The Right Word
As some of you may have noticed, I stopped writing my blog regularly a few years ago. I post an occasional essay when I feel compelled to share, but otherwise it has been pretty quiet. I love writing the blog, and I love reading the responses and stories people have shared with me. It’s priceless and therapeutic for me.
In all honesty, I stopped writing because I felt that I owed everyone some sort of progress on my part—that I needed to demonstrate that I was healing at a quicker pace so everyone could follow me full circle from devastation to cure. I was concerned that week after week, reading about my latest episode of banging my head against the wall, would grow tiresome and sound too whiny. But I didn’t want to be inauthentic and write about progress that I just wasn’t making. And that opens up a whole can of worms—what is progress as it relates to grief. None of this feels like progress even on my best day. Is rendering one’s love of a lifetime to a scale (1-10) of how much said loved one is missed, actually progress? Regardless, in my runaway imagination, I pictured all of you thinking, “Oh, would she just get on with it already. Blah, blah, blah, we know you’re sad. This is getting boring. Go on a date for God’s sake.” And so I stopped writing.
But now I’ve found the right word to describe my scenario. And I say “found” because although I wasn’t actively going through the dictionary seeking the right word, I had come up with all sorts of phrases describing the right word— “I’m deeply sad, highly functioning.” “I’m not crying, but I don’t feel any joy.” “I’m okay, I just work all the time because I have no idea what the hell else to do with myself.” “I’m not depressed.” Then I read it in a piece in the New York Times. It technically had nothing to do with grief, but it applied to me 100%.
Organizational psychologist and author, Adam Grant, penned a piece in the paper titled “There’s a Name for the Blah You Are Feeling: It’s Called Languishing”. Officially the article related to the pandemic, and all the confusing emotions surrounding the lock-down/work-from-home/loss that the whole world is feeling. When I read the definition of “languishing,” I popped out of my chair and cried, “That’s it! That’s what I am.” Grant describes it this way — “the void between depression and flourishing. It feels somewhat joyless and aimless. Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness…an acute state of anguish has given way to a chronic condition of languish.”
BINGO! And that’s the speed-bump that I can’t seem to get over. The thought of living in this space the rest of my life is not comforting.
Grant offers some minimalist advice; look for small victories, try to spend time in a state of flow. These are mostly things I’ve already been doing for myself. The pandemic really played into my introversion beautifully. It gave me a legitimate excuse to keep more to myself. But it has gotten out of hand, and I know that makes this whole languishing thing even trickier.
So, I think that after reading Grant’s piece, and now being able to identify my condition, I can see how I might be able to amp up my behavior in a way that would improve my own mental well-being.
I need to move more.
I need to create more.
I need to dance more.
I need to breathe more.
I need to be in nature more.
I need to write more.
Are you languishing? How will you battle it today?
