When despair takes hold
There is a line in one of my favourite poems, Wild Geese by Mary Oliver, which has been on my mind lately:
“Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”
Last Sunday, I collapsed onto my kitchen floor and howled.
. . .
Just a couple of days earlier, when recording an episode about H for Hope for The A to Z of Happiness, my friend and producer Mark winded me with the quote he used for our Cold Opener;
“It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand.”
~ Brian Stimpson, Clockwise
Here’s the thing. I study Positive Psychology. I’m a Head of Positive Psychology. I am currently the host of a podcast with the word “happiness” in its title.
But I am intimately, painfully, repeatedly familiar with despair.
With its body-wracking sobs and howls.
With an overwhelmingly unmet need for love and belonging.
With the belief that I cannot go on living “like this”.
. . .
I was lucky on Sunday night. I was with someone, for once (my despair has been, for many years now, a pretty solitary experience). His calm demeanour meant I could piggy-back on his nervous system a little (hello, co-regulation), just enough for me to remember the Havening technique of stroking down the upper arms to reduce my rapid cycling of self-aware commentary (“This is really uncomfortable on a full stomach”) and primal howling in emotional pain.
And then Temple Grandin’s work on soothing cattle was able to come to my mind, and how tight compression can also help to calm the nervous system (as my body started to spasm once the howling stopped, as if overloaded with emotional energy).
One of the gifts of being highly sensitive can also be its curse: emotional intensity. The smallest things can make me child-like with delight (I discovered how the River Ver is diverted to provide the lake in Verulamium Park in St Albans earlier that day, and had to restrain myself from doing an excited little dance), but negative experiences (like relationship uncertainty) can wipe me out completely. A balance between the two isn’t enough; weighting towards the positive is required, to provide enough resources to endure the latter.
Basic Psychological Needs Theory (BPNT), a component of Deci & Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory, suggests that we need autonomy (feeling like we’re in control), relatedness (a feeling of being connected to others), and competence (feeling like we have an impact on our environment).
Looked through this lens, my despair (and the continued lack of motivation for my dissertation), may well be a result of feeling like I have no control in either of my personal or professional challenges, of feeling disconnected, isolated, and left out, and feeling powerless.
Hardly a recipe for happiness.
With this realisation of my unmet needs, I will now try and reframe my work on my dissertation accordingly, focusing on doing bite-sizes stints (50 words is better than zero), writing the bits I enjoy most first (to build the momentum of word-count), and finding someone to share my progress with.
(The relationship one needs to be collaborative, I think, which depends on a willingness I have no control over.)
As I sit here and write this, I don’t know how either of my situations will resolve themselves. I will either complete my dissertation, or I will fail my degree; I will either make a fresh start and evolve a relationship, or it will dissolve. As much as I might be able to take control of my approaches, I cannot control the outcomes.
But at least I have an idea of how to take the wind out of my despair when it next decides to take me out at the knees in my kitchen.
And I draw comfort from the closing lines of Wild Geese;
“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
Photo by Emma Bauso: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-holding-man-s-hand-3585811/
