What is the Trait You Most Deplore in Yourself?
Proust Questionnaire: 3/35
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Deplore or Despise?
Deplore is such a fascinating word choice for this question. I spent most of the week misremembering the prompt and thinking the word was despise. What trait do you most despise in yourself?
To despise something is to be in contempt, or have a deep repugnance for something. I read that to despise someone is different from hating them — hate is an intense dislike, whereas to despise someone means to not only extremely dislike them, but find them unworthy of your liking. So I spent most of the week thinking about a trait that wasn’t just something I disliked in myself, but something I found fundamentally unworthy of myself. A trait that was utterly not of me, or should not be of me, or I should work to make not of me.
And I struggled.
But to deplore something is entirely different. To deplore is to feel strong disapproval. It is to regret, lament, express grief, to acknowledge the loss of something of value. The word seems, in some way, to embody more responsibility, a sense of self-ownership. I despise all sorts of traits and people and systems and circumstances because they feel radically separate from who I am. But deplore? Deplore would recognize interconnectivity with myself and the trait in question, some sort of agency I had that I am now showing a dribble of responsibility for. To deplore a trait within me implies not just a strong dislike for said trait, but true grief over it.
What a different question.
First I thought of Hilary Clinton’s 2016 “Basket of Deplorables” campaign speech in which she referred to (I’m paraphrasing here) racist Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables,” which quickly became one of the absolute dumbest moments of the presidential campaign (which is saying something because the Trump campaign and the ensuing four years were some of the dumbest, most brain-cell curdling years of my life).
Trump and his followers clutched their metaphorical pearls at such a brutal insult (seriously?), then attempted to “reclaim” the word by wearing it proudly on MAGA consumerist products. And for what? For implying that their racist beliefs were regrettable and worthy of grief? HOW DARE SHE. Clinton probably should have called them a basket of despicables which would mean more along the lines of being “so worthless or obnoxious as to rouse moral indignation” — which seems more reflective of what was happening at the time.
ANYWAYS.
I am not, nor do I believe I have ever contained within myself an entire BASKET of deplorables, but if regret and grief and lamentation are all wrapped up in this word, I can think of a trait or two that I might consider deplorable.
It’s Okay to Deplore!
I recently listened to an interview with the poet Andrea Gibson who spoke about the return of her ovarian cancer — how it had metastasized this time, how a little bit of it was growing now on her liver, and if she bent in such a way, she could feel it and tried as often as possible to send love to it when that feeling arose.
Years of therapy have taught me to treat my thoughts and body this way. I am always trying to send love to the various parts of myself that so often do not feel lovable (and I should be clear that none of them are as seemingly unlovable as terminal cancer). I regularly think about sending love to my anxiety, my tummy rolls, my anger, my bumpy skin, my tears — you name it. So it feels all at once terrifying and deeply luxurious to step away from this self-love if just for a moment and say, I DEPLORE this about myself, without worrying about a therapist or a friend saying, Noooo! Don’t say that! Be gentle with yourself!
At this point, my old school journalism professors would say that I have buried the lede. Get to the point! What do you deplore about yourself?! But if you’ll hang tight for just a moment, I’d like to tell you a story (and then I promise we can gossip over my most deplorable quality).
The Workshop that Changed My Life
In 2019, I was accepted into the Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop at the Omega Institute in upstate New York to spend a week studying and workshopping under Scott Russel Sanders, Amy Irvine, Major Jackson, and so many other fantastic writers. (*pats self on back*)
I was very broke at the time, and though I had somehow convinced my extremely aggressive executive director who seemed to thoroughly despise me (there’s that word again) to cover the cost of my flight as a business expense (and give me five extra days of PTO to make it happen), I was still on the hook for the cost of the workshop itself which came out to something like $1,200. If I slept out of a tent on their campgrounds, my lodging was free, but if I wanted a room in a cabin, it was going to run me another $500. So of course, I packed up my little backpacking tent and a sleeping bag, drained my savings account, and made my way to Rhinebeck, New York.
I was extremely anxious about the whole thing, namely because I had already fucked up my essay submission for the workshop (someday I will learn to read directions thoroughly) and because on the flight there while talking to the woman next to me, I had confused the Cascades with the Catskills while chatting about the region where this workshop was taking place, quickly realized my mistake, was too mortified to correct myself, then spent the remainder of the flight (as well as the last four years of my life) knowing this woman thought I was an absolute moron who most certainly did not deserve such a prestigious place in this week-long writing workshop.
