Criticism

“Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception,” wrote Joan Didion in her luminous essay, “On Self-Respect” (available here in its glorious entirety at Vogue). The problems of self-deception, honesty with oneself, and self-betrayal are as old as time and literature. Look no further than Hamlet to see a character weaving a web of self-deception in figurative language. Dr. Nicole LePera, in her new book, How to Do the Work finds a new language to describe the same problem. Didion called it self-deception. LaPera calls it self-betrayal. It comes to the same in the end. Self-deception may be one of the more important forms of deception when it comes to white collar crime, and other types of criminal behavior. Ann E. Tenbrunsel and David M. Messick in “Ethical Fading: The Role of Self-Deception in Unethical Behavior” write that self deception “involves an avoidance of the truth, the lies that we tell to, and the secrets we keep from, ourselves… We are creative narrators of stories that tend to allow us to do what we want and that justify what we have done. We believe our stories and thus believe that we are objective about ourselves.” One of the ways in which language and storytelling can shape moral behavior is through the use of euphemisms. Tenbrunsel and Messick show how euphemistic language like the idea of “collateral damage” in military campaigns, obscures the moral impact of what’s really taking place: civilian deaths; and they show how business terminology like “right sizing” to describe layoffs obscures the human cost. As a legal content writer I often encounter scenarios where the nuances of language matter. In everything from personal injury law to divorce law to criminal law, how you tell the story matters.

I had to look closely at my own storytelling while reading Dr. Nicole LePera’s book. I have to admit that Dr. Nicole LePera’s How to Do the Work is the type of book I’ll hide in another book jacket because I don’t want people around me knowing I’m reading it. The source of this embarrassment is something worthy of exploring. After all, Didion wrote “The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough.” One can just as easily clothe LePera’s book in the skin of Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem and call it a day.

I am not alone in admitting this desire to hide certain types of self-help books under the jackets of more acceptable, intellectual fare. It protects the ego, after all. But perhaps we could all benefit from a little humility.

While euphemism may facilitate certain forms of self-deception, facility with language in itself isn’t a defense against the most damaging forms of self-deception. As Shakespeare showed us with Hamlet, intellect and skill with words are hardly charms against self-deception, and actually, the more skillful one is in wielding these tools, the more easily one might deceive the self. Self-betrayal is easier when you have the ability to argue both sides of a decision equally well. How often have I seduced myself with my own syllogisms, while literally falling off cliffs? I climbed rocks for over ten years. This is not a metaphor.

How to Do the Work isn’t some Henry James deep dive into the essential self, nor is it an Oliver Sacks meditation on the mind. It offers readers a kind of Cliff’s Notes introduction to mental hygiene and attachment theory.

Attachment theory is the idea that our earliest relationships in life, the ones we form with our parents when we are infants, have the capacity to shape our attachment for the rest of our lives. There are basically four different types of attachment: secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized. Those who are securely attached generally feel safe in their relationships. They explore the world, and return to the safe base of their attachments, knowing that people are there for them and that people care. Anxiously attached people cling to other people, and don’t feel comfortable exploring the world on their own. They fear the loss of other people. Avoidant people tend to be extremely self-reliant, and express anxiety when a relationship gets too close, or when loved ones expect more from them. And disorganized attachment is a mix of avoidant and anxious, and often involves a mix of alcohol and drug dependence (the replacement of connection with addiction). The attachment styles formed in the first couple of years of our lives, can follow us for the rest of our lives.

LePera does a good job summarizing the attachment styles, and helping her readers explore which type of attachment style might play a role in current relationship patterns. The book offers its readers simple and humble exercises that LePera claims worked for her and for others. The fact that I couldn’t bring myself to complete these simple writing tasks speaks volumes about me.

Perhaps my desire to hide How to Do the Work stems from my lack of humility. It takes great humility to accept help and to seek it. It can take courage to be so humble.

LePera’s solutions are simple in theory, but they are incredibly difficult to actualize in practice. She writes: “To truly actualize change, you have to engage in the work of making new choices every day.” Sounds easy enough, but try building new habits or breaking bad ones and tell me how it goes. The simplest solutions are often the most difficult to implement. Tell Hamlet to forgive Claudius. Tell him to run away with Ophelia and admit his love. Tell him that he’s creating false dichotomies when he frames the choice as one between suicide or murder. Tell him that he can let it all go. Tell me how that works out.

The same holds true in business practice and white collar crime. As Tenbrunsel and Messick explain, the “slippery slope of decision making” can occur when a company assumes that if past actions were ethical, current similar actions are also ethical. Illegal practices, practices that damage the environment, and practices that damage other people can become routine or even considered acceptable within an organization. “…when a practice has become routine, it is ordinary, mundane, and acceptable.” As behavior moves closer to criminality, a person or organization may not be able to see “the incremental steps we take down the road of unethical behavior.” Even as I write this, the toxic products of billion-dollar companies are being sprayed near schools.

As for me, I actually knew most of the tools I read in LePera’s How to do the Work. Have I implemented them? To be or not to be, was always the question, was it not?

In “On Self-Respect” Didion wrote: “In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind or moral nerve…character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.” LePera gets at the same thing, but in different words: “This acceptance of choice in our health and well-being is the first takeaway that I hope stays with you as you continue forward in your own journey.”

It’s sounds seductively easy, does it not—to accept the fact that one always has a choice, that one always must accept responsibility for one’s own life. Try doing it for one week, though. Try not blaming other people for your poor choices. Try taking responsibility.

In corporate culture, this kind of failure to take responsibility also works the same way. When the focus is on profits and shareholders, it’s easy to pass the responsibility on to the shareholders. If an executive does something in the best interest of the shareholders, and it turns out to be unethical or even criminal, the decision-maker can all too easily blame the shareholders for his lapse of judgement.

But what follows from these insights? Didion wrote that it comes down to discipline, “a habit of mind that cannot be faked.” LePera puts it more simply: “You cannot eat better, stop drinking, love your partner, or improve yourself in any way until you become transparent to yourself.” Didion would probably add that you should be “willing to invest something.” She explained that a person with self-respect “may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.” But Didion was quick to note that discipline that isn’t in service to one’s higher values or goals, isn’t discipline at all. Rote exercises are just that. One needs to know oneself before putting discipline to a desired end. An arrow shot from a bow without a clear aim will land just about anywhere. To get any good, you’ll need to aim.

But how does one develop “aim?”

LePera calls it intuition. She advises her readers to “Learn how to spend time alone, to sit still, to really hear your intuition and witness your entire Self—even, and especially the darkest parts you’d most like to keep hidden.”

