Solis

Most of us sleep walk through most of our days: same time to get up, same gulped breakfast, same route to work, same forgettable chat with coworkers, same complaints, same concerns (overweight, underappreciated, underpaid), and the same vegetative evening routine. It’s easy and efficient, and it will, bit by bit, suck the soul out of you. 150 years ago, women – bright women, trapped in riskless, monotonous lives, of whom nothing more was asked than to play along with the “good wife” game – were diagnosed in droves with a new condition: neurasthenia. Exhausted after minor mental or physical efforts, tense, aching, unable to relax and unrefreshed by sleep, troubled by dreams, fidgety and sighing, they were subjected to a near-fatal treatment: extended enforced inactivity (called “the resting therapy”). The protagonist in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) is locked in a room for months, forbidden to express an opinion or to act, as part of such a cure. Eventually she sleeps all day, sits awake all night and discovers that there’s a woman trapped inside the room’s yellow wallpaper (“It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw--not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things. . . repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.”). Her husband, a physician who wanted only the best for her but who never understood her, held the only key to her prison. He used it to keep her locked safely away that summer until, as she stripped the paper from the wall to free the woman, she lost her mind and became the woman trapped in the yellow wallpaper.

By all rights, she (and they) needed the opposite; they needed stress in their lives. Any sudden change, in our routine or our environment, causes our brains to perk up. “Stress” is nothing more than “our body’s response to an unusual demand made on it.” If you go to work tomorrow and find the door that you always enter has unexpectedly been moved, your body will undergo a remarkable set of changes. Your temperature and breathing rate will rise, stored sugar and adrenaline will flood your system, blood oxygen levels will spike, your eyesight will sharpen, your muscles will tense, and – for familiar tasks – your reaction times will plummet and your productivity will soar. You will be at your physical and emotional peak; you’ll experience life more intensely. Two reputable scientists (endocrinologist Hans Selye and psychologist Richard Lazarus) even gave it a name: eustress, stress that’s healthy, that gives one a feeling of fulfillment and is part of a process of exploring potential gains.

But you can’t stay in that state, anymore than you can – in good health – stay locked away in an safe and secure yellow prison of someone else’s devising. Handled poorly, eustress’s evil twin – distress – replaces it.

And so to you, dear reader, who is feeling stressed by the decision you’ve made. Many subs are incredibly bright, engaging and outgoing folks who spent their adult lives winning under the competitive rules governing social and professional success. At the same time, they were being gnawed at by the suspicion that that’s not who they really are. Under the weight of steadily accumulated doubts, they acted to assert a hidden part of themselves. Many report being delighted to discover that they’re not alone, much less sick. At the same time, their new path confronts them with new choices and uncertain consequences. Some of the more serious-minded report a new gnawing sensation, doubts about whether they can finally be who they dreamed of being, without surrendering who they are. They don’t want to be inconsequential or a doormat, any more than they want to be perpetually on-duty, eternally on top and finding the solutions to someone else’s problem. They just want to have a part of their lives where they’re free, joyously free, to be submissive to another’s will. (Some of the more venturous harbor the hope of being tied up in a deep wood and fucked silly by a gang of mythical creatures, not quite a Harry Potter moment, but perfectly healthy, too.)

I’ve tried to listen carefully. I hope I have the story about right. Let me know.

Good news: being a sub is perfectly normal, one lifestyle pursued by certain smart, healthy people. More good news: being a little (or more than a little) queasy is perfectly normal, too. It’s a sign of stress. A final bit of cheer: there’s a clear, manageable path through the maze of doubts. That is, it’s possible – if you understand the source of the stress – to turn the experience into a series of positive eustress events, rather than terrifying distress ones.

I thought it might help to think a bit about the causes of your stress. You’re facing choices and demands that are likely far different from anything you’ve worked through before. One way to get your mind around the situation is to think through a metaphor. A metaphor allows you to use an experience you’re familiar with, as a tool for understanding an experience that’s new and foreign. One famous guy called it the process of learning “the this-ness of a that, and the that-ness of a this.”

You are, dear child, four turnings into a maze. You’ve been in mazes, perhaps as a child, and you know what it means to be four turns in. The entrance is no longer visible, yet you’re nowhere near the center. You don’t know the way forward and would be ashamed to seek the way back. This post shares an internationally renowned scholar’s take on why mazes are so consistently frightening. Its sister post, later in the week, will report Dr. Sternberg’s recommendations for managing that anxiety; that is, for overcoming distress.

After an opening meditation on Harry Potter’s panicky reactions to the enchanted maze in the Triwizard Tournament, Sternberg writes:

Mazes have always been associated with fear and stress, from the time maze-like designs first appeared, in Greece, around 320 to 140 B.C.E.

What is it about mazes that triggers anxiety and the stress response? Two important features are responsible, and they involve the senses that are most important in finding your way . . . In a maze, you cannot see where you are going and there are no clear sounds to guide. Without full use of these two senses, you become disoriented.

Furthermore, a maze continually presents you with disturbing choices, dead ends, and new territories. You do not know how long the solution will take or how many twists and turns will get you out. Choices, uncertainty, and novelty are all potent triggers of the stress response. Raise the bar yet again and add many different choice points, and anxiety will increase even more. [Those enmeshed might] freeze at the points that offer the most frightening combination of choices. Esther Sternberg, M.D., staff scientist at the U.S. National Institutes of Health, researcher in the science of mind-body interactions, from Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being (2009)

How familiar does any of that seem? If the answer is “too familiar,” it might be worth reading the upcoming companion post. If the answer is “you’re so off-base,” let me know why. I’d be fascinated to read of your experience.