Drama as spiritual attack
I was going to write about something else today, but I keep laughing about something I read recently, and I just had to share.
I recently finished the fascinating book The War of Art by bestselling author Steven Pressfield, which is a sort of field guide to spiritual warfare. He goes through practical tactics for defeating what he calls “Resistance,” i.e. the malevolent force that works to prevent anything good from happening in the world (what a Christian might call “the devil” or “the enemy.”) In the section called Resistance and Self-Dramatization, Pressfield writes:
Creating soap opera in our lives is a symptom of Resistance…Sometimes entire families participate unconsciously in a culture of self-dramatization. The kids fuel the tanks, the grown-ups arm the phasers, the whole starship lurches from one spine-tingling episode to another. And the crew knows how to keep it going. If the level of drama drops below a certain threshold, someone jumps in to amp it up…It’s more fun than a movie. And it works: Nobody gets a damn thing done.
I laughed out loud when I read that, mainly because I realized that I’ve had my own Starship Resistance miniseries playing over here.
“I don’t even know why I bother to write at all!” I’d announce at the start of the day’s writing time when I was working on the book. “I just can’t get the words out! It’s all a waste! THIS ENTIRE PROJECT IS DOOMED!” And, with that opener, I’d drag my friend/husband/babysitter/UPS delivery man into a tedious, belabored conversation about my life as a tortured writer (hoping that nobody notices my liberal use of the label “writer”) while my cursor sat motionless on the screen, not one new word appearing on the page.
I seem to be most prone to this kind of silliness when I’m doing anything that could remotely be considered “art,” but no area of life is immune: whether it’s planning homeschool curricula or organizing the house or writing thank-you notes, I’ve realized that getting swept up in theatrics over minutia is one of the main ways I let Resistance keep me from getting anything done. (The internet is a particularly rich source of drama-based Resistance for me — anyone else think of the blogosphere in that Pressfield quote above?)
Not all “drama” is bad, of course. I love how the Christian life makes everything so exciting; how every day is a great battle, and the truths of the faith are better than the best fairy tale. It’s also normal and healthy to have strong reactions to intense events (in other words, don’t expect me to lay off the caps lock key next time I see a scorpion). And then there are things like clinical depression, where you may have stronger reactions to situations due to serious medical issues.
But there’s also just drama: baseless, time-wasting, Resistance-fueled caterwauling that you need to learn to shut down in order to live a full life. So how do you recognize it when you’ve fallen into it? I’ve been pondering that for the past couple of weeks, and what I’ve come up with is this:
I think the primary difference is that Resistance drama is ego-focused, whereas the healthy ups and downs of the spiritual life are God-focused. When I get mired in bad drama I withdraw into a tiny solar system with my blazing ego at the center, where I fixate on who said what that offended me, whether people will think what I’m doing is great or terrible, whether what I do is good or bad in comparison to other people’s work…and I give nothing back to the world. I’m a black hole. Paralyzed by Resistance. Whereas on the occasions that I’m swept up in positive drama, I’m more focused on God than myself, more concerned with helping people than comparing myself to them, and, most tellingly, I’m still creating. I’m still giving something back to the world.
Now that I’ve recognized this tendency, I’ve been getting a lot more done, especially in writing/creative type endeavors. I’m learning to identify those moments when I’ve brought my life to a screeching standstill by turning it into another thrilling episode of Starship Resistance; to know when I’m faced with legitimate issues that I need to address, and when it’s time to stop the theatrics and get to work.
CAVEAT 1: I know there’s recently been a lot of discussion in the blog world about depression and the spiritual life, so I want to emphasize again that I’m not talking about that or other serious mental health issues here. I’m talking about good old-fashioned melodrama.
CAVEAT 2: Even though Pressfield is not a Christian, as a Catholic I found 90% of The War of Art to be dead-on accurate and life-changingly, put-down-the-book-in-mid-sentence-and-go-tell-everyone-you-know-to-buy-a-copy good. Since it deals with spiritual matters it’s one you’ll want to read “with discernment,” as they say, but I do strongly recommend it.
