I am myself and my circumstances

I know there are a lot of people who hate-follow my Facebook page; they make for some interesting, and often lengthy, threads. Hate following was something that never much appealed to me. I actually use my personal profile very little, rarely interacting with anyone. The reason being I don’t have time to do that and manage what has become a large and (mostly) wonderful community on my own page. I’d rather interact with the folks there.

But there is one page I hate follow. This is meandering, but it’s all connected. Sort of.

The page I hate follow is called “Authors Publish”. I don’t remember why I began following it, but their most frequent posts involve sharing a photo and saying, “Write a six word short story to go with this image.” And most of those six-word stories make want to fucking baarrrrffff! It’s called “purple prose,” that which is “so extravagant, ornate, or flowery as to break the flow and draw excessive attention to itself.” I often attempt to counterbalance it by using my six words to be a smart ass.

But that is not all they share. Sometimes, they share inspirational quotes, and in the last week they shared two that didn’t have me trolling, they angered me, so I did a rare thing and went Facebook warrior outside my own page.

I wrote a self-help book that was a mediocre seller titled The Holy Sh!t Moment. Part of the reason it didn’t become a bestseller, I surmise, is that the idea of understanding the science behind life-changing epiphanies wasn’t a big draw. Another, however, is that I didn’t play by the rules of self-help writing, which are: Over promise. Under deliver.

That’s the opposite of what they tell you to do in business, but it’s how self-help usually works. It makes outlandish promises of wealth and happiness and weight loss and how your life will be oh so very fucking awesome if all you do is follow their secret formula to blah fucking blah. That’s the over promise part. And then the “plan” is under delivery of highly implausible bullshit.

And people eat it right the fuck up. I have been railing about this bullshit since my first days as a fitness / weight loss writer back in 2009. Most people don’t want cold hard facts and critical analysis when it comes to self-help. They want flowery promises. The very purchasing of such a book gives us a hit of dopamine that makes us believe we’re doing something positive to change our situation. And when we inevitably fail, we don’t blame the author, we blame ourselves. Also, we have a short memory for these failures, which is why people don’t buy just one shitty self-help book. They buy 25.

Really, if such books worked that well, wouldn’t you just need one or two? If Tony Robbins was so helpful, why the constant upsells gouging people for tens of thousands to get fire-walking colon cleanses in Tahiti (really) to keep motivating them?

I had one weight loss book published in 2014, and it stands up today and I never felt the need to do another, because the principles haven’t changed much. Mark Hyman has had 10 weight loss books hit #1 on the NYT bestseller list and they’re all a bullshit variation of “sugar is evil.” Selling out like that isn’t in my DNA.

I don’t wish to sound bitter. I’m actually not at all. I’m proud of the books I wrote and believe they stand out as a scientific counter to genres that are mostly filled with bullshit. The fact that sales were mediocre taught me that I wasn’t going to change what people wanted, however, and that perhaps I didn’t belong writing in a genre that I didn’t have much respect for to begin with. Fortunately, history is a genre that does appreciate hard facts and critical analysis. And I’ve never been happier with my career path.

I told you this would meander, but I’m going to endeavor to bring it all together. Still, I expect if I had an editor on this piece their head would explode. Back to the Authors Publish bullshit. Two days ago, they posted a pretty photo of a mountain lake with a quote by bestselling motivational guru (and I use that word with contempt) Stephen Covey. This is it:

“I’m not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.”

Ugh.

I made a quick comment: “Yeah that’s some privileged bullshit.” I wasn’t the only one dragging them, but my thread got a fair bit of attention. A follow up comment I made on it to one person defending Covey was “Yeah all those children dying of starvation in underprivileged countries just need a better attitude.”

The next day the page did it again, this time with some Covey / Robbins wannabe I’d never heard of named Jaymin Shah. The image was of a guy running up a rocky hill, and the quote read, “No one is to blame for your future situation but yourself. If you want to be successful, then become ‘successful.’”

They got dragged by readers a second time, including me, who wrote: “Didn't you getting dragged on an earlier post for publishing this privileged garbage teach you a lesson yet? Such inspirational tripe is inspirational to no one, yet heaps guilt upon those born into difficult circumstances through no fault of their own. Stop it.” My friend Karen replied in agreement, saying that Shah’s statement was “gaslighting bullshit.” Because if your life sucks, it’s all your fault. Didn’t you know that? All you have to do is knuckle down, nose to the grindstone, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.

