Psychology and Other Stories (16 page)

Already, by the end of the second day, Margo realized that she was at the wrong seminar. She had not, on Sunday night, believed Jim Bird when he had said as much, for that, she assumed, was just a piece of rhetoric. It was like when spies in movies said,
Don't trust anyone—not even me.
Their bluntness, of course, was calculated to win your trust.

But now, alone in her hotel room, some of what he had been saying came back to her, with troubling implications.

“The only possible kind of happiness is happiness with who you
are.
”

“You can't
change
yourself—your
self
is a
self
, after all! You can only
be
yourself.”

But that was nonsense. She'd changed herself radically, and often. She was who she chose to be. Her self was what she made it.

She picked up the phone, then put it down. She ran a bath, but let it grow cold. She looked out her window and felt sad. She
stood at the window in the hotel bathrobe and looked out at the sky growing dark over the city's lights and in her mind's eye saw herself standing at a window in a hotel bathrobe looking out at a dark sky above a city's lights, and she felt sad. Brad and a few others were having drinks downstairs in the bar but she did not feel like talking to anyone. Her face needed a rest.

She sat on the bed and flipped through the seminar “material” and, for the first time, the Jim Bird books that Danielle had found at the library for her. (As a joke, Margo supposed, Danielle had also brought home
The Will and The Won't
, Bird's old book on Nietzsche; but this Margo had left behind—not so much because she believed Nietzsche had been a misogynist and proto-Nazi (which she did), but because she found it stuffy and unreadable.)

“The drive towards self-improvement,” she now read,

is a disease born out of self-hatred. You can't desire to improve yourself without desiring to change yourself, and you can't want to change yourself without hating the way you are. But what does it mean to hate yourself? It means one part of you hates another part of you. In other words, it means you're divided. And as everyone knows, it's united we stand, divided we fall.

NONSENSE, she wrote in the margin (in pencil—it
was
a library book). Then she pulled out her notebook and opened it to a clean page.

“Of COURSE I hate myself,” she wrote. “What self-respecting person doesn't hate herself? Self-improvement is
achieved
through self-hatred. As a child, you reached for a hot stove and your mother slapped your hand. And quite right. But if your mother was not around, your body provided its own slap, maybe even more effective: the pain of burning yourself.

“This is how we learn: through pain, through remorse. When we do or say something stupid, or mean, or
wrong
, we mentally slap ourselves. Or anyway we
should.
We
should
hate ourselves, because none of us is perfect. (No, not even little old ME.)”

She put aside her notebook and called home. Luckily, Danielle was still pretending to be non-judgmental about the seminar, so Margo was able to complain without losing face.

“You don't even
get
Jim Bird,” she said. “They break us up into ‘connect groups' and stick us with a ‘connect leader' all week.”

“I hate it when people use verbs as nouns,” said Danielle.

“I mean, there
are
three hundred of us, but for twenty-five hundred bucks you sort of feel entitled to—you know.”

“The guy on TV.”

Margo consulted her notebook, where she had jotted down some observations and criticisms that she thought Danielle might find amusing. “Our leader, though, this guy named Ethan. Must be all of thirty years old. He's very
casual.
In fact you get the impression he's playing a not very high-caliber game of Adverbs, and his word is ‘casually.'”

“Artfully disheveled hair?”

“Check. And ‘wild' eyebrows that he must comb backwards. And he always wears his shirt unbuttoned to the navel. But it's not very convincing. It's a very theatersportsy portrayal of casualness. You don't wear your shirt or your hair like that if you don't care how you wear your shirt or your hair—only if you want people to
think
you don't care how you wear your shirt or your hair.”

“Wait—to the
navel
?”

“Well he wears a T-shirt underneath.”

“Oh. Thank God. I had this image …”

Margo lay back on the bed and looked up at the ceiling. “I don't even know what I'm doing here.”

“Oh, you always hate it at first.”

“What? No I don't.”

“The first couple of days you don't know why you came, but by the end of the week it's the best thing to ever happen to you, it's changed your life, you've turned over a new— Sorry. But it's true.”

“That's ridiculous,” she said, but was vaguely troubled.

After she hung up, she turned on her laptop and opened her Resolutions file of three years ago. At about the time she had attended the Personal Pursuit seminar, her resolutions had been:

1. Write letter to Bertie

2. Learn Spanish

3. Wake up ten minutes earlier (weekdays)

4. Keep hands out of pockets (looks dowdy)

5. LOOK UP new words

6. More quality time with the daughters

7. Be goofier (take self less seriously)

8. Look in mirrors less

9. Exercise exercise exercise! (jogging?)

10. Floss (~3x week MIN.)

She read the list with dismay. Most of these resolutions could have been made last week. In fact, #6 was virtually identical to the #3 of today, and #10 had been upgraded to #7 (though now its demand had been decreased to twice a week). Spanish had been replaced by Norwegian—she had the crazy idea that she was going to translate Ibsen in her retirement—but she had, to date, learned nothing of either language. In fact she had made little progress with any of her old resolutions. She still battled with the snooze button most mornings, pulling herself out of bed at the last possible minute (she'd even tried setting the clock ahead, but, of course,
knowing
it was ahead, she
counted on the extra time). She still had never jogged a day in her life (perhaps that needed to go back on the list?). She still gazed at herself in mirrors as often as ever, which probably only exacerbated her self-consciousness. But if she had been fighting self-consciousness, what about #4? She did not know if she still stuck her hands in her pockets more than she should, but it seemed a ridiculous thing to resolve not to do. But was her current #9 (“Smile with teeth”) any better? She felt an urge to add a new resolution to her list: “Stop making stupid, petty, vain resolutions!”