7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 69)
Discussions about the weather with friends up north this week have led me to see that there is a need for a Cold Unfairness Index. Whenever I grouse about having to go out in rainy, 33-degree weather, they throw down with stories of blizzards, ice-covered sidewalks and highs in the 20′s. It always seems like they handily win the woe-is-me weather contest, but I keep sensing that there is something unjust about the scale.
It finally occurred to me: there needs to be some sort of winter weather index that takes into account the number of stinging bugs one has to deal with in the summer. For example, you get to drop five degrees for every scorpion sighting in your house, two degrees for every scorpion encountered outside your house, one degree for every wasp’s nest by your front door, etc. (And it automatically goes to zero Kelvin if you were actually stung by a scorpion. You just win. Nobody should have to deal with scorpion stings and weather below 40 degrees.)
A couple weeks ago my husband and I went to the coolest restaurant:
It’s called Ronnie’s Real Food, and eating there is a cross between dining in a restaurant and a cozy living room. The owner was an accountant who wanted to open a restaurant but didn’t want all the hassle, so he bought a house, set out some tables and started taking reservations. Each night he only offers a couple choices for entrees, you bring your own beer or wine, and it’s a fixed price: $25 per person including tax and tip.
The homey atmosphere, fresh, local food and personal touch made the dining experience one of my favorites ever. If you’re in Austin you have to check it out!
Speaking of food, here’s a tip for getting kids to get more variety in their diets: incorporate new or non-favorite foods into a “taco night.” For example, when I make beef stew my kids balk at the onions and mushrooms, and they don’t like the soupy texture. So I put drained meat and carrots on their plates, then set out little cups of sour cream and shredded cheese. I give them each a tortilla to combine it all into a taco, and they eat it like crazy. This works for all sorts of different food. You’d be amazed at the different kinds of “tacos” we make around here.
From the “I can’t believe this works” files, another tip: I’ve had great success in getting my three oldest children (ages five, three and two) to help me clean up at the end of each day by playing special music. Instead of setting a timer, I put on our two clean-up songs. It took a couple weeks to enforce the concept that they need to be cleaning while those songs are on (they get some treat afterwards in proportion to how hard they worked), but I’m telling you, it’s like they’re robots now. They’ll be standing around, whining, saying they don’t want to help straighten the living room, then I put on the music, and it’s as if their bodies start moving in cleaning motions without them willing it. It’s amazing.
(If anyone’s interested, our clean-up songs are 2-Minute Clean Up by Andy Dodge and Clean My Room by the Imagination Movers. Someone without young kids might find these songs grating, but they’re like freaking Tchaikovsky to my ears because I associate them with having my living room cleaned for free and not by me.)
Has anyone tried one of these Presto things? I love the idea: it’s a printer that prints emails for people who don’t own computers (a more thorough explanation here). We’re thinking about getting one for my 95-year-old grandfather. Anyone have any good/bad experiences with it?
I just remembered that this weekend is Valentine’s Day. That holiday never makes it on my radar. It’s not that I dislike it; I think my subconscious just has this tendency to block out non-essential holidays that require planning, creativity or domestic adeptness as a way to avoid epic failures on my part. My husband and I have half-jokingly talked about setting St. Claude la Colombiere day as our romantic holiday — there’d be less pressure to do anything elaborate, and since it’s the day after Valentine’s Day it’d be easy to get cards and flowers on discount. (This is why nobody asks me to write homemaking advice columns.)
Anyway, I like to live vicariously through people who do cool stuff for Valentine’s Day, though. Anyone have any cool plans?
Tomorrow I’m excited to be going to the Darwins‘ annual blogging meetup, where we’ll be joined by Melanie Bettinelli, Dom Bettinelli, Literacy-Chic, Christopher of Sanctus Christopher and a few other friends who don’t currently have blogs. (I apologize if I’m forgetting anyone!) Should be a great time, as always.
I look forward to reading your posts!
Powered by… Mister Linky’s Magical Widgets.
7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 55)
A little public service announcement for fellow procrastinators: Christmas Day is only nine weeks away!
