Janet McNeill

<March 24/10>

I just went shopping for a birthday card (yes, some environmental activists would no doubt frown on my “card habit.” It’s a fairly innocuous little addiction, seems to me, compared to some others I can think of).

I get a big kick out of looking at cards because I love laughing – & I came up with the phrase “card therapy” when I discovered some years ago now that I can cheer myself up lickety-split (& have a grand old time to boot) just spending 10 minutes looking at cards. My laughter generally even gets the store staff laughing too. (I’ve said it before & I’ll say it again – I’m a pretty cheap date!)

So, I found a card that made me laugh out loud, & then think some about families. Well. They sure do come in all shapes, sizes & kinds, don’t they?? Every one of them unique, every one of them almost certainly not at all what they appear to be from the outside, looking in.

My own “birth family” was a wee bit on the dysfunctional side. Of course they all are, as we understand now – but when I grew up in the 50’s & 60’s I laboured under the grand illusion that everyone else had it all together. I always felt like an outsider &, I suppose, an imposter – walking around acting as though everything was A-OK, meanwhile holding down the lid on the … confusion … that was my family’s life.

(I was fortunate enough to marry into a family that seemed to me like the very Waltons incarnate – really a very darn fine crowd of people! – & that was very nice & kind of a privilege for me for quite a few years there. Divorce took care of that, in time, although I can say with gratitude that I am still close to a number of very lovely individuals in that family.)

As a result of all this family-related…how shall we say, experience, all my adult life I’ve been a keen observer of this strange human animal called the “nuclear” family. Love & divorce & new relationships & friends’ families: one is endlessly being offered glimpses of the infinite variety of family configurations, our love (& hate) of them, their closeness (or lack thereof), their internal power dynamics… & the degree to which we can each probably be understood by others just by reciting a 5-minute snapshot or history of our childhood/family life.

My own birth family (which has always seemed to me to be pretty markedly dysfunctional, but which according to my sister was not a big deal at all) could be compared to some & seen as almost Waltonesque. (There are some pretty…hmmm….shall we say, off-the-charts families out there!) Compared to others, we look(ed) like full-on disaster. That of course is why I jokingly say it’s all relative. Pun intended…

I guess all this is what has made me crave all my life to be part of a (yes, fictional) “normal” family – one in which everyone gets together semi-frequently for birthdays & Mothers’ Days & Fathers’ Days & Thanksgivings & Christmases & Easters – & don’t all hate one another and, by golly, even mostly like (even love!!) one another.

I haven’t entirely lucked out in that department. Negotiating families of divorce can be quite challenging. Slight understatement here, hmmm? I’ve had more related experience in this regard than a person might strictly care to have had, but…perhaps the less said, the better.

Well.

The birthday card I came across that made me laugh right out loud said, “I was thinking about getting the whole family together to celebrate your birthday” – with a picture of a motley collection of people on the front of the card. You open it up & it says “But then I thought you might want to do something fun.”

It sure tickled my funny bone!!

Clearly, I am not the only person on the planet who doesn’t belong to that mythical “perfect” family, hmmm?

Well. I guess we all “wrestle” all our lives with the peculiarities & particular wounds of our own childhood & family, hmm? I know I continue to do so. I keep getting insights about myself – about my particular neuroses & idiosyncrasies – still! – & every time I get knocked on my butt by a new relationship drama, I learn yet a little more. (It seems a bit like an archaeological dig; one keeps on excavating unexpected things…)

One great lesson I’ve picked up along the way is that, while we don’t get to choose our family (on a conscious level, at least), we can find, & choose, a community – a tribe.

The big thinkers say alienation is the central bedeviling problem of the human race. The only way to beat that is to find a sense of belonging. Our families cannot guarantee us that, unfortunately. Once upon a time, each of us was born into a tribe. Belonging was our birthright in those days, I’m pretty sure.