The value of this work is everything and the fruit of this labor is to have everything, Didion explains. “To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is to potentially have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.”

The consequences at failing at this task are immense. Failing at the task leaves us empty. We become hungry ghosts wandering the world. Didion writes: “ If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us.”

In business a company in thrall to its shareholders may lose its moral compass. In business and in life, value is not found in the bottom-line alone.

Self-respect stems from authenticity that comes from within, not from performative actions that arise because we want to please others. In “On Self-Respect” Didion is ultimately writing about boundaries that arise from authentic self-knowledge. LePera’s How to do the Work calls for the same, but with more words and with a little more guidance.

In opening her chapter called “The Power of Belief” LePera writes, “It’s been said that we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” That’s a direct Didion quote, but LePera doesn’t credit Didion. Maybe she forgot the source. I didn’t. LePera’s book is infused with the spirit of Joan Didion. Maybe I didn’t need to hide How to Do the Work under my Slouching Towards Bethlehem jacket after all.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

There is a particular type of literary journal, review, and online magazine in America that doesn’t pay its writers. It claims to offer its writer something else. Exposure. Publication credits. Connections. The attention of agents. Maybe something to brag about in an MFA cover letter or essay. That these reviews, magazines, and journals are glutted with mediocre work that few people read is not surprising, but what surprises me more is that good writers also are willing to submit their work to these venues.

Unless you’re trying to promote a book or get free PR for a book (think book excerpts, Q&As, and interviews), you should never write for free. Writing for free, or for pennies, kills the soul, drives down the value of (your) good writing, and hurts not only you, but writers in general.

The literary journals that offer actual exposure, prestige, and the kind of publication credits that will get you noticed, all pay.

New England Review pays its writers. The New Yorker pays its writers. The Atlantic pays its writers. Ploughshares pays its writers. Subtropics pays its writers. Any literary journal and review worth your time will pay you. The ones that matter most for your writing career, for building your audience, and for gaining you exposure, all pay.

The rest really don’t matter.

The problem with writers is that they don’t value their work nearly enough. And they submit to places that don’t really value their work, either. It makes me dizzy how writers will give their work away for free to websites, reviews, journals, and online magazines, which may themselves make steady revenues from advertisements. Other upstart magazines use the free content writers give them to build the very audience they claim to offer their writers as a perk, eventually gaining the momentum they need to command ad dollars, subscribers, paying customers, donors, and the like. Some journals and reviews have the audacity to not pay, and also to demand reading fees from submitters.

Good writing creates value for someone. You should always value your work, and you might as well create value for yourself. Launch your own platform. Let your writing work for you. Command your own audience. Bring in your own advertisement dollars. Start a Patreon. Anything. But don’t give your work away for free.

Look, I get it. When you’re starting out, you’re a little desperate. I was there.

I spent years submitting my work to places that didn’t pay. But then I stopped. I stopped because I found myself homeless and no longer able to afford to do work for free. I started writing for the private sector. Good writing has real value. It makes people money.

Don’t think your writing is good enough? If you’re trying to be a serious writer, you shouldn’t be putting out bad or mediocre work. Hone your craft. Get feedback. Take a workshop or two. And then look for paying magazines, online venues, or companies that are willing to pay you for your writing. Yes, companies. Writing for a company doesn’t automatically cause your fiction or poetic abilities to wither away. Writing talent isn’t the Wizard of Oz. Taking off the ruby slippers, putting on some boots, and writing in the trenches won’t take away your magic, I promise. It might actually make you a better writer because you’ll be able to work on your craft on a daily basis.

Take the example of Luvvie Ajayi Jones, who spent ten years working on her own online platform. Today, she claims she makes $35,000 from one hour of work, has a New York Times bestselling book, and has built a strong following. Not everyone can do this, I get it. I know I’m not there.

But she didn’t get to where she got by writing for free for some literary journal that wouldn’t pay her. Spending hundreds of dollars in submission fees a year sending work to literary journals that wouldn’t pay her was not something she listed as being important in her roadmap to success. No. She built her own platform. And now she hangs with Oprah.

In Professional Troublemaker, she writes: “People LOVE offering us exposure for payment. But exposure is not currency I can use to pay my mortgage or support my shoe habit. I be wanting to say, ‘Expose deez nuts’ sometimes. I know I don’t have nuts, but the sentiment stands. As someone who started my entrepreneur life as a blogger, I know what it’s like to be offered exposure as a serious form of payment from people who didn’t know they were being useless.”

By letting people use our work for free, we allow the systems of capital to continue to abuse us. Your writing is your capital. Don’t give it away. Don’t give your words away so someone else can build a bigger audience and attract advertisers, while you struggle to make your art.

Value your work so much that when you write for free it’s because you are donating your writing and time to a good cause (like the Sierra Club or to the homeless), or a not-for-profit you believe in, or because you want the PR because you’ve just launched a future bestseller, and want to promote your work. But don’t write for free because someone convinced you it would further your career or get you exposure.

Also, don’t write for pennies a word. People in India deserve more, and so do you. Value your work, because most writing on the internet is making someone money.

As Luvvie Ajayi Jones wrote, “People who want to pay us pickle juice for champagne work have to get used to hearing no.”

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

To call Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour an angry breakup album is to do it a disservice. There’s enough angry breakup songs here to warrant the moniker, but there’s also so much more. Rodrigohas a wide emotional and musical range. Listening to her album is like taking a tour of pop music in the last 30 years. She’s too young to be this good. She was born in 2003. I graduated from high school in 2003. I’m so fucking old.

Everyone who is anyone has been writing about Olivia Rodrigo lately and comparing her to Taylor Swift, but I have to vehemently disagree. Yes, there’s the influence of Swift in this songwriting, but there’s also something more. The angry breakup songs in Rodrigo’s Sour remind me more of Alanis Morrisette’s Jagged Little Pill and Phoebe Bridgers’s Punisher than they remind me of Swift. Taylor Swift is pure pop music, Rodrigo is something else. What she is exactly is more difficult to define. She seems to have taken the pop music cannon of the last 30 years, mixed it up in her head, and put together something entirely original. This is art-making at its finest. In Rolling Stone, she’s been compared to Swift, Lorde, Billy Joel, and Billie Eilish. Others have compared her to Fiona Apple and Avril Lavigne and Hole. I haven’t seen an artist compared to such a wide range of musical influences. It’s stunning.