A while back I mentioned that I was musing about what the difference is between an essay and a book. “Why is a book not just a long essay?” I wondered. Thanks to that awesome Breakout Novel book, I think I finally found the answer: An essay has only one layer; a book has many layers.
To use my conversion story as an example, I’ve written quite a few articles on that subject, and each one comes at it from a different perspective: One talked about how, surprisingly, Christianity ended up being more of a fulfillment of (rather than a departure from) what I’d always believed as an atheist; one talked about I came to believe that Christianity simply presented a more reasonable worldview; another talked about how my daily life has changed; etc. Each one of those is a layer on a larger story. When you write a book, what you’re doing is taking all the layers of a story and weaving them together to form one multi-layered story. Just a thought for fellow book nerds.
I just got finished doing one of my least favorite things: Shoe shopping. “But I love shoe shopping!” you say. Yeah, well, you don’t wear size 12 and have to buy glorified clown shoes from special Sasquatch stores. There is never anything cute in size 12. Ever. On the rare occasions that you actually come across a shoe that looks just darling on the size 5 sample and find out to your short-lived delight that they actually have a size 12 in some dusty corner of the store, when you see it in your size it looks like some sort of conceptual art project gone wrong. Allow me to illustrate:
To put it in perspective:
Add to the fact that I’m six feet tall and therefore heels are out lest I seriously start to look like a hairless Sasquatch, and you see that my choices are limited to about five shoes in the entire world. Anyway, yeah. I really don’t like shoe shopping.
If you didn’t get a chance to read the comments to my post about what to do when you screwed up and went against God’s will, I highly recommend taking a moment to scan them. There were some great thoughts there. Thank you to all who commented!
Tonight (I’m writing this on Thursday) I’ll be heading out to the Texas Alliance for Life dinner to see Gianna Jessen speak. It should be a great evening, and I look forward to hearing her presentation. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Gianna’s story of surviving an attempted abortion — the abortion doctor, ironically, having to sign her birth certificate — you can read the BBC coverage of it here.
Speaking of which, my husband did a little unexpected pro-life advocacy this morning. He somewhat spontaneously decided to stop by one of the local 40 Days for Life continuous prayer vigils to say hello to and see if anyone needed coffee or snacks or anything. There was only one guy there, and as soon as my husband arrived he said, “Thank God you’re here! The next person wasn’t able to make it and I’m late opening my business!” Since the goal is to have at least one person praying at all times, the guy couldn’t leave unless my husband agreed to stay. After a little hesitation he agreed to take over. And then it started raining.
His conversion on pro-life issues was about as dramatic as mine, but I don’t think he’d planned to do sidewalk prayer vigils just yet. But, nevertheless, there he was, standing under an umbrella in his suit and tie in front of an abortion clinic on a major road during rush hour. I have to wonder if anyone drove by and thought, “Look, some weirdo out in the rain…wait…wait a sec…that’s my lawyer!”
Yaya just rolled into town. Those of you who don’t know what that means can find out here. It just occurred to me that if God ever wanted to send me THE ULTIMATE BLOG POST, he could hook up it up where I’m driving with Yaya and we find a scorpion in the car while getting stuck behind someone with Trucknutz. Dude. I think that would be guaranteed to pretty much triple my blog traffic.
Anyway, have a great weekend, everyone!
I look forward to reading your posts!
Powered by… Mister Linky’s Magical Widgets.
7 Quick Takes Friday (vol. 43)
We went to the San Antonio zoo yesterday. In 101-degree heat. With a four-hour round trip drive. Does that sound challenging? It was. However, it was all worth it to meet up with the other Kidsave families — who are some of the nicest people I’ve ever met — and to see how excited all the girls were to be there. My kids liked it as well, although as it got closer to naptime and they began to look more and more like angry tomatoes, the excitement of the exotic animals began to wear off for them.
Also, in the “scary things that bite” sections, I was trying to get the kids excited as we walked past rattlesnakes, poisonous spiders and scorpions but it kind of fell flat when I announced, “Look, kids! It’s…a bunch of stuff that you can find in the back yard.”
