Cliche Wisdom, David Foster Wallace

I read a good book the other day.  If you have some time and a dictionary and want to lie very still for several weeks and have your mind taken out of your body (anyone?), I very much recommend "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace.  It's about a lot of things (it's about...1173 pages long) but part of the book follows former addicts at a halfway house, going to AA meetings and slowly realizing that the tired cliches at the heart of the program, the "One day at a time"s and "Faith in a Higher Power"s insulting their intelligence, are actually the only thing keeping them afloat in a sea of their compulsions and diseases.   

At one point, when Don Gately is in the hospital for heroic injuries, another addict makes him a needlepoint-synthesis of several cliches, which has lately become my personal motto:  "Get well soon, one day at at time, if it's God's will."  I put these words on a dog I found on the Internet to illustrate my point.

 It so happens that I just joined a support group, an online symptom-management class for CFS.  It's less pseudo-religious than AA, but it also employs a lot of cliches that make me want to tear my eyes out.  I have no idea what "Taking control of your illness, so that it doesn't take control of you," means.  But I am finding that following simple advice is comforting, and not very simple when you actually start to do it.  I think about the words on the dog a lot.


Get Better

I can't help it, I am an optimist by nature.  I absolutely believe that I will get better.  There are no amount of discouraging statistics or horrific stories that will dissuade me.  I don't know if I'll get all the way better (for some reason the phrase "get better" is never taken literally), but I do think I will get somewhat better.  I think I can get back to where I was a year ago, the glass overflowing, half-full of health. 

Soon

Well, it probably won't be soon.  This seems to be a lifelong infection, and the stories I hear of recovery and remission all have in common a geologic time scale.  They say that progress isn't apparent day-to-day, or even week-to-week, but over months and years, healing happens.

One Day at a Time

This here is the cliche of cliches, the one true self-opthalectomy-inducing platitude that I used to hate with a blood-spitting passion.  Yes, days occur individually! They follow one another in sequential time!  What bearing does that possible have on me, my sickness and misery?

But actually, this is really important.  When I get overwhelmed with my illness, it usually isn't that I'm sick right now.  It's the imaginary projection of the illness indefinitely into the future.  I imagine being sick forever, and that is the unbearable thing.  I used to think that acceptance, the most basic and important step a sick person can take, meant acceptance of a lifetime of illness.  And I could never do that.  But I don't need to "accept" the future, because I don't know what the future will bring.  I can accept that I'll be sick today, probably tomorrow and on for a while, but worrying about what's going to happen years from now is completely unnecessary.  I can think of things that I am able to do, today, that will make me happy, today, and leave the rest alone.  If the days don't really add up to something greater than themselves, there's nothing wrong with that. 

If It's God's Will

I'm not really into believing in things I can't see.  I'm not going back to acupuncture school because of the lack of evidence that it actually works.  See two posts ago for my opinion on the spiritual principles of hippie doctors (it's low).  But nonetheless, there are things I believe in for no rational reason, simply because I feel that they're true.  I believe in them because I believe in them, okay?  It's the second rule of tautology club.

When I got sick this time around, real sick, I did my share of fist-shaking and God-cursing.  But really, you can only do so much of that before you start feeling ridiculous.  There's no shortage of pain in the world; "Why, God, why?" has no answer.  I tried my best to dispense with the self-pity.  And I found that, even though the amount of horror and suffering in the world is in no way rationally reconcilable with any idea of a benevolent "God," I still feel guided, and supported, and graced.  So I don't choose to believe, but just sort of happen to believe, that there is a divine logic at work that I can't understand, "Karma" or "God's will" or whatever.

To me, this means that even though shitty things are happening, they aren't necessarily things going wrong.  Who am I to know what's ultimately best for me?  Even if I'm not being "productive" in the outside world, I'm doing what I can to face this illness with as much dignity and equanimity as possible; maybe that's what my life's supposed to be about right now.  And even if chaos and entropy rule the universe, why react differently?  Why not, you know, try to be happy with what you have? So even though I particularly hate the phrase tossed around in certain circles, "Bloom where you're planted," and wish I would never again see those words in that particular combination, I must admit it makes a certain amount of self-evident sense.  And like following the advice of most of these cliches, what choice do you actually have?