But there’s so much more than pop reference here. Rodrigo is a new type of feminist singer that doesn’t need to push her feminism too hard, because she embodies it so purely. She lives it. Rodrigo taps into female rage, something I’m pleased to see more often expressed in pop music. But, alongside her anger, Rodrigo is also able to express remarkable vulnerability as well. She’s heartbroken, but won’t tear another woman down in her rage and grief. Damn, she’s so much more mature than I am. I’m so fucking old.

Vulnerability is anger’s foil. We get angry to cloak our grief. Beneath the rage there’s always an exposed heart. Listening to Rodrigo’s songs feels a little like unwrapping the bandages on a wound, and finding the truest truth beneath all the scar tissue. Vulnerability seems to be in the air, and not just because Brene Brown wrote a book about it.

When Rodrigo released “Driver’s License,” it became one of the most talked-about songs of the year—and for good reason. The song is accessible and poppy, but also tips its hat to Phoebe Bridgers’s emo vibe. I have to agree with Rob Sheffield of the Rolling Stone: what’s especially stunning about this album is its command of the entire pop culture lexicon. There’s punk, there’s Billie Eilish’s alternative indie, there’s Bridgers’ emo, there’s a little of Swift’s pop—there’s everything.

In the second, and possibly best, song on the album, “traitor,” Rodrigo sings about sexual betrayal: “It took you two weeks to go off and date her, guess you didn’t cheat, but you’re still a traitor…” While the song begins in a totally emo place (another track I thought I’d save for my “cry myself to sleep playlist,”), the song kicks into a higher gear toward the end. It gets angry, offering listeners real catharsis. Rodrigo raises the volume when she sings, “When she’s sleeping in the bed we made don’t you dare forget about the way you betrayed me.”

I couldn’t help but remember Alanis Morrisette singing: “Are you thinking of me when you f*** her,” in You Oughta Know.

Rodrigo taps deeply into teenage anger in Sour, an emotion that Swift only dabbles in. Swift gives us bubblegum with a little pop now and then for emphasis; Rodrigo puts the gum under the desk and scratches the chalkboard. So, while I understand the comparison, I think Rodrigo’s range is far wider than Swift’s.

In “traitor” Rodrigo sings about a boyfriend’s gaslighting. You could cry along, but you’ll have more fun punching a pillow while singing the song at the top of your lungs. There’s a complexity of self-analysis that that Swift and other pop stars never quite approach in their lyrics. Breakup songs are quick to blame the spurned partner (Justin Bieber, I’m looking at you), but Rodrigo is too smart for that. There’s a brilliant self-awareness in Sour. Rodrigo doesn’t choose easy anger. Rolling Stone’s Angie Martoccio writes that in songs about an ex’s new lover, Rodrigo “resists the urge to tear their new partner down.” I found myself similarly impressed by Rodrigo’s songwriting emotional maturity. Not even Alanis could pull that one off, and I love Alanis.

Rodrigo’s mom is a therapist, and that’s probably why so many of the songs have the feeling of someone who has really worked through the emotions fully by the time she’s sitting down to write the songs. In “favorite crime,” Rodrigo sings about her part of the breakdown, “I let you treat me like that. I was your willing accomplice, honey.”

Listening to Sour is a little like looking at a piece of ore with all these different veins going through it. There’s crystal and quartz and streaks of sediment, and maybe even a fossil or two. Rodrigo draws in what is necessary to make the song work.

Perhaps what’s most remarkable of all is her ability to appeal to such a wide range of women (and men). I’ve read reviews written by women in their late twenties who love her just as much as aged music critics. Is it that Rodrigo is able to live a kind of feminism so many of us could only imagine when we were 17? Is it because she brings us back to being 17 so powerfully? Is it because she can finally say all the things we thought when we were younger, but couldn’t quite say because we didn’t have yet a language for our experience back then? Has she tapped into a particular kind of nostalgia with her ability to evoke so many influences on one album? Perhaps Rodrigo’s Sour does all these things. What I know for sure: I love it.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

There is a a peculiar kind of “madness” in literature and art that seems inherintly female. There’s Ophelia in Hamlet, and Edna Pontellier in The Awakening (more on these two later). Researchers now understand that mental illness may or may not arise in a particular individual for a host of reasons. There’s a genetic component to developing mental illness and also environmental factors, or stressors, that can trigger mental illness (if you want to read more, refer to volume 115, number 8, of the journal of Environmental Health Perspectives for a full article on the subject). The writers explain that mental illnesses “increasingly fall into the realm of environmental health.” A person’s environment: from traumatic experiences, to the food they eat, to the drugs they use, can influence mental health. But environment can be construed far wider than all that, the researchers write. And in light of recent stories about women suffering from mental health crises, I’ve come to wonder whether a culture of misogyny could also be considered an environmental trigger for mental illness. Trauma and environmental stressors like poverty and abuse can make a person more susceptible to mental illness. In identical twins, if one twin develops schizophrenia, the chances of the other twin also developing the disease are 50%. According to Environmental Health Perspectives, people with schizophrenic relatives in their immediate family are at a tenfold risk of developing the disorder. Researchers note that this indicates that the development of schizophrenia may be genetically determined, but just as important, it also suggests that the onset of schizophrenia is also environmentally shaped. Growing up, these facts gave me great concern. I have relatives who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Given the variety of environmental stressors that can potentially trigger mental illness, I wonder why I have been resillient, why I didn’t succumb to the most serious symptoms of depression, psychosis, and mania that plague my family once or twice a generation.

My uncle was diagnosed with schizophrenia before I was born. He was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder by the time I was ten years old. I remember his clozapine tremors, his medicated stupors, his regular psychotic breaks that involved shattered windows, panic attacks in the mall, and days when he wouldn’t get out of bed.  My mother had some form of untreated, but more functional version of whatever my uncle had. She worked as an operator at a time when you could still push 0 on your phone and talk to a real human. She was excellent at a job that required her to have all the city’s emergency agency numbers memorized, but she also believed that the government was wire-tapping our phone, and that terrorists had strung up invisible wires throughout New York City. She was convinced that my brothers and I would be kidnapped if we were left alone for even a moment, and so I spent most of my childhood locked up at home. My father was a Vietnam Veteran and suffered from undiagnosed PTSD. He’d get triggered, and fly off the rails, throwing things, screaming, breaking dishes, slamming doors, and threatening to leave and never come back. In the worst of his paranoia, he carried a baseball bat wherever he went—even if it was just to throw out the trash or take my brothers and me to the park.

Throughout my youth, I always worried about the monster lying dormant in my genes. The kind of mental illness suffered by members of my family divorced them from reality, from themselves, and transformed them into different people. Growing up, it was like knowing that I had the gene for early-onset dementia, and living always with the lurking risk that one day I’d start forgetting things, forgetting myself.

