O!
1. Oprah's book club.
I turned up my nose at Oprah's book club the instant she introduced it. I'd been reading since I was old enough to hold a book in my hands without succumbing to the urge to chew on it. I didn't need Oprah and her minions telling me which books I'd like.
A few years ago I picked up a book by Anita Shreve called The Weight of Water. I'd never heard of her, but I was between books and the word water was in the title, and because I feel a special affinity for water I took my chances. (Sometimes I judge a book by even less than its cover.)
It was a pretty good read and compelled me to try another book by Shreve titled The Last Time They Met. Something I noticed about Anita Shreve was the first thirty pages of her books felt like slogging through a marsh to get to a sandy beach and clear waters. But the slogging was always so worth it. The Last Time They Met had me stifling yawns at the beginning and yelling at the pages by the end and became one of my all-time favorites. Even though it was technically a romance and I'm way too cool to read that kind of shit.
I was surprised to discover The Pilot's Wife, also by Anita Shreve, was The First Oprah Book. She was right about that author, and of the books that have since landed in my lap stamped with Ms. O's seal of approval, I haven't ever been disappointed.
I stopped turning my nose up at books endorsed by Oprah at about the same moment that it became cool to view Oprah as the personal savior of sheeple incapable of independent thought.
I've always had a real knack for timing.
2. There are people who refuse to consider the validity of a theory or idea on the sole basis that Oprah endorsed it.
Yet nobody would refuse a polio vaccine just because everybody was getting one. These are the same people who ignore Christmas on the basis that the holiday has become a gross caricature of its intention in the over-commercialization of our evil capitalist society. Of course the rest of us know that you're just a bunch of cheap fucks hiding behind the sadly thin veil of pseudo-self-righteousness.
Christmas is fun. Even Jesus thinks so. Stop being a dick.
An idea being popular and/or eagerly embraced by the masses does not automatically render it stupid and worthless. If it did, we wouldn't be excreting in toilets or adorning our feet with stylish footwear. While it's true that a passionate embrace of new ideas can sometimes result in unfortunate debacles like cults and scrapbooking clubs, it's also true that if everyone limited their investigation of popular ideas to quasi-intellectual online reviews and morning djs, we'd still be scratching our red asses and eating lice off each other's hairy backs. Or worse: we'd still be English. No offense, England.
3. The Secret
At the end of my three hour drive to Hayward in February my mother enthusiastically greeted me with "Shhh!" Oprah was on, talking about The Secret. The Secret is about the law of attraction. According to the law of attraction, you will attract people and experiences based on your thoughts, beliefs and expectations. If you don't like what's happening in your life, you have to change what's happening in your mind.
4. Everyone's a critic
Run a news search on The Secret and you'll find plenty of negative press. One of the chief complaints is that the premises in The Secret are nothing new. Well, no shit. But mating's nothing new and nobody's suggesting sex is a waste of time.
5. They're such copycats.
I'm of the "many roads" mindset in regards to religion. I view spirituality as being much like music, with different types of music appealing to different people. It wouldn't make any sense for God to write just one song and expect everyone to be moved by it. Maybe the most important things to know come repackaged over and over in history, until we find the song that resonates for us.
Buddha, 563-483 BC: All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become.
Paul, est 58 AD: Romans 12:2: Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Galileo 1564-1642: You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882: Success comes from within, not from without.
Norman Vincent Peale, 1898-1993: Change your thoughts and you change your world.
Sir John Eccles, Nobel Laurete, 1903-1997: I here express my efforts to understand with deep humility a self, myself, as an experiencing being. I offer it in the hope that we human selves may discover a transforming faith in the meaning and significance of this wonderful adventure that each of us is given on this salubrious Earth of ours, each with our wonderful brain, which is ours to control and use for our memory and enjoyment and creativity and with love for other human selves. --How the Self Controls Its Brain, pp. 180-1
6. The Power of Positive Thinking!
Expressing overly optimistic thoughts typically results in people assuming you're either a recovering addict or aspiring writer for children's television programming. Happiness as a whole is dismissed as the last bastion for the mentally impaired and intellectually inferior. My, we're a cynical lot!
