This got me thinking about how we do the same thing with the language we choose when we talk about ourselves. When we’re too busy to complete a task, we often say we “didn’t have time.” This is a way of distancing ourselves from the responsibility of having completed the task — it’s a linguistic loophole that lets us pretend that we are not in control of our time and our workload, and therefore not to blame when things don’t happen “on time”. But the truth is, we are in control of how we spend our time. Instead of saying “I didn’t have time for this”, what we really mean is, “I didn’t make time for this.” While this simple word substitution makes us own all the things we didn’t do, it also places us firmly in the driver’s seat of our own lives, which is where we all belong. I consciously made the switch from “having time” to “making time” a few years ago, and even though I still sometimes slip up, it’s amazing how this little change in wording can change your outlook.
Owning your time management skills is small potatoes next to owning your mental health, though, which is what’s on the line when people talk about themselves as “broken” or “damaged.” (I’ll be honest and admit that I’ve done it, too.) But this type of language casts us in the role of victim. It implies that things have been done to us; that we have no control or power over the circumstances of our lives; that, like a plunging market, we are just passive objects being acted upon. This is exactly why many victim support groups eschew the language of victimhood and talk instead about survivorship. Though they are two sides of the same coin, survivorship suggests agency, the idea of playing an active role in one’s continuing survival. Though used extensively by victims/survivors of violence or disease, I think this metaphor is inappropriate for the “survival” of life in general since, for me, it triggers thoughts of strife: images of just scraping by, washed up on one of life’s remote desert islands, existing on wildberries, mushrooms and the occasional raw fish. Surviving, yes, but barely.
Unfortunately, without resorting to New Agey lingo it’s tough to come up with alternative words to express the combination of love, joy, transcendence, pain, heartache and self-doubt that is part of the universal experience of living. A woman I know calls it being an “aliver”. I humbly suggest: “human.” Because the thing is, we’ve all got baggage: it’s called Life. Spend enough time at it and at some point, we all suffer heartbreak and loneliness and the misery brought on by being stuck inside our own heads for too long. This idea of being broken or damaged because of it doesn’t acknowledge the universality of the experience. Maybe that’s the problem: hand-in-hand with the American Dream and it’s magic formula of Hard Work = Success, we suffer the society-wide delusion that if we live right, we’ll always be happy and pain-free. But that’s just not true. If we want to truly own our lives, we need to start acknowledging and validating the pain of living along with the joy.
