No-Help Self-Help Books

And Other Failed Solutions to Pain and Anxiety

Sep 23, 2024

This was one of my very early posts rewritten, when I had very few subscribers. Enjoy!

The Heebie-Jeebies

It’s early morning when it arrives.
Uninvited, as usual.
So why so surprised?
Why up so fast like a tripped mousetrap?
And what’s that thunder between his ears that others call thought?
I remember the first time, like finding myself in a huge walk-in clinic where everyone was wearing black leather masks.
I was never the same again, though I won’t tell him that.
Better to pass on the optimism of a young Buddha than this crummy gene.
No reason to hold out one’s arms and pretend to be a crucifix, or act like you’re stuck in an all-night bar with your legs chained to a barstool.
When I was his age my mother said, “Speak to God. He’s always listening.”
But I left that heavy lifting to her.
Because sometimes you need someone to yank up the rope ladder behind you.
That’s what I tell him as I read aloud from the third chapter of My Old-Guy Guide to Falling Apart, appropriately called, “How to Ward off Anxiety.”
Mostly useless advice, yet it gives us something to do while killing what’s left of darkness, hoping we might stumble upon the right spell.

From While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems While the Undertaker Sleeps

This prose poem deals with an annoying affliction that, in varying degrees, has run through my family since the first Johnson poked his head out of some anxious cavewoman’s womb. For lack of a better word, my youngest son and I settled on the Heebie-Jeebies. It’s a scary phrase but also playfully childlike with its internal rhyming. If you too struggle with anxiety or other issues (and who doesen’t?), you know there is no cure for it. You just manage it. And yet there are hundreds of books offering solutions to anxiety and other afflictions. I’m sure Dr. Oz is selling some herb from the eyeball of an iguana guaranteed to turn you, overnight, into a Buddhist monk.

I am sitting in the library, sipping from my plastic Gatorade bottle of Pedialyte Sports drink and struggling with an essay I want to write on Red Bull, so I don’t have to finish another book of prose poems that, like most books of prose poetry, will have a small audience. I was very relaxed when I took my seat, just letting my mind roam, but then I noticed a stack of books to my right—all dealing with various physical and mental disorders. What an appropriate aisle for me, I thought, being by nature hypochondriacal. Years ago, it was an affliction I was ashamed of, but now I embrace it. I have even learned to use my anxious energy to be productive. Also, there are a lot worse things than being anxious, right? A sociopath. A pathological liar? A reality-TV star with orange hair, credibly accused of sexual assault and of overthrowing the government?

It was good to know that so many books had been written for us maladjusted people, but with that knowledge came with anxiety. The overwhelming number of self-help books, side-by-side, like battalions of Russian storm-troopers marching in a Putinesque military parade, was like a brief, yet intense, anxious slap in the face.

Suddenly, that slight pain I felt in my scrotum this morning morphed into an undetected STD I imagined a much-older hippie woman gave me fifty-five years ago. That same pain (a tingling really) then morphed into a rare case of prostate cancer–the only cure being castration with a dull Ginsu knife. “It’s the only way to save your sorry-ass life,” the urologist would say, while I wondered who had suggested to him that my life was “sorry-ass.”

The first book I see is called Stress Management, which I decide is useless. That boat sailed years ago. Next to it is Burn Out and a book simply called Death. I’m impressed by the latter title, guessing it to be written by my kind of person—a person who just wants to cut through the bullshit and get to the point. There’s also a book called Who Moved my Cheesecake? which was either misstacked by a librarian with a good sense of humor, or the book’s author wanted us to see “cheesecake” as a metaphor. For what? Our unhappy childhoods? That old provocative flame who relocated to Cancun just when I needed her?

One thing for sure, there’s a lot of money to be made writing books on suffering, in contrast to writing poems or literary fiction.

I regretted not having the time to skim the pages of some of these titles. According to my wife, I need all the help I can get in my quest to make my life a finished work of art before drifting into the white something-or-other, which the initiated call Heaven. I am so desperate for Buddhist tranquility that if a book called Searching for the Inner Penguin was guaranteed to help, I would give it a shot. I am not a penguin and know little about them, but I am more than willing to learn.

So many, many books, some whose titles seem to taunt me from their shiny plastic-covered spines. What are they about? I wonder. How should I interpret them?

The Upside of Stress. Sorry, dude, there is no upside to stress. Anyone with a nervous stomach can tell you that.

The Lonely Century. How can knowing that an entire century has been lonely make me feel better?

The Tapping Solution. This one has possibility. Rather than sipping chamomile tea and listening to your white noise machine at the insomniac hour of 2 a.m., you can tap your index finger over and over, hearkening back to an ancient incantation to the God of Sleeplessness. Or perhaps this book is a tap-dancing manual. I have always liked tap dancing, though I’m sure the tight, shiny little shoes would hurt my feet. Still, what a stress reliever, and if you do it long enough and with enough vigor, you just might be too tired to be stressed.

Born Anxious. A great name for my forthcoming biography?

Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief. How can anticipating anxiety after grief be of any help? Wouldn’t it just cause anticipatory anxiety.

Fuck Feelings. Finally, a title that makes sense to me.

Please don’t that think I am being glib about suffering. I have had my share, and I tend to be empathic to a fault, even with animals, especially pugs. I myself have read self-help manuals over the years. I used to start my mornings, stretched out on my “Personally Tested Ultra-Firm Mattress” (now that’s a job to aspire to) reading a short chapter from Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff. Unfortunately, for me, by 10 a.m. I would begin to obsess about that reoccurring pain in my scrotum, then move on to medium-sized stuff like the existence of God, ending somewhat terrified by the stuff I usually block out except during my 3 a.m. pee stop when it’s just me and my old friend Mr. Death waiting for the sun to rise. By 2 p.m. I’m sweating my family’s small stuff; by 4 p.m. I’m worked up about the small stuff I hear strangers at the supermarket complain about; and by 6 p.m. I’m imagining the small stuff of people I haven’t even met yet.

I exaggerate of course, but my point is that, for some of us, not sweating the small stuff means not thinking about the small stuff. Or talking about it. Conventional wisdom tells us that it’s deadly to hold negative thoughts and feelings inside. Thus, the popularity of psychotherapy. To a point, conventional wisdom is right. But for me, constantly thinking and talking about problems just keeps reminding me of them. It also makes me very bad company, because I am just one “small stuff” step from sharing my woes with others, who often either don’t care or have their own “small stuff” they’re trying to ignore.

Which is why I would ask those of you on social media platforms to consider the above before you decide to share information that can create small stuff for anxious people like me.

For instance, yesterday, someone I don’t remember “friending” on Facebook posted a picture of a few lethal weapons (one a nasty serrated knife) that were gifted to her by a new lover. Whatever happened to flowers and chocolates? I thought, as I unfriended her, fearing she might show up at my house some night on a whiskey high.

But it was too late because once I had exposed myself to this woman’s arsenal, I now had more “small stuff” to sweat and imaginary scenarios to conjure up. Which makes me wonder if it may be less exhausting to go all in for the ordeal of sweating the small stuff and accept that suffering is inevitable, instead of expending so much energy trying to avoid it.

Or maybe even a better solution would be to purchase Fuck Feelings and refer to it daily as one turns to the Bible.

It would certainly solve at least some of my problems, though I can’t believe any approach that simple will ever work.

And what’s the fun in not suffering? Imagine a world populated by happy smiling people, handing out roses and saying, “Jesus loves you.”

Wired to suffer and endure, and to suffer and endure some more, how could we ever trust such a person?

Old Man Still Howling at the Moon

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