I’ve still been reading through The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt, and it is definitely a good read. Today I read a chapter about things that make people happy. I don’t want to give away too much but social connections was pretty close to the top, obviously. Some other things in there were a sense of control (Haidt, 2006, pp. 92-93), and “finding flow,” aka “being in the zone” (Haidt, 2006, pp. 94-98). This happens when one is in “the state of total immersion in a task that is challenging yet closely matched to one’s abilities” (Haidt, 2006, p. 95).
This lines up with my experience of being happiest when I was a young child (before we moved when I was nine years old) and in college, because those were the two times when I felt uniquely free, competent, and socially fulfilled. Strangely, I am now in a locked unit, but it is still one of the happiest times since college because I feel connected to most of the staff and I am constantly praised because for some reason they think I’m “smart.” What’s bothering me is the lack of control. I’m in a setting that was designed for an average stay of five to seven days, but I’ve been here for months, because most people go home after this and I am awaiting a long-term placement. They cannot adjust the rules for me because then there will be an uproar among the other patients. I feel like Viktor Navorski in the movie The Terminal, who is trapped in limbo for much longer than anyone is supposed to spend in an airport. Other passengers come and go quickly, but he has to figure out a way to settle down and survive. Unlike for Viktor, in my case, everyone who works here is trying to help me as best they can, but there’s still no good way to live in a place that was never meant to be a home.
Consequently, almost everything has to be a battle. The doors to the kitchen, linen closet, and laundry room are all locked, and finding a staff member to unlock them is hard when the hospital faces constant understaffing issues. There are mental health groups led by staff, but most of them are on a one-week rotation and I feel like I’ve gotten all I can out of them by now. The only thing that consistently brings me solace has been this blog. I’ve always liked to write, and it brings me that sense of competence and purpose and identity. However, staff is mixed in their view of this. Some see it as therapeutic, whereas others look down on me as a millennial who is addicted to electronics and is probably not doing anything important on them. They’ve come to a compromise and let me check out an iPad for two hours at a time. Some staff give it to me right away, whereas others require me to repeat the phrase “I have a doctor’s order” ad nauseam in response to an interrogation on whether I’m really allowed to have it or just trying to pull one over on them. But once I get it and start writing, my mood immediately improves. I get sucked into writing and very much “in the zone,” as Haidt describes it, and I feel all the benefits he spends five pages describing in the book.
Then, when my time is up, a staff member comes to take the electronic device that my millennial brain is so addicted to. Being wrenched out of the zone is not mentioned in the book but it feels like an ultimate loss of control. Nobody else needs the iPad, but the rule is that I can only use it for a set amount of time, and if I go over, then I am in control and not them, and there is the risk of mutiny on the ward. I understand that they have to set it up so we know with no shadow of a doubt who’s boss. But being confident and in control and in the zone and then suddenly scorned and controlled is not fun. They did let me spend my spinster’s mite to buy myself a reMarkable 2, which I will be able to keep with me because it will have fewer features than other electronic devices, which is extremely kind of them. Honestly, most of these places allow NO electronics whatsoever except to write down numbers from your cell phone in your composition book so that you can call people from the wall phones. Never mind that some organizations can be reached only via app; cell phone use is totally banned. So the extreme relative liberality of this hospital is a huge blessing and I’m knocking the situation and not the people, even though I do get angry with them when they are the bearers of bad tidings.
When I mention this to my doctor, he asks, in genuine concern, “Do you think that being here is making you worse?” He doesn’t mean it as a threat. But all I hear is, “Would you rather we kick you out and instead of getting long-term care someplace else, things go back to how they were?” To clarify, how things were was not good. I was constantly suicidal and doing dangerous things in varying degrees of severity. This kept me in and out of hospitals so much that I couldn’t hold down a job. I was dependent on others to be able to bring in enough money to keep body and mind together, and felt constant anxiety that I would lose my access to food, laundry, and or housing. This may have been unfounded fear, but as most people who have actually been homeless before will tell you, the fear never leaves. I lived in a room with no kitchen in a vermin-infested building (absolutely crawling with mice and roaches) on a severely crime-infested block in a city with lots of blocks like that. But aside from financial stressors, I wasn’t doing ADLs such as basic hygiene, cleaning my room and bathroom, feeding myself, etc. Most importantly I was also completely alone. After a lifetime of hyper-productivity, I had sunk into a suicidal depression that had taken everything from me. If all you do all day is plan your demise, there’s not much time for anything else.
The problem is that I don’t want to be here; what I want is to not have to be here. I just want what everyone else wants out of life: a family, a full-time job that I don’t get fired from, and the consistent ability to meet my most basic needs. You can’t know me for long without hearing me talk about Maslow’s hierarchy. For those wondering, a modern adaptation of it is this:
Now, according to a couple articles which I just found and will include at the end, Maslow’s hierarchy wasn’t originally a pyramid or even a diagram but that is how I’ve always seen it presented. Either way, the gist is that you have to work your way up and down the pyramid. You can’t focus on your need for prestige if you desperately have to pee. For those of us who are consistently facing insecurity in the bottom layers, that makes even working on C-PTSD really ineffective, so that makes getting a job hard, which makes it hard to ever climb up from the bottom.
This is why my doctor says I’m “unable to function outside of a hospital.” There’s just way too much going against me. The plan is to get me into a place that’s at least designed for long-term treatment, but that’s going to involve waiting it out in here for a while. It does bother me that I’m so unable to care for myself on my own that being in the hospital is a mostly positive experience. But it makes sense according to the hierarchy. Freedom is at a much higher level than ADLs.
The good news is that I feel like I can express now why I get so angry over loss of control, because Haidt certainly did consider it to be something that would make anyone unhappy. I also understand why I’m willing to live with it for the moment. Now, I just have to figure out how to live with loss of control and still be reasonably happy. Maybe the rest of the book will offer insight into that.
References
Haidt, J. (2006). The happiness hypothesis: Finding modern truth in ancient wisdom. London, England: Basic Books.
Kaufman, S. B. (2019, April 23). Who created Maslow’s iconic pyramid? Retrieved August 8, 2021, from Scientificamerican.com website: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/who-created-maslows-iconic-pyramid/
Millerd, P. (2020, November 9). Maslow’s Imaginary Pyramid: Who really invented the pyramid? Retrieved August 8, 2021, from Think-boundless.com website: https://think-boundless.com/maslow-pyramid-inventor/
The Terminal. (2004). USA: DreamWorks Pictures.
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