You Don't Choose
When my daughter Mercy died at birth almost twenty years ago, a number of people warned me that having a child die is one of the top triggers for divorce. I was so determined that wasn’t going to happen to me. My family was not going to be a statistic. My (now ex-) husband and I weren’t going to grow apart. We were going to talk about our grief and do our grieving together. We were going to have communication!
We went to several rounds of marriage therapy with various therapists who did their best. We held on for another fifteen years. But the marriage fell apart anyway. Sometimes (not often) I wish that I’d read the tea leaves earlier and understood that the changes that we had undergone, partly due to our daughter’s death and perhaps partly due simply to aging and changing for other reasons, had inexorably pulled us apart. We not only didn’t communicate about our grief, but we didn’t communicate about almost anything else, either. It was too hard, too painful. Even before things got really bad, friends would notice that we didn’t seem to talk about weekend plans. Everything was a surprise. And yes, that was a warning signal.
People say that you choose happiness. You already know what I think of saying this bullshit to a depressed person. People also say that you choose your reaction to the events of life. You don’t choose what shit happens to you, the old saw goes, but you do get to choose how you react. You can rise above it. You can wallow in it and become incapacitated. You can be hopeful. You can be grateful in the worst of circumstances. You can at least hold onto your faith in God. You can be proactive. You can be your best self. You can figure out your values and stick to them, no matter how difficult things get.
Except I don’t really think that any of this is really true. At least not in any meaningful way.
Yes, some people react to tragic circumstances in different ways. But as a person who has been told both that I’m an “inspiration” to others and at other times that I need to “pull myself up by my bootstraps,” I don’t think that anything looks the same from my perspective as it does from the outside. And I don’t believe that the outside perspective is actually true, however supposedly “objective” it is.
I have reacted in certain ways that turn out to be praised. I started running Ironman competitions and I started writing about what happened to me. Neither of those were things that I really “chose.” Running Ironman felt like an imperative, one of the few ways to keep myself looking forward rather than backward. Checking boxes every day was a way to keep me alive. I kept imagining that at the end of the first Ironman, after a year of grieving, I would somehow be “done” with it. It makes me laugh a little now.
I didn’t choose for Mercy to die anymore than I chose to react to her death by working out too much and too soon. Those were things that were built in to my personality, if not before I was born, then at least long before Mercy died. Training was a way to punish myself physically (the pain was a feature, not a bug) and it was also a way to zone out and not have to deal with my emotions during the workout and as the pain lasted for hours afterward. It allowed me not to have to carry the weight of motherhood for a little while.
After the divorce, I’ve worked my ass off to retrain in a new job and to do well at it. But more and more, I see this as a bug rather than a feature. There’s a pattern here, in the way in which I distract myself from my emotions rather than “wallowing” in them. I don’t often cry because I don’t like how it feels to cry and feel like I’m no longer in control. People on the outside can decide whether or not they think that me looking “strong” is good or bad, but from the inside, it isn’t a choice I made. It’s a combination of things that are going on unconsciously in my body.
I know that we live in a capitalist society, and I’m aware that from that perspective, being “productive” while you’re grieving is going to get more positive attention than withdrawing from the world and sitting quietly on your couch every day, attending to your grief instead of to the cogs of the grand money machine of the world. But I’m under no illusions that I am somehow stronger than someone who grieves differently or that I am choosing to react in a way that is going to lead me to heal more quickly.
When my faith in God was unraveling, a lot of my other beliefs unraveled at the same time. I turned the myth of Joseph Smith the Mormon prophet upside down, and it is no coincidence that the American heroes of the same time period, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington, all lost their appeal to me. I don’t believe in the “American dream” anymore than I believe in doing good according to some Christian list and earning the reward of “heaven.” They seem cut of the same cloth. Ditto the idea that I have a “soul” that is somehow in charge of my body, guiding me to make “choices” that God judges as “good” or “bad.”
I’m just an animal called human who has a complex enough mind to fool itself into believing things that don’t exist. Belief in free will and even an idea of me being autonomous and somehow cohesive are also myths that I’ve rejected. Well, mostly. It’s hard to really let go of things that go that deep in our cultural programming. In the same way that I’m probably always going to be Mormon because you can’t just wash that shit off, I will probably always act as if I have some kind of free choice. But that doesn’t mean that I actually believe it. Believing in free choice isn’t really a choice, either.