There was however one significant difference between her list of three years ago and her list of today. Back then her #1 resolution had been “Write letter to Bertie.” Now, of course, it was “Do not call Bertie.”

So she
had
changed, in at least one very striking way. That was reassuring.

It was funny, though. She could not recall what sort of letter she had been going to write.

Well, she always hated writing letters, so perhaps it had only been something quite inconsequential. A thank-you note for some gift, maybe.

But why had it been #1?

WEDNESDAY
.

They crumpled their pieces of paper into balls with the enthusiasm of kindergartners. Ethan drew a line on the floor with his toe and pointed at the garbage can in the corner.

“Toss them on in there,” he said casually, “and we'll continue on to the next learning.”

The can wasn't far away; most of the balls of paper went in. Margo, one of the last to toss, missed. She laughed, then felt she was trying too hard to show that it didn't matter.

“Twelve,” said Ethan, sounding pleasantly surprised. “That's more than we usually get. This is a good group! Hmm … Tell you what. Let's try it a second time—crumple up a fresh piece of paper if you don't want to go rooting around in that old garbage can—and if
everybody
, I mean all fifteen of you, are able to sink it, we'll take an early lunch, and I'll buy coffees this afternoon. What do you say?”

This was fun; they were excited—but no one wanted to throw first. No one wanted to be the first to miss. Margo supposed this was all part of the lesson:
You can't win if you don't try.
And someone would miss, someone would have to be the
first
to miss. It might as well be her; it would take the pressure off everyone else. So she stepped up to the line and, with a humorous grimace, carelessly threw away her paper ball.

It went in. Everyone cheered. She curtsied.

Sonja, the shy single mom, threw next. It fell short. There were hums of sarcastically exaggerated disappointment and good-natured sighs to show Sonja that it was just a game, that no one really cared.

“That's okay,” said Ethan, “but you know what? Let's keep going. If the
rest
of you, all thirteen of you, get them in, the offer stands.”

In the end, he persuaded everyone to throw again. Altogether, only five went in.

“Sorry, gang,” said Ethan, smiling and shrugging his shoulders impishly to show that this was exactly what he'd expected to happen—that this was, in fact, all part of the lesson. “Well, I think there just might be time for one more learning before luncheroo.”

There were, on cue, a few mock-groans.

“So let's all sit back down and open our material to page thirty-seven …”

Most of the time, it's not that we're
not trying hard enough.
Most of the time it's
trying too hard
that defeats us. Desperation poisons all our efforts:

•
We've all met that person, at the office or at a party, who wants desperately to be liked. But what's more unlikable than desperation?

•
One person, desperate for a promotion, goes into their evaluation with sweat dripping from their brow. Another person, who doesn't care whether they get the promotion or not, goes into the evaluation with easy confidence, casual indifference. Who gets the promotion?

•
An athlete wants desperately to win, so they clench every muscle in their body and tie themselves in knots with needless tension.

•
Your golf game (or squash game or basketball game) is going very well, you're playing much better than usual—until you
notice
that you're playing well, and think desperately: “If I can just keep this up, it'll be my best game ever!” That's when, of course, you “choke.”

•
You can't sleep at night. You've got an important appointment tomorrow and you really really need to get some shut-eye. The later it gets, the more desperate you feel: “If I fall asleep
now
I'll still get five hours.” “If I fall asleep
right now
I'll get almost four hours.” “Oh God, I
need
at least
three
hours!” But the harder you
try
to sleep, the more desperate you get, and the more awake you feel.

Desperation—that is, wanting something really badly—is like a fear of dogs. Dogs only attack you when they smell fear. So being afraid of them is the worst possible thing you can do! And wanting something badly is possibly the worst way to get it.

An old adage says, “Whether you think you can or think you can't—you're right.” In other words, the confident are successful
because they're confident
, and the unconfident aren't
because they're unconfident.
Confidence is always justified—and self-doubt is always justified, too.

Well, you could also say, “Whether you're afraid of dogs or not, you're right.” But instead of “dogs,” think “failure.” Wanting badly to win is a kind of wanting desperately
not to lose
, and is the quickest way to failure.

Let's face it: You can't program yourself to be confident. (What could you possibly say to yourself? “Be confident, you loser”?) Confidence and success only come out of your
true self
in pursuit of its
real dreams.
To want something really badly and to try desperately to get it is a kind of bad faith, a self-betrayal, a backhanded admission that you're not completely sure you can get it, or deserve to. But when your true self is chasing after your true dream, the effort is effortless, and there's never any doubt.