7. But we're also a depressed lot.
According to the National Association of Mental Health, 9.5% of Americans over the age of 18 suffer from depression every year. I thought that number seemed a bit low. There isn't anyone I know who hasn't suffered at least one bad bout of depression in their adulthood. And I'm not talking about the blues people felt when Ben Affleck knocked up Jennifer Garner and doomed Alias to its untimely end. (Or was that just me?) I'm talking about real depression, the kind that makes you feel like life is best lived asleep and compels you to think showering is more of a social nicety than a norm.
In an ongoing effort to diminish the social stigma attached to mental illness in general, depression is frequently compared to diabetes. This is a dishonest comparison because it suggests depression is a purely physical ailment requiring a lifetime of medication.
8. Depression, as explained by web md:
There is absolute proof that people suffering from depression have changes in their brains compared to people who do not suffer from depression. The hippocampus, a small part of the brain that is vital to the storage of memories, is smaller in people with a history of depression than in those who've never been depressed. A smaller hippocampus has fewer serotonin receptors. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter -- a chemical messenger that allows communication between nerves in the brain and the body.
9. Did you know...
Just as brain chemicals can change thoughts, so too can thoughts change the chemistry and functioning of our brain.
from Mind-Body Medicine by John Spencer, PhD and Karen Shanor, PhD
10. Maybe Pollyanna was on to something.
Thoughts impact mental health which impacts life experience. Cognitive therapy posits our thoughts create our feelings and our life experience, rendering optimism a powerful tool in experiencing life absent the burden of dark lows and suicidal tendencies.
Of course you can't bottle and sell optimism.
11. Meds have their place.
The insidious thing about depression is that unlike its marketing sister diabetes, it makes a person question who they are. Reality is skewed as every experience is filtered through the sludge of hopelessness, unworthiness, anger, sorrow. Working to change one's thoughts in order to change one's brain can be like trying to light a match in a thunderstorm. Meds chase away the storm so a person can work on their thoughts.
I just wish shrinks would have the good sense to put down the prescription Pez dispenser and show people what they're capable of.
12. Depression, as experienced by me:
My depression was a symptom of PCOS. I required meds to balance estrogen, testosterone and androgens. Antidepressants did nothing to balance my sex hormones and the promises made to me by medical professionals writing out prescriptions for Zoloft and Paxil were doomed to be broken.
When it started I was fortunate enough to have a friend who had learned about cognitive therapy in college. He told me about thoughts and how habitual thinking alters the chemical paths in our heads. I fought to change my chemical paths, but I was busy lighting matches in the hormonal imbalance thunderstorm.
I did manage some level of progress. At its worst, I rarely showered and spent every moment I wasn't at work asleep. My wardrobe consisted of three pairs of sweats in black, gray and blue. At 220 my fat thighs wore away the material between my legs and I sloppily mended them because I refused to buy clothes.
I hit my rock bottom hard and didn't tell anyone for a whole year. The person I finally told was a shrink who told me I shouldn't have survived. I agreed, though we didn't mean it the same way. I worked to climb back up the cliff I'd tossed myself off of by laboring to change my thoughts.
By the time I was diagnosed with PCOS I'd managed to fight my weight (which the PCOS caused and makes difficult to lose) down to 185. I wore regular clothes and showered every day. The piece I had great difficulty with was my moods, which still lapsed into a blackness so profound that it was impossible for me to really let go of the comforting thought that I could always choose to throw myself back over the cliff again.
I had depression for seven years before I was diagnosed in 1999 and provided prescriptions which stopped the storm. From there the climbing got a lot easier.
My whole life is different now. At 21 I never could have imagined how fucking great my life would be at 34. I know how powerful the not-so-secret Secret is. It's just a shame to me that people who could benefit from a worthwhile tool dismiss it as crap because they don't like how it's packaged. I'm not even talking about depressed people, I mean people in general. I don't believe anybody was put here to suffer or to fail. I believe we are capable of great things and that the devil is not in the details, but in distractions. Minding one's thoughts is a discipline and it's easy to push that discipline aside in favor of just letting life happen all around you.
13. What if?
What can hurt in the 'what if' of considering a tool even if Oprah endorsed it? One of my favorite quotes: Have you ever noticed that what the hell is always the right answer?
