How I Cope
I don’t especially like the geese overrunning the Hoboken waterfront, but drawing this pair helped me forget the human shitshow.
HOBOKEN, FEBRUARY 10, 2025. I hesitate to write this column, because it might make me seem nihilistic, amoral, cold. On the other hand, it might help someone struggling in this tumultuous time. So here goes.
Since I was a kid, part of me has watched my life unfold with a kind of clinical curiosity. Even, especially, when things get shitty, I think, Hmm, interesting, or words to that effect. This trait is a kind of corollary of my life-long derealization, my suspicion that reality isn’t, you know, real.
Journalism turned out to be the ideal career for me, because I’ve always felt more like an observer of life than participant. I’m detached but not apathetic. I care, I’m eager to see what happens next.
A former girlfriend calls my tendency toward detachment The Coldness. That term is judgy but not entirely unfair, so I’ll go with it, with the following qualification: I feel love, anger, fear, shame, grief, yada yada, often quite intensely. But as I agonize, exult, crave, recoil, whatever, the observer in me strokes his chin and murmurs, Hmm, I wonder where this is going. Curiosity, you might say, is my meta-emotion.
The Coldness has gotten me through rough patches. Example: In the summer of 1981, a powerful psychedelic left me with severe flashbacks, during which I feared the world might end. Seriously. Then a woman I was seeing, whose name, I shit you not, was Faith, broke up with me.
My discombobulation and heartbreak spiraled into something strange and terrible. I thought, Oh, so this is depression. My condition wasn’t just psychological, emotional, it was physiological. In photos from this period, my face and entire body sag.
My depression wasn’t what David Foster Wallace calls “It,” a flame that devours your body, mind and soul. I never contemplated suicide, because I found depression fascinating. Curiosity kept me from being sucked into the darkness. I felt like an astrophysicist perched on the event horizon of a black hole, taking notes on its distortions of space and time.
Time pressed down on me like a vast weight, as if I were on the bottom of the sea. Whether I was at a party, on the subway or in a class (it was my last year of college), I was excruciatingly aware of the passage of every… goddamn… second.
Depression made me understand viscerally, not just intellectually, what Camus meant when he said life is meaningless. I glimpsed the void that Buddhists say lurks at the heart of things.
Depression was a crash course on the limits of reason. My mood was clearly irrational, it lacked justification, an objective correlative. So I kept telling myself, but my brain just sneered. It trapped me inside endless cognitive loops, all of which conveyed the message, You think you can climb out of this hole, fool? Think again. Or words to that effect.
One upside: I didn’t give a shit what other people thought about me. We’re all going to be dead soon, so who cares? But I cared enough to keep taking classes, so I could graduate. In spring 1982, my final semester, I took a creative-writing seminar that changed my life.
I wrote stories in which a numb narrator wanders through creepy, apocalyptic versions of Manhattan. In one story, as I stroll past the Empire State Building, bodies start smashing into the pavement around me.
Getting stuff like this out of my head and onto a page was cathartic, it made me feel better. So did dating Suzie, a classmate in that creative-writing seminar. Falling in love with Suzie knocked me out of my depressive rut.
I’ve undergone lots of setbacks in the decades since then, in my career and personal life. My second and third books didn’t match my first book’s commercial success, and publishers stopped offering me advances. I struggled financially.
In 2009 Suzie and I divorced, which was hard on our son and daughter. Last year I split up with the woman who diagnosed me with The Coldness. But I’ve never been as depressed as I was in ’81/’82. I credit The Coldness, and writing, with keeping the darkness at bay.
When something upsets me, I vent about it in my journal. That gives me distance, it calms me, and I might even come up with an idea for a column or book. Writing has helped me cope with public as well as private calamities: AIDS, 9/11, the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the slow-motion cataclysm of climate change, Covid, the rise of tech-enabled ultra-capitalism, the implosion of democracy.
That brings me to our present. For me and many Americans, this is a scary time, made scarier by the knowledge that millions of our fellow citizens are jubilant. They adore a man we see as a vicious buffoon, a cartoon villain.
People I love are freaking out, overcome by rage and despair. Some, when I try to calm them down, tell me to shut the fuck up. But here’s my advice for those who feel overwhelmed: Remind yourself of all that makes life worth living. If you must watch the news, watch with cool amusement, as if it were an episode of Squid Game 2.
Yes, this coping tactic is appallingly amoral, especially coming from an old white guy with a job and 401K. My advice is insulting to young women who can’t get abortions, to Mexican fathers whose children are being deported, to Gazan mothers whose children have been mutilated by American-made bombs.
I nonetheless follow my own advice because I’m 71, and I don’t want to spend what time I have left wracked by rage and despair. I also have an obligation—don’t I?--to remain upbeat for the sake of my students, family, friends.
So I avoid dwelling on bad news. I focus on what makes me feel good, like jawing about Plato’s cave with students, listening to Skye make fun of a polyamorous pal, teaching Vicki how to skate, drawing pictures of random stuff. I write columns about how lucky we are to be alive.
If I start feeling bad for feeling good, I exorcise my guilt by writing a column like this one.
Further Reading:
I talk at length about The Coldness in my lightly fictionalized memoir Pay Attention.
The Election and the Problem of Evil
Drawing Pretty Pictures in Troubled Times
I Am One of Those Evil Woke Professors