Sarcasm.

And it’s not like we haven’t known this is bullshit for a long time. Here is a paragraph from that epiphany book I wrote:

“I am myself and my circumstances.” These are the words of Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, written in his 1914 book Meditations on Quixote. Our situation can be both oppressive and limiting. Our circumstances come not just from the physical world, but our own minds. Mental health, prejudices, and preconceptions all effect our ability to flourish. We can imagine new possibilities, but they will run into our present circumstances. And so he wrote, “Life is a series of collisions with the future.”

Both of those quotes I railed against were only half correct, presenting their half as the full truth. You are yourself, yes, AND your circumstances. Your decisions matter, but the circumstances under which those decisions are made, along with your genetics and life experiences leading up to this point, influence the shit out of those decisions. It all has a profound effect on the life you have led and will lead.

Here is another relevant snippet from my book The Holy Sh!t Moment:

In 2017, I wrote a piece for the Chicago Tribune about sex abuse and weight gain, for which I interviewed Dr. Vincent Felitti. In the early 1980s, Dr. Felitti uncovered the connection between “adverse childhood experiences” (ACE) and a host of negative physical and mental health outcomes, obesity included. He spent decades surveying and following thousands of patients and publishing dozens of research studies to better understand the phenomenon.

One thing he told me stood out: “It is widely unrecognized that childhood sexual abuse is remarkably common.” I didn’t recognize it, either, until I requested interview subjects via Facebook. The response was overwhelming, the stories heartbreaking.

It’s not just the rate of obesity that is affected by ACE, but depression, anxiety, autoimmune disorders, suicide, and addiction. And they’re not small effects; they’re orders of magnitude higher.

There is a quote that is usually misattributed to Plato, because people often love to say it was a more famous mouth that spoke such profound words. The originator was 19th century Scottish minister and popular novelist John Watson, writing under the pen name Ian Maclaren. His quote was slightly different, but you know it as “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”

2020 has been a hard battle.

And I’ve been good at fighting battles in my life and thriving in the face of adversity. Also in The Holy Sh!t Moment I wrote about how one of those cheesy motivational quotes, this one by folk singer Joan Baez, changed my life when I was in my early 20s. She said, “Action is the antidote to despair.” It has served me well many times, worked as a mantra to push me to overcome, to succeed.

But there is a metric shit-ton of privilege behind it.

I wasn’t sexually abused, don’t suffer (much) in the way of mental health issues, am healthy and live in Canada with universal healthcare and a blah blah bunch of other shit that makes life easier for me than it is for a lot of other people. When encouraging others to improve their lives and change things for the better I’ve always endeavored to be compassionate and understanding of their situations and help them in setting reasonable and achievable goals. As we’ve acknowledged, that kind of thing doesn’t sell nearly as well as “Be rich and thin and deliriously happy and totally awesome by following these three guidelines. No excuses! Just do it!”

But in 2020, my Joan Baez mantra failed me for the first time.

When I look at my parents, it’s not surprising that I have issues with anxiety. I see it in them but never acknowledged it in myself until this year. The reason being was that I’d found a way to transform that anxiety in “action” to quell the impending “despair.”

But what happens when there is no action you can take? When the circumstances create a fucktacular shitnado of ass that is beyond your control, what then?

There were three things in 2020 that made it my year from Hell that I couldn’t do much of anything about. And I know it pales in comparison to what so many others suffered, but this was my own battle. When you’re used to being able to fix problems that come your way, it can be pretty devasting to suddenly feel powerless.

The first thing that weighed on me was the U.S. election.

I know, I know. I’m Canadian. But I’m also compassionate with many American friends, and it destroyed me to see what he had done and was continuing to do. Also, it spilled over the border in a big way, with a third of people in my province being Trump fans. The hate he made people unafraid to spew brought the bigots out of the closet up here too. Trump has been toxic on an international scale, and his steps backward regarding climate change harm us all. I couldn’t bear the thought of another four years of that.

Logically I knew back in June that his chance of reelection was small, and I did my best as an Emotional Support Canadian to reassure my American readers that he was likely to lose. But the sense of dread gnawed because the stakes were so high.

The second, of course, was Covid. My wife is a physician, and the news has been terrible. We’re not doing much better in Canada than in the U.S., with my province having by far the highest rates of infection because we’re full of right-wing anti-mask fucking dumb asses too. No amount of action I take can alleviate the despair I feel over that either. All I can do is try my best to protect my family, and wait for it to get under control. I’ve already lost some distant family to it, and close family has it right now, and I am afraid.