I turned up my nose at Oprah's book club the instant she introduced it. I'd been reading since I was old enough to hold a book in my hands without succumbing to the urge to chew on it. I didn't need Oprah and her minions telling me which books I'd like.
A few years ago I picked up a book by Anita Shreve called The Weight of Water. I'd never heard of her, but I was between books and the word water was in the title, and because I feel a special affinity for water I took my chances. (Sometimes I judge a book by even less than its cover.)
It was a pretty good read and compelled me to try another book by Shreve titled The Last Time They Met. Something I noticed about Anita Shreve was the first thirty pages of her books felt like slogging through a marsh to get to a sandy beach and clear waters. But the slogging was always so worth it. The Last Time They Met had me stifling yawns at the beginning and yelling at the pages by the end and became one of my all-time favorites. Even though it was technically a romance and I'm way too cool to read that kind of shit.
I was surprised to discover The Pilot's Wife, also by Anita Shreve, was The First Oprah Book. She was right about that author, and of the books that have since landed in my lap stamped with Ms. O's seal of approval, I haven't ever been disappointed.
I stopped turning my nose up at books endorsed by Oprah at about the same moment that it became cool to view Oprah as the personal savior of sheeple incapable of independent thought.
I've always had a real knack for timing.
2. There are people who refuse to consider the validity of a theory or idea on the sole basis that Oprah endorsed it.
Yet nobody would refuse a polio vaccine just because everybody was getting one. These are the same people who ignore Christmas on the basis that the holiday has become a gross caricature of its intention in the over-commercialization of our evil capitalist society. Of course the rest of us know that you're just a bunch of cheap fucks hiding behind the sadly thin veil of pseudo-self-righteousness.
Christmas is fun. Even Jesus thinks so. Stop being a dick.
An idea being popular and/or eagerly embraced by the masses does not automatically render it stupid and worthless. If it did, we wouldn't be excreting in toilets or adorning our feet with stylish footwear. While it's true that a passionate embrace of new ideas can sometimes result in unfortunate debacles like cults and scrapbooking clubs, it's also true that if everyone limited their investigation of popular ideas to quasi-intellectual online reviews and morning djs, we'd still be scratching our red asses and eating lice off each other's hairy backs. Or worse: we'd still be English. No offense, England.
3. The Secret
At the end of my three hour drive to Hayward in February my mother enthusiastically greeted me with "Shhh!" Oprah was on, talking about The Secret. The Secret is about the law of attraction. According to the law of attraction, you will attract people and experiences based on your thoughts, beliefs and expectations. If you don't like what's happening in your life, you have to change what's happening in your mind.
4. Everyone's a critic
Run a news search on The Secret and you'll find plenty of negative press. One of the chief complaints is that the premises in The Secret are nothing new. Well, no shit. But mating's nothing new and nobody's suggesting sex is a waste of time.
5. They're such copycats.
I'm of the "many roads" mindset in regards to religion. I view spirituality as being much like music, with different types of music appealing to different people. It wouldn't make any sense for God to write just one song and expect everyone to be moved by it. Maybe the most important things to know come repackaged over and over in history, until we find the song that resonates for us.
Buddha, 563-483 BC: All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become.
Paul, est 58 AD: Romans 12:2: Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Galileo 1564-1642: You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.
Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882: Success comes from within, not from without.
Norman Vincent Peale, 1898-1993: Change your thoughts and you change your world.
Sir John Eccles, Nobel Laurete, 1903-1997: I here express my efforts to understand with deep humility a self, myself, as an experiencing being. I offer it in the hope that we human selves may discover a transforming faith in the meaning and significance of this wonderful adventure that each of us is given on this salubrious Earth of ours, each with our wonderful brain, which is ours to control and use for our memory and enjoyment and creativity and with love for other human selves. --How the Self Controls Its Brain, pp. 180-1
6. The Power of Positive Thinking!
Expressing overly optimistic thoughts typically results in people assuming you're either a recovering addict or aspiring writer for children's television programming. Happiness as a whole is dismissed as the last bastion for the mentally impaired and intellectually inferior. My, we're a cynical lot!