While finding my own tribe was definitely something I did not set out to do by becoming involved in environmental work 20 years ago, that’s pretty much exactly what happened.

And as I write down that thought, it comes to me that I didn’t just sort of miraculously find the buried treasure under the spot marked X, I’ve been helping build the tribe to which I now so joyfully, gratefully & proudly belong.

I read in the Utne Reader some years ago this statement attributed to Kalle Lasn & Bruce Grierson: “Two centuries of philosophers stand in opposition to the modern American recipe for happiness and fulfillment. You can’t buy your way in. You can’t amuse yourself in. You can’t even expect falling in love to deliver you. The most promising way to happiness is, perhaps, through creativity, through literally creating a fulfilling life for yourself by identifying some unique talent or passion and devoting a good part of your energy to it, forever.”

Helen Keller said, “Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”

For me, for sure, “following my bliss” has really paid off!! The road has been full of potholes & detours & has even led me off a cliff or two…but hey!

Here I am, now, leading (& loving) this unexpected life – a full, never-dull life adventure for which I am wildly, wildly grateful.

I didn’t (& couldn’t, & can’t) re-create the Humpty Dumpty life I once had (that perfect family, perfect marriage I’d wanted so badly to last forever). Instead, I’ve become a member of a wonderful, wonderful ever-expanding tribe (with members, btw, who are often just as kooky & “dysfunctional” as everything & everyone else on the planet, myself included).

“Perfection” is just an illusion, hmmm?

I know what Kurt Vonnegut would say about it all: “If that isn’t nice, I don’t know what is!”

Janet

‘Quote of the day’ w. this post: “The return from your work must be the satisfaction that work brings you and the world’s need of that work. With this, life is heaven, or as near heaven as you can get.” – W.E.B. DuBois

<July 18/09>

Now, I’m not a psychological expert of any kind. I did get a B.A. in Psychology back in pre-history (1974), when really very little was yet understood about the human brain.

There’s plenty I don’t know about human psychology – don’t really understand – but I am a keen and constant observer of human nature – and I read a lot, think a lot, and have the occasional “Aha!” moment.

I believe there are two levels to our control freak-ism – the very, very personal, and the more global, shall we say.

I’m pretty convinced that the genesis of our tendency toward control freak-ism goes back to the time in human history, widely said by scholars to be about 10,000 years ago, when we chose to abandon the tribal lifestyle – the life of gatherers and hunters – and began to practice settled agriculture. Several books introduced this idea to me: In the Absence of the Sacred – The Failure of Technology & the Survival of the Indian Nations (Jerry Mander, Sierra Club Books, 1992); Ishmael – An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit (Daniel Quinn, Bantam/Turner, 1992); and My Name is Chellis & I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization (Chellis Glendinning, Shambhala, 1994). (I highly recommend all 3,btw.)

In doing so, we detoured away from millennia of placing our faith in the Earth/Universe to provide for us (which the Earth/Universe was so generously doing), and decided to “take control” of things. In retrospect, it now seems to a lot of us, I think, that this was a very, very problematic choice.

Abandoning the tribal lifestyle has had many unfortunate and no doubt unintended consequences (I love that phrase: unintended consequences; life is full of them, hmm?), to put it rather mildly. Separating ourselves from Nature – and from each other and our tribal ways – has been nothing short of disastrous.

That’s the global piece.

So now we all have 10,000 years of a control mindset wired into us – into our brains and our genes and our culture and our guts.

Bringing it down to the more personal level, many of us on the planet grew up in families in which dysfunctionality was rampant; is it not so?

There are/were alcoholic parents, parents who abandon/ed us in one form or another, mistreat/ed us, sexually abuse/d us, visit/ed violence upon us, berate/d us constantly – and we wind up/wound up very damaged in a startling variety of ways. If our childhood was very chaotic, unpredictable and out-of-control, as adults we tend to have an intense need to control our circumstances – our emotions, our surroundings, the people around us, and so on. (Even the appearance of our lawns! To the point of being willing to use poisons on them to “subdue” weeds. Sheesh!)

