Encourage, Discourage

Encourage, Discourage

   When someone "disses" you, they're putting you down, the meaning coming from the word, dis-respect.  It is much the same with discouraging someone, especially if that someone is yourself.  When Google "suggested" I view other blogs of interest, those picked out "recently" by the Google team, I noticed that many of the authors of the blogs mentioned had stopping adding to them several years ago.  Perhaps they had simply said what they wanted to say, perhaps they outgrew it, got too busy, moved on to other things.  Or perhaps they simply grew discouraged.  How could they make a difference if nobody was viewing the thing?

   Often it is easy to fall into this trap.  Whatever project you have attempted or are doing, self doubt can slowly creep in...wrong job, wrong person, wrong qualifications, wrong, wrong, wrong.  this can be especially true for writers and other artists.  The singer tired of playing dingy, smoky clubs at weird hours for little pay, the author staring at his unsold books that can't even sell at the bargain closeout table, the painter tired of watching cheap imitations of knockoff prints cheerfully flying off the shelves of mass market stores while her paintings don't even get a glance at the sidewalk fair.  This can also be true for the jogger working so hard to shed those twenty pounds while someone next to her, slim and trim, drinks with abandon and eats horribly.  The accountant who works honestly and diligently but gets no recognition.  The long-unemployed or single mom with two almost-teens (sometimes the same person) willing and able and eager but nothing happens, nothing ever happens.

   At that point, you have to somehow realize that the other side of the coin is that that singer has a gig, that writer wrote a novel, that artist painted her own work of art, that jogger is jogging.  Somehow, they all have accomplished more than most people could ever do...others may have dreamed of playing in a band, or writing a novel, or shedding twenty pounds -- but they didn't, at least not yet.  It's a point of believing in yourself and believing in others, of doing what's right.

   Listen to these words from one's woman's failed, almost desperate, quest to have a child:  My husband was patient and funny and smart.  In other words, outstanding dad material.  Wasting such material seemed like an unpardonable crime.  Besides, I’ve always believed that it is not possible to fall in love with someone without picturing what it might be like to combine your genetic goods.  It’s almost an aspect of courtship, this vision of what your nose might look like smashed up against your loved one’s eyes, this imaginary Cubist rendering of the things you hate most about yourself offset by the things you adore most in the other person.  And, a little over a year after we married, this curiosity, combined with the dumb luck of finding and buying an elegant, underpriced, much-too-large-for-us house in a foreclosure sale, had proved sufficient cause for switching to the leave-it-to-fate method of birth control.  Soon enough, I’d found myself pregnant.  It was as if the house itself had impregnated me, as if it had said, “I have three bedrooms and there are only two of you; what’s wrong with this picture?”  For eight weeks, I hung in a nervous limbo, thinking my life was about to become either unfathomably enriched or permanently ruined.  Then I had a miscarriage.  I was forty-one, so it was not exactly unexpected.  And though there had been nothing enriching about my brief pregnancy, which continued to harass my hormones well after vacating the premises, I was left with something that in a certain way felt worse than permanent ruin. I was left with permanent doubt.  As I was saying all this, I was lying on the cheap platform bed we’d bought in anticipation of a steady flow of out-of-town company.  The curtains were lifting gently in the breeze.  Outside, there was bougainvillea, along with bees and hummingbirds and mourning doves.  There was a grassy lawn where the dog rolled around scratching its back, and a big table on the deck where friends sat on weekends eating grilled salmon and drinking wine and complaining about things they knew were a privilege to complain about (the cost of real estate, the noise of leaf blowers, the overratedness of the work of more successful peers).  And as I lay on that bed it occurred to me, terrifyingly, that all of it might not be enough.  Maybe such pleasures, while pleasurable enough, were merely trimmings on a nonexistent tree.  Maybe nothing—not a baby or the lack of a baby, not a beautiful house, not rewarding work—was ever going to make us anything other than the chronically dissatisfied, perpetual second-guessers we already were.

   Here's someone in agony, someone who seems to be suffering depression, and she's writing about it, and writing about it spectacularly, so much so that it appears in The New Yorker, which, as many a writer knows, is extremely picky on what it chooses to publish.  Listening to someone tell that story to you on a couch, her third glass of wine almost gone, her eyes a bit sullen and her voice growing a bit irritating, it'd probably be easy to discourage her from putting it all down on paper.  Something made her do it; something encouraged her, perhaps her own belief in herself, perhaps she was the only one who did believe in herself.

   The two words are really quite different, one dissing you with dis-approval and dis-appointment, wanting you to dis-appear, wanting to dis-courage you.  The other wants you to en-joy, to en-velop you in its approval, to en-courage you to move forward.  And the common word shared here is "courage."  Sometimes, in the midst of all the down times, the lack of readers, the lack of listeners, the lack of interest, the lack of recognition, you become the only one to encourage yourself, asking yourself, why are you doing this and who are you really doing this for?  Is this something you're doing because you truly love it or are you just looking for money or fame or something that really isn't you?  Or did you start out on the right path but are slowly losing that passion?  And if you stop doing it, are you okay with that?  Maybe you're just trying something out, or thinking about trying something out.  Maybe you just need some encouragement to take the next step.

   The writer above ended her article with this, "that having certainty about your life is a great luxury."  It takes courage to believe in yourself, to encourage yourself, to find out what you want, who you are, and who you want to be.  It takes courage to love, not only to love others but to love yourself.  As Lao Tzu said, “Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”