7. But we're also a depressed lot.
According to the National Association of Mental Health, 9.5% of Americans over the age of 18 suffer from depression every year. I thought that number seemed a bit low. There isn't anyone I know who hasn't suffered at least one bad bout of depression in their adulthood. And I'm not talking about the blues people felt when Ben Affleck knocked up Jennifer Garner and doomed Alias to its untimely end. (Or was that just me?) I'm talking about real depression, the kind that makes you feel like life is best lived asleep and compels you to think showering is more of a social nicety than a norm.
In an ongoing effort to diminish the social stigma attached to mental illness in general, depression is frequently compared to diabetes. This is a dishonest comparison because it suggests depression is a purely physical ailment requiring a lifetime of medication.
8. Depression, as explained by web md:
There is absolute proof that people suffering from depression have changes in their brains compared to people who do not suffer from depression. The hippocampus, a small part of the brain that is vital to the storage of memories, is smaller in people with a history of depression than in those who've never been depressed. A smaller hippocampus has fewer serotonin receptors. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter -- a chemical messenger that allows communication between nerves in the brain and the body.
9. Did you know...
Just as brain chemicals can change thoughts, so too can thoughts change the chemistry and functioning of our brain.
from Mind-Body Medicine by John Spencer, PhD and Karen Shanor, PhD
10. Maybe Pollyanna was on to something.
Thoughts impact mental health which impacts life experience. Cognitive therapy posits our thoughts create our feelings and our life experience, rendering optimism a powerful tool in experiencing life absent the burden of dark lows and suicidal tendencies.
Of course you can't bottle and sell optimism.
11. Meds have their place.
The insidious thing about depression is that unlike its marketing sister diabetes, it makes a person question who they are. Reality is skewed as every experience is filtered through the sludge of hopelessness, unworthiness, anger, sorrow. Working to change one's thoughts in order to change one's brain can be like trying to light a match in a thunderstorm. Meds chase away the storm so a person can work on their thoughts.
I just wish shrinks would have the good sense to put down the prescription Pez dispenser and show people what they're capable of.
12. Depression, as experienced by me:
My depression was a symptom of PCOS. I required meds to balance estrogen, testosterone and androgens. Antidepressants did nothing to balance my sex hormones and the promises made to me by medical professionals writing out prescriptions for Zoloft and Paxil were doomed to be broken.
When it started I was fortunate enough to have a friend who had learned about cognitive therapy in college. He told me about thoughts and how habitual thinking alters the chemical paths in our heads. I fought to change my chemical paths, but I was busy lighting matches in the hormonal imbalance thunderstorm.
I did manage some level of progress. At its worst, I rarely showered and spent every moment I wasn't at work asleep. My wardrobe consisted of three pairs of sweats in black, gray and blue. At 220 my fat thighs wore away the material between my legs and I sloppily mended them because I refused to buy clothes.
I hit my rock bottom hard and didn't tell anyone for a whole year. The person I finally told was a shrink who told me I shouldn't have survived. I agreed, though we didn't mean it the same way. I worked to climb back up the cliff I'd tossed myself off of by laboring to change my thoughts.
By the time I was diagnosed with PCOS I'd managed to fight my weight (which the PCOS caused and makes difficult to lose) down to 185. I wore regular clothes and showered every day. The piece I had great difficulty with was my moods, which still lapsed into a blackness so profound that it was impossible for me to really let go of the comforting thought that I could always choose to throw myself back over the cliff again.
I had depression for seven years before I was diagnosed in 1999 and provided prescriptions which stopped the storm. From there the climbing got a lot easier.
My whole life is different now. At 21 I never could have imagined how fucking great my life would be at 34. I know how powerful the not-so-secret Secret is. It's just a shame to me that people who could benefit from a worthwhile tool dismiss it as crap because they don't like how it's packaged. I'm not even talking about depressed people, I mean people in general. I don't believe anybody was put here to suffer or to fail. I believe we are capable of great things and that the devil is not in the details, but in distractions. Minding one's thoughts is a discipline and it's easy to push that discipline aside in favor of just letting life happen all around you.
13. What if?
What can hurt in the 'what if' of considering a tool even if Oprah endorsed it? One of my favorite quotes: Have you ever noticed that what the hell is always the right answer?
posted by Jen @ 4:51 PM
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