After we leave grad school and enter the world of employment, it’s hard to create and maintain a full life.
It’s one of the great lies about young professional life. Why? Because current employer expectations on working hours are insane and it leaves very little time for anything else.
Add in a relationship, family time and the occasional pint with friends, and you’re pretty much done.
If you have the energy for even that. Plenty of people feel so exhausted when they finally do go home they have the energy only to stare blankly at the wall as they drink cold white wine.
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And it leaves us dangerously exposed.
Because the loss of any one of those things—job, relationship, family, friends—leaves a vast chasm. What was once a very full life can quickly look slightly bleak.
It’s an iteration of the “all the eggs in one basket” approach to life, the perceived wisdom relating to which is: don’t do it. Instead, do what any market trader knows as second instinct: diversify.
But it’s easier said than done.
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My experience was commonplace, but when it happened, it felt like radiation poisoning. The feeling literally made me nauseous.
The loss of a relationship in any circumstances is huge, even if you are the instigator of its destruction. It leaves both an enormous loss and a huge emotional dent on everything else, even for the most compartmentalised of thinkers.
But what if you can’t confide in your family because most of them don’t know you’re gay?
What if you can’t confide in your friends because you no longer have any?
What if you can’t bury yourself in work because your mind is too distracted?
It is the perfect storm for exquisite distress, and not everyone survives it. Divorced men fare particularly badly in these circumstances.
People think they can rebuild—and people can, and they do—but it is an exceptionally difficult, almost insurmountable task if your starting point is dark despair. And people can smell the desperation.
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Keeping your life brimming with “stuff” is not the same as keeping busy. Keeping busy is for idiots. Trust me, I tried it so you don’t have to.
And trying to distract the mind from a painful sorrow is a mug’s game. The only way out is through.
So what’s the answer?
The answer is to bulletproof your life as far in advance of difficult life events as possible. Because one of life’s certainties is hard times come for all us of. No one is exempt.
My personal solution was two-fold: gardening (specifically houseplants) and piano (jazz and classical). I like these hobbies because they are solo enterprises but can be “extroverted” if required (for example, by joining an orchestra or auditioning for a jazz club). And even when they’re ticking along quietly behind the scenes, you still feel part of a community. There’s plenty gardeners and amateur musicians out there.
This is going to sound weird coming from a writer but what doesn’t work is reading. Reading, it goes without saying, is the God of all hobbies—books will never let you down—but they do require a level of concentration and stamina which is hard to summon if you’re struggling.
And what definitively doesn’t work is surrounding yourself with people all the time. Given the way our society is constructed, it is a perfectly achievable task, but it is an exhausting way to live, especially if you’re an introvert. It can be fun—the endless nights out, all the booze, the bonkers nature of random encounters—and it does bring momentary relief, but what it doesn’t bring is solace. Nor is it sustainable longterm.
When my friend diagnosed the problem for me, I was grateful. It was, in a way, obvious like all the best advice is. But it took the perspective of a third party for me to see it.
I always said to myself one day I would find a way of helping others the way he helped me, and this article is my way of spreading the word.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men’s Lives is a Killer | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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