I landed in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere with many hours until the Omega shuttle was scheduled to pick me up and promptly sat down to edit the piece I had submitted for the workshop which clearly was a pile of garbage written by a total idiot who didn’t know her Cascades from her Catskills. 1
For the first time in possibly my entire adult life, I had not brought a laptop with me because I was assured that 1) I would not need it so long as I had a notebook and my piece printed 2) the WiFi was iffy and the cell service even worse 3) the experience would be better with less access to screens. So I sat on an airport bench with a red pen crossing out whole paragraphs on flimsy loose sheets of printer paper, rewriting entire sentences, and desperately hoping I could make sense of it all in the following days when I would be expected to work through this mess with some of the brightest, most thoughtful teachers and students this earth could summon.
Later that day, with my red-ink-edited crumply pages, a leather-bound notebook, a half-functional headlamp, a backpacking tent, crinkly sleeping mat, and down sleeping bag, I set up my “home” next to the lake where I would sleep for the next week.
By that evening I had filled my belly with delicious food from the mess hall (eaten at a giant round table with other workshop attendees on a sweeping covered porch overlooking the lake and the forests), listened to the welcome talk in a gorgeous yet cozy auditorium filled with kind, attentive people, and wrapped up the long day by 8pm (the time all conference/workshop/retreat engagements should end!) leaving me with enough time slowly wash my face in the shared camp bathroom sink, witness the absolute flurry of fireflies (a sight I hadn’t seen in five years since moving West), and read a book in my tent, ultimately drifting off to the sounds of crickets and other nighttime bugs.
Other than setting an alarm at night and turning the alarm off in the morning, I didn’t look at my phone the entire week. I used a desktop computer for approximately five minutes to print a copy of a story that I read aloud one evening to the group, but otherwise, I was completely free of not only screens, but also any tether, thought, concern, anxiety, or attachment to the rest of the world as it existed outside of these hundred or so people collected at this center.
Maybe you can see where I’m going with this, because as I’m writing it I feel the heavy-handed headline clichés wanting to tumble out of my head onto the page.
“Young woman goes without technology for five days and feels good for first time ever!”
The thing is, this wasn’t some kind of digital detox retreat. It was just the nature of the place coupled with the creative work of writing, which if done very well, requires the writer to have a sort of extreme presence typically unavailable to our overburdened minds. It was the simplicity of a tent and sleeping bag and earth beneath my bones. It was also the nature of, for five days, not having a job to report to, friends to catch up with, hobbies to attend to, meals to cook, or kitchens to clean.
Without really knowing it, I had stumbled into a perfect scenario for presence. And reader, I sincerely mean it when I say it changed my life. In the early mornings, I went bird-watching before breakfast. In the late mornings and afternoons, I wrote and thought about writing with beautiful minds. In the evenings I listened to wonderful stories. At night, I read and sat with my thoughts. It was a pure, unbridled presence. It was holiness.
At that time, I was not yet taking anti–anxiety medication (despite near-daily panic attacks), nor did I have any substances available to me on the trip, and I was the most peaceful and calm I think I have ever been in my entire life. Trying to describe it now sort of feels like trying to describe a psychedelic experience — you just had to be there. And similar to a psychedelic experience, when I sit quietly and try to put myself back in that place, I can feel my whole body quieting, my brain waves calming, my muscles relaxing, and — even now — a few fat tears forming in the corner of my eyes because there is a very real fear that I may never have that sort of transcendental experience again.
When the week was over, and the cell phone notifications started pouring in on the shuttle ride back to the airport, I swore to myself I would hang onto this feeling and find a way to incorporate it more earnestly into my life.
But in a matter of days, I was back under the weight of emails and news stories and texts and obligations to friends and panicked coworkers and climate change and disasters and…and…and…
Then, in a matter of months, the pandemic struck, and any hope of being the kind of person who could turn off the news and have a calm, attentive attitude toward life completely dissolved.
Paying Attention
So, 2,000 words into this piece, having successfully buried the lede (suck it grad school professors) I can tell you that I know without a doubt that the trait I most deplore in myself is my ever-declining ability to pay attention.
I’m hesitant to make claims about the causes of inattention in others (though there are dozens if not hundreds of articles and books out there making a pretty good scientific and cultural case for the reasons why), but I can tell you with near-perfect certainty that some combination of the internet, social media, and smartphones have nearly obliterated my ability to be present.
Mary Oliver says that “attention is the beginning of devotion,” and for the last six years or so (when I started working full time, being forced in front of a screen, forced into a pre-determined schedule, forced to respond and think on someone else’s timeline) I haven’t felt devoted to much of anything. I have however felt more or less constantly overwhelmed, burned out, scared, and uncertain. And the more time I spend on my phone or reading the news, the worse it gets.
Last year I read this really phenomenal novel called The Book of Form and Emptiness by Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki. In it, there is a character whose job is to spend many hours a day sitting in front of a litany of screens, scanning headlines and news articles for the worst stories out there (wildfires, climate change, natural disasters, shootings, etc.) and write up little summaries to send back to the company so that they can keep up on what’s going on in the world. I spent the entire book thinking that was a strange and unrealistic job, but sure, let’s go along with it.
And then one day a few weeks after I’d finished the book, seated in front of my laptop and monitor, bouncing between screens to grab news articles on climate change and horrific natural disasters to add to our organization’s social media feeds, it suddenly smacked me over the head: That character was me. I’m the person she was emulating.
That realization cut deep to my core because I’d spent the majority of that book thinking, Why is this character so fucking stupid? This constant barrage of bad news and pings and messages and screens is what’s destroying you! Stop doing that!
And in the words of the great Taylor Swift, it suddenly hit me: It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem, it’s me.
Last month, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy sent out a 25-page advisory saying there isn’t enough evidence to determine whether social media is “sufficiently safe” for children and teenagers. Meanwhile, rates of adolescent anxiety and depression are surging.
The attention economy is real and thriving. Just take Apple’s new $3,500 virtual reality headset — Apple Vision Pro — which the company says, “will rely on hands, eyes, and voice to interact with app icons and experiences that feel physical and even cast shadows in your space.” Is it possible to capture any more of our potential attention than that? Should we be terrified?
It’s estimated that the Attention Economy is a $500 BILLION industry — which means people and corporations with a lot more time and money than myself are working VERY HARD to capture more of my time and money. That’s just a little less than the $550 billion U.S. pharmaceutical industry and more than DOUBLE the $212 billion U.S. fossil fuel industry.
Which is also to say that while I do think my lack of attention is my most deplorable quality, I also recognize it’s not entirely my fault. Still, I carry the grief, the regret, the laments of this ongoing deplorable-ness that I can’t seem to shake off. I quit Instagram but always come crawling back. I tell myself no more news, but then get FOMO about what’s happening in the world (or worse, feel guilt that I could even opt out of the news at all).
Do Less, Or Do More of What You Love?
My therapist has not-so-gently suggested that I need to work on slowing down. I know that she sees not only how hard it is for me to be present, but how sad it makes me that presence is becoming less and less accessible in my life. And yet, old habits die hard, because just this month I’ve committed to a 15-week death doula course through the University of Vermont, working out five days a week, weekly salsa lessons, volunteering at a bunny rescue a few times a month, and moving all of my belongings from Bellingham, Washington back to Boulder, Colorado. In my last session, I asked if we could bump out my next appointment to July because June was already so busy.
“Okay,” she said hesitantly, “But just remember we’re working on slowing down, right?”
“Yep!” I responded with all the lying guilt of a child who swears to mom that they washed their hands before dinner meanwhile their fingers are visibly sticky and covered in goo.
And while I do know I would find more presence if I slowed down, I also know it’s not the foundation of the problem. Because I actually feel very present in my death doula course, and I also feel present when I’m at the climbing gym, and I definitely feel present during salsa class when I’m trying to remember how to move my body in rhythm with others. What ultimately drains me of my presence is my workload (and constant email/chat distractions) at my 9-5 and the ongoing tug of the internet telling me that even after salsa, bunny cage cleaning, climbing, writing, reading, learning, that I not only could but should be doing more, especially if none of those things will make me money (which they won’t and I don’t want them to).
What I’m enjoying about the Proust Questionnaire is that there’s no obligation to “fix” any perceived brokenness in myself, just acknowledge the prompts and say the answers out loud. And so I am not going to wrap this up with a tidy list of the 10 things I’m going to start (or stop) doing to pay more attention. But what I can say is that I’m really thinking about this. And if attention feels difficult for you, I hope you’ll think about it too.
As a little added bonus, here are two final Mary Oliver quotes to remind us why attention is so important:
“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
“Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
Next week’s question: What trait do you most deplore in others?
It turns out my piece wasn’t garbage and after a little more work, it was accepted at High Desert Journal and nominated for Best American Science and Nature Writing in 2021. https://www.highdesertjournal.org/semanco-passing-through-the-keyhole
I always look forward to your posts friend. You are an inspiration to me!