In which I share my bile and rancor
Things I am not grateful for...
I am all riled up after reading a rather benign article about trying out new hobbies. The Harvard Business Review, published Can Hobbies Actually Make You A Better Person? in which a young woman tries 4 new hobbies (a la “I took a hike today…”) and reports on how they make her feel.
I find it exasperating when people present hobbies as life hacks. Some of her prescriptions include:
If you want to be more creative, take up coloring
If you want to build self-esteem, try cooking
If you want to be happier, try journaling
And by journaling, she means gratitude journaling: writing three things every morning that she is grateful for. My journal is the opposite — not entitlement journaling, but more like a steady flow of complaining. Maybe this is partly due to a culture that expects women to be happy, polite, attentive, and calm at all times. Maybe I should be more free to voice my bile and rancor all day long. But what if it’s not a flaw, and instead its a function of processing the emotions and puzzles of the day. Pooping is not a flaw in the human digestive system, but an essential function. Which makes my journal the bowel movement of human emotional processing? I guess life-hacking sounds sexier than pooping…
That article sounds ridiculous! The fastest way to make something feel like a horrible obligation is to do it for the thing you might get out of it, instead of just because you enjoy doing it. If your hobby feels like a horrible obligation, it's not really a hobby anymore...
And I agree, there's huge value in having a contained and sanitary place to process all the things life throws at you, it keeps everyone safe! (Whether we're talking emotional baggage or poop!)