To make matters worse, when you grow up with mental illness, you grow up with trauma, because mental illness is a destabalizing force. My mother did some “crazy” things to me, but some of the most disturbing things were the ones with misogynistic undercurrents.

In recent months I have wondered whether misogyny could be an environmental factor that can trigger mental illness.

People who got to know my mother called her “mad.” People who knew my uncle called him “mad.” People who knew my dad called him scary crazy. I knew enough about inheritance as a child to figure that I was probably crazy myself.

Given my family, and the embarrassing things I often endured as a result of living with sick people, by the time I was a teenager, I’d given up. I embraced “crazy.” Crazy bitch was my own personal brand, my own label. I knew I couldn’t avoid it, so I might as well embrace it.

Literature is populated by an entire nation of “crazy” and “mad” women. There’s Ophelia, who goes “mad” in the middle of Hamlet. Ophelia is often depicted as one of Shakespeare’s archetypal “crazy” women, but I don’t see her as so crazy now. She was less a woman suffering from psychosis than a woman manipulated and led astray by the men around her. She listened to her brother and father, and they ruined her relationship with the love of her life. She trusted Hamlet, and he betrayed her. Laertes tells her to be chaste, while he goes off and has sex with everything that moves, and Ophelia is quick to comment on the double standard.

“I shall the effect of this good lesson keep,

As watchman to my heart. But, good my brother,

Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,

Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven;

Whiles, like a puff’d and reckless libertine,

Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,

And recks not his own rede.”

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Ophelia is a woman put in an impossible position. She loses the love of her life if she listens to her family, and she’s a whore who loses her family if she doesn’t listen. Can you blame her for wanting a way out?

As a teenager, I read the entire cannon of mad young women. Sylvia Plath was my poetic muse who gave me great comfort, Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen was my bible, and Mary Karr’s memoirs (Lit, being my favorite) corroborated the narrative that successful female writers were all “mad” in some way; I might as well embrace it and join the “crazy” fold. I was introduced to Virginia Woolf through the biographical fact that she had killed herself. I read a “Room of One’s Own” through that tragic lens. She would have her room in the end; it would be a coffin.

In high school, for AP English, we read The Awakening, and by the end, I couldn’t help but think that Edna Pontellier made the only logical choice available to her. There was no way out of her situation but to swim out to sea to die. Emily Dickinson avoided suicide, but she was a recluse. Toni Morrison wrote about ghosts.

Women who put themselves out there, who dare to make art, or literature, or poetry, or anything for that matter, are always a little crazy, aren’t they? How else could one deal with the forces of sexism, misogyny, and outright theft by more established men and institutions? You have to be a little nuts to keep trying. When your voice is small, you’ll need a lot of amplification to get credit for the work you’re doing. A young female artist will have to resign herself to working in the shadows for years, often fighting powerful forces that will either ignore her good ideas, or worse, steal them.

Perhaps we need to take this difficulty seriously as a real environmental stressor.

In recent years, we’ve heard of the concept of “amplification.” Amplification is a strategy that women in the Obama White House used to help each other get credit for good ideas, and to ensure that their good ideas were heard. Vox reports that if a woman made a good point in a meeting, or presented a good idea, the other women in the room would repeat it, and credit the source. This ensured that the idea wasn’t later appropriated by the men in the room, or worse, ignored. This was the Obama White House. I don’t see Obama as a particularly misogynistic guy. We’re just so used to ignoring women that we don’t consciously hear their ideas. We’re so used to undervaluing women’s input that when they come up with a good new idea we think we’ve thought it up ourselves.

I recently watched a documentary about the life and art of Yayoi Kusama, called Kusama: Infinity, which is currently streaming on Hulu. It’s a marvelous documentary. The film highlights the real struggle that female creators face, not only from the outright sexism in their respective fields, but also the constant threat of the outright theft of their ideas.

Kusama’s story is far more tragic than most. While Kusama always seemed to have a predisposition to divergent thinking (she experienced delusions in childhood), it wasn’t until her ideas were stolen repeatedly that she became suicidal. Schizophrenia tends to develop later in life, so I don’t think Kusama experienced mental illness as such as a child. I truly believe that something happened to her that changed her brain.

Misogyny happened to her, possibly racism too.

Throughout the documentary we learn about how Kusama would put on an installation, and then have that same idea replicated by a better-established man, who would then get all the credit, money, and fame. The documentary makes a strong case for Kusama’s genius—and is a strong indictment on the men and institutions who blatantly took her ideas.

In 1962, Kusama showed Accumulation No. 1, a chair covered in soft penile protrusions (imagine a bunch of socks sewn onto a chair). It’s a simple concept, but entirely original, and wholly quirky. A few months later, in the same gallery, Claes Oldenberg put up a show featuring his “soft” sculptures; he had been working with paper before this. People commented on how “interesting” it was that he chose to take up sewing, a feminine medium. Interesting indeed. His shift to soft sculpture was seen as revolutionary, but of course he got the idea from Kusama. He became an international celebrity, and Kusama continued to languish in relative obscurity.

Kusama kept trying. She covered a gallery with a thousand boats in wallpaper, in an installation piece called Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show at the Gertrude Stein Gallery. After failing once, she took her concept a step further. Kusama didn’t just cover a boat in soft protrusions, she covered the whole gallery wall with the image of her idea. Was Kusama using the idea of amplification to claim ownership of her concept? Surely, no one would try to steal it, right? That would be crazy. Andy Warhol came to the show and saw it. He liked it. Warhol would go on to wallpaper a room at the Leo Castelli Gallery in cows.

The final straw was when Kusama created an installation called Infinity Mirror Room (Phalli’s Field) in March 1965. Here, Kusama took the idea of covering furniture and mundane objects in soft protrusions and amplified this concept to encompass the entire room. But she knew that the room wouldn’t be enough. It’s never enough. So she installed mirrors and amplified the room to infinity.

This time, she’ll finally get credit for her idea, right? You can’t amplify something more than infinity, after all.

The piece was revolutionary and stunningly beautiful.

In October of that same year Lucas Samaras “originated” the “Mirrored Room” at the Pace Gallery. He became famous.

This is when Kusama became suicidal. She was later institutionalized.

Lucas Samaras ended up in my high school art history book, representing contemporary conceptual art. Where was Kusama? Institutionalized. Crazy. Mad.

Who wouldn’t be?

