#155: How to be delusional

Lying to yourself, but the right amount

Avi and I recently went upstate to celebrate our anniversary on a farm. The farm’s website promised chicken-feeding and donkey-petting, and the prices were higher in June, which I could only assume meant we were going during peak chicken-and-donkey season, and that we were about to be transformed by the rural charms of summer farm life. When we arrived, the clouds looked ominous. The deck outside our bedroom (where I imagined us doing yoga and drawing surprisingly good still lifes of trees) was soggy and unusable from recent rain. By dinnertime, it was pouring and thundering so hard it actually had us laughing, and this essentially continued for the remainder of our 48-hour trip, which consisted of us trying to do things between downpours and inevitably running for cover.

On the final afternoon, I suggested to Avi that maybe it was better that our weekend had been plagued by storms. We’d been too busy lately, I said, under so much pressure to be productive and make the most of our time, that maybe perfect weather would have invited that same pressure. With surprise, he said he’d just been having the exact same thought. Only later did this occur to me as the sweetest moment of the trip—not just because we’d both been searching for a positive spin, but because we’d mutually agreed to believe the one we came up with, despite the fact that it was almost certainly untrue. Had it been sunny, we’d have taken it as a good sign, too. 

I’ve always been ambivalent about “signs.” On one hand, I don’t believe the universe is actually sending us coded messages. On the other, clocking a sign and narrating its meaning is essentially confessing to a desire; it’s revealing in its own right. The catch is we’re not reliable narrators. I once wondered whether stumbling across the perfect one-bedroom apartment with my ex was a sign that we should move in together, while I conveniently ignored the stomach ache I’d had all day about our compatibility. I saw what I wanted to see that day: French doors, a rent reduction, and a relationship I didn’t doubt. We moved in the next month. This is the kind of risk we run in our relentless pursuit of narrative. And yet there’s something baked into this instinct that seems worth preserving, too. On that day upstate, I’d pick my and Avi’s delusion about the rain over a proper assessment of reality every time.

This is all very “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” I know. But I’ve been thinking about the ambiguity of that expression, and whether there’s more to unearth there about what our stories do for us, and when they harm us. When is delusion good and when is it bad? Delusion may not even be the right word. Maybe I’m thinking more along the lines of willful beliefs—the tales we spin about our lives and ourselves, like that we’re talented or satisfied or bad with names. Given that we construct these narratives to protect ourselves, or grant us clarity, when do they serve those purposes, and when do they fail to?

The actual experience that inspired this line of thought wasn’t the rainy trip, but my pregnancy. When I was trying to get pregnant last fall, I absorbed two competing strategies about how to make it happen. One came from people who were trying alongside me, and was essentially a bottomless compendium of tips, ranging from the reasonable (track your ovulation) to the absurd (drink maca tea three times a day). The other strategy came from everyone else, and it was, annoyingly, to relax. As we all know, relaxing is impossible to do on command, and so the advice is functionally a critique. Naturally, I resented this second camp, building a convincing case against their beloved claim that it “happens when you stop trying.” 

Then, of course, it happened when I stopped trying. Avi and I had been on a break, which we’d taken because I needed to relax, and then we’d become so relaxed that we wondered if actually it was better that I wasn’t pregnant yet, and if we shouldn’t wait another year while we were at it. When this mindset inadvertently knocked me up, we were baffled and delighted. I quickly conceded the point: Everyone had been right, how stupid! It really did happen when you stopped trying! This mental course correction was seamless and even fun. By losing the debate, I’d won.

The narrative wrote itself: The week before we conceived, I’d been on a trip to London with a good friend (relaxed, debaucherous, the opposite of peeing in tiny cups), and Avi had quit his corporate job, which he’d hated for years. Meanwhile, my friend who’d been having trouble doing IUI with her girlfriend also got pregnant, just after she’d been on a trip to London, where she’d broken all the rules she’d been following for previous inseminations (drinking, smoking, all of it). Scientifically, this amounted to mere coincidence. Anecdotally, it was basically science: Give up on getting pregnant, go on a trip (maybe to London?), change your luck. I recounted this equation months later with a laugh, while at lunch with a friend and his mom, a PhD who happens to study the psychology of infertility. She laughed too, and then gently reminded me it wasn’t true. “It doesn’t happen when you stop trying,” she said. “The data simply doesn’t bear it out.”

I didn’t doubt her for a second. On a purely intellectual level, I knew better than to turn my experience into prescription, and yet I felt an internal tug of resistance to the idea that it had all been completely random. I’d grown attached to the idea that there was a lesson to be gleaned in how things went down—something about acceptance, about attachment, about learning to unclench in order to proceed. There was wisdom in there, wasn’t there? Even if it wasn’t backed by data?

This is where the trouble starts. There is no doubt wisdom there, but the utility of a personal belief doesn’t necessarily make it true, or broadly translatable. I think of this every time a celebrity tells the public to follow their dreams, or a tech CEO tells you to bet big. They’re entitled to their self-mythology, but to universalize it is careless. Maybe that’s the tripwire—the ego-driven instinct to impose your life’s lessons on other people. Just as I wouldn’t claim that trips are better when it rains, I shouldn’t claim that “pregnancy happens when you stop trying,” or that any cascade of events in my life might translate to other people if they just do what I did. 

Applying universal logic gives our experiences a certain weight and our lives a certain order. I assume this is why we’re so drawn to recasting our life stories into tidy narratives and lessons to be shared with others. But in doing this we risk underestimating chaos, nuance, idiosyncrasy, and the occasional dose of self-delusion. I’m certain I’ve fallen for this trap before in my writing, even when I’ve actively resisted it. Now I find myself searching for ways to interpret my life that aren’t solely concerned with the rigidity of universal truths. I think I want other metrics of meaning.

There was a viral study in 2011 about how married couples are happier in the long-term if they’re slightly delusional about each other and their relationship, rather than purely sober and accurate. But experts cautioned people against full blindness of their situation; the trick was to learn how to harbor “positive illusions” without losing one’s grasp on reality. I like this caveat. Be delusional, it suggests, as long as you remain aware that you’re deluded. I think this veil of consciousness might be the key; it changes the narrative into a story without necessarily spoiling it.

There was a time when I discarded anything I couldn’t prove rationally true. Increasingly, paradoxically, that strikes me as an irrational way to live. It can be grounding to spin a little tale about your life, like that you found your one soul mate, or that you couldn’t live anywhere else, or that everything turned out exactly as it needed to. As long as you don’t project it on other people, and stay aware, in some recess of your mind, that you’re being playful with the facts, delusion can be its own kind of optimism.

My favorite thing I read last week was “Giving Away My Twin,” by Jean Garnett for The New Yorker. I always get excited when a new Jean Garnett essay comes out. Last Friday’s 15 Things also included my new lamp, my new cutting board, my new silverware, and more. The rec of the week was a share-your-work thread. Over 130 comments of people sharing their work, writing, and projects! So fun to read through.

I’ll see you on Tuesday for my next pop culture podcast with Avi and Harling.

Have a nice Sunday,
Haley