McMahon's Search for Meaning: February 11, 2014

02/11/2014

When Halitosis Can Push You Off a Bridge

Chapter 6

When Halitosis Can Push You Off a Bridge

I’ve loved comedian Richard Lewis for over thirty years, having fond memories of his standup on David Letterman as far back as the early 1980s. I immediately felt connected to his neediness, anxiety and depression. For example, he talked about how depressed he could get from foul odors and told a story of preparing for a date when his grandfather, reeking of insufferable halitosis, got right in his grandson’s face and wished Richard good luck on his romantic venture. Catching a whiff of his grandfather’s bad breath from hell had such an effect on Richard that he cancelled the date because all he could think of was his grandfather’s loathsome halitosis, which gave him thoughts of jumping off a bridge.

Viktor Frankl says we can choose our attitude toward life, that we are not a “plaything of circumstance.” But can Richard Lewis and I choose not to be repelled to the point of despondence and depression by rank odors? Our overreactions to stimulus seem to be part of our hardwiring and this is one type of example that makes me skeptical of Frankl’s claim that we are agents of free will.

Another type of example, one that I talk about with my students, was my “choice” to finish college. People I went to high school with congratulated me for getting my Masters and becoming a college professor at the young age of twenty-five. Part of their happiness for my success it seemed to me was based on their low expectations for my future. I was a troubled high school kid, self-conscious, anti-social, absorbed by bodybuilding. From the age of fourteen to nineteen I was the sidekick to Falco, a former high school classmate, three years my senior. He was equally troubled and had no future prospects evidenced by his short-term jobs at a margarine and ketchup factory, Toys R Us, a pork processing plant. One day I went with him to the unemployment office and Falco knocked on a nicotine-stained plastic partition to talk to a pinch-faced weasel about getting a job. The unemployment office and its joyless functionaries looked like a bastion from hell, a place I’d be doomed to frequent if I continued to hang out with Falco.

I was nineteen and on academic probation at the time. Standing in that hellish unemployment office, I saw this huge flashing red light bulb over my head and the warning flash possessed me with fear, which compelled me to break away from Falco and get serious about college.

I tell my students this story and make it clear that I don’t know if I made a choice to go to college. After the Light Bulb Moment, I didn’t make a choice to continue my education; I was driven by fear. Every morning I woke up and felt a cold gun pressed to my temple, coercing me to getting up early and going to college.

I had no choice in the matter. College would open opportunities for me. Not going to college would most likely put me at the mercy of the unemployment office. Was that a choice? I never saw it as one.

I also tell my students I was smart enough to know I wasn’t smart enough to make a good income without a college degree. I was no Bill Gates.

I make it clear to my students that lots of young people, many smarter than I, were in my circumstances, on a road to nowhere, but inexplicably they don’t have a Light Bulb Moment and they end up more vulnerable than they should have allowed themselves to be.

Did I choose to have a Light Bulb Moment? Did I choose to feel fear like a cold gun pressed to my head every day while I went to college? Did I choose to become nearly incapacitated by morbid thoughts when confronted with foul odors?

I don’t think so. I think I was hard-wired a certain way. So on the subject of free will I remain an agnostic, at best, and this casts doubt on my ability to teach the principles of my hero Viktor Frankl.

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“Don’t Start Acting All Special Here Because You’re Not”

Chapter 5

“Don’t Start Acting All Special Here Because You’re Not”

My brother is the kind of person who if you tell him you’ve been diagnosed by a professional with chronic depression and generalized anxiety disorder will roll his eyes and say, “Everyone has that, bro,” as if to say, “Don’t start acting all special here because you’re not.”

I’m not saying that such an exchange occurred between my brother and me because McMahon’s Search for Meaning is not, as many might be inclined to believe, strictly autobiographical. My book in fact is a sort of novel, a work of fiction. Just like the TV show Seinfeld was a work of fiction starring Jerry Seinfeld playing a character of the same name, same job, similar quirks, inclinations, and neuroses. As a fictional account of Jerry Seinfeld and his friends, the show wasn’t confined to literal truth and was, as a result, free to spread its wings and fly.

That’s what I’m trying to do with McMahon’s Search for Meaning. Get some wingspan and soar in a way that might help me transcend any depression and generalized anxiety that afflicts the fictional version of myself.

Speaking of depression and anxiety, I appear to have been born with it, a condition that burdened my parents. My father especially was chafed by my undying gloominess, which he didn’t want to see in me. So frustrated by my moping about, my father, a military man, would often attempt to will me into a higher version of masculinity, shouting at me “to grow some balls” and “to stop moving like an old lady.” These admonishments in turn made me feel even more inadequate, a condition that I tried to compensate for by becoming a Junior Olympic Weightlifter (number one in the 148-pound class at age 13), then a bodybuilder (runner up in the 1981 Mr. Teenage San Francisco at age 19) and now a kettlebell aficionado. In addition to abating feelings of self-loathing, exercise appears to medicate me and lessen my anxieties, but the fix is only temporary and I feel constantly compelled to find things to take the bite out of my generalized anxiety disorder and depression, so that these undertakings feel like a full-time job. Or as I tell my therapist, “It’s a pain in the ass being me.”

My hero Viktor Frankl would scoff at my self-analysis. He would argue that I am not a victim of depression and anxiety, that I have the power to free myself of my mental afflictions, that I possess free will. As Frankl observes, “Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.”

To be a true Frankl follower, then, means to accept free will, which means accepting responsibility for our actions. I wish I could say I drink the free-will Kool-Aid, but sadly my feelings, at best, are ambivalent on the matter, evidencing that I am indeed unworthy of teaching Frankl’s masterpiece.