Women who tell the truth, who challenge authority, who take risks are easily labelled crazy and mad. If they are crazy, they shouldn’t be believed, shouldn’t be taken seriously. A sick society will pathologize normal behavior as a means of control.

The normal response to an insane society will be crazy behavior. It’s the insane response of a sick society to pathologize normal behavior.

In a recent piece about Sinead O’Connor and her new book, Rememberings, the critic Rachel Hass writes in the New York Times: “Crazy is a word that does some dirty cultural work. It is a flip way of referencing mental illness, yes. But it’s also a slippery label that has little to do with how a person’s brain works and everything to do with how she is culturally received. Calling someone crazy is the ultimate silencing technique. It robs a person of her very subjectivity.”

Our culture appears to be in a place where it is re-assessing its propensity to throw crazy women in the proverbial “mad house.” Today, there isn’t a mad house, but there’s cancellation and conservatorship. There’s a movement to free Britney Spears from the conservatorship that stole her life and control over her career (I’ve written about this in my article on Compliant Women in Contemporary Writing). Now, it seems, we’re ready to look at Sinead O’Connor through new eyes, ready to re-assess her “insanity,” for tearing up that picture of the pope, just as we are now willing to re-think whether Britney Spears was so crazy, after all for shaving her head and getting pissed at the paparazzi. O’Connor explains that she shaved her head in response to music executives telling her she should look pretty. I’ve always believed that Spears’ move to shave her own head came from a similar place. But we’ll never know until Spears is allowed to speak.

I’ll always be one crazy bitch. I embrace my family’s mental illness as a shared struggle, and as a hidden superpower. Non-consensus views of reality can be incredibly creative and beautiful. They can lead to new ways of seeing. They can’t be easily imitated.

Non-normative thinking is my heritage, it is my culture.

In traditional or indigenous societies, the non-normative in the group became healers, hermits, shaman, or poets, often seen as being in touch with other realms, celebrated for their vision, for their difference. In our culture, they are medicated to stupor, or locked away, or vilified, or infantilized under court ordered patriarchy. Take a walk through Chinatown here in Hawai’i and you’ll see what I mean.

I believe I’ve passed the critical window during which environmental triggers could awaken the mental illness genes that I know lie dormant in my DNA. I wonder why I have am been so resistant. Did my creative writing and art-making as a teen make my mind flexible and resistant, like doing mental yoga? Since I was a young child, I’ve always been incredibly active. As a fifth grader I asked my dad to take me to the high school track so I could train for a six-minute mile. In sports I’ve always been a bridesmaid, never the bride–showing some promise, but never having the guidance or stamina to take my abilities too far. But I’ve kept moving all along. Did that stop me from developing schizophrenia?

Am I just lucky? I’ll never know.

I hereby diagnose myself with the human condition.

When environmental stressors get me down, I get to work. Last April (2020), as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world and put everyone in a dormant state, I started a book review blog in Hawai’i in the middle of a pandemic, at a time when no one was really reviewing books in Hawai’i in an in-depth manner. It was a crazed response to a world gone mad. If all I could do was sit at home and read, I might as well make something of it. In most places, there are enough critics. But in Hawai’i, I saw a need.

But critics are like roaches. Light a fire and more come out of the woodwork. There’s a lot of noise out there. This writing thing can sometimes feel like a shout out into the wilderness.

Some days I want to shave my head, but like Kusama, I keep writing.

Hold that one up to an infinity mirror, boys.

Really. Please do. When you’re a mirror, another mirror just makes you boundless.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Our culture supports compliant women, or at the very least, it supports compliance in the very systems that oppress, discourage, and disempower. And when women stop being compliant, the price they pay is often their very lives.

Look at the case of Britney Spears, and her often discussed conservatorship. We all want to “free Britney” now, but I remember with how much giddy joy the media took her down all those years ago. (And we all know there can’t be a takedown without willing consumers of that takedown.) And why? Because she got angry at a paparazzo invading her personal space and then decided to shave her head?

I remember one iconic image from the time, where Britney sits in the barber’s chair, gleefully shaving her head. There were many images of Spears from that time, and in all of them she looks pretty miserable, but in the pictures we have of her shaving her head, I noticed something. Britney was happy. Truly happy.

I remember thinking, “maybe this is the first real decision she’s ever made in her life.” Look closely at her face. This is not a deranged woman. This is a woman finally accessing her free will. She’s saying “fuck you” to everyone and loving it. Saying “fuck you” to standards of appearance, “fuck you” to the people in charge of her image, “fuck you” to the photographers, and to the superficial machinery that made her famous.

And what did that act of free will cost her? She lost her kids, her autonomy, her ability to guide her own career. In her Instagram videos, she looks overmedicated.

In several books I’ve read recently, I’ve encountered women wrestling with the consequences of their own compliance. The trauma is deep. While I believe our cultural narratives are changing, the consequences of women being raised to be compliant permeate our culture in very insidious ways, and I believe our culture of compliance continues to shape us.

In her book, Girlhood, Melissa Febos writes about women complying to have sex, because they fear the alternative to saying no is rape. Roxanne Gay, in Bad Feminist, writes about a boy she knew in middle school with whom she had a complicated relationship that escalated to him raping her. He would “tell me what he wanted to do to me. He wasn’t asking permission. I was not an unwilling participant. I was not a willing participant….I wanted him to love me.”

Gay explains that this kind of compliance is the ultimate struggle every “good girl” faces. “Being good is the best way to be bad.” She writes “as an adult, I don’t understand how I allowed him to treat me like that. I don’t understand how he could be so terrible. I don’t understand how desperately I sacrificed myself. I was young.”

In Girlhood, Febos interviews women who have consented to have sex they did not want, more acts of compliance. The fact that the women seldom speak about these experiences is itself a commentary on the ways in which compliance infects us, hidden beneath the surface. Gay also writes, “It never crossed my mind to say no or that I should say no, that I could say no.”

Oprah Winfrey writes about trauma and its role in compliance in her newest book “What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing.” I’ve reviewed the book in this blog, but here I want to talk about the role that trauma plays in compliance. Winfrey writes about her personal traumas and notes: “For the next forty years, that pattern of conditioned compliance—the result of deeply rooted trauma—would define every relationship, interaction, and decision in my life.”

While I think that conditioned compliance can be connected to trauma, I don’t think Oprah completely gets it right. Conditioned compliance is something hardwired into women from the moment we learn how to walk and speak. We are taught to put other people’s wishes ahead of our own. When a girl is old enough to have sex, or rather, old enough to be pressured into having sex, she will have often been so trained in compliance that she’ll readily put a boy’s wishes and desires above her own.

