F*ck Feelings (14 page)

You can't protect yourself from the immediate pain and helplessness of slander, but you can always win in the end by staying focused on your own goals, controlling what you do with your feelings, and working to restore the balance of your life, energy, and universe.

Here's what you wish for and can't have:

• Quick validation and vindication

• Protection from loss and damage to your finances, reputation, and family relationships

• Control over the damage by persuasion, negotiation, or retaliation

• Relief from outrage and general unbelievable bullshit

Here's what you can aim for and actually achieve:

• Avoid making things worse

• Limit damage, gather allies, and fight if necessary

• Stay focused on your life, as opposed to your defense

• Strengthen your self-control

• Learn from your mistakes

Here's how you can do it:

• Don't let your outrage take over

• Learn how to assert yourself in measured, careful speech

• Identify what's worth fighting for and what you can win

• Don't get panicked by outrage and fear

• Educate yourself about relevant laws and legal procedures and get the best help you can afford

• Take heart in your long-term goals and in your gradual ability to move beyond the reach of the Assholes who are out to get you

Here's what to say when you're slandered.

Dear [Me/Unjust Accuser/Those Who Believe Said Accuser's Shit],

I am aware of allegations stating that I [fool around/am a criminally bad parent/don't bathe] and can assure you they aren't true. I don't intend to discuss them unless it's necessary to protect my [livelihood/time with my kids/now fragile sense of sanity and reality—and even that, only with my lawyer]. Other than to deny them, I hope to avoid wasting time on old grievances and instead focus on the [insert positive noun describing anything but the rumors].

Instant Catharsis!

Unfair scenarios with some fictional justice, so you don't try to find it on your own.

Sometimes it's hard to get over a great disappointment or loss because of the longing, not just for what's been lost, but for what could or should have been. That's when the pain of mourning isn't just hard to bear but is prolonged by shock over the unfairness of life and the need to seek closure, that great emotional unicorn.

You've been counting on the power of a shared set of moral beliefs, together with your record of good actions, to keep your life and the life of your family and community moving forward. The yearning for closure happens when your heart and your faith in the way society is supposed to work are both broken.

So when someone betrays you, or something bad happens and no one sets it straight, it feels like your world is undone and can't be put back together. It feels like an open wound, which closure would protect from infection by restoring your world to its natural order.

In reality, of course, even people with the same beliefs often see the world differently, interpret the rules differently, and thus wind up betraying one another while feeling it's the other guy's fault. And bystanders and authorities, confused about the facts and having to listen to multiple arguments, can't act decisively and often do more harm than good.

So it's neither surprising nor unusual for things to fall apart in a way that undermines your faith in hard work, sacrifice, justice, and a fair society. What you want is for something to restore your faith, but what you need is a different kind of faith to begin with. You're the one who forged the connection between doing good and getting good back from others and you're the one who has to knock that crazy, dangerous idea out of your head, not keep pushing for relief and vindication that will never come.

It's not just the lingering malaise that's a problem; having faith in the commitment of others to your values is also dangerous because it blinds you to reality and makes you too reactive when something goes wrong. Feeling oppressed by whatever went wrong makes you seek out similar situations, looking for a do-over and a chance to make things right. You look for ways to get even or just to straighten things out instead of accepting what's broken and moving ahead.

Instead, accept life's painful lesson that some people you trust will betray you because, from their frame of reference, it's the right thing to do, or just the only thing they feel they can do. Some people will let bad things happen without doing much to stop or punish them because it's just so complicated. If anyone promised you otherwise, they were wrong and were just speaking for themselves, not the true powers that be.

So if you want to do good, make commitments and be part of a community, but don't expect it to be easy. In fact, given how often your efforts will be undone or treated badly by life—how often your good deeds will get punished—you deserve all the more credit, assuming you do them knowing the shit you're getting into.

And when you do get into shit—shit that you can't help but feel shouldn't have occurred—focus less on what could and should have been and more on what can happen from here on out. Remember, unfairness is very real, and closure is not.

