There’s a self-help book called Girl, Wash Your Face, that I haven’t read. But the title says it all, doesn’t it—just take that step. Get to work! Do something! When I say it to myself (even thought I haven’t read the book), I’m telling myself to get on with my day, to get moving. Or take one of the most famous of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life: “Clean your room.” When you boil most advice down, it ends up at the same thing: Just do something. Take a step. Yet anyone who is paralyzed by depression or anxiety knows how movement of any sort can feel impossible.
The idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps—fixing your own life—is laughed at nowadays for several good reasons. Your situation is not always entirely the result of what you’ve done, and it’s not always entirely in your control to fix. To look at someone who’s suffering and tie up this burden of, well, you just haven’t done this thing that you should’ve been doing, is cruel.
And yet, at the same time, so much of life does boil down to, “just do it.” We say it because it’s true. I even said it in my blog of advice on doing things that scare you… because there was no better way to say it. It’s brutal advice, and if you look at it with the wrong perspective, it will hurt you. It will make your situation worse because it beats you over the head when you’re vulnerable. But at the same time, it’s also true that if you can twist your mind around to be open to hearing it, you’ve begun your journey out of your paralysis.
“Just do it,” is clichéd advice, or in other words, a platitude. Platitudes can hurt because they’re easy to say, and when people say them, it sounds like they don’t care to really think about what advice might help you in your situation. However, sometimes there is something in them that you should listen to. Take this quote from Leon Garber, about how he views therapy can help us: “That’s what therapy does. It will grant you a platitude and won’t leave you alone until it discovers why you won’t embrace it.”
After all, if there were no truth behind a platitude, it wouldn’t catch on. “The platitudes, more often than not, represent reality,” Garber goes on to explain. “People aren’t terribly articulate and, therefore, use platitudes as a way to express something important in an easy way, which doesn’t necessarily discredit the clichéd comments.”
This is why self-help books all end up in the same place, urging you on to step forward, making you do something in the face of what looks like meaninglessness and suffering. Sometimes they try to help you by casting a happy, positive veil over the world, a positive spin where if you dream it you can do it. Sometimes they accept the world is cruel and challenging, but suggest by taking action in the world you’ll find yourself coping with the suffering of living in a better way. But in the end, the advice boils down to—you’ll feel better if you do something within your control. And this advice works because in the end, that’s really all you can do.
So what do we do when “just do it” isn’t enough? When we have tried and tried and tried and everything still fell apart? (I started this blog with, “Girl, wash your face,” and the author of that sentence can be seen as a shining example of someone who decided to make her life into what she dreamed of, and had to watch that dream fall apart). There’s a lesson I’ve been learning, and for me it’s been a hard one. The lesson is, you do have a responsibility, and you do have the ability to be effective on an individual level. But you don’t have control outside of that. When I worry, it’s about what I can’t control, but somehow feel like I should. Things that I do not have responsibility for, but which I try to control anyway. And my inability to control these things makes me paralyzed in the smaller areas that are within my control—because everything else looks so big and scary, the little things seem impossible too.
We both have agency, and we don’t have agency. And we have to grow to accept both sides of that coin. I’ll let you know if I ever get there 🙂
Let me know if you’ve found ways that work for you!
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