Our lives are shaped by what we believe we deserve.

When I was in high school, I thought I deserved nothing. When a boy I’d known most of my life asked me to do things with him in his truck, I complied. The next day in school, he acted like nothing happened. He wouldn’t hold my hand. My little girl-self wanted so badly to be loved that I accepted this arrangement. It made me miserable. I thought myself incapable of feeling pleasure. I told no one, not even my best friend.

We never had sex. We did everything else. It doesn’t matter. I was still nothing to him when we passed in the hallways. I accepted this. I felt terrible. I wanted to die. I thought I was crazy for feeling this way. I thought I was broken.

Then, the boy made a move on my best friend. When she called me to tell me, I drove to the mall alone. I climbed the stairs to the top of the parking garage, and I thought about jumping. I’m so grateful I didn’t jump.

When we talk about women and compliance, we need to talk about how our culture treats women who are not compliant. We need to think about how we treated Britney Spears all those years ago, right when she was finally showing the slightest degree of autonomy. We need to talk about the unspoken lesson the consequences of her actions taught so many little girls—lessons about whom their bodies belonged to, lessons about personal freedom. Britney Spears shaved her head and she was called crazy. I don’t think she was crazy. I think she was breaking free, and the great irony is that her attempt at being free was precisely the thing that led to her further imprisonment.

I think about other situations where women’s compliance may have played a role in their downfall. What about Monica Lewinsky, and the role that compliance may have played in her story with Bill Clinton? And then there’s Katherine Heigl who got cancelled because she didn’t want to play a role anymore. How many men decide they want to move on from a role and get that kind of crap?

I don’t think we’re talking about compliance enough, and the unspoken traumas it creates. Compliance is embedded in some of our culture’s sickest institutions. I think about Christian fundamentalism (with its requirements that adherents comply entirely with the church’s religious doctrines), the prison industrial system (which fosters obedience and not autonomy), our educational systems and the cultures they foster (where girls are sent home because their skirts are too short and where children are educated within systems of rigid rules and standardized tests), and the systems of compliance embedded in family systems. The kind of upbringing most girls receive, even in the best of circumstances in our culture, is not without its traumas.

Oprah writes: “When you’ve been groomed to be compliant, confrontation in any form is uncomfortable because you were never taught you have the right to say no; in fact, you were taught you can’t say no.”

People who are taught that they can’t say no also learn to ignore the alarm signals their bodies are sending them. Their ability to distinguish between danger and safety gets distorted. I think about that boy in high school, all my alarm bells ringing, and I complied anyway. How many times as a girl had I been taught to behave, to sit down, to cross my legs, and give hugs when asked. Could I have been any other way? Is it surprising at all that I complied?

Oprah writes, in “What Happened to You:” “Now when I begin to feel overwhelmed, I pull back. I have learned to say no.”

Perhaps the most radically feminist thing we can do right now, is to say “no” and say it often. And when compliant women get shit for “going bad,” we can speak truth to power, defend them, and hold their detractors accountable.

If you are in distress or are having suicidal thoughts, you are not alone. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24/7 to help. Call 1-800-273-8255.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

“I hate myself,” might have been the most frequently-written sentence in my prolific journals as a teen (I filled dozens of binders with my tortured teen prose; forcing anyone to read it today could probably be considered legitimate torture in some jurisdictions). If I think back to my own youth, the most common sentiment that rises up above all the others is self-hatred. The standards to which girls hold themselves is harsh and impossible and self-hatred is the only logical conclusion to setting impossible standards for oneself. And so, I am a woman recovering from my girlhood. One of girlhood’s defining characteristics is self-hatred, and I find myself on a daily basis working to undo the narrative damage I did to myself (and also experienced at the hands of others) as a girl.

I’m not doing a good job at undoing that damage. I sat down before the blank page of this essay and the first thing I thought to write is the first thing I’ve always thought to write as long as I’ve been alive. “I hate myself.” Where do I go from there?

I know am still recovering from the stories I told myself about who I was, the stories I continue to tell myself about who I am–that I need to be everything to everyone, that I need to perform my responsibilities perfectly without failure and with a straight face, that I need to avoid being too emotional, but be an emotional receptacle for everyone who suffers, and that I need to look good while doing it all.

I think about my latest surfing project. I’m trying to cross-step and then hang ten at the nose of my surfboard. This surfing trick might possibly be the perfect metaphor for what it means to be a girl. As in, this particular surf trick asks you to do something physically demanding and nearly impossible while also making the whole thing look effortless. That is, the trick requires you to paddle with enough speed to maneuver your surfboard into the most critical part of the wave (while not appearing to put in effort), then, with perfect balance, to cross one foot over the other, while still surfing and keeping the board in the most critical position of the wave, as you walk to the front, all while making sure the board doesn’t slide out from under you (a feeling which is a little like walking a tightrope, while also surfing). It doesn’t count if you don’t look beautiful and stable while doing it. It doesn’t count if you look like you’re losing your balance. It doesn’t count if you look like it takes any effort. If this isn’t a metaphor of what it means to be a woman or girl navigating modern day culture, then I don’t know what is. It’s not surprising that cross-stepping and hanging ten is considered a girl’s surf trick in most surfing circles. Leave the “raw power” to the boys, and the effortless grace to the women… but I digress.

Girls are taught to doubt their own narrative. As a woman recovering from my girlhood, I spend a great deal of time and effort on my own narrative. Perhaps this is why I became a writer. I find myself constantly revising the story I tell about myself. For so long my own story was predicated upon a tale of my own defectiveness. Now my story comes from power, but because I have so few frameworks for this story, I find the writing slow, the narrative difficult, and the power slippery at best. Melissa Febos’s Girlhood, is an illuminating collection of essays that offers a better framework, almost a self-help book for women recovering from girlhood. I’m not sure if I can do all she asks.

Febos writes: “The true telling of our stories often requires the annihilation of other stories…”

I no longer collaborate with the limited framework society provided me, the fantasies powerful men and boys projected upon my body and my desires, and the stories told to me by my mother and other women of what a girl should be. By this, I mean that I try not to be a “good girl.” By this I mean I rock the boat. I am recovering from the collective cultural delusion that defined me.

When I was a girl, I told my mother I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. She said that meant I wanted to be a prostitute. I don’t understand what kind of mental gymnastics got her to that conclusion. The internal workings of my mother’s mind remains a mystery to me to this day. She has suffered from mental illness my whole life. And while I can partially blame her mental illness for her conclusions, I also blame the patriarchy.