Among the wishes people express are:

• To get some official acknowledgment of what really happened in order to achieve catharsis

• To see some benefit, instead of endless harm

• To make sense of what went wrong so they can feel peace

• To see something bad happen to bad people so justice is done

Here are three examples:

My last job was almost ideal until the new boss came in; before that I was a happy member of the team. We all respected one another, the work suited me, and everyone knew I was doing a good job. I loved it. Then came the new boss, and it was subtle and unintentional, but he was buddies with the guys and was vaguely creepy with the girls, so he and I had zero chemistry. It was hell, but not in any way I could protest, so I let my contract run out and left. It bothers me though that I had it so good and lost it, and while my current job is okay but boring, I'm haunted by wondering what I could have done differently to hold on to something that was so right for me. My goal is to get over this feeling of not being able to stop thinking about what I had now that it's gone.

After almost twenty years of marriage, my husband left me for his gold-digger secretary. It turned my life upside down because I thought we had a good marriage and were getting along well—I felt I worked
hard and made big sacrifices for our family, which included both him and the kids, and to get rewarded by having him leave me for that tramp made the shock just too hard to bear. Now that my husband and I have been apart for longer than we were married, I want to hate him less, but can't figure out how. The kids are fine with families of their own, and I found a career that I really enjoy, but I've barely dated since the divorce and still find it painful when my kids mention going to spend time with their dad and his trashy wife. I don't care about remarrying, but I hate that my ex still has this hold on me after all these years. My goal is to find the closure I need to finally let go.

It took five years before the guy who killed my brother while driving drunk finally got a trial, but I know they got the right man. Unfortunately, this guy is from a rich family, so he's got a good lawyer who, as it turns out, has gotten him off the hook several times over the years for everything from DUIs to assaults. I go to the trial every day and glare at this spoiled asshole, because I want the jury to know there won't be any closure for me or the family until he's convicted and put away, and there can't be separate laws for rich people and working people like my brother. My goal is to get peace and know that justice was done for my brother.

After a loss that you feel shouldn't have happened, you may well find yourself unable to move beyond grief until you find something to balance out its unfairness, or give it positive meaning. What you actually need, however, is to attack the ingrained assumption that unfair shit doesn't happen.

Rationally, you know lots of bad things happen for no reason. On a subconscious level, your mind will tell you the opposite, and it's your job to talk back instead of getting hung up on closure, which is about as likely as cold fusion or a Cubs World Series win.

Instead of mourning unfairness, improve your ability to do good in an unfair world. You may have lost a relationship that should have lasted, but you did a good job with your part of it (other than, perhaps, choosing the wrong person). You may have lost a great job, but
you did well with it when you had the opportunity, and learned something about the kind of boss you should never work for. Challenge yourself to blot “should have” and “could have” from your vocabulary.

Whatever was good about what you lost, think about your contribution to that goodness, rather than trying to figure out what you did wrong to lose it. Whether it was a good job, a good relationship, or just a very happy time, focus on the good things you did to appreciate it while you had it, like making the most of a summer's day, knowing you probably had little to do with the way it ended other than, perhaps, not bringing an umbrella. If someone dumped you when things seemed to be going well, it probably had much more to do with their character than anything you did wrong or had any influence over.

Death can be particularly meaningless and unfair, but don't make it your job to give it significance. For most of us, death is what we have the least control over and it's not what we want to be remembered for. What gives our lives meaning is what we do with our living days, not how they end, so attend to what was good about the life of someone you lost, and your relationship with him, not to what was horrible about his death and the relationship's finish.

If you never stop feeling regret and a yearning for closure, consider it the price of experiencing something wonderful and having the kind of temperament that doesn't let go. Your brain may hit you with should-haves whenever you have too much time to think. So keep busy, and build a philosophy for fighting regrets and yearnings for fairness in a world that just doesn't have it.

Some people will always feel the need for closure, like an itch on a phantom limb, and if you're one of them, learn how to live with the feeling without paying attention to what it tells you. It will have less power over your life if you remind yourself that even if you can't have what it wants, other things are more important.

You haven't lost your ability to do good things with life, even if it never loses its ability to do bad things to you.

Here's what you wish for and can't have:

• Restoration of your belief that things will eventually work out

• Faith that everything happens for a reason

• Justice, fairness, vindication, world peace, etc.

• Closure, or relief from its opposite, aka waiting for the other bad-luck shoe to drop

Here's what you can aim for and actually achieve: