I’m apathetic! I never get around to anything!

Dear Cary,

I used to read your Salon column religiously and was sad when it stopped. Frankly I had no idea you were still doing advice via your own website, so I am thrilled to have discovered this!

I have a question about apathy. For years it has been my most loyal companion. I have dreams, visions, I have talents – all of which fall short because I simply do not get around to anything. Most days are spent wandering in a haze. For a long while I thought I was simply lazy and beat myself up terribly, but I don’t think that is the issue. I think fear is the thing on which my apathy feeds, fear of both failure and success. For a few years I struggled with depression, but I no longer feel depressed. Yet my apathy is still around.

The question is: how can I snap out of this? I am 38 next year and have seen my peers both catch up with me and then overtake me, with both their personal lives and careers going swimmingly (or so it seems). Meanwhile I’m without work, without love, without hardly anything. I feel like such a loser and desperately want my life to change, but how do I stop this apathy? How do I snap out of it?
Many thanks,

Dolores in a Haze

Dear Dolores in a Haze,

First I feel bound to mention that apathy is a psychological disorder, a treatable condition, distinct from but related to depression. If you have not seen a professional about it, I suggest you do so. There may be solutions available to you that will give you much happiness and relieve you of your worry and concern.

Now then. Not being a psychology professional myself, I would like to speculate about the possible meaning of this apathy. I would like to suggest more broadly that sometimes what might be diagnosed as a specific psychological disorder is also a strategy of the self to deal with intolerable conditions and conflicts. I do not know about your case, but I would like to suggest that what you call your apathy could be among other things an expressive act.

You say your apathy has been your most loyal companion for years. So it is worth asking, what benefits does this apathy bring? What does it allow you to avoid? In what way is it the solution to a problem?

Let’s postulate that your apathy is a protection against something. From what do you need protection? You say that you wander in a haze. Perhaps you need the freedom, or the permission, to do this wandering. To pursue the sort of life goals that you say your peers are attaining might necessarily curtail this wandering.

We now exit the medical realm and enter the realm of the soul, the search for identity, and the sacred.

Could this apathy, this refusal or inability to engage and strive in the world, be a protection against the defiling, or violation, of a closely held belief? Or of your essential nature? Perhaps it is your essential nature to dream, to live in a netherworld of half vision and half sensation. In a culture of striving and work, to be such a person would be dangerous. For a person whose peers are all doing impressive things, it would be challenging to remain aloof from the striving, to endure the suspicion that you are not keeping up.

You may envy your peers, but take a look at what they are doing to get what they are getting. You might want what they are getting. But do you want to do what they are doing to get it? It’s possible that you envy their success, but their path may not be your path.

It would be risky and perhaps unkind to come right out and say it, however. They are your friends. You don’t want to criticize what they are doing. You don’t want to say that you can’t imagine yourself in a million years doing what they are doing, that you don’t want that kind of success. It may be that you feel, authentically, what a job really is: a commitment of intolerable servitude, that requires you to pretend to care about things you don’t care about, to strive for things you don’t really want, to pretend to like people you don’t really like and value things you don’t really value. Perhaps the real you, the deep you, recoils at the idea of doing what your peers are doing. And so in this “apathy” you find safety, even if it appears like a kind of social failure.

I am thinking here about the sacred. We ourselves rarely know ourselves as sacred beings, but only as a set of functions, requirements, and responses to conditions. Therefore, when some possibility threatens us, we can sometimes can only present mute defiance. We do not know quite what it is that threatens us. We can only know that it isn’t for us.

Hence the fears you mention. In this case, the fears as well may be serving a function—to keep you from an intolerable situation.

No wonder you have not tried hard to win at this competition, if the prize is something you don’t really want: more work, more of the same, only on a more respected level. Perhaps that kind of success is not what your true deep nature longs for.

So I suggest that for a time you concentrate only on your dreams, visions and talents, without regard for where they may lead. Try to simply enjoy them and nurture them for a period of time, and thank your fears for saving you an intolerable and potentially fatal alliance with the devil. To do this will require some trust, some faith. Find it. Find the faith to trust in your talents for the time being. Listen for direction. Have faith that this will lead you where you need to go.

Where you need to go may not look like where you think you need to go. The path of life is an instruction; much of it is baffling; we press on.

Here is one insight I personally had in regard to my creative capacity and my worldly ambitions: For years I suffered the failure to lash my creativity to a profession that would pay well. Finally I realized that I had it backwards. I realized I had to reverse the relationship.

I, who had been lord and master over my God-given talents, had to become instead the servant of my creative capacity. I had to be not the star but the humble nurturer. I had to serve it breakfast in bed. I had to give it paid vacations. I did this for a period of time, practicing my craft only in obscurity while I, the grownup in the equation, went to work on the streetcar every day to earn a living. While I wanted fame, my talent wanted to be left alone, not to be hurried, not to be exposed to criticism or expectation. This process of self-analysis led to some deep change. But it took time and effort.

Much of the analysis took place in a private journal in which my talent was allowed to unfold in its own peculiar way. It was not really analysis that happened in the writing; it was rather the development of a style that I could trust. There was trust involved. Self-trust. I wasn’t going to distort what emerged in my dreamy writings or make it pretend to be something it wasn’t.

For me, this servitude to my own craft was a kind of penance. Formerly, I had tried to break my talent like a stallion. I had tried to tame it and control it, which made for a pathological relationship. I had sent it out on the stage to pretend to be brilliant, cutting, scholarly, intense, and this exhausted it. My talent, that is, my soul, did not want to mimic Thomas Pynchon and Norman Mailer. It was actually my voice, my own particular voice, that had to be nurtured.

The prize is the self. The self is the prize.

So while a therapeutic model would suggest to find a cure for this apathy, I would offer this idea as well: Interrogate this apathy. Interrogate this haze. What is its purpose, its meaning? How do you feel when you are in it? Is it protective? Do you feel safe in it? And what happens when it goes bad, when it begins to feel like a prison? Rather than fight it, listen to it. What voices are going on in this haze of yours? What color is the haze? Is it a Purple Haze? (Sorry. I am of a certain generation.)

Also, let us put this apathy in the context of a society that is driven and whose driven-ness begins to resemble a suicidal wish. For your battle is not only internal. You are not just in conflict with yourself. You are in conflict with the world. That implies a role for resistance.

As resistance training strengthens muscles, so social resistance strengthens the self, the individual, who must assert herself against forces arrayed against her whose presence is sometimes hard to detect. Your first resistance may be against the obvious armies of repression but as you begin to be more subtle, you will find that in resisting you accomplish an outline; like placing your soul under tracing paper, the lumps, the places where there is conflict, they become evident, and then a profile slowly appears. It is that profile that is the goal.

Not a picture of someone struggling to become someone else, or someone struggling to make herself do things she does not want to do and has no talent for, but the true self, the rock bottom self, the self at the core.

What is the self at the core? What does it look like?

Social resistance is self-saving. It is the great secret of rebellions and movements: You are not perfect, but neither are you your own enemy. The enemy is out there, telling you things that aren’t true, forcing you to contort yourself to its demands in ways that demean and weaken you.

Enumerate your dreams, your visions, your talents. Nurture them. Here is something I do in the writing workshops I lead. I say, OK, let’s have a dialog. Let’s have a dialog with the creative self. Let’s check in, like a mother or a caring servant, someone who exists to aid and nurture, not to criticize or demean. It might go something like this:

Hi there, creative self. How are you feeling lately? How am I treating you? Got any complaints, anything I’m not aware of? I’m here to help.

The creative self will often answer. It may be surprised but pleased that you ask. It may have been waiting to clobber you with recriminations. That’s OK, it can’t hurt you. Such a response would tell you that you have indeed neglected your creative self. It may be feeling betrayed. Give it a voice. Pay attention to it.

Remember: The self is the prize.