And so, when Febos says that certain stories need to be annihilated, I wonder if it’s really annihilation that’s required, but rather a rigorous reframing of all that self-hatred we’ve swallowed and consumed. What purpose does self-hatred serve? Does it serve a protective quality? Is self-denial easier than the denial of others? I’m not fully sure. Febos writes, “We are all unreliable narrators of our own motives.”

Where does self-hatred come from? If, as Melissa Febos notes, “the self becomes a collaboration with other people” we can likely draw the conclusion that much of the self-hatred girls experience comes from outside them. They experience it in their families, the peer groups, in early sexual encounters, and in messages they receive from the media. Girls compare themselves to other girls, and often the comparisons are based on external appearance.

But self-hatred doesn’t come from appearance alone. Girls hold each other to impossible standards of decorum and emotional availability. I think of a recent falling out I had with a close female friend I’ve known most of my life (I’ll leave out details here), but sometimes the cruelest criticism is the true criticism delivered in the meanest way possible.

Self-hatred exists in the family of self-limiting beliefs, and the universe self-limiting beliefs has real-world implications in women’s lives. Self-hatred might begin internally, but its impact is very real. It affects how we feel about ourselves, the jobs we try to get, the salaries we ask for, the dreams we let ourselves dream, the friendship and relationships we have. It affects what we let ourselves try to do. It underlies self-destructive behavior. I have experienced self-hatred’s many flavors. There’s bodily self-hatred, self-hatred of one’s personality, self-abnegating self-hatred with its self-punishments of excessive exercise, cutting, or starvation. There’s self-hatred that leads to dissociation from self and engagement in activities and friendships which do not serve one’s best interests. There’s self-hatred so rampant, its demands of perfection so exact, it leads to the failure to start anything.

I’ve been told that writing can be a cure for self-hatred. The re-framing of one’s story has immense power. But if writing is a cure, then it’s a very slow cure. I’ve been at it for over 20 years now, and I’m still working on my own self-hatred. Perhaps it is easier to see a solution or truth than to enact or live it.

There are other solutions for self-hatred. Therapy is one. Spending time with positive people has also been noted as a possible cure, but given my misanthropic tendencies, I’m more likely to say hi to the sea turtles while surfing than to say hi to the people in the lineup.

Febos offers a unique kind of self-help solution to the self-hatred problem, one that is difficult to do, but perhaps underestimated. She writes about how, for years, she practiced serial monogamy, and was therefore never really alone for any extended period of time. When she tries it for the first time, she finds it revelatory: “My time was suddenly my own, which subtly but completely changed the texture of being. I ran and slept and taught my students and talked for hours on the phone to my friends and family…intimacy … is a closeness to another person that requires closeness with oneself.”

Writing requires a particular kind of solitude. Unlike other creative acts like music, or even art, the writer can’t really do the work in dialogue with other people, in a collective, or at a party (though I’ve tried).

Girls are taught that they shouldn’t be alone. As a girl, I wasn’t allowed out of the house unless I was with friends. The fear of sexual assault or violence is a specter always lurking in the shadows any time a woman ventures out on her own. When I was a child, my mother’s paranoid delusions had her convinced that we lived surrounded by rapists. We lived in some rough neighborhoods in Miami, and given the prevalence of rape in America, she might not have been wrong.

And yet, perhaps the most important lesson of our recovery from girlhood can come from Gloria Steinem’s advice that we go at it alone, that we take to the road, that we spend time with ourselves. It might be less dangerous than we think. Gloria Steinem, in “My Life on the Road,” writes: “…domestic violence in the United States records show that women are most likely to be beaten or killed at home and by men they know. Statistically speaking, home is an even more dangerous place for women than the road.”

To be alone is to confront one’s own self-hatred directly. Febos notes: “It’s a particularly crushing disappointment to realize again that your problem is yourself.”

After months of quarantine together, my partner and I are only now venturing out. Being alone in the house again is strange. I feel anxious. I sit with myself and I am not always comfortable. I sit down to write, and think about the times when I was younger, when I hated myself more than I do today. I think about the immense labor that goes into building a life. Febos writes that she divides her days into “modules” or “the set of practices of which I make sure to include two or three in any given day, though my best days include all six: morning journaling, a meeting, exercise, meditation, writing, and meaningful contact with friends.” I think about my own practices to build a meaningful life: morning (sometimes afternoon surfing), meditation, writing, art-making, meaningful contact with friends and family.

But being alone with myself is a new feeling in this almost post-pandemic world.

My partner bikes to his studio in Chinatown and I worry about drivers who don’t look when they make left turns. He tells me of friends he’s meeting, about the people starting to venture out again, and I think about how fragile I am here on this island, how few people I truly know, having only just moved here a few years ago. How grateful I am for the friends I do have. The silence is loud. I write “I hate myself” down. Why? I write this essay. I think about it.

Perhaps the most ready diagnostic to determine whether a woman suffers from self-hatred can be the test of how she feels when she’s alone. If I subject myself to that diagnostic, I see that I have work to do. I’d get started, but I go surfing. I need to work on my cross-step. I can barely hang five. How will I ever hang ten?

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Nobody picks up a book about trauma because they are feeling well. Ever since I learned that Oprah Winfrey had a new book out, I went back and forth about whether I’d read it. Oprah is, well, Oprah, and I didn’t want to be disappointed. But when I found myself feeling a little down last week, and unable to break out of the funk, I picked up a copy of “What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing” by Bruce D. Perry, M.D. and Oprah Winfrey.

I wasn’t disappointed.

Oprah Winfrey’s deepest talent has been to have tough, honest, and empathetic conversations with just about anyone. Oprah can put a stranger before a crowd, even an unsympathetic one, and reveal his or her essential humanity. This is a special and rare talent. In Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey’s “What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing” Oprah puts the trauma therapist on the spot, and guides the conversation in unexpected, and often refreshing, directions.

Brain doctors can sometimes be difficult to follow on their best days, but with Oprah as guide, readers of “What Happened to You?” will find an accessible explanation about what trauma does to the brain. The book focuses particularly on how a traumatic upbringing affects development.

Having read more in-depth books on trauma like “The Body Keeps the Score” and having spent years listening to Josh Korda’s Buddhist lectures on attachment theory and trauma (which you can find in their entirety here), I found “What Happened to You” to be an accessible introduction to trauma theory, but for the most part, at least as far as trauma theory is concerned, the book doesn’t offer anything you can’t learn elsewhere. The most fascinating aspects of the book were the moments when Winfrey and Dr. Perry step aside from therapeutic frameworks, and talk frankly about how simple things, like community, culture, and meaning can have immense healing power.

