A Bit of a Slump

I was in a bit of a slump the other day, piggybacking on other people’s slumps the way a summer cold passes through a household, and you end up sniffling and chilled after watching everyone else go through it yet somehow telling yourself you’ll be spared. I shouldn’t have been surprised, really, as the slump was so palpable around me, but there’s nothing like a good education, lifelong dedication to personal growth, and years of experience in the helping professions to cultivate little moments of personal surprise.

So I was surprised and in a slump. Hmmm. Best way out? A good book or an episode of Glee. I know I’m late to Glee, even later to Netflix, but so be it. Just the fact that the entire first season is on my “instant queue” is enough to lift my spirits. The idea that there are enough people in the world who would make a musical TV show popular is reassurance enough, as I rarely meet others who will watch Grease, Momma Mia, West Side Story and all the rest as many times as I can, not feeling the least bit foolish crooning every word to every part, swaggering the male vocals, swooning the female ballads, shouting out the choral parts, with surety and sensual sass about love and lust and love lost and love found and love transcending. Of course, I can’t really watch Glee unless I’m alone – the content is too mature for kids, I don’t care how catchy the tunes are, and I need to be completely alone so I can turn the music up, way up, and shake my stuff with the dance scenes. I’m sure it’s quite a sight. I love to hate the despicable characters, ache with the as-yet (and I’m only on episode 6, so no one tell me how it turns out) unrequited love between the OCD guidance counselor and the married head of Glee Club. But more than anything I can convey in print, I loved watching the football team dance in formation to Beyoncé’s Single Ladies. I watched that scene twice. I’m sure I'll watch it again.

Since the house was peopled with others-in-a-slump, my instant-fix was unavailable. On to number two – a good book by an author who can provide a little pick-me-up. I’m 15 years late to Marian Keyes, as her first novel was published in 1995. (So my lateness to Glee is actually less late than . . .). I picked up her latest novel and listened to it, enjoying the lilt of the Irish, the delight of unexpected Irish profanity, and the satisfaction of the story line. Then I went on to listen to her first collection of first-person journalism essays, and found myself laughing and nodding my head in agreement as she described the surprise of her life becoming a writer. I see from reviews that her writing falls into the category of Chick Lit, but that seems a bit condescending. Jane Austen wrote about the same things, but we call her oeuvre “romantic fiction” and we look back on her writing now as historical or period pieces. Perhaps, then, Chick Lit is our period’s romantic fiction, and will one day be elevated to regular literature - we just need another hundred years or so to pass.

I decided to read her first book, since I’d started with her last. Where did this author begin? What were the ideas and who were the people in her mind as she made the transition from accounts clerk to writer? Was she as strong a writer out of the gate, or has she matured over time? And, less loftier, did the book come on CD so I could listen to it at the gym?

The book came the other day, so it was a fresh start with it. I took my slumpy self off and got on the eliptical and listened to what turns out to be a story of a woman whose husband leaves her the day their baby is born. It’s set as a comedy, and perhaps it will become one, but the first 40 minutes (duration of my cardio workout) left me a bit saddened. I don’t yet like these characters very much, but I imagine I will, as I like the author so darned much. Just like reading People magazine and finding out what’s wrong with, well, the People, then feeling better about ourselves, I did feel a tiny bit better.

Until I got to a small passage, nearly at the 40-minute mark, about the way people create a narrative of how life doles out bad things, that ultimately did the trick:

Up to now I suppose that I'd thought that life doled out the unpleasant things to me in evenly spaced bite-size pieces. That it never gave me more than I could cope with at one time.

When I used to hear about people who had serial disasters, like having a car accident, losing a job and catching their boyfriend in bed with their sister all in one week, I used to kind of think it was their fault. Well, not exactly their fault. But I thought that if people behaved like victims they would become victims, if people expected the worst to happen then it invariably did.

I could see now how wrong I was. Sometimes people don't volunteer to be victims and they become victims anyway. It's not their fault. It certainly wasn't my fault that my husband thought that he'd fallen in love with someone else. I didn't expect it to happen and I certainly didn't want it to happen. But it had happened.

I knew then that life was no respecter of circumstance. The force that flings disasters at us doesn't say "Well, I won't give her that lump in her breast for another year. Best to let her recover from the death of her mother first." It just goes right on ahead and does whatever it feels like, whenever it feels like it.

Now I realized that no one is immune from the serial disaster syndrome.

-Marian Keyes, Watermelon (1995)

Nothing in my mostly great life is as bad as this. I don’t have even a single disaster, let alone multiples, on my plate. De-slumped, I took my post-work-out victorious self home, and then spent a day in the sun with my clan. By the end of the day, there was overall less slump-age, and the trajectory is good for this bug getting out of our household and moving on to the next, just like our summer cold did last month.