Dear Reader,
I find that most of my advice is about how to take control of situations that bother you. However, I’ve discovered that one of my blind spots is how to deal with situations that are beyond your control. Sometimes, you’ve done all you can and more, and you’re left to simply bite your nails to shreds or curl up in a ball on the floor and shriek. Or, at least, that’s what I usually do.
The fact is that giving advice on the uncontrollable is my blind spot because I really don’t know how to help — some of the most stressful parts of life involve anxiety without cause or completely justified anxiety that doesn’t really have a solution. Unfortunately, this happens a lot. There will be many times when you are left pacing outside of a locked room (metaphorical or otherwise), fighting the urge to break down the door or just simply collapse. There’s no great solution, either, except to just wait it out.
All that said, here are some things that I find helpful, to at least make the time go faster or cope in the immediate aftermath with news that you really wish you didn’t have to hear.
Feel your feelings. But don’t despair.
Post-terrible-thing, or in the midst of a situation that’s beyond you, it’s okay, and even important, to have a mini freak-out. Have a cry, have some ice cream and generally do something that makes you feel like a sitcom character that just got broken up with, which always seems to generally be a more normal and less stressful situation than whatever you’re dealing with. If I can concentrate, I read a book or watch a comforting show. It seems truly impossible in the moment, but learning to relax when there’s nothing more to do is an important skill; you can’t just be absolutely wired 24/7.
The counterpart to this advice is that it’s easy to just give it all up, walk away and generally just fall into the bottomless pit of hopelessness. There’s not much to help once you’re already despairing, except to say that almost no situation is truly helpless, and at some point, you are going to have to get back up again and keep going — time will continue to pass, after all.
Call someone.
I may be good at other things, but one thing I am really world-class, Olympic-level good at is spiraling on my walk home. For some reason, I can get more mental deterioration done in those 15 minutes than I normally can in a week. Luckily, I live with a whole lot of very practical, calming people, and so the world-ending doom of it all is usually brought up pretty short by walking in the door and encountering an actual rational human, and not the made-up ones in my head, all of whom are usually extremely angry at me. If you don’t have a friend handy, give someone in your life a call. Even if they’re far away and can’t help, talking to someone who cares about you, even on the phone, helps an immeasurable amount. For some reason, hearing solutions from someone else suddenly makes them sound a lot more doable, and even difficult situations feel bearable when you remind yourself that someone is in your corner.
Keep your head and your hands busy
Your heart might be hurting, and you might be somewhat hyperventilating, but if you have the ability to start a crossword, doing something small and distracting can prevent you from losing it. Even making small talk with someone has succeeded in taking me out of a complete breakdown, if only because my commitment to never freaking out completely in front of a stranger is stronger than my commitment to literally anything else. Knitting and becoming weirdly obsessed with the games for kids in the dentist’s office (another regrettably uncontrollable situation is knowing you are going to be told that you are not flossing enough and also knowing that this situation will never change) are other great options for expending the extra energy. Sometimes, in my worst moments, I have just started memorizing poems, which can make you sound a little unhinged, but it actually does work. And as a plus, I can recite “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” at the drop of a hat! Which I have never actually needed to do, but who knows!
To be honest, there is also probably practical stuff you can do.
I’m going to go back on the entire premise of this article and say that once you have avoided the pit of despair, kept yourself busy and called someone you care about to get advice, there probably is something you can do that will help the situation. If anything, you can find someone going through something similar and help them, now that you know what it’s like. You can (as many of us do) report on the situation in the hopes it will get to someone who can do something. You can even just make yourself a nuisance in the face of terrifying odds, like the time I needed our landlord to turn on the heat and simply called him incessantly until he caved from sheer annoyance. Often, if the problem is large, people will convince you that you can’t do anything to solve it. But the truth is that doing something, however small, is maybe the best solution to fixing something that you know is wrong, or even feeling better about something you can’t control.
No matter how well you live your life, there are bound to be moments when you feel like everything is lost. You’ve gotten a rejection in your personal or professional life, you’ve hit a dead end or you have to move (a terrible proposition even in the best of times). But the great part about it all is that because everyone has to experience it, we all know what it’s like, and most of us are willing to pick up the phone when you need it. So don’t be afraid to call or email, and here’s to hoping we can all make it to the other side.
If you have a pressing problem you need advice on, or a response to this, email [email protected] with “Best Guess” in the subject line.
Mika Ellison is a Medill senior. She can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.
