Editor’s Note: Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at [email protected].
Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get “Dear James” in your inbox.
Dear James,
I’m a 20-year-old dealing with a string of terrible events. My estranged mother died in a car accident a few days ago. A close friend of mine has been hospitalized for mental-health reasons, and I haven’t heard from them. I recently had a falling-out with my family; the details are complicated, but, long story short, I was forced to move out of my family home and am now living at my partner’s.
What should I do? How should I even feel? How do you retain your compassion and drive when the worst keeps coming your way?
Dear Reader,
I read somewhere that Carl Jung, if you came to him with news of a wonderful event in your life, would shake his head and say words to the effect of: Well, that’s very unfortunate, but if we pull together we can probably make it through this. Conversely, if you’d had bad luck, or were experiencing a personal downturn, he would offer you his heartiest congratulations.
The point being, I suppose, that these up-against-it moments—like the one in which you find yourself—are the places where we grow and learn, about life and about ourselves. Not that this is any consolation to you right now: You’re just trying to keep it together under an onslaught of events and emotions. But as much as the current situation is filling your windshield, covering every inch of available surface, I’m pretty sure that, sooner than you think, you’ll have all of this in your rearview mirror. And how you look back on it, how you feel about it, will be determined by one thing: whether you kept an open heart.
You identify clearly the risk of being overwhelmed—a sealing-up of the self that leads to loss of feeling for other people, loss of connection to your own sacred momentum. This is suffering in its demonic aspect; it grinds off your humanity. So there’s the challenge. Don’t be defeated. Don’t go into a defensive crouch. Stay upright and available to what’s going on, even if—especially if—what’s going on is pretty terrible.
I’ll say this to you as well: You are young and strong. Me, at the age of 57 and with all of my various habits—I’m susceptible. The faintest touch of calamity lays me out. But you can probably run for days on two hours of sleep and a graham cracker. You can survive this. One upside to everything being awful, to your whole world going acute, as it were, is that you know it can’t last. Acuteness, by its nature, has to turn into something else. So hang in there, try not to identify completely with the feelings that are blasting through you (they will pass), and keep your eye on the horizon. Relief is coming.
Sending you the power vibes,
James
By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it in part or in full, and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.