It’s not so surprising, is it? We want to somehow right the wrongs that were done to us, and so we become control freaks – to a greater or lesser degree. We want things to be predictable. No more out of control stuff, please, we are saying, hmm?

It’s a coping strategy, pure and simple. It doesn’t tend to work terribly well, of course, given that the very nature of life is to not be controlled or controllable. So it becomes a vicious cycle. The more we try to control everything around us, the more out-of-control things seem to become. And on and on we go, around and around, making ourselves (and the people around us) miserable, sick, and maybe even crazy.

Control freak-ism is kind of a losing strategy, you might say, hmm?

It often seems to take a personal disaster of some sort to make us see that our excessive need for control is causing us more problems than it solves. (Been there!)

When life throws an unexpected curve ball our way – especially one of rather large proportions (and Life seems to positively delight in doing so!) – and life as we’ve known it is shattered, often light begins to dawn. We see the illusory nature of the control freak-ism that has so limited us, and we begin to see that a generous Earth/Universe is there to support us, quite without our trying to always be the Great Big Sheriff of this, that & the other thing. We let go and, as it were, the Earth rises up to greet us.

It’s all quite magical, really.

I find all of it very, very poignant. Tragic, but poignant. So much of human endeavour and our human frailties (and worse) can drive us right around the bend, almost – but when we come to see that underneath all the nonsense we are really quite innocent creatures – innocent, but very, very damaged and hurt; well, it helps, somehow, doesn’t it? It certainly helps bring up compassion, if nothing else.

I’ve heard that some of the major writers (being terrible with details, I can’t remember who) have pinpointed alienation as the key human problem or issue. I think they’re right. A word I would twin with it is abandonment. So many of us feel we were abandoned in one or many ways by our parents (and we were, we were) and/or by spouses/partners along the way (we were, we were) – and this comes down through the generations, and Heaven help us all, we then pass it on down to our own children, one way and another; tragically, tragically, this is so.

We’ve all felt abandoned/alienated for 10,000 years, so how could things be otherwise??

We human beings evolved to be loved and looked after and cared for by a whole tribe of people, whom we in return love, look after and care for.

How then could we feel anything other than abandoned and alienated in a world that tells us to get by on our own, more or less – or in the care of a very small number of people, some of them too damaged themselves to do anything but pass along their hurts and pain and damage?(1)

It’s all very sad – nay, tragic – and so poignant to realize that we are all in the same darn boat. We’re all damaged – to greater and lesser degrees – and we live in a world – an industrial economy that, as Wendell Berry has said, “thrives by damage.”

Healing is always possible, however. It is human nature to change/grow/evolve. It may very well be that we have let the sickness go on too long, and our condition (as a species) is terminal – but at least as individuals, we can turn ourselves around (only if we truly want to, of course. That is a choice we make, and choice is key, key, key in human endeavour…).

Now. All of this is just my opinion. None of it is scientific fact, and you can’t put any of it under a microscope or conduct a scientific experiment to prove (or disprove) it.

As Einstein once said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts.”

It seems to me like truth. Make of it what you will, hmm?

Janet

P.S. The essays ‘Control Freaks Anonymous’ and ‘Ditching the 2 x 4’s’ are also about the perennially important subject of control – which I see as the central issue/dilemma of human endeavour, pretty much… You can find those essays in the blog Index. I also wrote another essay on the same day as this one. It’s called ‘Out of Control,’ & I will post it eventually. It’s considerably more personal and more passionate than this one, & I’m just not quite ready to post it yet.

<January 2009>

Putting people up on pedestals seems to be an irresistible pastime among us humans, doesn’t it?

I’ve done entirely too much of it in my own life, for sure – but I know I’m far from alone in what I now see as this very unfortunate tendency. I really believe this pedestal business is something we need to put a stop to.