For example, Dr. Perry notes that in traditional cultures, there were four pillars of traditional healing: (1) connection to a community and to the natural world, (2) rhythmic dance, drumming, and singing, (3) adherence to a set of beliefs or values that brought meaning, and (4) the use of natural hallucinogens and healing plants to bring about healing.

As I kept reading, I couldn’t help but feel a little sad as Dr. Perry and Winfrey kept returning to the idea that full and true healing cannot take place in the absence of a community or in the absence of connection. I live in Hawai’i, and I had only just begun to put down roots, when COVID-19 lockdowns began, but I’ve always struggled with feeling a sense of belonging. I’ve always been awkward, an outsider. I’ve always had close friends, but never really saw myself as part of a community.

As the world went into lockdown, I read about what life had been like in Hawai’i before western contact.

Kanaka Maoli, or people who lived in Hawai’i prior to contact, lived lives rich with the four pillars of traditional healing Dr. Perry describes in “What Happened to You.” Polynesian close-knit farming communities were good stewards of the natural world. This is reflected in the rich community-based farming traditions that sustained families on the islands for generations. It is also reflected in the vibrant natural and mythological framework passed down in the hula and oli, the chants and dances of the people who expressed their connection to nature and its gods through poetry, dance, and singing. The pantheon of gods reflected a deep sense of wonder, awe, and belief in the interconnectedness of all beings. And healing herbs and plants were used in the la’au lapa’au, a holistic form of plant medicine that treated not only the sick body, but also the whole person in relationship to his or her community. In the la’au lapa’au, healing could not take place without relational healing, without fixing the ruptures between people, as well as the ruptures within, as June Gutmanis describes vividly in her stunning book “The Secrets and Practice of Hawaiian Herbal Medicine.”

Modern Hawai’i’s relational poverty is a stark contrast to the ancient Polynesian traditions that people first brought to these islands. Where there were interconnected farming communities that traded ideas and food from the land to the sea, there are now neighborhoods rift apart by homelessness, addiction, abuse, violence, and colonialism. Where there were rhythmic dances based upon ancient chant and deep spiritual traditions, you’ll find a commercialized westernized hula that perhaps only resembles the ancient form in spirit. The true nature of the gods are veiled, though Pele’s name is widely spoken of, especially during eruptions. And the ancient healing power of the community, of the plants, of water, often arrives in veiled metaphor. In Hawai’i, the old wisdom arrives intermittently, like the mountains hiding and reappearing in the mist of Manoa.

Lacking any community center to speak of (especially given the devastation the COVID-19 pandemic had wrought on communal spaces), having felt growing rifts between my closest friends and family members for reasons that are at once predictable and also baffling to me (you can only be too busy for so long), as unsure about my beliefs as ever, and having no real access to hallucinogens nor shamans, I realized I’d have to settle for the accessible items on Dr. Perry’s list: nature and rhythm. I didn’t live far from the sea, and while I wasn’t about to try to start a drum circle of one in Waikiki, I knew that the rhythm of my feet during a long walk could be as healing as dancing, the pace of my gait as metrical as a poem.

When depression settles into my bones, it often settles in slowly, and subtlety. I can go for days without noticing it. But in the past few days, I’ve found myself sleeping in the middle of the day, unable to motivate myself to complete the simplest of tasks, and feeling more and more lost in the haze of my own increasingly narrow inner world. Depression brings the walls in close. I found myself circling the same despondent thoughts like a vulture.

I leashed up my dog, and got to walking.

I wish I could report that the change in my system was instantaneous, but unlike a pill, the effects of rhythmic movement are cumulative and slow. For the first half of the walk my thoughts were no better than Yeats’s sad falcon turning and turning in a widening gyre. I circled the same old arguments over and over. Screw humanity. But the “screw humanity” sentiment falls short when you’re walking through a covid-19 deserted street with no humanity to speak about.

It wasn’t until I reached the sea that a deeper feeling of peace settled inside me. And as I continued my walk, I found my thoughts slowly widening to take in Ka’ena Point. The winter sun had stopped setting over the sea weeks ago, and the sun had now settled in behind the mountains, lighting the clouds above them aflame, mirroring the newly lit flames of the Royal Hawaiian, which had only recently come to life in the past few weeks, thanks to a loosening of pandemic restrictions. Summer would soon be here. And while Waikiki has two seasons: a wet one and a dry one, summer brings its own unique qualities.

Two boys played the ukulele on a park bench, and one playfully sang falsetto. The surf was down, but the report promised a rising swell by the weekend, and the calm water offered a respite for the lifeguards, welcoming the stand-up paddleboarders, wading children, and snorkeling retirees. Young people lounged on hammocks. People read books on the beach. My heart opened. My mind widened. I didn’t feel so isolated. My dog sniffed the palm trees, and guided me to the Barefoot Beach Café where the musicians were playing their Aloha Friday set.

Dr. Perry in “What Happened to You” explains that the medical model for handling trauma, depression, and anxiety relies heavily on psychopharmacology, cognitive behavioral therapies, and that it “greatly undervalues the power of connectedness and rhythm.”

In times of great distress I have been a patient of cognitive behavioral therapies and I have found them helpful, but I have to agree that no amount of “reality testing” of my own thoughts in a notebook can replace a good conversation with a friend, or the rhythmic peace of a surf session when the waves are good, or the variety of natural experiences that this island of O’ahu in its infinite wisdom offers.

Reading also offers a kind of community, though distant.

Some of the most moving parts of “What Happened to You” are when Oprah opens up about her own traumatic upbringing, and about the ways her relationship with her mother has challenged her and shaped her growth throughout her life. She writes about visiting her mother in hospice, being frozen, unable to find the right words. And that’s where Oprah, the master of interview and conversation, opens up a hospice brochure to learn what the right words might be for her to say.

Ultimately Oprah finds her way forward, but the way forward is beautifully unexpected and moved me to tears.

Writers don’t always have the right words. In my personal essays and in my work as a legal content writer, I have always felt like a blind woman feeling her way toward the truth. It is only when I finish a piece of writing, whether it’s about trauma and healing, post-traumatic stress disorder in those who have survived horrific accidents, or the nuances of surviving a divorce, that I can look at the breadcrumbs of words I have written and trace my way back

I’ll never be able to hold a conversation like Oprah, with her real-time wit. But Oprah’s radical vulnerability gives me hope that maybe someday I might become a better letter writer. Because that’s what “What Happened to You” feels like at its best. It feels like reading the curated letters of two smart people, trying to grow, to learn more, and to help others.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.