Venting
“Healthy
people need to unburden sometimes unpleasant feelings and information, such as
hating everything about life and everyone on earth, and hoping the bad people
are killed by snakes, or that they ate all the frosting off a Safeway carrot
cake because they were feeling fragile.”
Anne
Lamott (Almost Everything: Notes on Hope, p.57, Riverhead Books, 2018)
Anne
Lamott’s sense of humor cracks me up. It’s honest, raw and for me, hysterical.
These last couple of years, ever since the pandemic turned our lives into a
paranoid hell, I’ve spoken with many “healthy” people who have cursed like
sailors, wished everybody and their brother were dead, and that everybody in
politics would be sent straight to prison. I may have said these things myself,
but then it’s debatable as to whether I’m included in the category of “healthy.”
Venting is an essential
ingredient of being psychologically healthy. Possibly, this is because when we
were growing up, we were told so many things were not to be spoken out loud,
and that if you did, the lord would punish you. Maybe it’s just a Southern
thing, but we were taught early and often to maintain a curb on our tongues—which
is like clamping a lid on a pressure cooker.
The key to safe venting
is properly choosing the person or persons you vent to—they should be friends
who know you well and know that you’re not “that kind of person.” Don’t vent
your most incendiary vitriol to a stranger, or someone you barely know, or you
may end up in the “house of detention.” Choose carefully. But when you vent,
let her rip! I used to tell clients to get a tennis racket and beat a pillow
while venting—that way you get your whole body into it. What is not okay is to
get you gun and go out into the street—which is what too many folks do these
days.
Let’s face it, we all
have intense feelings at times. We have reached our outermost level of frustration
tolerance in the past year and a half. A lot of what we say when we’re venting
is simply not true, of course, but is feels good to say it—to get it out of
your system—and then you can calm down and become rational again. And become
kind again. Don’t worry about being chastened by the lord—he understands that we’re
all half-crazy with being shut down, and masked up, and had our so-called “freedoms”
curbed. Here’s the bottom line—too bad. We didn’t invent this virus, and neither
did the Chinese, but this is where we are, and this is where we will be until
enough people are vaccinated. So, vent or whatever you need to do, and then go
roll up your sleeve and get the damn shot!
In the Spirit,
Jane
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