We put people up on pedestals in (a likely completely unconscious) way, as if to say, “Wow. You’re so good/smart/pretty/talented/virtuous/accomplished…and I could never be so (take your pick) good/smart/pretty/talented/virtuous/accomplished… and so, I’m not maybe even going to try very hard to be as (again, take your pick) good/smart/pretty/talented/virtuous/accomplished as I can be.

Or something like that. I don’t really understand it myself, dear Reader – I’m still wrestling with it, okay?

I think it’s tied up with the widespread tendency to have rather low regard for ourselves, no matter how good/smart/pretty/talented/virtuous/accomplished we may happen to be. As in, I think too many of us feel inside, really, that “I’m not OK; YOU’re OK” (‘cos you are so much more good/smart/pretty/talented/virtuous/accomplished than I am).

I think the roots run pretty deep… I’ve written elsewhere about how I believe most of our pathologies go back about 10,000 years – and I suspect this pedestal business can trace its roots to the same loss – the loss of our feeling connected (deeply and inextricably connected) to a whole tribe of people, the loss of which led to that horrible scourge of human life – alienation.

Well. This little rant is about pedestals, not alienation…

I think lots of us come from families in which the dysfunctions were numerous and in some cases raging, and we grew up looking around us thinking “everybody else” had it all together (at the very least, this certainly holds true for my own pedestal-creating tendencies…).

If we could just get a fabulous job and make tons of money and really, really succeed at “looking good” (which most “big shots” and celebrities do, hmm?), we’d finally fill up that inner hole of insufficiency, insecurity and need…right??

And meanwhile, we go around firing other people up onto pedestals.

In my own life, I’ve at one time or another had scientists, academics, couples with intact marriages, mothers of many children, certain individuals and certain families way up there on lofty pedestals.

Eventually, of course, they’ve all come crashing down under the weight of their mere… humanness.

Turns out we are ALL merely human, and terribly fallible. Academics can sometimes be not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer about 101 things – brilliant, perhaps, in their own narrow way, yet utterly clueless in so many others. Scientists? Same story. Very often brilliant in a tiny area of expertise, but incapable of seeing the big picture, or the forest for the trees, you might say… (this of course does not apply to all academics, or all scientists…but enough of them to have made me realize that the one-size-fits-all pedestal had to go…).

And all those individuals and the families I’ve hoisted up so high, well, they’ve all turned out to be about as fallible as I myself am – which is pretty goshdarn fallible, I’m afraid.

Shoot, I’m aware that a few people have put me up on some kind of pedestal – poor unfortunate, misguided souls! My ex-husband and children (and all the people who know me really well) would certainly have a grand belly laugh at the thought of anyone elevating me onto a pedestal; to them, my faults, neuroses, problems and shortcomings are so glaringly numerous and obvious that pedestal-occupying is an utterly nonsensical concept.

Here’s the thing, you see: as my sister Elizabeth once said to me, “There’s only one way to go off a pedestal, isn’t there?”

She got that so right…

We’re all kinda the same, is the deal.

We all have our faults, neuroses, problems, challenges – and sure, some of us are so damaged (I’ve worked in the psychiatric and correctional fields, so have seen some kind of extreme things) that recovery seems pretty darn unlikely – but anyone reading this little rant has enough intelligence and perception and resilience and sheer gumption to do some reading and meditating and self-healing (counsellors can sometimes be mighty helpful too) to clear away some of those internal cobwebs that get in our way so readily.

You can also let this wonderful, inspiring Ralph Waldo Emerson quotation fill you up with hope:

“What lies behind us and what lies ahead are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

We are capable of awesome feats, dear Reader; yes! Each and every single one of us.

Instead of using up our energy to put ourselves down & elevate others unrealistically, let’s each acknowledge & then act on our very own awesome potential for greatness.

What are we waiting for??

Janet