A few months ago or maybe longer, a friend had a very busy day and, though she and I don’t talk too much on the phone, she’d called me in the days after to recount it to me—the precise chronology of tasks, the way she had to run from obligation to obligation to obligation. In a joking, lighthearted way, she said: “I kept thinking of you because I was like, ‘Amelia could never do this.’” I didn’t take offense in the moment and probably laughed at it, too, especially since the way she retold it felt rooted in a desire for a witness to all that she was doing, which make no mistake, was a lot.
But lately, I have found myself wanting to recount the events of my day. I’ve found myself wanting to tell the people with their full-time jobs (who are very often partnered to people with full-time jobs) (who are parents, too): “That’s great, but you could never do this!”
And by this, I mean: sit for hours at a time with your own thoughts. By this, I mean: get deeply curious about yourself and your own feelings. By this, I mean: allow the pain of x, y, or z to hit you and stay with you. Allow it to move you, but not reactively, not in a way that will only cause more pain. By this, I mean: journal.
As I’m writing this, I’m reminded of another Substack—that of Elif Batuman’s. Specifically, I’m thinking of her post titled, “Proust Pep Talk 1.”
In it, Batuman—a novelist whose two novels plumb the depths of her life in intricate and fascinating detail—writes:
So look: whenever it happens to me that I wander into the next room and think, “Wait, where did the past week go?”—and then I remember I spent most of it recreating a bad feeling I had in like 1997—and then I wonder how is this my job, how did it happen, who is making me do this—and the answer is nobody, I’m doing it to myself—and then I think I’m living my life wrong… at moments like those, I find it really helpful to dip into Time Regained, the last volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
After a funny little ‘spoiler warning’ that I personally find unnecessary, Batuman then quotes the following passage from Proust’s Time Regained:
How many for this reason turn aside from writing! What tasks do men not take upon themselves in order to evade this task! Every public event, be it the Dreyfus case, be it the war, furnishes the writer with a fresh excuse for not attempting to [write] this book: he wants to ensure the triumph of justice, he wants to restore the moral unity of the nation, he has no time to think of literature.
Note: the links in the above are the ones that Batuman originally provided.
Note: Neither Batuman or I (!) is saying to do nothing in the face of what you perceive to be injustice. Oy, I’m gonna have to quote Batuman again because she’s just so funny and good at this! She writes:
What if the indulgent thing is to write the billionth tweet about justice, and the rigorous and disciplined thing is to sit alone in a room and decipher the intense feeling you had once in a driveway?
All this makes me think of a different line from another famous book. In Howards End, E.M. Forster writes: “How dare Schlegels despise Wilcoxes, when it takes all sorts to make a world?” (The Schlegels are more left-leaning, you could say, while Wilcoxes are to the right.) Or in other words: the way that I live my life is just as key to society as those of you with full-time jobs who run from task to task to task!
What I’m trying to say is that my life, though not as outwardly busy as many others, is important. And now I’m reminded of another line from a famous writer. Some of the last words that Emily Dickinson wrote—in a letter—were: “But it is growing damp and I must go in. Memory’s fog is rising.”
Quoting these lines, Mary Ruefle, another poet, writes:
A woman whom everyone thought of as shut-in, homebound, cloistered, spoke as if she had been out, exploring the earth, her whole life, and it was finally time to go in. And it was.
What I’m trying to say is that, though I haven’t used my passport in over a decade(!), I have been out exploring the earth. What I’m trying to say is that, though my life may not look busy to you, I have been busy making time for myself, for my own rhythm.
I can hear you saying, “But, but, but…” But(!) before you defend your life—which is just as valuable as mine, I promise—let me defend mine further, using the aforementioned “Dreyfus case” as an example.
When I began writing this, I had many ideas that I wasn’t sure I could synthesize into one post. And while I remembered the spirit of the Proust-pep-talk post by Elif Batuman, I hadn’t recalled that the quote she used mentioned the “Dreyfus case.” When I saw those words there, they felt a bit magical, or at the very least, providential.
Because I’d been thinking a lot about the Dreyfus case. Specifically, I was thinking about this Ted Talk from 2016, which uses the Dreyfus case as an historic example of what scientists call “motivated reasoning.” You can listen to the whole Ted Talk here, but quoting the speaker, Julia Galef, motivated reasoning is:
…the phenomenon in which our unconscious motivations, our desires and fears, shape the way we interpret information. Some information, some ideas, feel like our allies. We want them to win. We want to defend them. And other information or ideas are the enemy, and we want to shoot them down.
The quickest example that comes to mind for Galef is, guess what? Sports-related!
Here’s Galef again:
Probably most of you have never persecuted a French-Jewish officer for high treason [She’s referencing Alfred Dreyfus here.] I assume, but maybe you’ve followed sports or politics, so you might have noticed that when the referee judges that your team committed a foul, for example, you’re highly motivated to find reasons why he’s wrong. But if he judges that the other team committed a foul—awesome! That’s a good call, let’s not examine it too closely.
Of course, Galef doesn’t stop there. She goes on to explain that despite this natural phenomenon, some people are wired to be skeptical of themselves and their own biases. Some types of people want to know the truth even if it’s personally uncomfortable.
I would say that unfortunately, these types of people are getting about 10 likes on Instagram right now. But do you know where these kind of people are shining bright? Yes, you guessed it! This Jungian Life.
I particularly loved their most recent episode where they interview Aaron Balick, PhD, psychotherapist and author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking. (Shout out to around minute 12 where they introduce something called “the depressive position,” which sounds bad but is basically the calm, non-animated grown-up in the room, who/which social media doesn’t amplify or seemingly care about!)
Lastly, I want to leave you with one more quote. This one from the poet and philosopher David Whyte’s newsletter(!).
There is a way of being in the world that is sparkling, spacious, generous, and life giving; both for ourselves and for others. There is a way of being in the world that feels besieged, set upon, defensive and life-sapping, both for ourselves and for those who come into contact with us.
Despite the title of this post, I am aiming for the former. (At least, online.) (0 likes and -6 followers!)
I ASPIRE TO THE DEPRESSIVE POSITION
"the rigorous and disciplined thing is to sit alone in a room and decipher the intense feeling you had once in a driveway?" lolol this is why I love her / The Idiot. -6 followers! lol. I loved Defending Your Life and was made to watch it like it was homework. P.S. even though I might be I might be one of the people preprogrammed to examine many sides in spite of discomfort, I have MANY times thought I couldn't do what Amelia does - sit in a room for six hours and physically write. I can spend six hours in a room reading and organizing my jewelry but actually focusing on the task at hand? Forget it!! More on this in **private voicemail** sometime. Loved the obligatory sports meme. xoxo