A few years ago, after a series of cascading injuries and illnesses that rendered me unable to type, drive, or sleep, I briefly became a professional patient. Like all of my professions, I took it seriously. I went to appointments armed with lists of well-researched questions written down neatly on my yellow legal pad, brought in the occasional medical journal article, and compiled detailed descriptions of my array of increasingly bizarre symptoms. My goal was to get my doctors to take me seriously so they would dive into the complexities of my case. I wanted to walk out of every appointment one step closer to determining the underlying cause of my mysterious condition and with concrete strategies to ameliorate my suffering so I could work, sleep, and live my life again. Inevitably, though, I instead was handed the same thing over and over—a prescription for mindfulness.
My primary care physician told me to download guided meditation MP3s from the clunky hospital website; my therapist insisted that I do deep breathing exercises even though they triggered my mysterious abdominal spasms; and the pain clinic declined to do “any interventions” at all, instead vaguely suggesting mindfulness. The pain clinic’s message was clear—after two appointments and a clean MRI, I was being dismissed. From now on, managing my pain was my responsibility, not theirs.
Before these medical problems, I’d had only benign feelings toward meditation. My parents, products of the 1960s, were always dashing off to the Omega Institute and Kripalu when I was a kid, and I meditated briefly in college to impress a boy who’d just returned from a gap year in India. I’d mostly thought of mindfulness as promising evidence that mainstream medicine was becoming more progressive, more open to alternative, adjunctive treatments, and more interested in the patient experience.
The reality, I now know thanks to years of being denied medical care and instead being prescribed mindfulness as self-management, is quite different. For me, the current obsession with mindfulness has become synonymous with my overall feelings of disempowerment within the medical system. In my experience, in clinical settings, mindfulness is frequently disempowerment framed as empowerment, a way of placing responsibility for suffering squarely on the patient herself and a way for doctors to wash their hands of problem patients.
And I say herself deliberately, because data indicates both that women underreport pain and that their pain is taken less seriously when they do report it.
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Grace Alexander also had an objectively verified medical condition—spinal disc degeneration and cauda equina syndrome, nerve compression in the lumbosacral spine. She was bedridden with her left leg half-paralyzed, partially incontinent, “and in so much pain I couldn’t breathe. The solution was … be positive / meditate,” wrote Alexander. She does use mindfulness breathing techniques to help manage her pain, but those tools weren’t going to reverse her partial paralysis or her incontinence. She needed more aggressive interventions like surgery, medications, and injections to gain back her mobility. The mindfulness rhetoric felt familiar to Alexander, though, who grew up in an evangelical sect and as a child with intense migraines was taught that if she prayed hard enough and had enough faith her pain would go away, “and if you’re not better it’s your fault for not having enough faith.”
This circular logic permeates the way mindfulness is currently being prescribed in medical settings: If it doesn’t work for you, it’s because you’re too anxious and too invested in your pain, which is in fact more evidence that you need to practice mindfulness. And we’re back to the trope of the hysterical female pain patient.
What I mean by passion is not just that you have something you care about. What I mean is that you care about the same ultimate goal in an abiding, loyal, steady way. You are not capricious. Each day, you wake up thinking of the questions you fell asleep thinking about. You are, in a sense, pointing in the same direction, even eager to take even the smallest step forward than to take a step to the side, toward some other destination. At the extreme, one might call your focus obsessive. Most of your actions derive their significance from their allegiance to your ultimate concern, your life philosophy.
You have your priorities in order.
u ever get really apathetic about your interests for no reason so u just start cycling through all your past hyperfixations in ur head out of an inexplicable need to feel passion for something
The metric of objects only “sparking joy” is deeply problematic when applied to books. The definition of joy (for the many people yelling at me on Twitter, who appear to have Konmari’d their dictionaries) is: “A feeling of great pleasure and happiness, a thing that causes joy, success or satisfaction.” This is a ludicrous suggestion for books. Literature does not exist only to provoke feelings of happiness or to placate us with its pleasure; art should also challenge and perturb us.
We live in a frantic, goal-obsessed, myopic time. Everything undertaken has to have a purpose, outcome or a destination, or it’s invalid. But art doesn’t care a noodle about your Apple watch, your fitness goals, active lifestyle, right swipes, career and surrender on black pudding. Art will be around far longer than Kondo’s books remain in print. Art exists on its own terms and untidy timeline.
As for culling one’s unread books – while that may be essential for reducing fire and tripping hazards, it is certainly not a satisfying engagement with the possibilities of literature. (Unless it’s self-help or golf, in which case, toss it.) Success is, eventually, actually reading your unread books, or at least holding on to them long enough that they have the chance to satisfy, dissatisfy or dement you. Unread books are imagined reading futures, not an indication of failure.
Anakana Schofield, What we gain from keeping books – and why it doesn’t need to be ‘joy’
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stormborns
jacobvanloon
annaxmalina
jbbartram-illu
areudirty
germansingergirl