I have a new job description for myself: wife, mother, writer and Hannah Montana English-to-Spanish translator. Rita is absolutely enchanted with this show but doesn’t know a word of English, so I narrate each episode in bad Spanish.
It’s a good thing she has the peppy visuals, because my descriptions alone make the show sound Kafkaesque. “Hannah without the hair is Miley…the friend does not know that Miley is famous because is secret that she is Hannah…and the father of Miley is mad…because she wants to sing and not go to dance with the nice boy…” I can only imagine the plot summaries she’s going to recount to her friends when she returns to Colombia.
“You’re letting her watch Hannah Montana?” you say? I know. Early on I tried to avoid it, but 12-year-old girls have Hannah Montana radar, and when I was flipping through the TV menu she spotted it immediately. Trying to steer her to something more enriching, I suggested that we watch EWTN in Spanish instead. “Look!” I announced, “A movie about Maria Goretti! How lovely to watch a film about a saint.” About thirty minutes into the movie I learned that I should do a little research to make sure I know about a saint’s life before encouraging children to watch movies about them. Just before the assault scene I switched it over to Hannah Montana in a desperate attempt to put on something a little more light. We’ve watched it daily ever since then.
Earlier this week we toured some amazing caves in our area. The tour was fascinating. It was so weird to look up at the top of the cavern and realize that we were standing right under the highway. The craziest part was when they turned out the lights to let us see the total darkness of the cave. The guide told us to close our eyes while he turned off the lights; when we opened our eyes again, there was no difference. None. Just complete darkness. I waved my hand an inch in front of my face and couldn’t see any trace of it. So creepy.
That experience made me realize that it takes a special type of person to be a cave explorer, that type being “not me.” I have a newfound fascination with people who are able to do that. Anyone know of any good books about cave exploration?
What are we going to do about the lack of a gender-neutral singular personal pronoun in the English language? Saying “he or she” all the time is way too clunky, but just using “he” or “she” often comes across like you’re trying to make some kind of political statement. Is there someone we can petition about this? Maybe we should just riot? Maybe we could all just agree to use “them” in the singular sense and fie on anyone who says we’re using it incorrectly. Who’s with me?
A huge “THANK YOU!!!!!!” to those who recommended duct tape in response to my feces apocalypse post. Putting a couple layers of duct tape across the flaps on my daughter’s diaper is a new part of our naptime and bedtime routines, and it’s had a 9 out of 10 success rate. Granted, 1/10th of the time it’s still pretty grim, but it’s a huge improvement.
A few people have mentioned that I seem stressed lately. My friend Elizabeth said in an email the othe day, “You sound SO incredibly tense and stressy-filled lately on your blog.” I found that interesting since I have been especially, ah, “challenged” lately but I didn’t realize it was so obvious.
I’ve been thinking a lot about why I’ve been having a tough time, and I think that 95% of it simply comes down to not having much “introvert time,” i.e. time when I don’t have to be “on” at all. I haven’t felt comfortable enforcing that with a guest in the house, worrying that it would be rude to essentially say, “Now that the kids are down for naps and it’s just you and I…I’m going to sit alone in my office. See you later!”
Though I technically knew that that was how I recharge my batteries and de-stress (I talked about that some here), I had no idea just how much it impacts me when I don’t have time like that. Even the slightest things leave me feeling like I CAN’T. DEAL. Nothing about having Rita here has been unmanagable in and of itself, but all the activity and responsibility + almost zero alone time has left me running in the red zone lately.
What I’ve realized is that when you have a guest staying with you for five weeks, you can’t be in “guest mode” all the time — you have to relax around them the way you would around family. Starting today I’m going to make it a high priority to get back to having daily introvert time. I’ll be interested to see how much it helps. I’ll report back in next week’s 7 Quick Takes.
Have a great weekend, everyone!
NOTE: Normally this isn’t a big deal, but because we’re going to use this list for something on Monday, this time I will need to delete any links that are not to the specific 7 Quick Takes post. If your link gets deleted because you accidentally entered the main URL of your blog, please re-submit with the link to your 7QT post. If you’re not sure how to do that, this post offers a great explanation. Thanks!
Powered by… Mister Linky’s Magical Widgets.