in front of an elegant backdrop.
The isolation of the pandemic gave me plenty of vacant, musty hours to immerse myself in this. I brooded on the fact that when she mentioned her (mostly white, like her) book group had just read, The Sun of Distant Lands I had suggested her club might also consider reading White Fragility. Had that been it?
I examined that friendship from every angle there was, from wounded self-justification, to prostrate abject apologies over unknown crimes. (All right, full disclosure, I never considered I had done any wrong. But I can apologize on the drop of a dime.)
Rumination, holding a scalding puzzle piece to my past, or my present, or my blighted future; taking its measurements, its temperature, its weight, examining its psychic heft and dimensions, mentally recoiling, mentally recording. This is my personality, and I can excuse this behavior because it’s good for my art, I whisper to myself. All this rumination, neurotic or artistic, is who I am, I tell myself.
A few weeks into California’s lock down, where the traffic nearly vanished and the streets were instead filled with the chirruping of birds, I, part from the need of distraction, part from my restless self-improvement compulsion, enrolled in the popular, free Coursera class on the Science of Well Being.
Mid-course, I ordered one of the recommended readings: The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky. There I discovered terrible truths about myself: I have a penchant for social comparisons. Where do I rank? How far up, how far down? Research shows we tend to compare ourselves up, to what’s missing. And even if we compare ourselves downward, against those who are lower down whichever scale of our choosing, it brings us no consolation whatsoever, only guilt or a sense of inadequacy or a sense of undeserving whatever gifts or greatness or joy we have. What a happiness buzz kill, amirite?
The answer, according to these well-being experts? Stop. Doing. It.
The horrible thing is, these insidious social comparisons for some of us (me, me, me) are as second nature as breathing in and out.
I don’t know where you are on the social comparison scale; perhaps, like my husband, it never enters your head to think if that person walking by is better fit than yourself, more fashionably kitted out, or whether an acquaintance or friend has a smaller behind and a larger bank account; the measures are limitless, almost like our capacity for self-loathing and self-recrimination.
Sonja Lyubomirsky links social comparison and rumination together, although her term is “over thinking,” How presumptuous! Dammit, Sonja, I’m a writer and over thinking is something we pride ourselves. If there were a test on it I’d score 110%. Again, you’re telling me to simply cut it out?
Actually, she offers five specific strategies for subverting your own worst impulses in order to open the possibility of leading a fuller life, opening your brain waves like passageways to more positive possibilities. One in particular involves writing it all down. Of course, I am simplifying things here, because if you want her strategies completely spelled out, and if you want to find areas for your own flourishing, do Sonja a favor and buy the damn book.
For my particular neurosis, I was prescribed to spend a minimum of fifteen minutes writing about this very thing you are ruminating over, for four consecutive days. Write about the incident that you’re reliving, write about anything connected to it, write about other things you’re over thinking, over and over again. So that’s what I did, kicking and screaming and cursing, and then I forgot on the third day so I started the clock again.
This was not fun. This was not pleasant. I am here to say, it was actually kind of painful doing an autopsy of the events that seemed to seared into the obsessive/compulsive part of my brain. I had to force myself to continue writing for fifteen minutes. When that ended, I did not feel much better. When the full four days ended, I did not feel much better.
(Oh, Lord, what is the objective criterion one can use on oneself for how we feel?)
As the weeks passed, I admit I was not paying much attention, but my mind no longer seized on the missing friend. When my mind fluttered across her, it blithely, cheerily, kept going. No more pauses. No more spiraling loops and recriminations and ruminations and accusations. Nope. On to something else.
That had been happening, but it had taken me a moment to actually notice. Huh, well, indeed, I no longer had that anxious mentally racing laps circling her. Huh, well, my oh my, was it all really as simple as that?
Recently, more than a year after the realization that my friendship had ended, I received a card from my former friend. I groaned. Had she sent me an early, cheery, smiling Christmas family photo? I dreaded what I would find inside.
I slit the envelope open and pulled out a birthday card. I examined the text for clues as to why things had ended. There was nothing, only neutral birthday wishes, signed off with “take care.”
Did I scrutinize every interaction again? Did I, like previously, unpack the years before she stopped talking to me, for further possible hints and clues layered between child-rearing activities or political disagreements?
No, I did not. I felt released from the tug of this dangling thread of a severed relationship, and tossed the card and envelope into the trash bin. That writing away your ruminations strategy has the depth charge of a long-lasting, slow-release wonder drug. I felt freed and light-hearted
The next time I catch my mind going round and round the toilet bowl of obsessive rumination, or over thinking, I’ll be sure to sit down for four days straight, and write it out and flush it away like the mental waste it is.
Désirée Zamorano is the author of the novel The Amado Women (Cinco Puntos Press). Her work often explores issues of invisibility, inequity, or injustice. Her writing has appeared in Catapult, Cultural Weekly, and The Kenyon Review, and upcoming in the Akashic anthology series South Central Noir. A frequent contributor to the Los Angeles Review of Books, she was recently a scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.