let yourself languish

marinating in misery

I think one of the biggest myths about life is that it gets good. That we are walking forward to reach some destination of eternal goodness. If we keep shrugging off the bad, one day it will forget about us. One day, we will finally be free of The Struggle. I hear this in how people talk about their feelings as if they are something to overcome, once and for all. But there is no once and for all. You will always feel really bad again.

My menstrual cycle is something that I find really grounds me in this. Every month, there is my luteal phase. Ten or so days before my period I am struck with a wave of sensitivity and exhaustion. I need more sleep, more food, more time alone. My capacity is cut in half, my mood volatile like a toddler. Then, the euphoria of relief hits me. My period comes. I feel like a warrior. I don’t need sleep, I barely even need food. All of the tension literally flows out of me. Sometimes it’s painful when the month preceding has been tumultuous, but I don’t even mind the pain.

Tension and release. The Struggle is the predecessor to ease. In music, tension and release is a marker of good story telling. We expect it. We wait for the bass to drop, we know it’s coming. Yet, somehow, we forget this in our own lives. We intellectualise the anticipation and start frantically searching for the bass line. The moon waxes and wanes, the seasons change, yet we resist our pain.

bella languishing in new moon

My past couple of days have very much mirrored the scene in New Moon where Bella stares out the window as time indifferently passes her by. This feeling used to bother me, but I have learnt to let myself languish. Safe in the knowledge that, just like my menstrual cycle, tension is always followed by release. Languishing is not the same as rotting, no. It’s pure presence, it’s pining.

We try so very hard to hack and accelerate this process. Sometimes I think the self-care movement is about making misery look cute. Bella staring into the abyss is rotting, but journalling isn’t. Journalling is something to do, for we must always be doing. You cannot always do your way out of The Struggle. You cannot make the bass drop.

I’m not saying that we shouldn’t journal or go for mental health walks, but sometimes you simply need to languish and fester. It is deeply unpleasant, but I almost enjoy it for the impending euphoria of relief. Sort of like how hunger can feel good because it leads to food. I’m not trying to romanticise depression or say that action is never necessitated by negative emotions, but let yourself languish in a feeling before you label it.

I think that we truly forget that things take time. That we aren’t actually supposed to do so much in a day. That some feelings take more than five minutes to be experienced. It’s the curse of being human, our ability to project our present into the future. I feel bad today, therefore if I do not squash this feeling I will surely feel bad tomorrow. We don’t sit in the tension with anticipation, waiting for the bass to drop in a song, we sit in dread. What if it doesn’t drop? I should probably make a plan for what I will do if it doesn’t drop.

We are shackled by our minds. If a deer encounters a lion and narrowly escapes, it doesn’t dread the lion the next day. It shakes for as long as it takes for the stress to pass through its nervous system. If the deer did dread the lion, perhaps it would be more cautious and live longer. We are cautious. Humans take longer to mature than any other animal, meaning we are insanely vulnerable. Children must learn caution and dread. Yet, despite it being our biggest evolutionary advantage, our minds are a hinderence. We forget to shake.

If you watch the video above you will see that it is not a little shake. It is thorough. Languishing is how we shake our minds. Swimming in the void that dread so desperately wants to fill. Languishing is thorough, it cannot be rushed. You must let yourself be useless to once again be useful.

Capitalism expects consistent output, it makes periods of languishing and lamenting feel criminal. It shuns us for our cyclical capacity. Imagine telling the shaking impala to get over The Struggle so that it can once again be productive. We do this to ourselves. We deny ourselves our tantrums and wonder why The Struggle lingers. Why our energy is depleted.

In Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now he talks about this idea of “life” versus “life situation”. Life just is. It is neither bad nor good, it just is. Your life situation, such as the deer being attacked by a lion, is where good and bad come into play. As humans we tend to identify with our life situations and conflate them with life itself. Work was stressful today, life is stressful. The deer doesn’t do this, the deer shakes off the bad situation and life continues.

It is unfortunately impossible to be present in all moments, to not conflate life and our life situations. We are simply not granted the space to be as intuitive and instinctual as perhaps our bodies and souls long for. Yet, in the absence of pure animalistic freedom, we cannot forget ourselves. We must breathe out, and when our breath has been held for an entire work week, the exhale can feel painfully long. It can feel like languishing.

“Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence” — Alan Watts

Presence can be productive, but it can also be useless. To be present in the midst of unpleasantness is to feel your feelings, to shake, to languish.

So please, let yourself languish. Let yourself lament. Let life be unpleasant for longer than you would like it to be. The more thorough the shake, the more thorough the relief.