The Self-Help Book I Wish Someone Would Write

Even though I’ve written parodies of self-help books, I don’t think I’ve ever read a real one all the way through.^[1]  But, oh, lots of other people have. According to Worldmetrics.org, “the global self-help industry is estimated to be worth $11 billion,” and “58% of Americans have purchased a self-help product at least once.”

I guess one reason I’m not into self-help is that I’m in my seventies, retired, so not in the market to pick up “the 7 habits of highly effective people” nor do I have the energy to “accept nothing less than the life [I] deserve.”^[2] Before retirement, revisiting the texts I was teaching left little time for recreational reading, so if I were going to slip a side book in between Crime and Punishment and The Sound and the Fury, it would be a contemporary novel like Cloud Atlas rather than the bogus-sounding The Influential Mind: What Our Brains Reveal About Our Power to Change Others. 

There is, however, a topic I wish some self-help sage would address, i.e., helping wretches like me come to terms with “the thousand shocks that flesh is heir to,” in other words, how to help us forget those PTSD-inducing experiences.

My late wife Judy Birdsong used to complain about what she called my “demons,” for example, my habit of awakening in the dead of night screaming after a nightmare conjuring that time at age seven when I accidently saw my demented wheelchair-bound great aunt naked. Or my self-defeating habit of reexperiencing in a never-ending loop Lonnie Smith’s getting deked in the ’91 World Series and not scoring what would have been the winning run. Imagine being at your in-laws at the Thanksgiving table holding hands while the patriarch is praying out loud, but rather than joining in the amens, you blurt out, “Dammit, Lonnie, why did you stop running?”

I wish some self-help sage would write How to Turn Your Demons into a Flea Circus. Ideally, this book would demonstrate to the – to use a quaint term – neurotic reader that she has blown negative life events way out of proportion, that she should shrink those bloodsucking vampires of her imagination into fleas, absurd itty bitty insects performing amusing little tricks in a miniature circus mock-up complete with tiny trapezes and tightropes. In essence, to find the humor in horror.

How to Turn Your Demons into a Flea Circus would teach us how not to take ourselves so seriously. Rather than being blown out of proportion, these negative life events would be weighed against what TS Eliot called “the immense panorama of futility and anarchy” i.e. the historical tapestry of famine, war, and genocide. 

Come to think of it, though it’s certainly not a quick fix, reading great literature is a way to tame those demons because it teaches, to quote Wesley Moore III, that “suffering doesn’t make you special; it makes you human.”^[3]

I suspect that there’s not a quick fix. So, to quote the late, great Kurt Cobain, “never mind.”

I’ll leave you with this:

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^[1] Tolerating Upper Middle Class Northerners for Dummies, Crippnotes: Moore’s Treatise on Rearing Children in Late Empire America, and Mining Insomnia for Gold. 

^[2] Come to think of it, given some of the stupid, hurtful things I’ve done, I’m thankful that I’m not living the life I deserve.

^[3] from “The Art of Grieving.”