Dissatisfaction Meditation

Dry off and fly.

I’ll give you my version of the Four Noble Truths in a nutshell.

1. There is suffering in the world
2. Suffering has a cause
3. If it has a cause, I can figure out what it is
4. Once I know what is causing the suffering, I should eliminate it, especially if it’s mine.

Dissatisfaction meditation is my new name for the process of getting extremely specific about problems, annoyances, and irritations.  Wallow in them.  Write them out, shout them at the top of your lungs while driving in your car, make up songs about them, illustrate them, give them mean names and insult them.  Get to know your problems inside and out.  Then, when you have nothing left to say, eliminate them with extreme prejudice.  By all means, be dissatisfied, but don’t stop there.  Use your dissatisfaction meditation as a guide to a better life.
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I was lucky.  Enough parts of my life fell apart at the same time that I figured it had to be more than coincidence.  I must have been basing my world on some false principles or incorrect ideas.  I spent hours every day writing in my journal, going back over what went wrong, figuring out my contribution to my own problems, and imagining something better.

What went wrong?  I developed a very painful repetitive stress injury that left me unable to do buttons or hold a cup.  So that sucked.  (Nearly two decades later, I still drop things a lot and hold my teacup in my left hand; the positive is that I can write and use chopsticks with either hand now).  The painful RSI led to losing my job with the non-profit that I loved.  That in turn led to my first husband asking for a divorce.  That led to his opening a letter from the IRS, addressed to me, and withholding it until after the deadline had passed, just to mess with me.  In rapid succession, I wound up in constant pain, with no money, no marriage, a pending workers comp lawsuit (apart from the two separate issues of the IRS thing and the divorce), and friends who were “choosing not to take sides.”  The physical therapy burned holes in my skin.  My fibromyalgia had nothing to do with any of this, but it was still a daily issue.  Let’s just say that I had a lot to work on.

What I decided, in the hundreds of pages of intensive journaling I did during this period, was that I needed to change what I could.  I needed to be as accountable as possible, and I needed to be WIDE OPEN to feedback and constructive criticism.  Any clues I could get from anyone else, I needed to hear them, I needed to take them in, and I needed to keep them coming.  I wasn’t doing too well by letting my ego and my sense of cleverness run things.

The other thing I needed to do was to be organized and persistent.  Now, I would call that being a CLOSER.  Always Be Closing.  My journaling shifted to a running recap of issues I was trying to resolve and actions I had taken toward resolving them.  My first success was with the IRS issue.  Someone else’s income had been reported under my social security number, and I had a tax bill for over $8000 for money I hadn’t earned.  I was so scared to make that call, because the letter my ex had kept said that I hadn’t contested the claim in time.  I picked up the phone, explained why I hadn’t called sooner, and found that the agent was completely gracious.  “This happens all the time.”  (!!!)  I was able to track down the W-2 of the person who actually had earned that higher salary and mail in a copy, and my case was closed.  (What I would have done if this hadn’t been a coworker, who was willing to share her personal financial information, still is not clear to me).  The downside of inaction would have been so bad that I knew I had to move forward.

During the course of my recovery from the disaster of my divorce, I learned something important.  When you have to get up, you can.  My pain from fibromyalgia was so bad at that time that I sometimes needed help to sit up in bed in the morning.  Or I thought I did.  When there’s nobody around to help, it’s surprising what you find out you can do.  I learned that my pain was worst first thing in the morning, and that once I got up and started moving around, it was easier.  I was eating barely enough to get by, and I lost 30 pounds in a few months.  My pain went away for a few years.  This should have been my first clue that excess body weight made my pain worse, but of course I ignored it and regained the weight as soon as I could afford to.

I kept up the habit of journaling whenever my stress level hit a certain point.  I used my journals to work through the process of applying to the university.  I used my journals to figure out additional ways to earn money.  I used my journals to work out a schedule to pay off my consumer debt.  I used my journals to work through a few romantic relationships, figuring out what worked and what didn’t work.  I checked out dozens of self-help books from the public library and meticulously worked through all the exercises.  I was trying to get to the bottom of why my life had quit working and what I was doing that other people weren’t, or vice versa.

Gradually, I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t start with my default as the baseline.  I had to figure out a universal baseline and plan my behavior around that, even if it had nothing to do with the way I wanted to behave.  Perhaps especially if the universal baseline had nothing to do with what I was doing.  I figured there was a way to find a suitable career and advance in it.  I figured there was a way to plan a budget.  I figured there was a healthy way of eating and exercising.  I figured there was a way to get to know someone and build a relationship without any of the misunderstandings of my first marriage.  I decided I would learn what successful people did and copy them.  If it worked for them, it might work for me, and if not, well, what I was doing on my own wasn’t working, either.  I would keep researching and experimenting until I found an answer I could live with.

I was right about the accountability.  That’s probably the single most important piece of advice I could give anyone.  No matter what, it’s up to us to handle what comes our way, no matter whose fault it was.  The IRS bill wasn’t my fault, but it was still my problem.  Whatever caused my divorce, it was still mine to process and use for information.  For whatever reason I developed fibromyalgia (spraining my back in an accident), it was my problem to try to manage.  Nobody else could do it for me.
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I was right about getting organized.  It’s valuable in its own right.  When my life was at its hardest, at least I had some semblance of a plan.  Sometimes I would just make up things to try.  In those days before Google, we had to figure out more for ourselves.  It was harder but it taught me to be more resourceful and inventive.  It also taught me that mental clarity is high on the list of great traits.

I was right that you can get up even when you think you can’t.  I learned a deep and mystical secret, which is that grit and fortitude are there for the asking.  Navy SEAL training teaches that most people quit when they’re at 40% of their physical capacity.  I think I’ve made it to about 80% of what I can do.  Anyone who suffers chronic pain, if you’re reading this, HEY, you’re not dead yet.  You’re not even unconscious.  You’re not even dizzy, or you wouldn’t be reading.  You have more in you than you think you do.  The SAME PAIN that we feel in a chair or on a bed, we can tolerate in other ways and other situations.  Trying to rest and endure only leads to more pain, to another day just like the first.  What I learned from training for a marathon is that DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) is pretty much exactly the same intensity as fibromyalgia pain.  The pain I have endured in physical therapy was slightly worse than any pain I’ve ever pushed through at the gym.  I bought myself my current level of strength and fitness by using the pain tolerance I developed through being chronically ill.  I stopped feeling trapped by learned helplessness.  I stopped reading the articles that talked about how difficult fibromyalgia is to treat.  I tried telling my current doctor about my success story, and she told me I must have been misdiagnosed, because “people with fibromyalgia don’t get better.”  That’s why nobody knows we can get better – because when we walk in and share our experience, the medical establishment ignores us.  They used to tell me it wasn’t a real disease, until pharmaceuticals were developed to treat it, and now they say it’s real but there’s no cure.  I say differently.

I beat poverty.  I beat chronic pain and fatigue and became a marathon runner.  I beat thyroid disease and (unintentionally, cluelessly) shrank my own thyroid nodule.  I beat obesity.  I beat pavor nocturnus.  I beat migraine.  I beat divorce and found love again; despite the odds, we’ve been together more than three times as long as my first marriage lasted.  I beat the IRS.  I beat the market and broke even in the crash of 2008.  I could easily still be broke, single, fat, and in pain every day.  Nothing was going to fall from the sky and make me better.  Dissatisfaction meditation helped me figure out tiny pieces of my problems and take baby steps forward.  I tried to make my life 1% better as often as I could.  Where I am now, it’s hard to find anything to feel dissatisfied about.  It gets better.  It gets better, but only when we imagine how it can be better.

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