Finally, there was the major career shift.

The daily column “On This Day in History, Shit Went Down” isn’t the only thing I’ve been working on. Only a few people know this, but my agent has been pitching an ambitious “big think” history book. I wrote a 9,000-word Introduction and an accompanying proposal, and we started pitching it last October.

My agent was excited, he was confident we’d sell it. When it came to The Holy Sh!t Moment we had half a dozen meetings with publishers set up within days and we sold it within a week. Two months later we have a lot of flattering rejections, but no takers. That’s another thing I have no control over: the publishing industry. I was worried they’d not want the book, and it’s looking like I was correct.

Those three things, things I couldn’t control, are why I began to have small panic attacks. I’ve witnessed the big kind, and this wasn’t on that scale, but the energy to “do something” to “fix” things had nowhere to go, and I often found my heart racing. Usually when I go to sleep at night I’d be out in minutes, but now I’d lie there and feel my heart pound for no discernible reason. I’d try to relax, and watch TV and it would pound again. Not that fast, but hard. My skin would tingle, and I’d be on high alert like I was watching a horror movie. There is a reason I hate those kinds of movies.

And so, I drank, and ate, and gained weight.

This isn’t a happy tale of victory about how I came to better understand my anxiety and learn to accept things I can’t control and live happily ever after. That is not what happened.

What happened is that Trump lost, and vaccines are getting rolled out. I had nothing to do with those two things, there wasn’t any action I took that made those changes, but it changed my circumstances and therefore had a massive positive effect on my mental health. I celebrated with Champagne when Trump lost then didn’t drink for over a month. Last week I had a single day of some drinking when I finished writing a year’s worth of the “Shit Went Down” column then went right back on the wagon. I’ll have some more Champagne to celebrate the inauguration, but plan to stay dry until then.

And the publishing industry? That one I decided I could somewhat control. For now, I’ve decided, fuck ‘em. I guess that’s a bit of a personal victory. I launched this page and the subscriptions have blown away my expectations. (Thank you!) The book we pitched is on hold and all my focus is turning On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down into a book for as fast a release as I can manage via self-publishing. I’ve already hired a copy editor and we’re targeting an April 17 release. Hopefully. There is much to do.

So, no. I didn’t really learn much this year. My wife was trying to get me to address the anxiety and seek help and accept that which I can’t control, and I basically said I just need to suffer through it and see what happens with this election. If Trump wins, I said, I’ll get help.

Basically, I got lucky. Two of the big things bothering me are on their way to being resolved and the third I was able to exert control over. So, everything is back to being mostly peachy and I’m not drinking and eating better and exercising more and feeling fine.

For now. For now, my heart isn’t pounding, my skin not tingling.

But I know I can’t mentally afford to do this again. There will one day come a time when shit like this is going to go sideways, and I won’t be able to power through it. There will be those circumstances that are way beyond my control, and I’ll need to . . . seek help.

I’ve not been good at that. I’ve been the stoic, the one who is there for others to lean on, not the one who leans. When I’m in trouble, I sort my own shit. When others are in trouble, they come to me. That guy. You know what I’m talking about. It’s that patriarchal toxic masculinity bullshit I criticize. I never said I wasn’t immune to hypocrisy. I didn’t write this as a how to, but more of a how not to. Like with so many things in life, our circumstances are about luck. I’ve been lucky in the past and I got lucky again. Go me.

But I promise not to do it a second time. I’ll recognize it if it happens again, and seek that help. Really. In the meantime, well, I’ve got a book to write and some weight to lose.

Speaking of which, that book we’ve thus far failed at pitching will be written eventually. It’s just on temporary hold. The primary concern of the publishing industry was their short-sighted view of “what is a fitness / motivation guy doing writing history now?” They get a ton of proposals and it was easy for them to reject based on that. The fact that with the genre switch my writing suddenly became more popular than ever was lost on them.

But sales matter. The success of this and what I hope will be a successful publishing of the shit went down book will give us another shot at submission next fall. If they say no a second time, I’ll say fuck you and self-publish that one too. It yearns to be written.

And I’ll not keep you waiting on learning about the idea for too long. That 9,000-word introduction contains the best writing I’ve ever done. I’ll be sharing it here soon so you can see what else I’ve been up to.

In the meantime, thanks for permitting me to unload. Here is hoping 2021 is better for us all.