“Dwelling on our troubles only makes them hurt more. I’ll just make myself look on the cheerful side.” (ODAT, 10 July)
The Al-Anon literature tells me until it’s blue in the face—as blue as the cover of this book—that I’m the author of my own woes. The job is to recognise whenever I’m unhappy: I chose to create this unhappiness because apparently I’d rather than be miserable, whining, self-pitying, than brave, cheerful, and hopeful.
The three core character defects in me: entitlement, ingratitude, cowardice. My ego tells me that I’m entitled to everything being delightful and trouble-free the whole time, the land of Cockaigne, that nothing I have is worth anything and the prize is what remains ever out of my Tantalus reach, that I haven’t the resources to deal with anything difficult and I shouldn’t have to: that’s for braver people.
Of course, one’s at liberty to think what one wants, but one’s not at liberty to avoid the consequences. Whatever goods I receive, emotionally, that’s what I ordered. I pressed the button. I can’t blame the deliveryman. For the longest time, I fostered complaint, disgruntlement, ‘plights and gripes as bad as Achilles’, in my Greek chorus of mournfulness alternating with alarmed dread, lavish with blame, extravagant with condemnation, but then ran to others because I couldn’t handle the emotions I had generated, and did not even like what I had done to myself.
At some point, I had to start to stop the misery at source. When the gramophone cranks up, lifting the needle out of the groove and saying to the ghostly culprit, ‘Now, now!’ A hundred, a thousand time a day, some days. But at some point the mental poltergeist goes and bothers someone else or lapses back into the ether. I’m the one who Madame Aracti’d the ‘blithe spirit’ into my life: I’m the one who has to exorcise it. That’s the direction from God. God gives me the direction and strength, but does not do it for me.