I’ve been using my phone timer a lot lately. Twenty minutes to load the dishwasher. Twenty minutes to work on editing my printed out manuscript. Twenty minutes to walk the cat around the yard. Twenty minutes to learn some French.
Answer e-mails. Go on Twitter. Repeat.
It’s helping.
It’s helping me close – or open – my laptop or put down my phone and get off the couch despite this state-of-mind I seem to have entered, flavoured a bit like the frightening despair (a.k.a. depression) I fell into a couple of years ago, which I struggled to get a handle on.
But this isn’t depression. It’s just flavoured in a similar way (probably thanks to medication). It’s got the same tang of ‘whatisthepointedness’ but without that salty and dark, squid ink undertow.
Turns out there’s a name for it.
Languishing.
‘The neglected middle child of mental health,’ writer Adam Grant called it in the New York Times this week, in an article pointed at the next day by The Guardian which summarized it in case, you know, readers couldn’t concentrate long enough to read the entire article (because, yeah).
“Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness,” writes Grant. “It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.”
Languishing and mental illness are at the bottom of the mental health continuum scale – developed by Canadian Dr. Corey Keyes in 2002 – while flourishing is at the top.
And flourishing is really, really hard these days. For many of us. For me.
What to do? According to the article’s advice: pursue the “just manageable difficulty” or ‘tiny things’ as I call them in my Writing During Difficult Times workshop.
“Taking on a small but achievable challenge – a project, a puzzle, a modest goal – that can sharpen your focus and rekindle your enthusiasm for life,” advises The Guardian.
Enthusiasm might be a lot to ask for these days but keeping one’s head above water isn’t because it’s necessary. Life will get better, and perhaps we’ll even find a way to make meaning out of this whole mess, as Vic Strecher talks about with vulnerability, humour, and optimism in his Ted Talk On Purpose (if you do no other ‘tiny thing’ today, watch this video).
My timer has already gone off – 20 minutes to write a blog post – but I continue to polish it, to finish it up. This effort, with a cup of hot tea by my side, feels meaningful, feels like a way of turning the shit-happens of my current mood into a pretty little ball of sculptured dung (seriously, watch the video).
And now over to you. How are you coping? What ‘tiny things’ are helping you?
Hi Lauren, great post.
Languishing…languishing feels like ‘restless-stillness’, if that makes any sense.
I’ve so been there, these past few months especially…waiting, waiting for an essay to be accepted, for inspiration to start (or finish the next one), to peck away on my nascent novel, to put away my clothes, to get rid of the flowers that died in the vase three weeks ago.
One day, I snapped out of it, and for no particular reason either. Just like it began. I suspect this is also how I will enter the state again, the next time around. 🙂
Love your blog posts and being connected. Can’t wait for your class on character in June.
Warmest regards,
Cheryl
Loved this, but I’m older than you and I find I have this dire urgency nipping at me that does not allow for the intrinsic inactivity of languishing. So, I don’t languish but I do other frog-boiling things. By rights, I should be a good languisher — I certainly have the carotene colouration, though maybe I’ve faded into the wan sweet potato end of the red register.
Anyway, instead of languishing, my go-to frog-boilery is unreasonable blaming. Blaming, you see, feels like I’m in motion, even if all I’m doing is tapping keys and sending them into a vapid void filled with like-winded others; ungentle carrots and not-so-sweet taters among them. Yelling at some faceless foe feels like flourishing, you see? But it is not.
I think, dung-wise, they come to the same pungent point, your languishment and my angry blaming do. So I’ll make myself this bargain: Others — Janice (wifey), the big raven who hangs around here, the good people in my writing circle, my daughters, anyone — can blame me, without reason, for any incidental not-niceness that comes their way. I’ll just take it. In return, I’ll try to refrain from barking furiously at every squirrel that I suspect may have chittered at me unfairly or the form rejections (even those signed, “Sincerely,”) that have collected inside my castle walls lately.
I’ve been doing my fair bit of blaming lately too, Mitch. Starts with P, ends with R, rhymes with Shallister. Enjoy the hot tub, but don’t stay in too long 🙂